TERTIUM QUID

Pictorial Narratives Created from Vintage Press Photographs

Murray Moss

Description: ter·ti·um quid: noun, Late Latin, literally, third something; a third party of ambiguous status

“A press photograph is defined by its function, which is to infuse a text with visual meaning in the telling of a news story,” Murray Moss writes in his introduction. Assembled from his own unique collection of archival, annotated, and published prints that were acquired in the past two years from the photo morgues of a moribund newspaper industry, these original photographs are “for the first time shown publicly without the newspaper text they were originally assigned to accompany. Rather, I have paired these images, at my own discretion, with other orphaned press images, putting them in dialogue, and in the process creating for each image a new narrative—a new life, a third story, a tertium quid.”

In turns humorous, striking, mysterious, and always surprising — these photographs reveal an undiscovered side of their personality through these pairings. Unwittingly, they have become starring characters in new narratives that are both revealing and delightful. “Some are duets, or fugues.” Moss writes, “Some dance a pas de deux. Many are six degrees incarnate. And others are conversations between strangers who share a bench in the park and discover common ground.”

Reproduced at the actual size of the original photos, with both the front and the often annotated back presented with equal importance, these artifacts, “retired now from their labors, are akin to those exceptional functional objects that have served their time and have later come to be appreciated, even coveted and exalted, for the extraordinary qualities that lie outside of their original function.”

Tertium Quid is a personal tribute by Murray Moss to a lost newspaper culture, a love letter to the often unsung press photographer, and a transformative elixir to the power of the image. Tertium Quid is published in a limited edition of 1250 copies, each sequentially numbered.

About the Author: Murray Moss is a Principal, along with his partner Franklin Getchell, of Moss Bureau, a multi-platform provider of strategic design consulting and curatorial services. Prior to establishing the Bureau, Moss was the founder and creative mind behind the internationally renowned Moss design gallery, which was established in 1994 and in its eighteen years continuously created new paradigms for design communication. August Editions is a New York-based publishing venture focused on contemporary visual culture.

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THE SOCIAL SCENE

The Ralph M. Parsons Foundation Photography Collection

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Theresienhohe

Franziska Von Gagern, Zoltán Jókay, Ulrike Myrzik Peter Neusser, Andrew Phelps, Wolfgang Thalerr

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OTMAR THORMANN

Origins

Otmar Thormann’s latest work takes the form of an artist’s book, its content personally selected from his archive of photographs and its stringent editing resulting in an immutable sequence. The spectrum ranges from early street photography of postwar Graz and Vienna to the Surrealist-influenced still lifes that begin in the early 1970s. On this personal quest for the origins of his interest in photography, Thormann links his classic photographs into an associative medley of images. References to photographic greats such as Josef Sudek, Hans Bellmer and Christer Stromhölm come to mind when looking at the artist’s long career. The images are complemented by eleven short stories by Thormann, which explore the strange incidents and events in his (photographic) life. Thormann’s work is in the collection of major institutions worldwide, including LACMA.

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TINA BARA AND ALBA D’URBANO

A Question(ing) of Gesture

This expansive exploration of gesture – a wink, a nod, a shrug – is a unique and rich convergence of performance art, visual art, video, literary art, architecture, and theater, led by Tina Bara and Alba D’Urbano, professors at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig. The book itself is the culmination of various efforts by more than 50 international artists, first showcased in 2006 at Leipzig’s famed Opera House as well as other venues, and collected in this weighty exhibition catalogue brimming with dozens of full-color photos and extensive commentary. Intriguing and captivating, the elongated softcover was designed with an exposed, clear binding and full-color slipcase. Include texts from Joachim Brohm, Harun Farocki, Fiona Tan among others.

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TOPPLED

A Book by Florian Göttke

Life as an absolute dictator may not be all it’s cracked up to be. Artist Florian Gottke collected a huge number of images of the toppled statues of Saddam Hussein on the Internet, and then started looked at them carefully. A close reading of these images reveals an astonishing amount of information about what happened in Iraq, about the statues’ desecration and humiliation, their transformation from manifestations of Saddam’s totalitarian power into icons for the defeat of his regime, their expulsion from the public sphere, their appropriation into his enemies’ museums and their symbolic reinterpretation for use in anti-war protests. Even in our modern image culture, the ancient magical link between the person (Saddam) and his representation (statue) is still alive in the human psyche.

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WOLFGANG TRÄGER

A Fluxus Family Portrait Album

Kerstin Skrobanek

German art-world photographer Wolfgang Träger has long been known for his unflinching dedication to documenting international openings, performances and festivals. His passion since 1989 has been following the Fluxus movement and their charged and unpredictable global performances and happenings. Working for the German art magazine Kunstforum International, Träger seldom missed a Fluxus event, traveling from the Venice Biennale and fluxus subjektiv (1990) to Fluxus-Virus with grilled 2CV in Vienna, da capo in Wiesbaden (1992) and the grand Fluxus Medicine Show world tour (2014). Over the years, he created an invaluable visual record of a movement that dates back to the early 1960s and included art icons such as Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, John Cage, Carolee Schneemann and Ben Patterson. After following Fluxus’s 50th-anniversary celebrations, Träger has finally released his encyclopedic visual history, beautifully produced with 100 black-and-white historical images and poignant essays. His years of dedication come together to create a breathtaking “who’s who” of this pivotal art movement. Viva la Fluxus!

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ANDREAS TSCHERSICH

Peripher

For photo-based Swiss artist Andreas Tschersich (b. 1971), Peripher refers to an aesthetic and structural moment when places of transit and transition have exceeded classification, standardization and demarcation. To capture this moment, the artist has combined assorted medium-sized negatives to create large urban images without perspectival distortion. The final large-scale prints create a haunting series that explores a peopleless and what looks like abandoned city landscapes but are actually various cities around the world, Charleroi to Detroit, Kawasaki to Liverpool and into New York City. The more than 90 photographic montages presented in the publication capture the artist’s cool minimal urban work to date. The subject matter of this digitally constructed work firmly roots Tschersich in the mid- and late 20th-century photographic tradition of recording man’s relationship to the built environment represented by the banal unpeopled cityscapes of the New Topographics and the architectural folios of Bernd and Hilla Becher. Tschersich lives and works in Berlin.

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TSUGARU: POETRY, WRITINGS, PHOTOGRAPHY

Yojiro Ishizaka, Facsimile edition: Yoko Mori (Eds.)

During his short life photographer Ichiro Kojima (1924–1964) released his only photo book: Tsugaru: Poetry, Writings, Photography (1963, Shinchosha). Beautifully reproduced to once again coincide with the staging of Ichiro Kojima’s noted exhibition, To the North, From the North held at Izu Photo Museum 2014, this fascimile of the original artist book is a unique record of the landscapes, climate and customs of the rural Tsugaru region. Kojima spent his career photographing the natural features of the Aomori region and the traditions of its people, which when viewed today, still harbor a soul-stirring power. Text by Yojiro Ishizaka and poems in Tsugaru dialect by Kyozo Takaki flow alongside Ichiro Kojima’s grainy meditative photographs.The slipcase features a woodblock print by Junichiro Sekino, a printmaker also Aomori born, whose career spanned the same period. The book capitalizes on the distinctive qualities of the rotogravure printing of the time, and attempts to faithfully re-create the carefully crafted binding of the original as well.

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PIOTR UKLANSKI

Real Nazis

New York–based Polish conceptual artist Piotr Uklanski’s (b. 1968) book The Nazis (EPF,1999) has long been out of print and is highly coveted to this day. While The Nazis showed movie stills of actors playing Nazis in various Hollywood films, Uklanski’s current publication, Real Nazis, juxtaposes film images with the real thing—Nazi party bigwigs, decorated “war heroes” and war criminals. Painstakingly culled from a variety of archives and featuring over 200 images, Uklanski superimposes fact on fiction to reveal the uncanny resemblance between the play-acted and real-life exponents of evil. Who are the “real” Nazis in this picture puzzle? This play of mirrors is a radical commentary on our alarming present condition, in which the lines between populist and fascistic politics are increasingly blurring. Uklanski’s Real Nazis is premiering at dOCUMENT (14), Kassel (2017). He has exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Guggenheim Museum, NY; P.S.1 MoMA, NY; Walker Art Center, MN; Whitney Biennial (2010) among others.

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