Our August show features work by Corey Arnold, Clayton Cotterell, Todd Hido, Ron Jude, Raymond Meeks, Shawn Records, Tatum Shaw & Alec Soth, photographers that we’ve always admired, even obsessed over a little. Each of their recent photobook publications & exhibitions have been like vinyl records, constantly on rotation in our minds. Like anything one becomes obsessed with, there is the inclination to seek out more, or, extending the analogy, to experience to the B-sides. To this end, each photographer has selected a few photographs that didn’t make the cut for a recent book project or exhibition, while others are images captured in the daily practice of photographing that may or may not influence the direction of future work. With the popularity of 45 rpm records in the 1950s came the B-side, an unambiguous way to describe the physical space on the flipside of a vinyl single. The B-side was considered inferior, containing the song that record companies did not promote & radio stations did not play, a mere filler to enhance the value of a product. Even so, despite such value judgements, the B-side often became the hit single, suggesting that even at its inception, the larger cultural value & the very meaning of the term B-side was flexible. The passing of time & changes in technology have added even more nuance to the word, both for connoisseurs of music & the recording artists that make it. For the former, B-sides are now almost synonymous with rarity; they are the outtakes, unreleased tracks or rough versions that are gems for someone obsessed with a band. For the musician, the B-side is a moment of uncertainty, a cut from an album's final outcome, yet an emblem of the editing process that the artist can't resist sharing. In the both cases, then, the B-side is an intersection of sorts that reveals a lot about the creative process. In this, the word is applicable to any number of art forms, but seems to fit especially well with photography. Of the various visual arts, photography is the cultural phenomena that is arguably closest to music, both in terms of production & ubiquity of distribution. The sheer number of images that most photographers make, whether as negatives or digital files, is astounding. Moreover, the internet & social media allow any photographer to immediately share an image he or she has made. In light of these two factors, it is restraint, the ability to edit from a wealth of possibility, that may very well distinguish the photographer as artist from the everyday instagramer. But this kind of talk leads us into the quagmire of critics & academics. At root this is an exhibition about the simple pleasure of looking at individual photographs outside the imposing context of a larger body of work, B-sides that each photographer was unable to shake & that we, as their fans, are thrilled to be seeing.

Alec Soth’s photographs have been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including the 2004 Whitney & São Paulo Biennials. His widely acclaimed photobooks include Sleeping by the Mississippi, Niagra &, most recently, Broken Manual. Recent solo exhibitions include a survey at the Walker Art Center (2010), the Rome International Photography Festival (2011) & Broken Manual at Sean Kelly Gallery in New York (2012). Soth also publishes books under his own imprint, Little Brown Mushroom. One of his most recent titles, House of Coates, is now in its second edition after selling out quickly when first released in March. The book is a collaborative project with Brad Zellar that includes photographs by Lester B. Morrison, Soth’s alter ego. The three photographs Soth has contributed to B-sides are outtakes from this publication. Shot on a disposable camera & printed as one-of-a-kind pieces on newsprint, they reveal a little about Soth’s editing process & a lot about his eagerness to experiment with an assortment of photographic technologies & printing methods.

Todd Hido is a San Francisco Bay Area-based artist whose photographs have been exhibited internationally & are included in numerous museum collections, including the Whitney Museum of Fine Art, Guggenheim Museum, San Francisco Museum of Fine Art & the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. His award-winning monograph titled House Hunting was published by Nazraeli Press in 2001. A longtime favorite of ours, this now highly collectible photobook serves a cornerstone for much of what we continue to see in Hido’s work, not only in terms of the imagery itself, but also in the excellence of book design that is characteristic of all his titles. Hido’s recent notable photobook, A Road Divided, brought the viewer into environments made strange by inclement weather & the blurring effect of a foggy & rain-streaked car windshield. These atmospheric landscapes figure in his new body of work as well, which is also populated by a cast of female subjects that bring to mind “a visual pulp novel of Midwest mythology,” as Stephen Wirtz Gallery describes it. Shown as a solo exhibition titled Excerpts from Silver Meadows this past winter at Wirtz, the work will also be published by Nazraeli Press in the fall. For B-sides, Hido has selected two outtakes from this forthcoming monograph; the pairing is like a vignette edited out of the larger narrative sequence. As such, we are compelled to intently wonder at the interrelation of this seemingly forlorn woman & the frozen house in which she may or may not reside.

Ron Jude’s photographs have been exhibited widely & published in several books, including a few of our favorites, Alpine Star & emmet. His work is in numerous collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, George Eastman House & the Georgia Museum of Contemporary Art in Atlanta. Jude is also the co-founder of A-Jump Books, an independent photobook publisher based in Ithaca, New York. Jude’s most recent publication, Lick Creek Line, was published by MACK this past April. The work “extends & amplifies Ron Jude’s ongoing fascination with the vagaries of photographic empiricism, & the gray area between documentation & fiction. In a sequential narrative punctuated by contrasting moments of violence & beauty, Jude follows the rambling journey of a fur trapper, methodically checking his trap line in a remote area of Idaho in the Western United States. Through converging pictures of landscapes, architecture, an encroaching resort community & the solitary, secretive process of trapping pine marten for their pelts, Lick Creek Line underscores the murky & culturally arbitrary nature of moral critique.” Jude has selected three photographs that are isolated photographic moments from the larger sequence that comprises Lick Creek Line. They are offered as one-of-a-kind pigment prints.

Raymond Meeks lives & works in Portland, Oregon. His Fall 2011 exhibition at Charles Hartman Fine Art included selections from Amwell, which was published by Nazraeli Press as part of their exclusive 6x6 series in 2010. Meeks’ other books with Nazraeli include one of our favorites, Sound of Summer Running, published in 2005 & unfortunately now out of print. His recent creative efforts have focused on collaborations with Deborah Luster, Wes Mills & Mark Steinmetz as part of the Orchard Journal series, as well as a series of artist books published under his own imprint, dumbsaint. The three photographs featured in B-sides were printed as a supplement to his 2011 artist book titled pretty girls wander. Perfect not only for their unmistakable summer atmosphere, the photos were are also shot in NE Portland not far from the gallery. In addition to these photographs, we will also be showing examples of his artist books, including his latest, raymond was a young man that took beautiful pictures.

Tatum Shaw is a photographer & copywriter that lives & works in Portland, Oregon. His January, 2012 show at Wieden + Kennedy featured work from Etowah, a series of photographs that takes its title from the river that runs through Shaw’s hometown of Cartersville, GA. The river itself serves as a kind metaphor for a body of work that developed over time as Shaw made photographs during trips home for holidays. To coincide with the exhibition, Shaw designed & published a book of the same title. Both the book & prints from the series are available through Ampersand. Shaw’s photographs also featured in a recent group exhibition, America MMXII, at Breeze Block Gallery alongside work by Jason Kreher & Jimm Lasser. Sorting through what Shaw offered as “random shots I’ve taken over the years,” his B-side contribution joins three shots that are striking on their own, yet together share common visual cues that seem to imply a connected narrative despite the reality of their autonomy.

A recent Portland transplant by way of Brooklyn, Cotterell is a photographer & educator whose work has been shown nationally & abroad, including the 15th Annual Quinzaine Photographique Nataise in Nantes, France (2011). In march 2012, Ampersand exhibited a selection of pigment prints from Cotterell’s Unarmed, which focuses on his younger brother, a marine, as an investigation into the current generation of young Americans crossing the gap between childhood & adulthood in a time of war. We also published a limited edition book with the same title to coincide with the exhibition, available here. Cotterell’s B-side selects represent single moments in a kind of working journal that aims toward a larger photographic concept. In this, they are images that may or may not inform a larger body of work, but which nonetheless are striking as stand-alone photographs.

Shawn Records lives & works in Portland, Oregon, where he also serves as President of the Board of Directors at Photolucida. His work has been exhibited widely & published in Vice, Contact Sheet, Remain in Light, Camerawork, Pause to Begin, Doubletake & Adbusters. His recent book, From the Bottom of a Well, a "poetic & tragically humorous account" of a 2010 Chinese government-sponsored trip, was published by A-Jump books in October, 2011. Looking through an assortment of his recent work, one gets the impression that his camera is a mere extension of an eye that tirelessly isolates the nuances of our daily visual experience. Like Shaw, his B-side photographs are unrelated temporary moments that are each frayed, torn & tangled in their own way & thereby imply a narrative that may or may not exist. They are taken from work that, as he notes, is “not so much a work in progress as a life in one.”

Corey Arnold is an Alaskan commercial fisherman & photographer based out of Portland, Oregon. Recent exhibitions of his work include Fish-Work at Fecal Face Gallery (2010), Wolf Tide at Richard Heller Gallery (2012) & Fishing with My Dad 1975-1995 here at Ampersand last fall. Fishing with My Dad was published by Nazraeli Press last summer as One Picture Book #69. Arnold’s first monograph, Fish-Work Bering Sea, was also published by Nazraeli to wide acclaim. Photographs from this series were recently shown as a solo exhibition at the Sincfala Museum in Heist, Belgium, where his photographs were also featured in the Wonderland photo festival. His upcoming solo show, Graveyard Point, will open at Charles A. Hartman Fine Art in October, 2012. Arnold’s B-side selects are outtakes from photography assignments in the far north of Alaska. We were drawn to the unknowns in these photographs: the light glow of a mysterious settlement, the tracks trailing away to distant vistas, the skinned animal corpses, the snow sparkle mimicking what is not seen in the icy sky above.