PhotoForum #87: The Shops - Steve Braunias & Peter Black (2016)
PhotoForum #87: The Shops - Steve Braunias & Peter Black (2016)
PhotoForum #87: The Shops. Steve Braunias & Peter Black
Design by Katrina Duncan
Published by Luncheon Sausage Books in association with PhotoForum, 2016.
Designated as PhotoForum #87
ISBN 978 0 908689 941
250 x 210mm, 44 colour plates, hardback.
The apparent subject matter is New Zealand shops - disappearing, sad, beautiful, comic, lonesome, dirt poor, rich in spirit - but perhaps the work is about loss and changes, with shops being metaphors. It is also a celebration of the overlooked and about the poetry of the commonplace.
The Shops contains 44 colour images by photographer Peter Black and an essay by Steve Braunias that combines intensely personal memoir with reflections on how the online and stripmall revolution has created ghost towns.
More about The Shops on Peter Black’s website
Reviews:
Peter Simpson Best Art Books 2016 - NZ Herald
" Essayist Steve Braunias and photographer Peter Black are both (in Shakespeare's great phrase) 'pickers-up of unconsidered trifles', so the idea (Braunias is publisher as well as author) of putting them together in a book was inspired, while Katrina Duncan's clean unfussy design makes the most of their encounter. Photographer and writer worked independently of each other. Braunias' essay makes no reference to Black or his images and in choosing what to photograph, Black followed his own instincts entirely, yet the two complement each other perfectly. Braunias' essay about his childhood fascination with small-town shops and their messy back doorways is also a moving chapter of autobiography, while Black's photographs of shop windows, signs and shabby exteriors are poignant and curiously uplifting; his use of colour - sometimes sparing, sometimes blatant - is extraordinary."