What We’re Reading at Picnic

Joe Charrington is reading Jack Latham’s “Sugar Paper Theories”

Latham’s second major photo project, developed in response to a notorious unsolved double murder investigation in Iceland.

“Forty years ago, two men went missing in southwest Iceland. The facts of their disappearance are scarce, and often mundane. An 18-year-old set off from a Nightclub, drunk, on a 10-killometre walk home in the depths of Icelandic winter. Some months later, a family man failed to return from a meeting with a mysterious stranger. In another time or place, they might have been logged as missing persons and forgotten by all but family and friends. Instead, the Gudmunder and Geirfinnur case became the biggest and most controversial murder investigation in Icelandic history” – Here Press

Georgie Cook is reading Robert Frank’s “The Americans”

First published in France in 1958, then in the United States in 1959, Robert Frank’s The Americans changed the course of twentieth-century photography. In eighty-three photographs Frank looked beneath the surface of American life to reveal people plagued by racism, ill-served by their politicians, and rendered numb by a rapidly expanding culture of consumption. Yet he also found novel areas of beauty in simple, overlooked corners of American life. And it was not just Frank’s subject matter—cars, jukeboxes, and even the road itself—that redefined the icons of America; it was also his seemingly intuitive, immediate, off-kilter style, as well as his method of brilliantly linking his photographs together thematically, conceptually, formally, linguistically, that mad The Americans so innovative. More of an ode or a poem than a literal document, the book is as powerful and provocative today as it was then. – Steidl