12.28.2020

BEST PHOTOGRAPHY BOOKS OF 2020 : ROUND-UP PART l

An Aperture Monograph by Ming Smith

Sun Ra Space II, New York, 1978 © Ming Smith

Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph

This monograph brings together four decades of Ming Smith’s work, celebrating her trademark lyricism, distinctively blurred silhouettes, dynamic street scenes, and deep devotion to theater, music, poetry, and dance—from the “Pittsburgh Cycle” plays of August Wilson to the Afrofuturism of Sun Ra. With never-before-seen images, and a range of illuminating essays and interviews, this tribute to Smith’s singular vision promises to be an enduring contribution to the history of American photography. 

Ming Smith was the first African-American female photographer whose work was acquired by the Museum Of Modern Art in New York City and the first female member of the influential Black photography collective, Kamoinge.

Co-published by Aperture and Documentary Arts, 2020


"Necessary Fictions” Radius Books

Debi Cornwall: Necessary Fictions. Radius Books

Debi Cornwall: Necessary Fictions

During trips to ten military bases across the United States since 2016, DEBI CORNWALL documented mock-village landscapes in the fictional country of “Atropia” and its denizens, roleplayers who enact versions of their past or future selves in realistic training scenarios. Costumed Afghan and Iraqi civilians, many of whom have fled war, now recreate it in the service of the U.S. military. Real soldiers pose in front of camouflage backdrops, dressed by Hollywood makeup artists in “moulage”—fake wounds—as they prepare to deploy.

Cornwall presents a meta-reality—the artifice of war—and the book combines her photographs with a variety of texts to provoke critical inquiry about America’s fantasy industrial complex.

Radius Books, 2020
 

Kyle Meyer: Interwoven. 
Co-published by Radius Books with Yossi Milo
Untitled 100, 2018

Meyer often photographs his subjects wearing a traditional head wrap made from a vibrantly colored textile. He then produces a large-scale print of the portrait and hand-shreds the photograph, together with the fabric from the head wrap, weaving the strips into a complexly patterned, three-dimensional work. Included in each copy of the book, is a unique piece of fabric torn from the remnants of the Interwoven project.
 
Co-published by Radius Books with Yossi Milo, 2020


Jennifer McClure: You Who Never Arrived

You Who Never Arrived was photographed as McClure examined the patterns and the breakdowns of her failed relationships. The memories were staged in hotel rooms with stand-ins playing the parts of old loves, blurring the line between the past and the present, allowing her to heal old wounds. This Peanut Portfolio Book includes one signed and numbered original photograph and one signed and numbered hardcover book, 40 pages, 18 color plates.

Peanut Press, 2020
 
 

Peanut Portfolios

Each Peanut Portfolio Book, a collection of 9 books by 9 photographers: one signed and numbered original photograph and one signed and numbered hardcover book, 40 pages, 18 color plates.

 
Lyndon Baines Johnson, President 1963-69, Vietnam Dinner Plate
 
 
Zackary Taylor, President 1849-50, Owner of Nearly 150 Slaves, Butter Dish

Kathleen Y. Clark: THE WHITE HOUSE CHINA


"The White House China is a book of photographic and mixed media reconstructions based on the collection of dinnerware at the presidential residence in Washington, DC. Aiming to correct certain historical omissions, Kathleen Y. Clark explores the iconography and incongruity of an America established through violent conquest yet framed by elegant theory and language."
 
"Inspired by early political illustrators who used their explosive imagery to reveal the injustice behind the country’s facade of equality, these re-creations look at presidential contradictions and pivotal judgements made throughout the nation’s history. The White House China shines a light on often-destructive events which happened by decision or neglect within each administration, providing a stark contrast to the assumption of civilization and culture set around historic dining tables."

Published by Kathleen Y. Clark, 2020
 
 

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. being greeted on his return to the U.S. after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. Baltimore, MD. October 31, 1964 © Leonard Freed/Magnum Photos
 
Leonard Freed’s seminal c photo essay, Black in White America, was first published in 1968. This newly-expanded 2020 edition includes unseen photographs, as well as Freed’s most iconic work and is the definitive collection of his photographs from the time. This extraordinary work is a vital historical record and includes pivotal moments in the civil rights movement, such as the March on Washington and the Selma to Montgomery marches.

Reel Arts Press, 2020
 
 
"If Sir Elton John wrote the Foreword and director John Waters wrote the Afterword, then we're surely dealing with a major talent. In this 400-page retrospective, award-winning photographer Greg Gorman presents the finest shots of his half-century in Hollywood. Throughout his star-studded portfolio entitled, It's Not About Me, you'll find the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio and Johnny Depp at the beginning of their careers, as well as the iconic posters Gorman created for films such as Scarface and Tootsie, record covers for David Bowie, and magazine covers for Andy Warhol."

teNeues, 2020



Rebecca Norris Webb: Night Calls

A meditation on fathers and daughters, on memory and one’s first landscape, on care-taking of the land and its inhabitants, and on history that divides us as much as heals us. For the past six years Norris Webb has retraced the route of her 99-year-old doctor father’s house calls through Rush County, Indiana, the rural county where they both were born. Following his work rhythms, she photographed often at night and in the early morning, when many people arrive into the world—her father delivered some one thousand babies—and when many people leave it.

Radius Books, 2020
 
 

 


Produced in conjunction with the FotoFest Biennial 2020 exhibition, African Cosmologies: Photography, Time, and the Other brings together 33 artists of African origins from around the globe whose works challenge traditional notions of Blackness and transnational histories in relation to concepts of liberty, rights, and representation. For nearly forty years, FotoFest has presented and worked with artists, photographers, and thinkers from Japan, Latin America, Korea, China, Russia, and the Arab Region, and this is the first time in the Biennial’s 37-year history that the central exhibition focused on artists of African origin.

Schilt Publishing, 2020
 
 


"Jamie Johnson has been traveling around the world for twenty years and is best known for her touching portraits of children. When she came to Ireland for the first time in 2014, she immediately felt connected to the cosmos of the Irish Travellers and would visit and photograph them time and again for five years. The encounter with the children of this extremely poor and socially discriminated population group fascinated her and even changed her views as a mother. Fascinated by the resilience and optimism of the children, who are proud of the culture and traditions of the Irish Travellers, Johnson’s portraits aim to promote the perception and respect of children as such, far removed from the common prejudices of society." 

Kehrer Verlag, 2020

 


 

"Uniform is Jeffers series of portraits of Nevisian kids in their regulation garb, shot in situ at Nevis’s fourteen schools. His images make a terrific use of light and have an impeccable color sense. They also beautifully, and oftentimes poignantly, chronicle how despite having to wear the same thing as everyone else every single school day, who you really are can’t help but shine through." Mark Holgate, Fashion News Director, Vogue U.S. Uniform, the first book by Kacey Jeffers is a series of portraits of kids on Nevis, the Caribbean island where the photographer grew up. 

Self Published, 2020
 



Joni Sternbach:SURFBOARD


SURFBOARD is both a celebration and an impassioned study of some of the most important designs in surf history. Tracing the roots of the sport to Hawai’i, photographer Joni Sternbach uncovers layers of meaning, historic and cultural clashes, and ultimately the sheer pleasure of the common and utilitarian surfboard and its handmade origins. Drawn from the supreme collection at the Surfing Heritage and Cultural Center (SHACC) in San Clemente, California, Sternbach demonstrates, through her deft use of her ultra-large large format camera and wet plate collodion glass plates, what it means to capture the mana of these totemic and historic boards.


"In A Parallel Road, Willett focuses on just one avenue where Black Americans have been denied the ability to fully participate in an aspect of the American dream. The book explores the complexities of the American road trip, examining how race can and continues to affect this experience. The car and the open road have long been equated with independence and freedom, yet this has often not been the case for Black Americans, as it remains an unpredictable and dangerous place today. The culmination of a five-year project, A Parallel Road is deeply personal for Willett, as it was influenced by conversations with friends and relatives about their experiences on the road."

Overlapse, 2020
 
 
"Nicolas & Adrien. A World with Two Sons is a series of intimate portraits of Martine Fougeron’s two sons and their friends growing up in New York and France. Both tender and distanced, the book is a visual bildungsroman that delves into the intense present of her sons’ adolescent states of mind before they become independent adults. Nicolas et Adrien consists of two interconnected bodies of work, “Teen Tribe” (2005–10) and “The Twenties” (2010–18). Nicolas & Adrien is a sensual biography of two adolescents and a depiction of the universal processes of growing up to which all can relate."

Steidl, 2020

 




In Lost Venice, photographer Sarah Hadley guides us on a journey through foggy days and veiled nights through the mysterious hidden corners of the city and outlying islands, all the while examining her deep connection with this opulent and mythic place. She presents an alluring and haunting portrayal of Venice as distilled through her personal lens of loss and nostalgia. By contemplating the temporal beauty of Venice, Hadley examines our own impermanence and the uncertain future of this unique city.  

Damiani Editore, 2020

Watch For In 2021:



Ragnar Axelsson:

"Arctic Heroes takes a poignant look at the fate of the Greenland sled dog. In Greenland, where the melting ice sheet is irrevocably disrupting the hunters’ 4,000-year old traditional way of life, the stark reality of global warming is an immediate and direct threat to their everyday survival. The Greenland sled dog, essential to Inuit settlement and survival, now faces extinction as hunters are forced to adapt to the vanishing world around them. In over 150 images, and through hunters’ personal stories, this book bears witness to the animals’ magnificence and the deep, integral role they play in the hunters’ lives. The subjects of Icelandic photographer Ragnar Axelsson, also known as RAX (b. 1958), are people, animals, and landscape, but the focus of his work is the extraordinary relationships the people of the Arctic have developed with their extreme environment."

Kehrer Verlagm February 2021

VISIT : PART II


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