Waikiki, by Henry Wessel. In the seventies and eighties, Wessel made trips to Hawaii to photograph the tourist destination of Waikiki Beach, which seems a natural extension of what he was doing in California. As far as I know, this is the first time that the Waikiki pictures have been presented as a cohesive project, rather that simply as part of his larger body of work. It works. It's a small collection (about 25 photos), smartly edited and sequenced, and nicely printed by Steidl. About half of the photos have been published before, so if you have his other books, you are only going to find about a dozen "New" images here. Maybe not a great value for some, but for a fan like me, a no-brainer.
North South East West, by Richard Benson. Benson is known more for his innovation in (and encyclopedic knowledge of) photographic printing and reproduction than for his photographs. As far as I know, this new book from MoMA is the first of his own photographs. You might call these landscapes (both rural and urban) for lack of a better pigeonhole (people appear in only 1 of the 100 or so photographs). They are all about color, both bold and subtle. He works with pretty pedestrian tools, a dslr and an Epson inkjet printer, but being something of a tinkerer/inventor, ha has rigged his printer with a mechanism which allows the paper to be fed through repeatedly for multiple passes. This, he says, allows him to "Build" the print in layers, evaluating after each pass and making decisions about the next step. For the printing of this book, he apparently adopted the same approach to the offset press.
Believing is Seeing (Observations on the Mysteries of Photography), by Errol Morris. Documentary film maker extraordinaire (Gates of Heaven, The Thin Blue Line, Fog of War) questions the nature of truth in photography by examining a variety of documentary photographs. Among them, Roger Fenton's "Valley of the Shadow of Death" images from the Crimean war, depression era FSA photographs and the Abu Ghraib scandal pictures. Just got this and am still reading, but very interesting.
On pre-order...Some Aesthetic Decisions: The Photographs of Judy Fiskin. Los Angeles based photographer and video artist who's work is related to the New Topographics movement (apparently she was considered for that show but not selected). This should be something of a retrospective look at her work from the sixties through the nineties when she switched to making videos.
