Tod Lippy – Private – PhotoBook Journal

Review by Hans Hickerson ·

Photography is mostly about visual editing. What does the photographer notice and photograph? What do they include in the photograph? What do they leave out? It is a mental art and it involves cultivation of the mind’s eye.

Anyone can learn it. Did you notice something that no one else did? Take a picture, then another, and then more until you have a series. Then shake and bake and turn it into a photobook. Voilà, easy. Except it is not so simple to do it well and to produce a well-executed visual statement like Tod Lippy’s photobook Private.

Private is a series of twenty-nine photographs that are nominally the same thing, the entrances to private, staff-only areas of art galleries. You should know what to expect when you turn the pages, because how different can the private areas of art galleries be? It turns out that they can be quite different, and in subtle, unexpected ways.

The book is set up as a sequence of photos, one to a page spread, that are variations on a theme, where the theme is views of off-limits interior private areas seen from the other side of closed doors – but you do not actually see much of the out-of-bounds areas. The variations are the small but significant details: door or no door, slightly open or closed, wood or glass; chain or rope barrier or none; stairs, elevator, or hall; glimpse of beyond or not; the kind of door handle – knob or handle or crash bar; sign or no sign; the variety of sign typefaces; the sign location (door, wall, stand); the sign wording; the flooring; the wall color; the pictorial space including the lines, planes, angles, and patterns made by door, wall, floor, lighting, and shadows; plus the format of the photographs themselves – mostly the same but with a number of outliers, just enough to surprise you.

What should read as a predictable set of variables becomes anything but, confounding your assumptions and expectations.

The photographs are finely printed on gloss paper and the design choices of the book mirror the minimalistic, understated, upscale elegance of the anonymous art galleries pictured, including a full palate of whites.

Depending on your tolerance for ambiguity and dry, tongue-in-cheek humor, Private can leave you feeling in on the joke or not. The joke is extended by the cover, which adds another layer of complexity. It is labeled “private” but unlike the doors in the photographs it is openable. Inside, though, all you see are more doors labeled “private…” A humorous text by Ed Park that narrates a visit to the back rooms of an art gallery complements the photographs.

As for what it might mean, well, in life you don’t get to look behind the scenes at a candy store or sausage factory. You can only imagine what is there, what they do not want you to see. Does the hushed, filtered, taste-and-money ambience of exclusive art galleries continue into the back room or is that where the carpet is coffee-stained, the desks are littered with post its, and the bodies are buried?

On a less literal level, Private serves perhaps as a metaphor for the inaccessibility of other people’s thoughts and lives, their unknowable mental spaces and realities, limited as we are in time and space as we move through our own eternal present.

Original in concept and accomplished in design and execution, Private takes a seemingly finite set of possibilities and makes them look limitless.

Hans Hickerson, Co-Editor of the PhotoBook Journal, is a photographer and photobook artist from Portland, Oregon.

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Tod Lippy – Private

Photographer: Tod Lippy (born in 1963)

Language: English

Design: Tod Lippy

Text: Ed Park

Softcover with French flaps; 29 color photographs: perfect binding; 979-8-9882645-0-7; 66 pages; 8.5 X 8.5 in.

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Articles and photographs published in the PhotoBook Journal may not be reproduced without the permission of the PhotoBook Journal staff and the photographer(s). All images, texts, and designs are under copyright by the authors and publishers.