latest additions to your library

Jan I hate to tell you this but there are three books in there, not two... 😉

I'm currently reading Walker Evans: Decade by Decade, a catalog published in conjunction with a current exhibit of the same name at the Cincinnati Art Museum. The publisher is Hatje Cantz Verlag, the ISBN is 978-3-7757-2491-3 and the book is beautifully printed in four color offset by Hatje Cantz in-house in Germany. The print quality of this catalog is sublime, the character of the vintage prints really comes through and you can almost imagine yourself standing in the museum looking at the print itself. My copy is hardcover but you can buy a paperback version online directly from the museum.

The theme of this exhibition is that Walker Evans is more than the FSA work during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Much more. There's a wonderful essay by curator James Crump at the front of the catalog that is biographical in nature but brilliantly sets the context for the exhibit. I don't know that much about American photography, I'm ashamed to say that I'd never even heard of Walker Evans 😱 until earlier this year when a friend gave me a recently reprinted book of his.

Crump's essay was fascinating to me at it reveals all the machinations in the NYC art world and especially at MoMA, why Walker Evans was effectively frozen out of it and how he got back in. However the best thing about the book is of course the 170 pictures, and they include his earliest work in New York in the late 1920s through to his Polaroid shots in the 1970s. There are one or two iconic images from the 1930s but there are some really excellent portraits, plenty from his Victorian House survey series, some southern plantation houses, his time at Fortune magazine, and also shots from Tahiti! A wonderful book, the best I've seen in a long time. The exhibition ends in a weeks' time at the Cincinnati Art Museum on September 5th. Go see it if you can.
 
I've also skimmed Outside Inside in a bookstore in Zürich (There was not one copy in any of the bookstores I've visited over the past months), it seems to be worth its price. I liked it a lot.

martin
 
I have recently added The Edge Of Darkness by Barry Thornton (a classic I'd recommend to anyone!) and the Controls in Black-And-White Photography by Richard J. Henry.
 
Lee Friedlander - America by Car.
Jury still out on that one.
Prior to that -Looking In. A stunner of a book,I thought. Worth the money for the eighty two contact sheets alone.
 
Been a while since I had much time to go shooting. Fortunately, finding time to order and appreciate photobooks is a lot easier to fit into my writing schedule than getting out of the house to take photos (let alone process and scan them)! Here's the list from the last 4-5 months or so.

Bill Burke, I Want To Take Picture (Twin Palms, 2007, edition) (ISBN 9781931885638) -- signed copy

Bruce Davidson Outside Inside (ISBN 9783865219084) -- on the recommendation of this forum and it surely does not disappoint.

Robert Frank, Storylines (ISBN 3865210414)

Bruce Gilden, Facing New York (ISBN 094879707X)

Greg Girard and Ian Lambot, City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon Walled City (ISBN 1873200137) -- growing up in HK, the Walled City was always a hyperbolic place of dark myth and horrific rumors ... depraved drug addicts, triad gang warriors, and rats that were bigger than cats. This book, while acknowledging that part of its past, portrays a unique but very real community. As much text as photographs, it wonderfully documents the place visually in images but also in the short life stories of its inhabitants. A superb book on a truly unique place, now gone.

Paul Graham, A Shimmer of Possibility (ISBN 9783865218629) -- I still have not completely digested this. Some images are so striking that they are burned into my brain (the man mowing in the rain, the explosively glowing stop sign, and others), but many of the sequences I find myself lost with. Still, I keep going back to look at it, so there is something there, just haven't yet articulated it, even to myself.

Justin Guariglia, Planet Shanghai (ISBN 9780811863452) -- despite my involvement with China, this book disappointed me, filled with mostly facile, boring images. Frankly, there's a lot better work being done on Flickr when it comes to mainland society (particularly Shanghai and Beijing, but even in places like Chongqing).

Hu, Chui The Forbidden City (ISBN 7800071537) -- purchased mainly as visual fodder for courses on late imperial China.

Mary Ellen Mark, Indian Circus (ISBN 081180531X) -- beautiful and it pairs very well in a cross-cultural way with Davidson's Circus

Eugene Richards, Dorchester Days (ISBN 0714840017) -- after buying The Blue Room earlier this year, I find myself wanting more of Richards.

Eugene Richards, The Fat Baby (ISBN 9780714841960) -- still waiting for this to be delivered.

Britt Salvesen and Alison Nordstrom The New Topographics (2009) (ISBN 9783865218278) -- important, obviously.

August Sander, People of the 20th Century (7 volumes) (ISBN 9780810963986) -- monumental, one face at a time.

Cindy Sherman, The Complete Untitled Film Stills (ISBN 9780870705076) -- polarizing book, but it is hard to overestimate its po-mo influence (for good or ill, depending on one's proclivities)

Shomei Tomatsu, Skin of the Nation (ISBN 03000106041) -- excellent overview of his whole oeuvre.

Shomei Tomatsu, Nagasaki 11:02 - August 9, 1945 (ISBN 9784106024115) -- still on its way from Japan -- this, along with Skin of the Nation is part of a syllabus I've written for a course on war in 20th century Asia

Larry Towel, Then Palenstine (ISBN 0893818348)

Larry Towell, The World from My Front Porch (ISBN 9781905712090) -- interesting book with its rootedness in Towell's hometown, but tied to his journalistic work worldwide too. This pairs very well, in my opinion, with Depardon's The Farm (or Le Garet).
 
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Just received a 1979 (2nd printing) copy of "Cape Light" by Joel Meyerowitz which is a stunning book. Together with Eggleston's "Guide" and "American Prospects" by Joel Sternfield these are my favourite books on colour photography.

Now waiting on a copy of "England and Scotland 1960" by Bruce Davidson. I highly regard his book "Circus".
 
As I understand it, Meyerowitz donated all the photos he took at ground zero to the Museum of New York in exchange for a letter from them getting him access. As their funding ran out he sold his apartment to ensure the project continued. He was supposedly the only photographer granted official access and he felt that if he didn't document it then it wouldn't be done. Those photographs will, of course, be available for research in perpetuity.

In any case, I don't think he profited from me buying a 31 year old copy of his book! And it is still a good book, no matter whether you agree with his actions on Ground Zero or not.
 
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