2024 has been an excellent year for photobooks. I am surprised that after the past few years with fewer titles surfacing into greatness, 2024 has presented so many outstanding titles. It gives me a bit of hope that the medium is picking up again, though I suspect inflation and a general shrinkage of audience means that there might be fewer and fewer books published over the following years. We shall see.
Regarding Dutch artist Awoiska van der Molen’s The Humanness of Our Lonely Selves, published by FW: Books and designed by Hans Gremmen, I firmly believe it is one of the most impressive books of the year. There are several reasons for this. Some of which I will explain to you how I got there. Before we start, it would be fair to outline that Awoiska and I have what she refers to as “history,” I want to be fair in outlining this before we start as some of the things I will mention. The review will be majority praise-oriented, but I will come up with some criticality that I consider independent of my relationship to Awoiska, which might be worth mentioning. Whereas I do not think we have history, it would be fair to outline that we had a few missteps when I attempted to interview her previously that went a little sideways, and it is safe to say that we are not fans of one another. For me, that does not mean that I cannot appreciate what she has done with this book, and I feel it is fair to praise her work without letting my feelings about the artist as a person get in the way of that. It is a bit of an overshare, but I think it’s fair, if a bit silly, to air out dirty laundry in this context of praise.
So, I will start with the minor point I find slightly wanting. This way, I can get onto the contextualization and praise of the work. When I look at Awoiska’s books, designed by Gremmen, I have always seen an incredible collaboration despite only sometimes being warm to the subject matter. Blanco, Sequester, and The Living Mountain are excellent exquisitely printed books. Though I do not find the subject matter of the artist’s books exciting, I can see the true excellence of the bookmaking with Gremmen to be genuinely exceptional.
Regarding subject matter, my critique comes from not seeing her prints, which I have been told are equally exquisite and detailed. I see her work through her books, and as expressed, I see that process as being well-crafted, if not my subject matter. I am voicing an opinion that artists (myself included) find difficult to hear. And for what it is worth, who cares what I think? I know plenty of people who find massive value in the artist’s work, so I do not see it as a problem, but that would concern how an artist deals with this opinion…
As for the prints being beautiful, that has helped propel the artist’s career to the heights it has, and I am likely missing out on some of the other iterations for assessing what I think of her work without seeing it in person. I work through books, so I solely know an artist through that prism. On that note, I also want to praise this body of work. It is a change from the previous bodies of work and takes a more direct take on something like a typological study of Japanese windows at night, deviating from her last work on the natural world. I found a quote from the artist on the Benrido Hariban site that contextualizes some of this, and it works well for the images found in THOOLS.
” Since the start of my artistic practice seventeen years ago (at first photographing in urban settings, then more and more drifting into the natural wilderness), my aim has always been to try to get as close as possible to some true, unspoiled core of a place. By peeling off all the many layers of today’s roaring world, I slowly eliminate all distractions to hear, see, and experience my surroundings with clean senses.”-AVDM.
The deviation mentioned above is that she has made photographs of windows in Japan, and there needs to be more focus on the natural world. However, one can imagine her seeking an unspoiled core of a place similarly. The risk of this work and why it is fantastic is two-fold. First and foremost, van der Molen is now a mid-career artist who has, despite my opinions, built a decent career from photographing natural environments. It would be easy for her to continue to do that. As far as I can see, an audience is not into the notion that artists change what they are celebrated for. They can be fickle, and taking that chance shows an artist unafraid to explore risk when they do not need to. She could ride it out, making variations of the same theme, but instead chose to put this work together. I think that is brave. We could use more people that defy expectations with their work.
The artist also decided to put a project together that, for the most part, is a partial typology of Japanese windows, mostly looking inward from what I can make of it. Typologies are not always welcome in books as they create lots of repetition; in this case, that is true, but the repetition makes them remarkable. There are minor deviations of glass panes, different frames within frames that beg questions of viewership, and at the heart of it all is an opacity to reach a subject directly. This is interesting, as denying the viewer a subject means that we are left to look at the periphery as a subject matter, along with the latticework of the window frames and the occasional objects that press against them or are silhouetted by them. I’m reminded of several artists, but none are The Bechers. First, the window has been a central theme for several photographic artists. I think of van der Molen’s work as close to both Josef Sudek, whose lyrical examinations of still lifes by his window recall a melancholic beauty that exudes warmth, but at a distance, not dispassionate, but without a direct relationship to who or what goes on with the humans positioned behind or in front of the glass in a nod to introspective subjectivity.
The second artist would be Merry Alpern, whose highly influential book Dirty Windows (Scalo, 1997) featured 87 grainy black and white photographs from the artist’s Wall Street studio window, looking in on the backside of two windows from a strip club. All matters of goings on occurred within her frames, and a deep sense of voyeurism pervades that work. Though van der Molen’s work does not suggest that extremity, there is still a feeling of voyeurism implicit in this work; though arguably, nobody’s identity has been shown in the picture, it makes one think of Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of what it feels like to be observed or stared at. Perhaps that in and of itself presents interesting questions if you are positioned on the other side of the curtain. Other artists worth mentioning in haste and proximity are Ruth Orkin, André Kertész, Alfred Stieglitz, and many more. Magnum has even dedicated an online exhibition entitled Through the Window.
Though I promised to start with one minor critique of the work I observed with The Humanness of Our Lonely Selves, it is, in the end, minimal. It does not change the context of how great the work and book are for all the reasons I mentioned above. The title is something I struggle with. The word humanness is strange and feels slightly forced for poetic license. It feels stuck in my throat when I say it, and although technically, Humanness is not incorrect in its usage, Humanity would have been the first derivation and the more widespread usage. It suggests that the title has been worked to that effect, no matter how jarring it feels, which for me feels slightly pretentious, a quality that I wish we could drop when doing work as it feels somewhat pining. That said, I am sure it does not bother most people and certainly does not detract from the power of the assembled images. I bring it up honestly as I have several parts of this discussion surrounding how I view the artist’s work. I attempted to praise the book as much as possible but remained honest about how I saw it and the extended history of arriving here. The book has my highest recommendation.