Photographers Tim Carpenter, Nelson Chan & Carl Wooley gave an intimate talk last night at the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, presenting an inside look into their publishing imprint TIS Books. Already, since their 1st release in spring, they’ve produced 3 solid publications. In April, at Philadelphia’s Art Book Fair, they unveiled their collaborative 4-photobook set TIS01 demonstrating a pensive, meditation on the notion of place, and Steve Smith’s exceptional Waiting Out the Latter Days, employing the clear-sighted, descriptive principles of documentary photography, gazing at Utah’s Mormom culture perpetually “waiting” / fearing the ultimate doom that a once-looming Cold War promised. Smith’s monograph came as a breath of fresh air amid the present photobook scene, which seems a bit over-saturated with conceptual work. Most recently, they published the poetic call and response dialogue of photographer Justine Kurland and poet John Yau in Black Threads from Meng Chiao. Kurland and Yau battle the woes of home-confinement due to the responsibilities of parenting, in Kurland’s instance, now that her young son Casper, her “on-the-road partner”, begins schooling, and Yau who’s been forced to rest and recover after intense surgery. Tim, Nelson and Carl (along with contributing photographer J. Carrier) have some great publications in the pipeline for 2016, certainly one photographer many folks will be happy to find published in an ample-size edition. I’ll keep it a surprise. Each photographer talked about their inspirations growing up and venturing into photography. It’s the background of each of them that lends to such a dynamic collective of minds and makers. Nelson spoke of his admiration for the punk rock, do-it-yourself (DIY) ethos that came with the post-punk scene and such record labels as Dischord Records, Epitaph Records & SST Records. The notion that such successful enterprises were created by musicians / artists confirmed their legitimacy to him. Carl spoke about the influence of cinema, especially from Japanese directors Akira Kurosawa, Yasujirō Ozu, who exemplified the power of editing, sequence and narrative. I concur wholeheartedly with Carl’s admiration of Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon! Tim expressed his faith in literature, the idea of writing not only being descriptive, but also evocative, owing inspiration to writers such as Virginia Woolf, Flannery O’Connor, John Irving, David Foster Wallace and Marilynne Robinson. Tim also felt a deep connection with music in his early teens and onward, mentioning R.E.M.’s Murmur album affecting his artistic sensibility, (also Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks), with the sparseness and elliptical quality, requiring some work on the audiences behalf to fill in the ambiguities. Hearing the TIS crew’s background and seeing their books demonstrates an exciting, varying batch of publications to come, let alone other endeavors they have going on at their website, including essays by contributors. Keep your eye on This Is Sausage . . . Das Ist Mir Wurst!
TIS01, By Tim Capenter, Nelson Chan, Carl Wooley & J Carrier, 2015
