Subjective Realities: The Refco Collection of Contemporary Photography

Rating:
Summary: Book Design and Virtually All Photos Quite Interesting
Review: The Refco Group is a financial services company whose collection of recent (i.e., mainly 1970s-2002) artistic photographs is highlighted in this catalog. The book's overall design by "studio blue" is unique. The clear plastic dust jacket contains the title and subtitle on the front and spine. This partially encloses the stiff paper cover which extends only 2/3rds of the way to the edge and which consists only of a detail of a photo by Oliver Boberg, "Himmel [Sky] IV," picturing "clouds" actually made of cotton. The next layer visible through the dust jacket has the last names of the 96 artists; if you open the front or back cover, you see their first names. The first 10 pages and last 10 pages are five sets of two-page spreads showing enlarged details of selected photos in the book. The main sections, separated by 2/3rd-width stiff papers, are: Wild Cards (7-page essay by Dave Hickey), Photography in the Refco Collection (10-page essay by Judith Russi Kirshner), Selected Works (arranged alphabetically by artist), and Checklist (including works in the collection but not in the book). The essays in the front are illustrated with a half-dozen photos showing how some of the photographs in the collection are displayed in Refco's offices.

Some of the 115 photos did not impress me. Despite three paragraphs of explanation, the photo of the back of a woman's head and neck by Jeanne Dunning seemed banal. The significance of the luthier's window by Patrick Faigenbaum eluded me. Rodney Graham's photo of a tree, other than being upside-down, was not special. The portrait of a woman by Jitka Hanzlova did not communicate any meaning. The headshots by David Robbins are not inherently worthy of note unless one is familiar with the artists portrayed (like Ashley Bickerton or Robbins himself). I couldn't connect with Thomas Schutte's image of a small sculpture of a man's head, nor with Beverly Semmes's image of a mysterious red figure in a boat. Seton Smith's blurry photos of a room as reflected in two mirrors reminded me of Uta Barth, but without her aesthetic sense. I'm not very familiar with any of these photographers' bodies of work, so perhaps I would have appreciated the photographers more if the book contained other examples of their photographs.

However, virtually all the other photos in the book are quite interesting from a conceptual viewpoint in that they "call the ethics and veracity of the photograph into question." Besides the artists listed in the Editorial Review, the following are noteworthy: Marina Abramovic, Vanessa Beecroft, James Casebere, Maurizio Cattelan, Thomas Joshua Cooper, Thomas Demand, Elger Esser, Seiichi Furuya, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Louise Lawler, Tracey Moffatt, Shirin Neshat, Walter Niedermayr, Gabriel Orozco, Sigmar Polke, Michal Rovner, Sam Taylor-Wood, Gillian Wearing, and James Welling. At Amazon.com, click "Add to Shopping Cart" to put this book on your shelf!