12.27.2017

2017 BEST PHOTOGRAPHY BOOKS : PART II + HONORABLE MENTIONS

Photograph ©  Larry Sultan

MACK, 2017

 MACK, 2017

First published in 1992 to wide critical acclaim, Pictures From Home is Larry Sultan's (b. 1946, Brooklyn; d. 2009, California) pendant to his parents. Sultan returned home to Southern California periodically in the 1980s and the decade-long sequence moves between registers, combining contemporary photographs with film stills from home movies, fragments of conversation, Sultan's own writings and other memorabilia. The result is a narrative collage in which the boundary between the documentary and the staged becomes increasingly ambiguous. 196 pages, 140 color plates MACK

In the wake of his passing I reread Pictures From Home. Unbelievable. Has there ever been a photographer who writes better than Sultan? I’m certain that nobody has done a better job combining text and pictures. In this regard, Pictures From Home is the absolute zenith. Plainspoken, smart and brutally honest, it is a masterpiece of narrative photography.” – Alec Soth



Aperture, 2017


Susan Meiselas, one of the most influential photographers of our time and an important contributor to the evolution of documentary storytelling, provides an insightful personal commentary on the trajectory of her career in Susan Meiselas: On the Frontline. She guides us through her ideas, practices, and decision-making along her journey—from Carnival Strippers (1976) and Nicaragua: June 1978–July 1979 (1981; reissued by Aperture 2008, 2016) to Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History (1997) and Cova da Moura, Portugal (2004). This book includes over 100 photographs from her earliest work and most iconic images, along with previously unpublished photographs.” Aperture



Åsa Sjöström: Silent Land
Bokförlaget Max Ström, Stockholm

"Moldova is one of the poorest countries in Europe and one of the consequences of this fact is felt most harshly in the fabric of the family. Since the fall of the Soviet Union - when the country was a prosperous farming and wine community - nearly a quarter of the population has moved abroad in search of a better life."

"Åsa Sjöström focused on the Gradinari family. This past year, they could not afford to buy enough seed for their harvest since the father of the family was unable to travel to russia for work. Around the struggling family, she found a strikingly beautiful countryside. Amidst the painful economic pressures, sunflower fields were in blossom. Her pictures are poised between joy and sadness, work and play, summer holidays and annual responsibilities." Bokförlaget Max Ström



The Black Dandy and Street Style
Aperture Foundation, 2017

The Black Dandy and Street Style

Photograph (c) Russell K. Frederick

Described as “high-styled rebels” by author Shantrelle P. Lewis, black men with a penchant for color and refined fashion, both new and vintage, have gained popular attention in recent years, influencing mainstream fashion. But black dandyism itself is not new; originating in Enlightenment England’s slave culture, it has continued for generations in black cultures around the world. Dandy Lion: The Black Dandy and Street Style, 173 pages, 140 black-and-white and four-color images. Aperture Foundation



 Aerial Photographer, Kacper Kowalski
Landskrona FotoFestival Portfolio Review Winner 2016

 OVER
Kacper Kowalski

 ... I first saw from above the world below covered in fresh snow


I discovered flying....I quit my job, stopped seeing my friends, and hardly spent time at home anymore. I needed an excuse to justify what I was doing, so I came up with photography. There were no digital cameras or drones at that time—you needed to be able to slip a new roll of film into the camera in midair. I would take off from a meadow next to my house and enter that enchanted, colorful realm at one hundred and fifty meters. I would bring back photographs, like pirate’s booty. It was my mission to reveal the unknown, unseen world to the people; to record a portrait of civilization from on high. I felt I was educating and enlightening...I received awards, had exhibitions, and signed photobooks.

Do you recall Tarkovsky’s Stalker? That’s how I felt when I first saw from above the world below covered in fresh snow. Cold, empty, and strange. Under my rib cage an unfamiliar planet, abandoned by people. The sky merges with the Earth in front of me, the depths of whiteness stretch behind me. Through horizonless fog I move instinctively from one shape to the next, guided by structures and forms. I plunge deeper and deeper until all that remains is the here and the now, within which I meditate. With my whole being I experience the disturbing, ephemeral universe that belongs to nobody, not even to myself. I’ve found my Utopia. It doesn’t matter what I see when looking but what I feel. –
Kacper Kowalski

I was fortunate to meet Kacper Kowalski at the 2016 Landskrona Photo Festival Portfolio Review. His portfolio was nominated as the best of all the work viewed by the Reviewers, and he was chosen as the Winner of the Review. His work continues to be exhibited internationally.

"Over" Aerial Photographs and Text by Kacper Kowalski




Cheshire Bridge Road is an alluring look into a diverse southern urban community within Atlanta

Cheshire Bridge Road
by Teri E Darnell

For the last twenty years photographer Teri Darnell has lived in a neighborhood along Cheshire Bridge Road know as Atlanta’s Red-Light District. She submersed herself into the culture by walking up and down this infamous one-mile road photographing people and the environment. She discovered that Cheshire Bridge Road provides a community where all people are free to live with the person they are inside regardless of sexuality, gender, and race. Seedy strip clubs, sex shops, and gay nightclubs line Cheshire Bridge Road. Drag shows come alive most nights of the week, as they have been for decades. The establishments are disappearing quickly from an explosion of redevelopment. It’s just a matter of time before this unique community is forced to disperse, the diversity along this road no longer exists. Check out Teri Darnell's photographs. Amazon , 12x12



 ANDERSON + LOW : Voyages
Lucky Panda Press, 2017

ANDERSON + LOW : Voyages
Lucky Panda Press, 2017

Internationally acclaimed photographers Anderson + Low brought their latest photography series, Voyages, to the Science Museum last spring, focusing on the Museum's collection of maritime models. Using innovative methods of photography, Anderson + Low created a series of beautiful and ethereal images which capture the collection in a new light, reimagining the models as epic voyagers. Lucky Panda Press



ANNE BERRY | PRIMATES
 21ST EDITIONS, 2017

ANNE BERRY | PRIMATES
 21ST EDITIONS. 2017

"Anne Berry spent several years traveling across Europe and America, stopping at small zoos to photograph the primates you see here. The smaller zoos allowed Berry more one-on-one time with her subjects. Sometimes Berry would wait for days to get the right shot, which meant connecting beyond the glass-as-cage as well as the glass-as-lens...few photographers have communicated the depth and complexity of primate emotions as Berry has." – Collier Brown. 21st Editions



Following in the Footsteps of Johannes Larsen
Crymogea, Reykjavík, Iceland 2017

 Melstaður, July 27, 1930
Drawing by Johannes Larsen

Melstaður, June 17, 2016
Photograph by Einar Falur Ingólfsson

Photographer Einar Falur Ingólfsson has been photographing places in Icelandic nature previously portrayed in illustrations for translations of the Icelandic sagas. Now it is time for another artist, Johannes Larsen, that illustrated the Icelandic sagas published by Gyldendal. It is a fascinating study of the role of landscape. 

From 2014 to 2016, the Danish artist Johannes Larsen' (1867–1961) drawings were the guide of Einar Falur Ingólfsson, while travelling around and photographing Iceland. Larsen was in Iceland during the summers of 1927 and 1930 and made over 300 drawings of sites mentioned in the Sagas of the Icelanders for a three-volume edition of the sagas published by the Danish press Gyldendal between 1930 and 1932.  Almost ninety years later, Ingólfsson followed in Larsen’s footsteps, working with a large sheet film camera in many of the same places he visited. 182 pages, Crymogea, Reykjavík 2017


MAN WITH PANAMA HAT
 Photograph © Raphael Shammaa


Raphael Shammaa


Raphael Shammaa

“It is beautiful! Very elegant, sophisticated. Beautifully designed and printed. A lovely piece to keep for anyone receiving it” –Elizabeth Avedon. Fifty two pages plus cover and 39 images. Printed on Mohawk Superfine Eggshell Fine Art paper. Available at Dashwood Books




ALISON ROSSITER: EXPIRED PAPER
Radius Books / Yossi Milo Gallery

Expired Paper offers a comprehensive look at Alison Rossiter's body of work—Latent, Tarnish, Landscapes, Pools, Pours, Dips, Quads, and Collages. Art critic Leah Ollman’s accompanying text serves as an ideal complement to the images: “All of the works pay homage to the rich idiosyncrasies of photographic papers across history, and restore a sanctity to the photograph as object. Made without cameras, lenses or film, the works are nothing but process and materiality. Their subject, if they can be said to have one, is time, photography’s most irreducible ingredient.” (Art in America) Includes a selection of early 20th-century photographic paper packages (which the artist has collected for over 30 years) in a separate booklet. Radius Books



FRIEDLANDER | MEISELAS | MANDEL | BURKE  


Four Book Set : TBW Books
Book 1: Mike Mandel - Boardwalk Minus Forty
Book 2: Susan Meiselas - Prince Street Girls
Book 3: Bill Burke - They Shall Take Up Serpents
Book 4: Lee Friedlander - Head

Four iconic living American photographers offer entirely new bodies of never before seen work. Reaching back 30 years and beyond, the books feel contemporary through deliberate choices in editing, sequence, and design, while continuing to celebrate their vintage origins. Each artist's vision, while individually experienced, comes together to form a powerful quartet of books.


The Legacy of Judaism in the New World
Photographs by Wyatt Gallery

Award-winning photographer Wyatt Gallery documents the oldest synagogues and cemeteries dating back to the early 1600’s on Barbados, Curacao, Jamaica, St. Thomas, St. Eustatius, and Suriname through his singular style of photos with histories written by Stanley Mirvis. The enclaves, formed by Sephardic Jews who fled the Catholic Inquisition, became so influential that they helped fuel the success of the American Revolution and partially finance the first synagogues in New York City and Newport, Rhode Island.  Schiffer


 Cig Harvey: You An Orchestra You A Bomb
Schilt Publishing, 2017


"You An Orchestra You A Bomb, is a vibrant and bold book; possibly her most beautiful to date. It explores the photographer’s relationship with life itself. It is a book about paying attention to and appreciating the fragile present. You An Orchestra You A Bomb captures moments of awe, makes icons of the everyday, and looks at life on the threshold between magic and disaster. 

Cig Harvey has always experienced the world viscerally but after a traumatic event, a raw heightened awareness of temporary nature of life permeates this new work. Through breathless moments of beauty, her images propel us to fathom the sacred in the split seconds of everyday. Cig's photographs are interwoven with her intimate poetry in this hauntingly beautiful book.”– Schilt Publishing

 Gabriela Herman: The Kids
The Children of LGBTQ Parents in the USA
The New Press, 2017

A stunning new photobook featuring more than fifty portraits by Gabriela Herman of children brought up by gay parents in America, sixth in a groundbreaking series that looks at LGBTQ communities around the world. The New Press


Bluewater Shore
by Douglas Stockdale
Bluewater Shore
by Douglas Stockdale

I finally met Douglas Stockdale last summer at the LACP Portfolio Reviews after following his "PhotoBook Journal" for years. He shared his latest self-published Artist Book, Bluewater Shore,  created from re-purposed photographs from the artist family album that investigates memory, family and American culture. It's housed in a unique, hand-inscribed plastic ziplock bag. Self-published.



 The Topography of Tears (Paperback)Rose-Lynn Fisher
Bellevue Literary Press, 2017

In this powerful collection of images,  award-winning photographer Rose-Lynn Fisher trains her optical microscope and camera on her own tears and those of men, women, and children, released in moments of grief, pain, gratitude, and joy, and captured upon glass slides. These duotone photographs reveal the beauty of recurring patterns in nature and present evocative, crystalline imagery for contemplation. Her first book, BEE, is a close-up study of the honeybee via scanning electron microscope in magnifications from 10x to 5000x. Her new book, The Topography of Tears, explores the realm of our tears through an optical microscope.  Bellevue Literary Press




Here For The Ride is Andre D. Wagner’s first monograph and comprehensive body of work. The book chronicles the everyday life of people as they embark on a personal journey through the New York subway system. 62 photographs that are intended to be read more than viewed, Here For The Ride is a collective sequence alluding to the qualities of life that are often invisible to the common eye. Containing two interrelated documents, the hardcover book contains the primary photographic narrative, with an introduction by Miles Hodges. The paperback includes an essay by Zun Lee, an in-depth interview with the artist and a series of images that delve deeper into the artistic process behind book. Creative Future





I met Lithuanian photographer and media artist Visvaldas Morkevičius (now based in Berlin-Vilnius) at the Landskrona FotoFestival Portfolio Review 2017. He works between fashion and documentary, collaborating with other artists as a photographer: Dazed digital, i-D online, i-D Germany, NEON magazin, Nido, Future Music magazine, Citizens of humanity magazine...more here
Portraitzine is the latest project by Visvaldas Morkevičius, comprising a series of photographs as results of the visual anthropology research. The author sees Portraitzine as a collection of “journeys.” Read more: http://portraitzine.com/



Photographer Sinden Collier

Rhett Collier and Sinden Collier
 
"Losing my Religion but not my Faith"
Photograph © Sinden Collier

"The collaboration of writer Rhett Collier and photographer Sinden Collier has produced a conceptual museum quality book of original thoughts and images, aptly entitled: "TRAINS OF THOUGHT - Welcome Aboard!" The thoughts are visceral and stimulating, touching upon wisdom, reality, imagination and inspiring reflections. The images are ethereal, evoking mood and atmosphere in a painterly photographic style, each resonant to the thought with which it is paired. This pairing provides a central underscoring of the messages.” Trains-of-Thought.com




Once in Harlem, Katsu Naito builds on his remarkable ability to intimately engage with his subjects to create emotional dialogues that can transcend bounds of ethnicity, gender, and socio-economic strata, to, as he puts it, "look into each other’s soul to build another dimension of a relationship.” 100 pages 55 duotone plates TBW Books


 Reading New York
Lawrence Schwartzwald

Photojournalist Schwartzwald’s beautifully printed self published 30 page book-zine available at Dashwood Books.


Passage, 2017


”Sundets Pärla”, The Pearl of the Strait by Swedish photogapher Sanja Matoničkin taken from Helsingborg, the town at Öresund, where fresh north-western winds blow in from the sea. The low pressures bring in showers of rain from the North Sea creating glittering pools, where the buildings are mirrored, meditating on their age and beauty. Passage

2017 BEST PHOTOGRAPHY BOOKS
PART I


* Text for most posts courtesy of their publisher. 

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