ZEKE Magazine: Spring 2023.2

BRIEFLY
NOTED
EDITED BY MARISSA FIORUCCI
A TIME BEFORE CRACK
By Jamel Shabazz
powerHouse, 2022 | 184 pages | $40
Once upon a time before
crack, inner-city communities
were vastly different. Where
now you see drug wars tearing
families apart with violence and
addiction, there were once vibrant
and eclectic neighborhoods filled
to the brim with culture and style.
Thankfully, photojournalist Jamel
Shabazz was on the scene throughout
these decades, working the streets of
New York City, capturing the faces
and places of an era that has long
since disappeared.
Best known as Hip Hop’s finest
fashion photographer for his blockbuster
best-selling monograph, Back in
the Days (powerHouse Books, 2001),
Shabazz revisited his archive and
unearthed an extraordinary collection
of never-before-published documentary
photographs compiled for his third
powerHouse Books release, A Time
Before Crack. This collection serves as
a visual record of the streets of New
York City from the mid-seventies to
the mid-eighties. Shabazz’s distinctive
photographs reveal the families, the
poses, and the players who made this
an extraordinary age, before crack
changed everything.
60 / ZEKE SPRING 2023
SOME SAY ICE
By Alessandra Sanguinetti
Mack Books, 2022 | 160 pages | $70
Since 2014, Alessandra
Sanguinetti has been returning
to the small town of Black
River Falls in Wisconsin, creating the
photographs that would become the
stark, black-and-white series Some
Say Ice. The same town is the subject
of Wisconsin Death Trip, a book of
photographs taken by Charles Van
Schaick in the late 1800s documenting
the bleak hardships of the
lives and deaths of its inhabitants.
Sanguinetti first came across this
book as a child and the experience
is engraved into her memory as her
first reckoning with mortality. Van
Schaick’s work inspired her to explore
the strange relationship of photography
and death, ultimately leading
to her own photographic project on
Black River Falls.
The austere, sculptural scenes and
ambiguous, uneasy portraits that make
up Some Say Ice depict a place almost
outside of time. Presented unadorned
by text or explication, the photographs
Alessandra Sanguinetti, from Some Say Ice (MACK, 2022). Courtesy of the
artist and MACK.
are touched with the spirit of the gothic
as well as the unmistakable tenderness
familiar from Sanguinetti’s 2003 series
The Adventures of Guille and Belinda.
By bringing undercurrents of doubt
and darkness to the surface of her
images, Sanguinetti alludes to things
absent or invisible, playing on atmospheres
both real and imagined, as
well as the ghostly possibility of undoing
death through the act of photography.
With its title inspired by Robert
Frost’s famous poem equivocating on
how best one’s inevitable death might
be met, Some Say Ice is a humane
look at the melancholic realities underpinning
our lives as seen with glacial
clarity by one of the world’s foremost
photographers.
FOREST FOR THE TREES
By Rita Leistner
Dewi Lewis, 2021 | 256 pages | $55
In her early years, Rita Leistner
planted over half a million trees
in an attempt to save her beloved
forests. She spent the next twenty
years working as an award-winning
documentary photographer and
photojournalist, primarily in war
zones. In 2016, she returned to
the vast swathes of Canadian land
cleared by logging, living with and
documenting a community of 100
tree planters in the planting camps of
Coast Range Contracting.
Leistner spent four years creating
heroic and uncanny portraits of the
hardworking planters, the physical
toll of their sacrifice, and the precious
landscapes they tend. In addition to the
book, this project resulted in large-scale
works that are now in major collections
in Canada as well as the awardwinning
documentary film Forest for the
Trees (2021).