I have been thinking about my list of Best PhotoBooks for 2009, and I am in sort of a quandary. The implication is that this list would be for the books that were published in 2009, but the fact is that many interesting books published in 2008 took a while before I could acquire them. And I have... Continue Reading →
Innovative photobook designs this year
Copyright Todd Oldham, Bedrock City, 2008, courtesy AMMO books I have been thinking about Joerg Colberg's post about a lack of "cutting edge" photobooks, while I am working on my list of best photobooks in 2009. Joerg states "...there isn't much of a variety in photo books...the format itself is so conservative". I think that for... Continue Reading →
Swann Photobook auction results
Update on the results from the Swann Galleries Photographic print and literature auction of December 8 (2009): Highlights of the Photographic Literature portion of the sale included: Early works: Francis Frith’s Egypt Nubia and Ethiopia, 100 albumen stereoviews, London, 1862, $10,200 Camera Work Number 20, featuring three images by Stieglitz, New York, 1907, $6,000 Classic... Continue Reading →
Hisashi Shimizu – Portraits of Silence
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 →
Christopher Thomas – New York Sleeps
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 →
Future of Photobooks?
Andy Adams of Flak Photo contacted me a couple of days ago to participate in a discussion about the future of photobooks. Seems that this discussion is a spin off of a brief article posted by Joerg Colberg on Conscientious regarding his thoughts on cutting-edge photobooks, found here and potentially summed up by "I have been noticing that there isn't much of a... Continue Reading →
Nan Goldin – Variety
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 →
Arnoud Bakker – Atropa bella donna
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 →
Lukas Felzmann – Waters in Between
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 →
Duane Michals – 50
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 →
PhotoBook Journal 