12.30.2016

2016 BEST PHOTOGRAPHY BOOKS and HONORABLE MENTIONS : PART II



By Mark Speltz, with a Preface by Deborah Willis
Publisher: Getty Publications / J. Paul Getty Museum

"For this powerful and compelling book, North of Dixie: Civil Rights Photography Beyond the South, author and historian Mark Speltz shines a light over the most iconic photographs from the history of the civil rights movement. He carefully selected one hundred photographs, some never-before-seen or published, taken between 1938 and 1975 in more than twenty-five cities in the Northeast, Midwest and West by photojournalists, artists, and activists that include Bob Adelman, Ruth-Marion Baruch, Charles Brittin, Diana Davies, Jack Delano, Leonard Freed, Don Hogan Charles, Gordon Parks, Art Shay, Morgan and Marvin Smith, and Maria Varela. Together these photographs offer a broader, more complex view of the American civil rights movement than is usually presented by the media. "Hardcover, 160 pages, 100 b/w images.

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The Swiss. Photographs by Christian Nilson

  (c) Christian Nilson

Publisher: Scheidegger + Spiess

I met Zurich based photographer, Christian Nilson, at the Landskrona FotoFestival Portfolio Reviews and was amused by his view of Swiss life, now in a signed and numbered Limited Edition, wrapped in cheese paper, with a signed A5 print. "Affectionately, and without ever being patronizing, the Swedish photographer Christian Nilson captures a country in his pictures that oscillates between openness and reticence, between tradition and progress—a country that has been his beloved chosen home for many years: Switzerland.” First Edition, published by Scheidegger + Spiess: 1000 copies including 100 Limited Edition copies, 96 pages, 67 colour plates. U.S. publication by the University of Chicago Press in February 2017.

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(c) Harold Feinstein 


SAYING YES – Harold Feinstein
Publisher: Christopher Rauschenberg/Blue Sky Books

"No matter the context, with his camera or in a classroom, Harold Feinstein believed in the power of photography to reveal the human condition. All you need to do is look at the photographs in this volume to know he was constantly searching to connect with the world around him, to share the beauty he experienced in the everyday and to open the eyes and hearts of his fellow travelers – to be more appreciative of the world around them." – Sean Corcoran, Curator of prints and photography, Museum for the City of New York. "Saying Yes" sequenced by Christopher Rauschenberg, 130 pages. Blue Sky Books
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Libyan Sugar.  Michael Christopher Brown
Publisher: Twin Palms Publishers

"Centered around the 2011 Libyan Revolution, Libyan Sugar is a road trip through a war zone, detailed through photographs, journal entries, and written communication with family and colleagues. A record of Michael Christopher Brown’s life both inside and outside Libya during that year, the book is about a young man going to war for the first time and the desire to get as close as possible to a conflict in order to discover something about war and something about himself." Casebound, 412 pages, 280 4-color plates. Twin Palms

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By Paula Bronstein
Publisher: University of Texas Press

"What sets Paula Bronstein's photographs apart from many of her peers is her choice to spend most of her time with the Afghan people. Her work goes beyond war coverage to reveal the full complexity of daily life in what may be the most reported on, yet least understood country in the world. The result is an intimate photographic portrait of this war-torn country's people." With a Foreword by Kim Barker and Introduction by Christina Lamb, 228 pages, 114 color photographs.

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Unspeaking Likeness.  Arne Svenson
Publisher: Twin Palms Publishers

"Unspeaking Likeness is a series of images of forensic facial reconstruction sculptures. Occasionally, when investigators call for it, shortly after an unidentified corpse (or part thereof ) is found, a forensic artists constructs an artificial face made of clay or plaster to better aid in victim identification.” Casebound, 108 pages, 49 duotone plates. Twin Palms

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 RICHARD BRAM  NEW YORK
Publisher: Peanut Press

"Richard Bram's “NEW YORK” reflects his attention to the energy and people of the city. Richard is attuned to the small gestures that pass in an instant before his eye as he goes about the city." 1000 copies printed in three editions. Find out more here: Peanut Press 

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 (c) Simon Johansson


I met photographer Simon Johansson at the Landskrona FotoFestival Portfolio Reviews and viewed this terrific series now in a handsome linen hardcover book with a tipped in photo on the cover. “The sound of the Öland Bridge expansion joints against the tires. The first years, when the bridge was new, islanders would come out in droves along the road to look at the invasion of the mainlanders. They don’t anymore. Apart from that most things have kept the same, time runs slower here. I see friendship, happiness, love, a breakup and a sorrow. There is so much ugliness here. So much beauty.”—Simon Johansson. Black/white photographs.

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Portraits by Linda Hansen
Publisher: Fotografisk Center

I met Copenhagen based photographer, Linda Hansen, this past summer at the Landskrona Fotofestival Portfolio Reviews. Her series, Naevus Flames,  breaks with established visual standards. Naves Flames, or port-wine stain, is a congenital vascular malformation, and as such it is almost invariably present at birth. “Her book brings together her photographs, representing a group of courageous people who are part of a community where 0.3% is the new norm, proud they show their unique brands forward.” Available : fotografiskcenter.dk

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August Eriksson is a photographer based in Sweden I met this summer at the Landskrona FotoFestival Portfolio Reviews. In The Walk, sixty-six images follow one after another, all with the same strict composition: the path, seen from the eye level of the walker, disappears into the vanishing point of the image. This is Eriksson’s second book, he first published ’Sacred Waters’ about the Japanese bathing culture. The Walk is “One of the 5 Best Art Books of 2016" (Svenska Dagbladet, Stockholm newspaper). 80 pages, 66 color images. English. Kerber Verlag

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(c) Torsten Schumann

Fotografien von Torsten Schumann
Publisher: Peperoni Books

I met Berlin based photographer, Torsten Schumann, at the Landskrona FotoFestival Portfolio Reviews this past summer and was amused by his eye for the absurd in his series, More Cars, Clothes and Cabbages. "The ludicrous story about a black dot and a passport control that starts the book already says a lot about Torsten Schumann and his view of the world. His images even say more. Namely, that life in the so called civilized world is full of curiosities. Schumann photographs on the street, nothing special actually. And yet we see in his book the sinking of the Titanic, a woman who disappears under a magic hat, a sausage, which mutates to a ventilation tube, a designer furniture made of foam and bottom panels and a bikeway turning into a rushing river.” Hardcover: 96 pages, English, German
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(c) Heather Evans Smith 


Seen Not Heard  Heather Evans Smith
Publisher: Flash Power Projects

"Seen Not Heard takes its title from the Old English adage "To Be Seen and Not Heard", a term often thrown about in reference to the desired behavior of children. These images are silent, but they create a voluble visual narrative on the relationship between parent and child. They explore the cycles that are passed down through generations and the tension between keeping to what is known and forging a newer, and perhaps stronger, path. As strong as the close, forever bond between mother and daughter is, there also exists a distance inherent between two different individuals." Hard cover, 80 pages, 31 color images. Edition of 500.

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Frank Hamrick Tintypes

"Harder Than Writing A Good Haiku was an analogy I spoke of while guiding my senior photography students as they struggled to edit their BFA portfolios to a slim number of prints that would fit into their allotted wall space while at the same time still conveying their original concepts." A limited edition artists’ book featuring seventeen tintypes created during the summer of 2016 in the hills around Whites Creek, Tennessee." –Frank Hamrick

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Lissa Rivera. Motel from Beautiful Boy Series
The Peter Urban Legacy Award


22nd Annual Juried Peter Urban Legacy
Exhibition Catalog

"I was honored to be invited to jury the 2016 Griffin Museum of Photography’s 22nd Annual Peter Urban Legacy Exhibition. With this call to entry, no boundaries were set, no requests were made to follow any particular theme, medium, style or schools of thought to participate. Traditional, contemporary, experimental and mixed-techniques were welcome and encouraged. I believe the unspoken commonality was our shared love of the medium and magic of the photographic image.” –Juror, Elizabeth Avedon. Exhibition catalog with the over 60 selected images. Griffin Museum  catalog

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12.29.2016

2016 BEST PHOTOGRAPHY BOOKS : ROUND-UP PART I

Publisher: Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art

In Brian Lanker's, From the Heart, an oversized 224-page coffee-table book documenting Lanker’s groundbreaking work, from his Pulitzer Prize-winning photo-essays at the Topeka Capital-Journal in the early 1970s to his tribute to influential African-American women, I Dream a World, one of the best-selling photo books of all time, to his best images for publications like LIFE, National Geographic and Sports Illustrated. Published by the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art; designed by Pentagram partner DJ Stout and designer Barrett Fry; impeccable master prints from the drum-scans and digital production mastery by Sean Perry round out this extraordinary monograph. 


Narciso Contreras "Libya : A Human Marketplace"
Co-Publishers: Fondation Carmignac | Editions SKIRA

An elegantly designed and produced book by Mexican photographer, Narciso Contreras, the 7th Laureate of the Carmignac Photojournalism Award. "Contreras lays bare an unfolding humanitarian crisis in which illegal migrants, refugees and asylum seekers are at the mercy of militias who exploit them for financial gain.” The overall book, beautifully typeset on magnificent paper, belies the dangerous situations Contreras put himself in to bring us this ongoing chronicle documenting the brutal reality of human trafficking. Texts by Narciso Contreras and Ela Stapley; Hard Cover, 102 pages, English+French.



Myles Little is an award-winning photo editor at TIME magazine. Outside of TIME, Little curated an exhibit of documentary photography about wealth inequality with an accompanying book, 1% Privilege in a Time of Global Inequality. "If you are concerned that the top 1% of the world owns 50% of all wealth, then this is the photo book for you!” Included are some of the best photographers in the world, like Christopher Anderson, Nina Berman, Michael Light and David Chancellor. Edited by Myles Little. Texts by Joseph Stiglitz, Geoff Dyer, Myles Little. Hardcover, 80 pages.


diane arbus: in the beginning
Publisher: The Metropolitan Museum of Art 

The exhibition, diane arbus: in the beginning, was curated by Jeff L. Rosenheim, Curator in Charge of the Department of Photographs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Rosenheim commented, "Arbus's early photographs are wonderfully rich in achievement and perhaps as quietly riveting and ultimately controversial as the iconic images for which she is so widely known.” This fully illustrated catalogue - with two essays: "in the beginning" by Jeff L. Rosenheim and "notes from the archive" by Karan Rinaldo, Senior Research Assistant - accompanied the show. Hardcover, 256 pages. Ephemera: Neal Selkirk is the only person ever authorized to make posthumous prints of the work of Diane Arbus.  Read My Interview with Neal Selkirk



Introduction by Elisabeth Biondi
Published by Damiani

"He takes wry photographs of fashion and the fashionable but without malice, he reveals robot-like models, multitasking make-up artists, a woman doing pushups on the sidelines. He truly enjoys pageantry, the foibles of the style conscious, and the over-the-top displays of vanity—they all make up the spectacle for him." - ELISABETH BIONDI



Photographs 1993–2016 
Publisher: Peanut Press

Who doesn’t love David Carol? Now a compilation of 32 photographs representing the last 25 years of his work is being published in conjunction with his first retrospective exhibition, "NO PLAN B" at the Leica Gallery in Soho, New York! The photos of David's travels include images from Russia to Turkey, Mexico to the Canadian Arctic, all with his very unique and personal vision. Afterword by Jason Eskenazi. Available in two editions: Hardback trade edition - bound in black and a Limited edition of 99 - bound in white, and includes a signed and numbered 6” x 8" gelatin silver print of Gorilla. More books from Peanut Press


Publisher: Fall Line Press

Nancy McCrary, SouthxSoutheast Photo Magazine Publisher and Editor-in-Chief: "Bill Yates arrived at my farm one day a couple of years ago. He was one of those “finds” you make on Facebook I probably would have never met otherwise. He was carrying a large, flat box full of a magical trip back to 1972, my teenage years. Bill spent his weekends during the better part of 1972-1973 photographing kids at a roller skating rink outside of Tampa, Florida and inside this box were the b/w prints he had produced, prints that had remained in a box for all these years. In the 70’s socializing in the rural areas of America was mostly a weekend event, the roller rink was where the action was - a stew of poorly controlled emotions and raging hormones, with some fashion thrown in for flair. Bill Yates captured a place and time with all its roughness and beauty, provoking contemplation and memories. Laurie Shock’s book design and Barbara Griffin’s photo editing make it flow as if you’re back there." – NANCY McCRARY

by Byrd M. Williams IV
Foreword by Roy Flukinger. Afterword by Anne Wilkes Tucker. 
Publisher: University of North Texas Press

"Byrd M. Williams IV has compiled a fascinating look into 120 years of his family’s four generations of photographers in his monograph, Proof : Photographs from Four Generations of a Texas Family. He deftly captures the history, personality and individuality of each age, presenting all through the vernacular of photography. Williams time-travels through images that predate the Civil War, from cyanotypes and ambrotypes, to today's world of digital capture and ink jet prints.” – Elizabeth Avedon 



Homeschooled, Photographs by Rachel Papo, “A quiet meditation on the home education movement from the children's perspective,” photographed around Woodstock, New York, where a small number of families follow this path. Hardback, 128 pages; With text by Ariel Shanberg and Holly Graff; 85 color images. 


Photography As Object in the Digital Age
 Publisher: George Eastman Museum

Paul Kopeikin, Kopeikin Gallery, Owner and Director:
Lisa Hostetler’s “A Matter of Memory: Photography as Object in the Digital Age” is my favorite book of the year. It’s a comprehensive survey with impressive idiosyncratic additions of the most recognizable and important movement in photography of the last decade. The insightful text confirms Hostetler’s importance as curator and writer, while it’s layout makes it a valuable reference as well as an easy and fun read." - PAUL KOPEIKIN

"Susan S. Bank peels away the veneer from Havana, that maddening, mythical metropolis with one eye on the Florida Straits. An imaginary tropical urban paradise, Havana is flirtatious and consistently inconsistent. By-passing worn out clichés, Bank illuminates the invisible with her iconic, metaphorical black and white photographs.” Hardback, 128 pages. Photo-Eye Books

 
Published by STANLEY/BARKER

Lucy Kumara Moore, Director Claire de Rouen Books, London:
Gentlemen presents a collection of staged photographs of upper class English men in the private gentlemen's clubs that surround St James's in London. Knorr describes these as 'the most elite and exclusive enclaves of male power in Britain'. Taken between 1981 and 1983, the images foreground the semiology of language, architectural setting, fashion and pose in relation to aristocratic values. Gentlemen is published by Stanley/Barker.” – LUCY KUMARA MOORE 



Publisher: Editions Bessard

Robin Hammond’s ‘My Lagos’ introduces us to the color, energy and chaos of Africa’s largest city. An original Nollywood film poster wraps this beautifully designed book delivering an authentic piece of the city to the audience. Full bleed color photographs take us on a journey through bustling Lagos streets and into the homes of the rich, poor, and rising middle class. ‘My Lagos’ opens our eyes to an Africa rarely seen in western media. Placed over and between these views of Lagos is a series of large format Polaroid portraits accompanied by quotes from the sitters themselves. A businessman, an actor, a fisherman, a pastor, a prostitute speak of their hopes and dreams in this city of strivers. ‘My Lagos’ is intense and bold....much like the city itself. Editions Bessard



 Jacqueline Roberts: Nebula 
Published by Damiani

Reviving 19th-century photographic wet plate collodion processes, Spanish photographer Jacqueline Roberts long exposures required by the process, ease the subjects into detaching themselves from their immediate surroundings; they appear to the viewer almost as if suspended in time and in space. Nebula is a collection of portraits that capture the mist of psychological and emotional change in youth; a glimpse into their nascent sense of self. Hardback, 144 pages, 87 B+W plates 



"Absence of Being is a haunting, intensely personal and yet extremely universal exploration of the subconscious world, which began with Susan Bernstine’s highly praised first monograph, Within Shadows. Burnstine captures images that purge her dreams. Finding no existing camera that could create what her mind envisioned, she began to experiment with building her own and molding her own lenses until she arrived at the prototype for the handmade cameras she continues to use. Hardback, 120 pages, 80 black-and-white images described as 21st-century impressionism.




12.13.2016

BEN ARNON: Documents Life at PhotoNola

A classic hat lays next to the pew beside the foot of a 102-year old gentleman at Berean Baptist Church in Philadelphia. Photograph (c) Ben Arnon

"Police Your Racism" - Protestors demonstrate against police brutality at Union Square in New York City in July 2016, days after the back-to-back killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castille. Photograph (c) Ben Arnon

Several teams of girls await their Irish dance performances backstage in the 8-hand Mid-Atlantic Regional Competition in Philadelphia. Photograph (c) Ben Arnon

A bucking bronco throws tosses a rider and his hat to the ground at the Friday Night Rodeo in Dubois, Wyoming. Photograph (c) Ben Arnon
 
I met Ben Arnon, a New York City-based visual journalist, at PhotoNola 2016 Portfolio Reviews. His work focus's documentary reportage, street portraiture, and the impact of human existence on urban landscapes. He documents the unflinching honesty of people’s lives and is particularly interested in examining themes of socio-economic, racial and class dynamics amongst and within communities of people.

Photographs from Ben’s most recent work, entitled "RIO," are on view throughout New York’s Chelsea Market to December 31, 2016. Photographs from Ben’s “Black Lives Matter” series were exhibited at Davis Orton Gallery from October 8 to November 13, 2016, and were exhibited during the 2016 DNC Convention in Philadelphia at an exhibition called Truth To Power.  

Ben writes frequently for the Huffington Post, offering social commentary on a wide array of topics including visual arts, culture, society, digital media, and politics.