Charles H. Traub

Tickety-Boo is a block of a book with more than two hundred images edited from smart phone photographs taken during Charles H. Traub’s everyday ramblings over the last four years. The English expression tickety-boo loosely translates ‘Everything is okay, but maybe everything isn’t!’ Therein lies the enigmatic crux of the images contained in the book.

The smart phone is an ingenious companion that readily makes a photographic response by Traub quick and unobtrusive – a third eye, if you will. A stream of consciousness flows in his response to places, things, and people that catch his eclectic whimsy. His subjects are ambiguous and out of context, yet once organized together within this book, create a kind of pictorial completeness, both soothing and disquieting.

The photographs in each spread vividly amplify each other leading the viewer to the next sequence. The mundane becomes animated, and in the end, this is a book about the delirious conditions of our time.

About the Author

Charles H. Traub has been a photographer/educator for over 50 years. His work is represented in major museums and collections all around the world. In 1988, he founded the MFA program of Photography, Video and Related Media at the School of Visual Arts in NYC and still serves as its Chair. Formally, he was a founder of the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia Collage, Chicago. Later he directed New York's prestigious Light Gallery, and for over 25 years was president of the Aaron Siskind Foundation.

Traub has received numerous awards including the prestigious ICP Infinity Award for his work on here is new york: A Democracy of Photography. He has published 16 books, including 8 monographs of his own. Recent publications include Dolce Via (2014) Lunchtime (2015), the iBook No Perfect Heroes-Photographing U.S. Grant (2016), and Taradiddle (2016).