Copyright Hisashi Shimizu 2009, courtesy photo-eye & Kodansha On the surface, the subjects of Hisashi Shimizu’s book Portraits of Silence are soldiers who perished during the Iraq conflict, indirect portraits developed from the perspective of the soldier’s parents. But Portraits of Silence is also about the desire to maintain the memory of a beloved, and... Continue Reading →

Copyright Christopher Thomas 2009, courtesy of Prestel Verlag When I recently shared my thoughts about the future of photobooks when looking out another 10 years, I can not imagine at the moment an electronic version that would be capable of simulating the feel of a wonderful photobook lying in my hands. Christopher Thomas’s recent book... Continue Reading →

Photographs copyright Nan Goldin 2009 Courtesy Skira Rizzoli New York and photo-eye Bette Gordon’s famous, perhaps infamous, 1983 independent film Variety evolved from an earlier series of cinematic narrative photographs created by Nan Goldin. A few of the photographs from Goldin’s Variety were incorporated in her earlier opus, The Ballard of Sexual Dependency. This photobook is the... Continue Reading →

Copyright Arnoud Bakker, 2009, courtesy Stichting Fotografie Noorderlicht To be in love, or perhaps in lust, is to experience a kind of narcosis and paralysis, with an inability to focus, while the heart rate becomes erratic. There are other symptoms of which there may be a lack of awareness in the moment; dilated pupils, blurred... Continue Reading →

Copyright Lukas Felzmann 2009 Courtsey Lars Muller Publishers Water is an elusive essential to both man-kind and nature, without it you will certainly wither away and perish, and if by chance there is too much, you may drown. People have tried to control, manage and harness water, to force it to do what they feel... Continue Reading →

Copyright Duane Michals 2009, courtesy Edizioni Siz and photo-eye Spending time with the recent Duane Michals book, 50, a fifty year retrospective by the Italian publisher Siz, was essentially re-experiencing much of my own photographic life, having come of photographic age with his somnambulist period. His fascination with dreams, dreamlike states and dream-walking precedes our current interest with making connections to memories. Michals is... Continue Reading →

Copyright Linda Gordon & estate of Dorothea Lange, 2009, courtesy of W.W. Norton & Company I had been aware of Dorothea Lange’s immense photographic body of work during the FSA (Farm Security Agency) in the 1930’s, primarily her iconic images of Migrant Mother, White Angel Breadline, which I thought was a FSA photograph (it is... Continue Reading →

Copyright Deanna Templeton 2008, self-published, courtesy photo-eye There is something amiss with Deanna Templeton’s self published book, 17 Days, the photo documentary she created while accompanying a product promotional tour through Europe in 2008. I am bedeviled by all that bothers me, and I think that it is best described as an overall unevenness in... Continue Reading →

Copyright Bill Jacobson 2009 courtesy DECODE Books The title of Bill Jacobson’s recent book, A Series of Human Decisions, has an interesting double meaning. Jacobson is photographing those things that can represent the artifacts of decisions we as human’s make, and the process of photographing reflects the decisions that Jacobson is making, thus hinting at... Continue Reading →