12.27.2019

BEST PHOTOGRAPHY BOOKS OF 2019 : ROUND-UP PART I


Photographs by Elinor Carucci
Foreword by Kristen Roupenian 
Monicelli Press

From acclaimed photographer Elinor Carucci, a vivid chronicle of one woman’s passage through aging, family, illness, and intimacy. "As one of the most autobiographically rigorous photographers of her generation, Carucci recruits and revisits the same members of her family that we have seen since her work gained prominence two decades ago. Even as we observe telling details—graying hair, the pressures and joys of marriage, episodes of pronounced illness, the evolution of her aging parents’ roles as grandparents, her children’s increasing independence—we are invited to reflect on the experiences that we all share contending with the challenges of life, love, and change.” Purchase

 
from Caress : (r) Elinor Carucci (l) Mickalene Thomas

A Yoffy Press Triptych

Elinor Carucci also featured in this impressive limited edition 3 book set along with David Hilliard and Mickalene Thomas in from Yoffy Press. All three photographers explore intimacy, emotion and connection between the people in front of their lens, the artist and subject. Purchase

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© Roy DeCarava
  
Roy DeCarava : Light Break
Photographs by Roy DeCarava
Preface by Zoé Whitley
Introduction and text by Sherry Turner DeCarava
David Zwirner Books

Light Break presents a wide-ranging selection of Roy DeCarava’s photographs accompanied by a preface by Zoé Whitley, an American curator based in London, and features an introduction and essay by curator and art historian Sherry Turner DeCarava. Titled “Celebration,” Turner DeCarava’s essay considers the artist’s singular poetic vision, his timeless portrayals of individuals and places, and his mastery of composition and photographic printmaking.

“In making photographs, as in life, DeCarava was patient. Possessing both a peerless self-awareness and acute observational skills, he knew intuitively when to wait and when to open the camera’s shutter. In the dark room, he availed himself of these same attributes, moving with steady assurance to develop his prints so as to allow the full range of what he called his “infinite scale of grey tones”—often realized at the deepest end of the spectrum—to emerge slowly and fully.” Purchase

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 Cover : This Empty World
Bus Staion With Elephant In Dust © Nick Brandt

 River Of People With Rhino © Nick Brandt

Nick Brandt - This Empty World
Photographs by Nick Brandt
Thames & Hudson, London   

"Moving into color photography for the first time, this monograph of new work from photographer Nick Brandt is both a technical tour de force of contemporary image making and an ambitiously scaled project that uses constructed sets of a scale typically seen in major film productions."

"Each image is a combination of two photographs taken weeks apart, almost all from the exact same camera position. The starting point of each composition is always the animal photographed in its native savanna landscape. Brandt then designs and builds sets in the precise location of the original photograph depicting the human developments, such as gas stations, highway and bridge construction sites, and bus stations, that are invading the East African landscape. A second sequence is then photographed with the completed set, populated by a large cast of people drawn from local communities and beyond."

"The final images are powerful composites of the two source photographs, which presents the wild animals and the people as equal victims of the environmental—both now aliens in their once-natural, once-native habitat.” PhotoEye Books

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 Veruschka and sumo, Yuzawa, 1966 © Gideon Lewin 

Gideon at Modernage Labs, working on the Twiggy mural 
for the retrospective exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum 1979
Photo: Kaz Nakamura 
  Ara Gallant creating a bracelet (on Veruschka), Tokyo, 1966 © Gideon Lewin

Avedon – Behind the Scenes 1964-1980
Photographs and Text by Gideon Lewin
PowerHouse Books

"This monograph on the work of Gideon Lewin, master printer and assistant to Richard Avedon for 16 years, reveals moments never told, stories never heard, and a life that only a few ever experienced. It is a story of a close working relationship and collaboration with a master." 

Beautifully written and illustrated, Lewin shares with us a look back stage at one of the most prolific and successful photography studio's. Publishers Weekly Review (12/11/2019): "Photographer Lewin pays homage to his mentor, fashion and portrait photographer Richard Avedon (1923–2004), in this lavishly illustrated tribute. Having worked as Avedon’s assistant and studio manager for 16 years in the 1960s and ’70s, Lewin describes highlights including assisting a shoot in 1967, when Avedon photographed Anne Bancroft and Dustin Hoffman in bed to promote The Graduate. Lewin speaks about a range of subjects, such as helping around in the studio, traveling to the Japanese countryside to photograph supermodel Veruschka (von Lehndorff) alongside a sumo wrestler, and the unexpected and humorous difficulties that came with working with Hollywood megastars such as Sophia Loren (who continually motioned to adjust the light) and Raquel Welch (who “demanded to look in the mirror every time Dick pointed the camera” at her). The true strength of the volume lies in its descriptions of Avedon, whom Lewin describes as “totally committed to photography, consciously creating imagery with a fierce determination to leave a legacy.” Lewin’s enthusiastic testimonial will thrill Avedon’s fans." Purchase

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Dear Mr. Picasso: An illustrated love affair with freedom 


"Fred Baldwin’s life took a turn in the direction of the extraordinary when he decided to interview and photograph Pablo Picasso. In his last year of college, he delivered a letter with own drawings to the artist. This made Picasso laugh and open the door. Baldwin’s life changed. He followed his dream, used his imagination, overcame fear, and acted – now he could accomplish anything. What followed were picture stories about reindeer migrations, a day and a night with the Ku Klux Klan, Nobel Prize coverage, cod fishing in Arctic Norway, polar bear expeditions. Then underwater images of the fight of hooked Marlin in Mexico – an homage to Hemingway. In 1963, Baldwin joined the Civil Rights Movement, photographing Martin Luther King. A two-year stint as Peace Corps director in Borneo was followed by more photojournalism in India and Afghanistan. This account takes the reader to high adventure worldwide, but also to disaster and failure. This illustrated love affair with freedom shows how a camera became a passport to the world.” – Schilt Publishing. Purchase

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 Vince. New York © Alec Soth

Nick. Los Angeles © Alec Soth

MACK Publishing

"Taking its name from a line in the Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Gray Room,” Alec Soth’s latest book is a lyrical exploration of the limitations of photographic representation. While these large-format color photographs are made all over the world, they aren’t about any particular place or population. By a process of intimate and often extended engagement, Soth’s portraits and images of his subject’s surroundings involve an enquiry into the extent to which a photographic likeness can depict more than the outer surface of an individual, and perhaps even plumb the depths of something unknowable about both the sitter and the photographer." Mack Publishing
 
“After the publication of my last book about social life in America, Songbook, and a retrospective of my four, large scale American projects, Gathered Leaves, I went through a long period of rethinking my creative process. For over a year I stopped traveling and photographing people. I barely took any pictures at all. When I returned to photography, I wanted to strip the medium down to its primary elements. Rather than trying to make some sort of epic narrative about America, I wanted to simply spend time looking at other people and, hopefully, briefly glimpse their interior life. In order to try and access these lives, I made all of the photographs in interior spaces. While these rooms often exist in far-flung places, it’s only to emphasize that these pictures aren’t about any place in particular. Whether a picture is made in Odessa or Minneapolis, my goal was the same: to simply spend time in the presence of another beating heart.” – Alec Soth

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  Kohei Yoshiyuki: The Park
 Kohei Yoshiyuki: The Park
  Kohei Yoshiyuki: The Park


Photographs by Kohei Yoshiyuki
Introduction by Yossi Milo
Text by Vince Aletti
Interview by Nobuyoshi Araki
Radius Books / Yossi Milo

For his notorious Park photos, taken by night in Tokyo’s Shinjuku, Yoyogi, and Aoyama parks during the 1970s, Japanese photographer Kohei Yoshiyuki used a 35mm camera, infrared film and flash to capture a secret community of lovers and voyeurs. His pictures document the people who gathered in these parks at night for clandestine trysts, as well as the many spectators lurking in the bushes who watched—and sometimes participated in—these couplings.

With their raw, snapshot-like quality, these images not only uncover the hidden sexual exploits of their subjects, both same-sex and heterosexual, but they also serve as a chronicle of a Japan we rarely see. As Martin Parr writes in The Photobook: A History Volume II, The Park is “a brilliant piece of social documentation, capturing perfectly the loneliness, sadness and desperation that so often accompany sexual or human relationships in a big, hard metropolis like Tokyo.”

This newly designed, comprehensive edition of Kohei Yoshiyuki: The Park brings this collectible classic back into print with eight never-before-seen images, as well as documentation of the sold-out 1980 Japanese zines that predated the 2007 Hatje Cantz/Yossi Milo edition. Purchase
 

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Vince Aletti : Issues 
PHAIDON Press

Acclaimed photography critic Vince Aletti has selected 100 significant magazine issues from his expansive personal archive, revealing images by photographers rarely seen outside their original context. With his characteristic élan and featuring stunning images, Aletti has created a fresh, idiosyncratic, and previously unexplored angle on the history of photography.

Issues, a luxury, oversized object, richly illustrated with brilliant reproductions, and enclosed in an elegant archival-style magazine-file box, is an essential addition to every book collection on photography, fashion, and graphic design.

It's the first survey to explore the history of photography through the lens of fashion magazines, spanning the years 1925 to 2018. Magazines featured include American, British, and French Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, W, Details, Purple Fashion, The Face, Dutch, and many more. –Phaidon Press 

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Tod Papageorge : On the Acropolis
Photographs by Tod Papageorge
Stanley / Barker 

In 1983 - 1984, Tod Papageorge spent a month each summer on the Acropolis in Athens, producing a body of work that seems lost in time, fusing the ancient with the modern.

“I stayed at a nice hotel, the Zafolia, five minutes from the Acropolis, where every surface in my room was marble, and where I did laps in the pool every evening, driving the hotel staff crazy. I usually ate lunch at a vegetarian restaurant in the Plaka, right under the Parthenon. I just liked the food. Have no memory at all of where I’d go for dinner. Very solitary the whole time. That was it: up The Hill in the morning, down for lunch, usually back up for more after that, then a swim and dinner somewhere nearby.” - Tod Papageorge

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Raghunath Manwar examines an X-ray of one of several workers who has been diagnosed with asbestosis in Ahmedabad, India. Raghunath is the secretary of an NGO, the Occupational Health and Safety Association, that assists employees affected by asbestos from a power-generating company and a cement factory. Image © Louie Palu/ZUMA Press


Asbestos tailings from the mining of chrysotile asbestos, a.k.a. white asbestos, seen in the city of Thetford Mines in Quebec, Canada. Image © Louie Palu/ZUMA Press

Photographs by Louie Palu
Essay by Alison Nordstrom, PhD
Yoffy Press 

In A Field Guide to Asbestos, Louie Palu documents the effects of asbestos on people and the landscape in Canada, the US, India and the UK. In this 15-year-long award-winning investigative project, Palu also addresses the visual aspects of asbestos that are related to fatal diseases that can take up to 40 years after exposure before they appear. – Yoffy Press

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Images of the New West
Photographs By Joan Myers
Essay by Lucy R. Lippard
Damiani Editore 

"In this latest collection of photographs, taken over the last forty-five years, Joan Myers turns her lens to the contemporary American West. In so doing, she turns our conception of western landscapes and the life contained within them upside down, revealing the changes the region has undergone over the last half-century. Her perspective is at once elegiac and ironic, capturing the myth and reality of the West, its shaping and appropriation by Hollywood, popular culture, and the ever-present, but fracturing American dream. “

In deconstructing the pictures, cultural critic Lucy Lippard notes that they “seem to emerge from cracks in American culture. They show us a past that still affects, and reflects, our present, revealing unexpected insights into how the myths of the West were formed and how they relate to reality.” Purchase

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Anastasio Bonnie Sanchez, left, a rancher in Colorado's San Luis valley, whose Hispanic ancestors can be traced to early settlements in neighboring New Mexico, and the San Geronimo church massacre site in Taos Pueblo, right, which U.S. troops attacked in 1847, killing 150 © Tomas van Houtryve/VII

Medicine Bow Peak, left, near the early-19th-century border between Alta California, Mexico, and the United States. Ralph Peters III, right, a member of the Hupa tribe. 2017 © Tomas van Houtryve/VII


Portraits by Tomas van Houtryve
Radius Books

What if Mexico Still Included California, Nevada and Texas? 

With Lines and Lineage, Tomas van Houtryve takes aim at America’s collective amnesia of history. The work addresses the missing photographic record of the period when Mexico ruled what we now know as the American West. To visualize the people and places from the remarkable yet unseen Mexican era, van Houtryve chose to photograph the region with glass plates and a 19th-century wooden camera. 

Using a North American map from 1839 (the same year that photography is thought to have made its debut in Europe), Mr. van Houtryve traveled along Mexico’s old northern border to meet families who have lived in the region for centuries.

His portraits of direct descendants of early inhabitants of the West—mestizo, Afro-Latin, indigenous, Crypto-Jewish—are paired in diptychs with photographs of landscapes along the original border and architecture from the Mexican period. This book lifts the pervasive fog of dominant Western mythology and makes us question the role that photographs—both present and missing—have played in shaping the identity of the West – Radius Books

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 Lost Venice, Damiani
Photographs by Sarah Hadley

 from Lost Venice © Sarah Hadley

Photographs by Sarah Hadley
Text by Karen Haas, Susan Burnstine
Damiani

Los Angeles based photographer Sarah Hadley’s 'Lost Venice' is both an alluring and haunting portrayal of that majestic city as distilled through her personal lens of loss and nostalgia. Hadley contemplates the paradoxes of Venice with evocative images that celebrate the magnificent architecture and its fragility.

Hadley’s unusual childhood and lengthy history with the city, coupled with the premature loss of her father who introduced her to Italy, have allowed her to channel Venice’s ethereal nature with subtle intensity. Her dream-like images of dark waters and shadowy passageways emanate longing and conjure a forgotten Venice – Damiani    
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      Serge Kayaking Through the Salvinia © Lynne Buchanan

Florida’s Changing Waters: A Beautiful World in Peril
Photographs By Lynne Buchanan
Essays by Jason M. Evans, Robert L. Knight
George F. Thompson Publishing


"Lynne Buchanan began photographing rivers to create artistic records of her connection with water and the lessons she learned from rivers about being in the present moment and aligning with the flow of life. The more time she spent photographing waterways in her native Florida, the more she noticed what was being damaged and lost due to human impact….The result is Changing Waters, which documents the negative effects of climate change, agricultural pollution, population and urban growth, and land development on Florida’s inland and coastal waters and springs." Purchase

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Anna Marie Mesa, 16, listens to music on her smartphone in Centro Havana. Technology is leapfrogging the infastructure in Cuba where citizens went from landlines to smartphones in a matter of months. Cubans born after 1989 have only known a time after the USSR dissolved and left the Caribbean nation with little resources and a powerful, growth-crippling, US-led economic embargo © Greg Kahn

Havana Youth © Greg Kahn

Havana Youth : Greg Kahn
Photographs by Greg Kahn
Introduction by Ariana Hernandez-Reguant
Yoffy Press

"In Havana Youth, Greg Kahn explores Cubans born after 1989, who have only known a time after the USSR dissolved and left the Caribbean nation with few resources and a growth-crippling, US-led economic embargo. Those kids, born during what is called “The Special Period”, are now in their twenties and developing a sense of individuality in a society that was historically focused on collectivism. This is their cultural counter-revolution, and they are redefining what it means to be Cuban." Yoffy Press

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The Best of LensCulture,  vol 3  
Schilt Publishing

The next generation of contemporary photographers. . .

"Here are 150 award-winning photographers you should know. These exciting contemporary photographers hail from 42 countries on five continents, and they are making remarkable work right now in diverse cultures around the world. It's fresh, inspiring, insightful and thought-provoking. LensCulture is the leading online destination to discover the latest trends and freshest contemporary photography, and this volume compiles some of the best discoveries of the year. This book celebrates excellence in the visual language of photography in all genres: documentary, fine art, photojournalism, portrait, street photography, abstract, landscape, architecture, nature, alternative
process, experimental, poetic, personal, and more. Everyone who is curious about the current state of photography around the globe will be delighted to discover the rich variety of photographers and their imagery presented in these pages." – LensCulture.com

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Kwaidan. Stories and Studies of Strange Things
Photographs by Hiroshi Watanabe
Text by Lafcadio Hearn
Introduction by Paul Murray
Unicorn Publishing Group



PHOTO-EYE Book Store asked internationally renowned experts and artists from the photobook world to choose just one book for their 2019 photo-eye Favorite PhotoBooks List. Check them out https://www.photoeye.com/best-books-2019/index.cfm

"Out of this year’s vast ocean of photography books, I chose "Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things" with photographs by award-winning contemporary photographer Hiroshi Watanabe illustrating Lafcadio Hearn's century-old folk stories. One of my favorite short stories opens the book...with Watanabe’s magnificent photograph, remarkably created with an accurate Buddhist spell painstakingly written all over the entire body of the main character, Hoichi, also shown on the book cover." Elizabeth Avedon


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