Kathryn Abarbanel’s Rathaus


Among photobooks I find myself returning to are those that convey a deep intimacy between photographer and subject. While the sequencing of photographs, form of the books, typography and other design choices all work with images to produce this effect, design aspects seem to dissolve away when I browse these books,  leaving only the photographer, subject, and me in a shared experience. Maxwell Anderson’s See You Soon documents a summer spent with Jun, a woman he met by chance, felt “immediately compelled to photograph her,” and said goodbye to after a brief love affair. The book’s photographs give the impression of a summer of love and loss. Intimacy pervades Motoyuki Daifu’s Lovesody too. Like See You Soon, it documents a brief love affair. The woman, one of Daifu’s coworkers, has a two-year-old son and is pregnant when they meet. During the six-months that Lovesody portrays, she gives birth to another child. An album originally meant only for Daifu and his lover, Lovesody immerses us into a life of familial chaos and tenderness.

 

Two books complement photographs with commentary. Geraldo Dell’Oro’s Imágenes en la memoria is a meditation on the disappearance of his sister, Patricia, who became one of the Argentinian junta’s victims during the Dirty War. Intermingling family photographs with Patricia’s drawings, eerie shots of forests, and fragments of family letters, Imágenes en la memoria culminates with a partial transcript of testimony of the only witness of Patricia’s disappearance, Jorge Julio Lopez, who spoke before the Federal Court of La Plata in July 2006.  In the less harrowing19 Pictures, 22 Recipes,  Paola Ferrario draws on similarities between cooking and photography to create a unique photobook.  Ferrario writes that “simple cooking done with what is fresh and in season and good 35mm photography share the principle that photographers and cooks are only mediators of remarkable physical realities….Intelligence, humility, and close observation are at the basis of… seeing and tasting.” Photographs of family mingle with tasty recipesand Ferrario's memories, inviting the reader into her kitchen, her family history, and her thoughts on how to open our eyes (and taste buds) to the world around us. 

 

Kathryn Abarbanel’s Rathaus would make a fine addition to these intimate explorations. “Rathaus” is a play on the German word for city hall and a homophone for the name Abarbanel’s firm, Abarbanel & Gamboa Design, gave to a rodent infested house the firm bought and rehabilitated. An elderly woman, apparently abandoned by her family, hoarded and lived in disarray in the house, feeding rats and raccoons that populated it. Abarbanel carted out bag after bag of the woman’s personal belongings to her studio where she has photographed hundreds of them. The result is a collection of photographs printed life-size and gathered in a Japanese stab binding. 

 

Having collected a large diversity of objects, Abarbanel organized them chromatically, the fabric sculpture constructed of women’s, men’s and children’s clothing in her recent show at Seattle’s A Gallery is a dramatic example.   The base of the conical sculpture consists of a mass of dark clothing. As the structure rises the mass of clothing decreases and colors lighten.  A white shirt rests at the apex like a strange, unsettling mask.  

 

Abarbanel’s book, included in the gallery exhibit, is also organized chromatically, a black shoe opposite a broken toy horse, a pink doll’s leg with a pink bow, a green-tinted spiral notepad displayed next to a piece of white clothing trimmed in green piping.

 

The nuances of all photographic prints all lost when presented on digital monitors, but Abarbanel’s especially suffer. The prints themselves have a delicacy reminiscent of watercolors, a quality that accentuates their intimacy. Looking through Abarbanel's book, I felt as though I were paging through through the life of the woman these objects once belonged to.

 

While Abarbanel doesn’t usually show her work framed and on the wall, several of the spreads from the book are part of the group show Still Life: 21 at Seattle’s Ida Culver House Broadview. The exhibit runs through June.  Abarbanel’s work makes a visit worthwhile.