photobook daily

“From Here to There: Alec Soth’s America is the first exhibition catalogue to feature the full spectrum of the work of Alec Soth, one of the most interesting voices in contemporary photography, whose compelling images of everyday America form powerful narrative vignettes. Featuring more than 100 of the artist’s photographs made over the past 15 years, the book includes new critical essays by exhibition curator Siri Engberg, curator and art historian Britt Salvesen and critic Barry Schwabsky, which offer context on the artist’s working process, the photo-historical tradition behind his practice and reflections on his latest series of works. Novelist Geoff Dyer’s “Riverrun”—a meditation on Soth’s series Sleeping by the Mississippi—and August Kleinzahler’s poem “Sleeping It Off in Rapid City” contribute to the thoughtful exploration of this body of work. Also included in the publication is a 48-page artist’s book by Soth titled The Loneliest Man in Missouri, a photographic essay with short, diaristic texts capturing the banality and ennui of middle America’s suburban fringes, with their corporate office parks, strip clubs and chain restaurants. This full-color publication includes a complete exhibition history, bibliography and interview with the artist by Bartholomew Ryan.”

From Here to There: Alec Soth’s America [Amazon]

“The first substantial survey of international street photography since the late 1980s. For the last twenty years the candid photography of life in public has been mostly underground but secretly flourishing, stimulated by the wide availability of digital cameras, a profusion of photoblogs, and new self-publishing opportunities.

Street Photography Now showcases the work of forty-six image-makers who are notable for their candid depictions of life on the streets and in the subway, in shopping malls and movie theaters, on beaches and in parks. Four thought-provoking essays put the work into the wider context of what has gone before, while quotes from the photographers expand and illuminate their work and draw attention to their influences and ways of working.

Included are luminaries such as Magnum grandmasters Bruce Gilden, Martin Parr, and Alex Webb, as well as an international group of emerging photographers whose views of New York or Tokyo, Mumbai or Bournemouth, Istanbul or Dakar, all record moments in time that will never be repeated.” 

Street Photography Now [Amazon]

“The New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape was one of those rare exhibitions that permanently alters how an art form is perceived. Held at the International Museum of Photography in Rochester, New York, in January 1975, it was curated by William Jenkins, who brought together ten contemporary photographers: Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore and Henry Wessel, Jr. Signaling the emergence of a new approach to landscape, the show effectively gave a name to a movement or style, although even today, the term “New Topographics”—more a conceptual gist than a precise adjective—is used to characterize the work of artists not yet born when the exhibition was held. Although the exhibit’s ambitions were hardly so grand, New Topographics has since come to be understood as marking a paradigm shift, for the show occurred just as photography ceased to be an isolated, self-defined practice and took its place within the contemporary art world. Arguably the last traditionally photographic style, New Topographics was also the first Photoconceptual style. In different ways, the artists thoughtfully engaged with their medium and its history, while simultaneously absorbing such issues as environmentalism, capitalism and national identity. In this vital reassessment of the genre, essays by Britt Salvesen and Alison Nordstrom accompany illustrations of selected works from the 1975 exhibition, with installation views and contextual comparisons, to demonstrate both the historical significance of New Topographics and its continued relevance today. The book also includes an illustrated checklist of the 1975 exhibition and an extensive bibliography.”

New Topographics [Amazon]

“The Asakusa quarter of Tokyo has a shady past—it was the home of some of Japan’s most notorious pleasure palaces. Today it embraces this history by remaining a steadfast holdout of independent culture, which encompasses traditional comedy theater and some of the most innovative burlesque in the world. Asakusa has long attracted bohemians who opt out of Japan’s contemporary consumer society, yet it is also home to the famous Senso-ji temple, which attracts floods of tourists. Over the past two decades, Hiroh Kikai has created an extensive and unforgettable series of street portraits from the diverse mass of people that pass through the district. Posed against the stark walls of the temple, his portraits of Asakusa’s iconoclasts radiate a sense of hard-won individuality. The photographs are accompanied by Kikai’s own pithy commentary.”

Asakusa Portraits, Hiroh Kikai [Amazon]

“Although Edward Steichen exhibited some of Saul Leiter’s color photographs at The Museum of Modern Art in 1953, for 40 years afterward they remained virtually unknown to the art world. Saul Leiter: Early Color provides the first opportunity to see a comprehensive presentation of images by one of photography’s great originals. Leiter moved to New York in 1946 intending to be a painter, but through his friendship with the Abstract Expressionist Richard Pousette-Dart, he quickly recognized the creative potential of photography. Though he continued to paint, exhibiting alongside Philip Guston and Willem de Kooning, Leiter’s camera became—like an extension of his arm and mind—an ever-present interpreter of life in the metropolis. He sought out moments of quiet humanity in the Manhattan maelstrom, forging a unique urban pastoral from the most unlikely of circumstances. The lyricism and intensity of his vision come into fullest play in his eloquent handling of color unequaled by his contemporaries. Leiter’s visual language of fragmentation, ambiguity, and contingency is evoked by these 100 subtle, painterly images that stretched the boundaries of photography in the second half of the 20th century.

Saul Leiter: Early Color [Amazon]

“An undisputed masterwork among Japanese photobooks, Eikoh Hosoe and Tatsumi Hijikata’s Kamaitachi was originally released in 1969 as a limited edition of 1,000 copies. Hosoe, the renowned photographer, and Hijikata, the founder of ankoku butoh dance, had visited a farming village in northern Japan, where Hijikata improvised a performance inspired by the legend of a weasel-like demon named Kamaitachi. As Hosoe photographed Hijikata’s spontaneous interactions with the landscape and with the people they encountered, the two artists together enacted an intense investigation of tradition and an exploration, both personal and symbolic, of contemporary convulsions in Japanese society. In 2005, Aperture published a limited-edition facsimile in homage to the original, in close consultation with the artist; now, they have made this enchanting body of work available in its first ever affordable trade edition, which was painstakingly reworked by renowned graphic artist Ikko Tanaka—the designer of the original volume—shortly before his death. His reinterpretation of this classic book object, which is truly a paragon of Japanese bookmaking, includes as a special bonus four never-before-published images from the classic Kamaitachi series.”

Eikoh Hosoe: Kamaitachi [Amazon]

“Mark Steinmetz completes his powerful and moving trilogy, ‘South’, with ‘Greater Atlanta’. Photographing in Atlanta and its outlying regions, Steinmetz provides his testimony on contemporary American civilization. Combining portraits and landscapes, he weaves a symbolic and lyrical investigation that subtly questions notions of progress. He further develops motifs - on the automobile, on the telephone - that were first introduced in ‘South Central’, and catalogues car culture, fast food, convenience stores, and suburban sprawl. Beautifully printed in duotone on matt art paper, ‘Greater Atlanta’ is printed in a first edition of 1,000 casebound copies.”

Greater Atlanta [Amazon]

“For photographers, the city of Paris must constitute a genre of its own (alongside “nudes” or “botanical”), so perennially photogenic are its streets, skylines, storefronts and people. Here, William Eggleston—“The Father of Color Photography”—offers a brilliant, unusual take on Paris today, with depictions that completely revitalize our sense of this most picturesque of cities. Eggleston spent three years working throughout different seasons, to craft images that reveal surprising and rarely-seen facets of the city, as one might expect from the lens of a photographer most associated with the American South.”

William Eggleston: Paris [Amazon]

“In this exquisitely produced book, the influential American photographer Robert Adams revisits the classic collection of nocturnal landscapes that he began making in the mid-1970s near his former home in Longmont, Colorado. Originally published by Aperture in 1985 as Summer Nights, this new edition has been carefully reedited and resequenced by the photographer, who has added 39 previously unpublished images. Illuminated by moonlight and streetlamp, the houses, roads, sidewalks and fields in Summer Nights, Walking retain the wonder and stillness of the original edition, while adopting the artist’s intention of a dreamy fluidity, befitting his nighttime perambulations. The extraordinary care taken with the new reproductions also registers Adams’ attention to the subtleties of the night, and conveys his appeal to look again at places we might have dismissed as uninteresting. Adams observes, “What attracted me to the subjects at a new hour was the discovery then of a neglected peace.”

Robert Adams: Summer Nights, Walking [Amazon]

“Edward Burtynsky’s Oil collects a decades’ worth of photographing the world’s largest oil fields, refineries, freeway interchanges and automobile plants, in an attempt to comprehend the scale of production attending this most politicized of resources. The ideal photographer for this job, Burtynsky locates and documents the sites that urban dwellers never see, and questions human accountability. His imagery is vast in both scale and ambition, revealing the apparatus behind the energy we mine from dwindling resources, and the ongoing effects of the industrial revolution. “In 1997 I had what I refer to as my oil epiphany,” Burtynsky explains: “it occurred to me that all the vast, man-altered landscapes I had been in pursuit of for over 20 years were all possible because of the discovery of oil and the mechanical advantage of the internal combustion engine.”

Edward Burtynsky: Oil [Amazon]