photo book world

f.8 be there (photobook banter) for June 20, 2021

You Can Call me Nana, Will Harris (Overlapse, 2021)Two Men Arrive in a Village,Jo Ractliffe (Gould Collection, 2021)The Boys, Rick Schatzberg(powerHouse, 2020)The Moon Belongs to Everyone, Stacy Arezou Mehrfar (GOST, 2021)Street Portraits, Dawoud Bey (MACK, 2021)Death Magick Abundance, Akasha Rabut (Anthology Editions, 2020)Past Time: Troubled Visions of the Good Old Days, Paul Shambroom (Fall…

f.8 be there (photobook banter)

You Can Call me Nana, Will Harris (Overlapse, 2021)Working Together: Louis Draper and the Kamoinge Workshop (VMFA, 2020)Reconciliation, S. Billie Mandle (Kehrer, 2020)Photographs 1980s – now, Jo Ractliffe (Steidl, 2020)Night Calls, Rebecca Norris Webb (Radius, 2020)The Locusts, Jesse Lenz (Charcoal, 2020)Transparencies, Stephen Shore (MACK, 2020)Untitled, Sasha Phyars-Burgess (Capricious,…

War Sand

Polygon, 2018

“What a crazy object this is” was my thought when I first opened up Donald Weber’s expansive, multi-faceted exploration of a few grains of sand. I’m not sure that William Blake, when writing “Auguries of Innocence” in the early 19th century, ever imagined that the trope of his first four lines – “To see a World in a Grain of Sand/And a Heaven in a Wild Flower/Hold…

Drop Dead Gorgeous

18 Publications, 2020

What struck me about Drop Dead Gorgeous(aside from its title, one of the best!) is the flood of insights and visual information one can draw from a microscopic, aerosolizeable virus. How are we, as a community impacted by a pandemic, communicating the story of this novel coronavirus Covid-19? Never mind, for the moment, successfully subduing it. Can…

Book Review: Keeper of the Hearth

Keeper of the Hearth: Picturing Roland Barthes’ Unseen Photograph Edited by Odette England

There are at least two things that everyone knows about Camera Lucida, the last book by the brilliant French philosopher Roland Barthes. The book has two sections; each offers a dense nugget of enduring value to the image intelligentsia. Part One is a close, theoretical reading of the intellectual…

Life is all about access, isn’t it?

As we climb Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, from the basic—food, water, rest, security, safety, etc.—to psychological needs of belonging, love, and esteem, we ascend toward the goal of self-realization. Every step involves access to resources. There’s not much room at the top of the pyramid; only the most determined can…

Read "Two Questions for Alexandre de Mortemart" now on rephotographica.com

Quest

Damiani, 2019

Given the global ecosystem of photography in the 21st century, it should never surprise you to encounter notable imagery by photographers whose names were previously unknown to you. This French photographer meets that criterion; the first I’d heard of him was in a press release about this book. I looked into the work and the artist, and was struck by the rugged…

ForTress. A book about Arthur Tress by Tim Soter

The Ship Escaped, 2019

Arthur Tress’ photographs were fish out of water when I first encountered them flopping around in the library files at

Magnum Photos circa 1986. These mysterious images from his series “The Dream Collector” were full of energy and imagination, truly wondrous misfits amidst Magnum’s relatively staid archive. I think…

Because the book itself is pretty modest.

The Photograph Commands Indifference

Text and images by Nicholas Muellner

A book that matters. Bernd and Hilla Becher, Blast Furnaces. Matters to me, at least. The photographs remind me of a time in the early 1980s when my ideas about photography were expanding. I spent an hour in the Sonnabend gallery absorbed in a full-scale installation of this work.

If I could go out in the world today I'd pass this book around, across a table, with fellow photobibliophiles. I don't know how, or even if it's possible, to photograph a book in an effective way; there's no satisfying way to share it in a Zoom, Skype, or FaceTime forum. Like trying to drink wine, smoke a hookah, or share pizza with everyone in separate cubicles.

Can our photobookworld discussions continue in virtual form? Maybe we just point out books that matter, good reproductions be damned. We hold a book in our lap, snap a pic, imperfect lighting and all, and share it here on the Tumblr. Add a sentence or two about why it matters to you. And comment about other people's books.

Jörg Colberg has an incisive take on photobooks. Here, he makes a close reading of the relationship between Surrealism as tied to Sohrab Hura’s widely recognized 2019 book The Coast and the form/content continuum that perpetually animates any thoughtful consideration of photography. Colberg’s Conscientious magazine is always rewarding.

Today, honoring the late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. through a just-received book of photographs by Susan Berger collecting streets that have been named to honor King. It’s a gritty and forthright book that derives its strength in part from the poignance of absence. The reproductions tend toward the shadowy greys, and the unenclosed spine leaves an “unfinished” aura that may be consistent with King’s interrupted work as an American leader. Berger traveled around the country from October 2009 to September 2014 to record these streets, boulevards, and drives that keep King’s presence alive in our daily lives. Named thoroughfares bear a rough, daily grace in cities from Los Angeles to Jersey City, Little Rock to Seattle, and Shreveport to Milwaukee. 

Judging from the neighborhoods Berger has recorded, King’s legacy lingers as an exhortation to keep rising, keep striving, keep moving along those roads. Don’t rest, there’s a lot of work yet to do. Let me show you the way. “I've seen the Promised Land,” the Reverend Doctor said in his April 3, 1968 address in Memphis. “I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!” King was assassinated the next day. The roads lead on.

Life and Soul: American Streets Honoring Martin Luther King

Photographs by Susan Berger

Foreword by Frank Gohlke