Far Away From Home — Hristina Tasheva. Self Published.
We were able to widely ignore Yemen and Syria over the past decade. But today’s wars in Ukraine and the Gaza Strip tell us in clear images: we have become a global community, an unhappy Family of Man, possibly on the edge of a world war. This urges us to reflect on our state of being.
Far Away From Home: The Voices, the Body and the Periphery by Hristina Tasheva (self-published, 300 copies) is a perfect starting point to look at both our past atrocities and the latest. “Are you a communist?,” Hristina Tasheva was asked after she moved from her native Bulgaria to The Netherlands. She didn’t know how to take this. Was it an approbation or an accusation? She analyzed the question by studying literature, going to memorials of former Nazi concentration camps, and searching in neglected fields for hidden signs of Soviet concentration camps. Finally, Tasheva could conclude her artistic investigation with a hefty dossier containing factual images and cold but evocative poetry ‘slams’. Don’t skip these words that feel like a burden. Read them out loud and they become your indictment. And watch the images of your mind’s eye.
A final quote in Tasheva’s book is written by Viktor E. Frankl (originally in Man’s Search for Meaning): “At any moment, man must decide, for better or worse, what will be the monument of his existence.” With this, we are delivered at the door of Trent Parke who just published what he calls his own “monument to humankind”.
Viory Schellekens is a Dutch photographer, also schooled as a journalist. She collects photobooks and year-end lists of photobooks. The latter resulted in a yearly List-of-Lists and the Meta-List which both contain more than 600 publications, published on 100 lists of ‘favorite photobooks’ made by 200+ people and institutions involved in the art of the medium. This year for the 9th time, you can go to Facebook.com/Viory.Schellekens to see who chooses what and which book collects the most voters behind its title. If you made a list, or see one that I missed, please let her know. It will be added.