21st: The Journal of Contemporary Photography.
originally published in Black & White Magazine  19, June 2002.

Ó 2002 Carla Williams. All Rights Reserved.

The periodical 21st: The Journal of Contemporary Photography debuted in 1998 under the editorial directorship of John Wood and publisher Steven Albahari. Produced in three editions--Trade, Deluxe, and Museum--the journal reintroduced an art book aesthetic in contemporary photography that had seldom been seen since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in efforts by the likes of Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Sheriff Curtis, or even photographer Frederick Holland Day, who as half of the firm Copeland & Day published nearly one hundred handmade books and periodicals on English literature that were works of art themselves. Employing the best of the best in their fields, Wood and Albahari have assembled a dream team of the fine art printing and publishing worlds including printer Jon Goodman of Massachusetts, who has made the photogravure prints for each of the five editions to date, the Stinehour Press in Vermont, and the Stamperia Valdonega in Verona, Italy. No detail of quality is overlooked--letterpress printing, handmade papers, embossed Japanese silk, and “Moroccan goatskin” binding that reviewers regurgitate from the press release so often it begins to call to mind the hype over Ricardo Montalban’s fictional “Corinthian leather” ads for Chrysler Cordobas back in the ‘70s. The books are indisputably gorgeous and sumptuous, a kind of photo-couture that few could expect to acquire. All of the essays, poems, and interviews by renowned historians, curators, and literary figures are commissioned exclusively for 21st; the images, by and large, are culled from the greatest hits of the artists’ oeuvres. I invited everyone I could find to look at them, certain that we would probably never see and handle books like these again. Everyone sighed and gasped as we carefully perused each loaned volume. These are not books to place on a shelf. They must be looked at; they should be shared.

No ordinary publication, 21st is available from select galleries worldwide, specialty art booksellers, and directly from 21stthese cannot be browsed at your local Barnes & Noble. With each deluxe or museum volume there is a limited edition signed print offer. The journals are in the collections of major public institutions including the Library of Congress, The Royal Photographic Society, and the Fratelli Alinari Archive. Sponsors of the ambitious project include auction houses Sotheby’s and Christies, View Camera and Camera Arts magazines, and fine art publisher Twin Palms of Santa Fe, New Mexico, who, along with other independent photography publishers including Nazraeli Press and Arena Editions, have maintained the highest standards for duotone, tritone, and sheet-fed gravure reproductions, a standard that provides a ready market for 21st to take to the next level. (Volume II includes a brief but informative essay about these independent publishers by 21st Contributing Editor Lance Speer.) How could anyone who loves photographs fault such an elegant, grand production?

The Trade edition of 21st is a folio-sized book with tritone prints bound in German Iris or Italian fabric; although it is the “lowest” edition, it is a stunning volume by itself and easily more luxurious than most books on your shelf. For those who do not collect photographs, it is attainable and certainly among the most beautifully produced books out there, on a par with the best productions of the above-mentioned presses. When you consider the average price for a nice-but-not-spectacular photography book these days, it really is a bargain (The Trade edition of Volume 5 opens at $119). Because of its size and accessibility as a less precious, less expensive object, it is the friendliest version of the three for simply sitting down with it and reading the text--they are, after all, books. The first Trade edition, an anthology, had a print run of 4,500 copies with Volume II (also an anthology) at 2000, Volume III at 750, Volume IV at 850 (both monographs), and Volume V returning to the anthology format and creeping back up at 1200 copies. Since the often provocative essays and poems in 21st do not appear elsewhere it is important for that reason alone that the trade editions are available for scholars, historians, and non-collectors. Inevitably, many users of these volumes do not buy three thousand dollar books and will read them in public collections, not in their living rooms.

Deluxe and Museum editions, with hand-crafted binding, consist of tipped-in hand-pulled photogravures by Jon Goodman Photogravure on Lana Gravure or Rives BFK rag paper with tritones and letterpress text printed by either Stinehour Press on Mohawk Superfine paper stock, or in Italy by Trifolio or Stamperia Valdonega on Canaletto Papers. The books for these editions are identical to each other, while the Museum edition also includes loose, signed photogravure prints (of the same gravure images in the book) for easy exhibition. What a novel idea--had every photo-illustrated book or album come with its own set of exhibition prints a lot of regrettable vandalism at the hands of book and photo dealers might have been avoided. (In one early article about the publication a photo dealer supposes that other dealers will indeed break up the sets to sell the loose prints.) The Deluxe volume editions are 235/200/110/110/165 copies, respectively, while the equivalent Museum versions are in editions of 50/50/55/55/55. Clearly this series is intended for a very limited audience. And if there were any doubt about the target audience for these volumes, each includes a resource directory of artist representation, galleries and dealers, and book publishers and distributors. Please delete the previous sentence, as Volume V will not include this directory.

Upon 21st’s debut, most critics praised the publication; Harper’s Bazaar even recommended it as something in-the-know actresses Winona Ryder or Sharon Stone might like to collect. However, as reviewer Jim Hughes noted, aside from being a periodical 21st bears no resemblance to more populist efforts of the mid-twentieth century like Tom Maloney’s U.S. Camera. Writers like Marianne Fulton, Senior Scholar at the International Museum of Film and Photography at George Eastman House, likened 21st to Alfred Stieglitz’ journal Camera Work for its conceptual and technical resurrection of that vaulted tome which sought to elevate the photographic art. Stieglitz published Camera Work from 1903-1917, having previously used photogravure reproductions to transform Camera Notes, the influential journal of The Camera Club that he edited from 1897 until 1902. So fine was the quality of reproduction that the gravures from now-dismantled volumes of Camera Work are highly collectible. Photographers like Stieglitz and Alvin Langdon Coburn considered gravures to be equivalent to their platinum prints and would sign them. The comparisons are natural and, indeed, are welcome by 21st’s publisher and editors. No journal until 21st has even attempted to match Camera Work’s commitment to quality and fine art, due in large part, no doubt, to the prohibitive cost of such an endeavor. However, underlying Camera Work’s achievement was Stieglitz’s stubborn pettiness and unwillingness to accommodate artists whose ideas differed from his own. Like Camera Work, 21st has no editorial boardjust Wood, with input from Albahari and Speer, selecting the images and writers, but unlike Stieglitz, Wood and Albahari “will publish work of scope, depth, and learning, whether it reflects our personal view or not because what we admire is excellence...” Though the photography old guard will vehemently disagree, for that more democratic reason alone 21st surpasses in its scope and vision the pictorially narrow focus of photography in Camera Work. The editors’ ability to be broader in their selections is also a reflection of the rich diversity of photographic imagery at the dawning of a new century.

In execution, 21st also owes a significant debt to Edward Curtis’ twenty-volume, thirty-year project The North American Indian, an ambitious book series begun in 1900 and supported by creative financing as well as grants and loans from President Theodore Roosevelt and J.P. Morganthe books were, in fact, Morgan’s suggestion. Using the finest materialshand-made, imported paper, bound in Morocco leather, the complete volumes included more than fifteen hundred prints with each including three hundred pages of text which Curtis wrote. Bound portfolios of thirty-six or more copperplate photogravures accompanied each volume for a total of 722 plates. The set, published from 1907 to 1930, sold for the then unheard of amount of three thousand to forty-five hundred dollars, yet museums and wealthy collectors like Morgan and Henry Huntington purchased at least two hundred sets through subscription. After 1907, however, sales slowed considerably due to waning interest in the subject matter and economic depression and by 1950 only three hundred sets of the originally proposed five hundred had been sold. However, like the Camera Work gravures, the Curtis gravures have since become highly collectible, fueling a cottage industry where prints continue to be made and sold in limited editions from the original plates, their appeal showing no imminent signs of waning.

21st’s technical achievement is pretty unimpeachable. Brief descriptions of each process are available on their website at http://www.21stphotography.com, though the words do not do approximate the experience of the books themselves. Hand-pulled or not, gravures are a photomechanical reproductive process. Like any printing, the gravure process can vary, and there are both subtle and not-so-subtle tonal variations between the book and loose gravures in the Museum edition. The Cyan Blue prints by John Dugdale and John Metoyer nearly jump off the pages in their luminosity and richness. Frederic Weber’s and Willie Middlebrook’s textural portraits seem drawn rather than printed on the rich, warm paper. On the down side, some of the tritones, though they are printed on the best paper, are see-throughtext on the following page (not the verso) can be seen through the paper. For minimalist work like Joan Fontcuberta’s Hemograms, this is very distracting (Interestingly, this does not occur in the Trade edition). Furthermore, some of the work does not benefit from the gravure translation. Luis González Palma’s images are far more luminous in their original incarnation, and Sandy Skoglund’s assemblages are really lost without their color. Yet the editors keep up with the latest and best printing techniques available. Volume V is the first to include full-color images in each of the editions. (Previously, the trade editions did not include any color.) Volume V includes rare dry-trap tritones and four full-color planographs, a waterless lithographic process, on tissue, described as “hand-printed, high resolution photolithography,” of images by Sally Mann, David Levinthal, John Metoyer, and Christopher Pekoc.

For the essays, style should reasonably be subordinate to clarity. Why, for example, in the two-hundred page first volume with 3-inch margins are twenty-eight endnotes run together in a solid block as though someone accidentally went through and removed all the paragraph breaks and then didn’t know how to make them again? (This is a pet peeve of mine--publishers are increasingly marginalizing notes. If authors include them, they are important!). It looks neat graphically but is a challenge to read. Style is so dominant here that one begins to wonder--with all this sumptuousness of production, do the words and photographs draw the viewer in and, hopefully, back, or is it the beautiful book object that compels the audience?

What about 21st’s content? In the editor and publisher’s statement in the first volume, Wood and Albahari state that what they are interested in is “style” and art that is “unforgettable.” It is a rather modernist approach to photographs based on the power of aesthetics and dictated, in part, by the visual limitations of the processes, yet this is photography true to the medium--there are no artists who just happen to use photography here. Neither political art nor the politics of art enters the realm of this self-described “cultural and critical journal of the coming century’s photography.” Indeed, the subtitle “Culture & Criticism” was dropped after Volume I. In this dynamic era of digital art and Iris prints, where virtually anyone can easily print, publish and market his or her own work via computers and the Internet, and when the “culture” of photography embraces increasingly more socio-cultural aspects of imaging and representation, 21st with its emphasis on fine printing and aesthetics feels like a throwback to an earlier era in more than just technical ways.

Much has been written about 21st’s ability to bridge the past and the future of photography. Intentionally or not, the editors select work that largely transcends period and movement, imagery that would fit as easily into 1952 as 2002. At its best, the viewer is transported through the image to another place in his or her imagination; at its worst, the work simply looks dated. Evocatively nostalgic imagery by artists like Adam Fuss and Sally Mann, which is absolutely at the cutting edge of contemporary photography, lends itself easily to this format.

Although from the beginning, 21st’s stated mandate was to include work by at least two photographers “who have never previously had a national publication,” for Volumes III and IV this avowal went by the wayside in favor of two consecutive “special edition” monographs of work by John Dugdale (Volume III: The Clandestine Mind) and Cy DeCosse (Volume IV: The Gardens of DeCosse). Dugdale’s cyanotype work is brilliant in this format and in gravure. The elegiac quality of the images is evocative of history but not stuck in it. But really, does his work, some of it repeated, need to have appeared in two of the first three volumes? Likewise, DeCosse, whose lovely floral and vegetable arrangements are reminiscent of Charles Aubry’s floral studies from the 1860s, also showed up in Volume II with images repeated in the monograph. In addition to Dugdale and DeCosse, writers Ann Beattie and Robert Olen Butler appear in multiple volumes, too. With such precious limited space, a bit more diversity of contributors in an annual publication purporting to represent the coming century’s photography would seem imperative.

On one level, the editors seem to have addressed some of these issues: with the publication of Volume V: Strange Genius, 21st will no longer publish monographs. While focus on a single artist’s work lends cohesion, the variety of the thematic compilations is more appealing in this context. Additional artists in Volume V include Kelly Grider, Vincent Serbin, Connie Imboden, Josephine Sacabo, Don Gregorio Antón, Michal Macku, Andrea Modica, Keith Carter, Sheila Metzner, and Stephen Berkman, with essays about each artist’s work.

Poetry, prose, criticism, and book reviews are interspersed with the plates, though it is strangely incongruous seeing reviews for “ordinary” books in a $3,000 “journal.” Photography and literature are likely, natural bedfellows with a long history, from Julia Margaret Cameron’s interpretations for Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King to Langston Hughes providing the narrative counterpoint to Roy DeCarava’s photographs in the Sweet Flypaper of Life. However, 21st is not the only current journal to explore the intersection of these art forms. Doubletake, a quarterly journal published by the Center for Documentary Studies, debuted in summer 1995 purporting to do a similar thing in marrying photography with poetry, fiction, essays and interviews which may or more likely may not relate to the images. While Doubletake’s visual interest is exclusively in documentary work and Doubletake is an infinitely less ambitious but no less interesting project, the conceptual comparison can be made between the two journals. Essentially, 21st is to Doubletake what galleries are to museumspretty, seductive, and not intended for the general public.

Platinum series

Less known than 21st are the Platinum Series books from the same publishers. In many ways the smaller-run Platinum Series books are more successful in their intimate blend of image and text and in their thematic coherence. The first Platinum book, Sheila Metzner’s New York accompanied by six Walt Whitman poems from Leaves of Grass, debuted in spring 2001 and quickly sold out. Only thirty-five copies with ten original hand-coated platinum prints and an unbound platinum print of the Brooklyn Bridge were available (Another bridge image appears as a photogravure in Volume V). Metzner’s views of the New York skyline, particularly compelling since its dramatic and unwelcome rearrangement on September 11, are reminiscent of a Francis Frith album of Syria or Egypt in the mid-nineteenth century. There is a similar sense of discovery, mystery, and revelation in the timeless images of what editor Wood calls “the glowing New Jerusalem.”

The second volume in this Platinum Series is the highly anticipated Songs of Experience: ten initialed Joel-Peter Witkin platinum prints (also with one signed unbound print) accompanying William Blake poems. Only sixty-five copies of the Platinum Series Book #2 will be printed. Included are some of Witkin’s most celebrated images such as Harvest (the unbound print), Androgyny Breastfeeding a Fetus, and Cupid & Centaur in the Museum of Love. Whether you love his imagery or hate it, Witkin is inarguably an exacting printer and platinum has exciting potential for revisiting these iconic images. The pairing with Blake provides Witkin’s loaded imagery with aptly metaphysical company.

Conclusion

John Wood’s contention that he and Alibari hope “to make 21st the cultural and critical journal of the coming century’s photography,” remains to be seen. With the recent closure of The Friends of Photography after more than thirty years, undertakings such as 21st take on a more immediate relevance and assume a more important role in the field. It is necessary for photography to exist as both the means and the end of artistic production, not merely as another tool in the artist’s box. Likewise, it is crucial that a photographic art be maintained separate from art history. Though they overlap with increasingly more frequency, they are not interchangeable.

For all of its overall beauty, few of the individual images in 21st stayed with me after I returned the borrowed volumes, and truthfully, while the design is quite nice the essays and poems are not greatly enhanced by being printed so well. I just remember the books themselves and how glorious they are. However, the selection of images for Volume V is at once more diverse and compelling than previous issues, and contributing writers, including poets Morri Creech and Gerard Malanga, promise to continue the high level of dialogue between words and images. An enterprise like 21st has clearly learned from both the examples and mistakes of its predecessors and can easily co-exist in a contemporary context with everything from artists’ websites to photocopies. At times 21st may seem impossibly precious and dear, but then we all know that photographs are only infinitely reproducible in theory, anyway. Indeed, in the 21st century, it is refreshing to see photographic fine art simply celebrated for what it is with no pretense to be something else.

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