Saturday, March 13
reviewed by Tom Leininger Gary Ciadella's book The Calumet Region: An American Place shows us in a direct unsentimental manner the landscape of place commonly referred to as the Region. It is not Chicago, or Illinois, or Indiana, it is just the Region, a place built and destroyed by industry...

Friday, March 12
reviewed by Shane Lavalette After a positive response from Jeff Ladd on 5B4 and having been selected as one of Markus Schaden's top ten photography books of 2009, it seems that Sébastien Girard's Nothing But Home has begun to receive the attention it deserves. Self-published in an edition of 500 copies (with a special edition of 100) and beautifully printed in Girard's hometown of Toulouse, France, the book itself takes on the personal charm of the photographs within...

Wednesday, March 10
reviewed by George Slade When a dream machine goes into overdrive, what happens to its dross? What forms do a community?s dreams take? Can the overflow be incorporated into everyday life? Dreams have only passing relationships to rational daily life, but dreams can also be manufactured in very intentional ways. Pieter Hugo addresses these dream issues by photographing elements of the machine that has grown up in Nigeria, the movie capital considered the third -wood after Holly and Bolly...

Friday, March 5
reviewed by Larissa Leclair Paula McCartney has been making unique and limited edition artist books for many years. She sees the book as a medium and visualizes much of her photographic work in book form, many of her photographs exist only in the artist book...

Thursday, February 25
reviewed by Colin Pantall Rewind the Photographs is the latest in Nina Korhonen?s photographic voyage of self-discovery. Korhonen?s previous book, the excellent ?Anna,? used bold color and dry humor to portray the life of Korhonen?s grandmother after she migrated to the USA from Finland...

Wednesday, February 24
reviewed by Tom Leininger Passion, drive and mud fill the pages of Jake Mendel's book Short Track, published by powerHouse Books. In the 77 black and white photographs determination and the ghost of Dale Earnhardt show their faces...

Saturday, February 20
reviewed by George Slade OK, now, how do I get the R and the L to turn upside down like Powerhouse did for the title of this book?must be one of those hidden corners of the Word software world, or a design trick?and what do you get when you multiply ?twirl? by ?run?? Oh, sorry. I was just mulling about Jeff Mermelstein?s book, trying to recreate its carefully considered spine and cover graphics at the head of my piece...

Thursday, February 18
reviewed by John Mathews Luxury is a compilation of works created by Martin Parr between 2003 and 2009 whilst visiting a range of high profile and wealthy social occasions such as horse racing at Ascot, Art Basel Miami Beach or Sotheby?s auctions in Dubai. The images use richly saturated colours and adopt a close up technique that cannily epitomizes the crassness of the situations and the ritualistic need to display wealth...

Tuesday, February 16
reviewed by George Slade Some books prompt laughter or provoke anger. Some are thinly disguised exercises in self-aggrandizement or false humility...

Monday, February 15
reviewed by Shane Lavalette In the spirit of his oeuvre, Roe Ethridge's Farewell Horse is at first encounter both seductive and elusive. The book itself, bound in natural cloth with a tipped-in photograph on the cover, is structured in three distinct and seemingly unrelated parts ? the central one being black and white photographs of wild horses...

Tuesday, February 9
reviewed by Nicholas Chiarella Tina Enghoff?s Dogwalk and Kent Klich?s Out of Sight are testaments to the interrogative possibilities of photography. The books document the images and installation of the Get Lost project in Copenhagen, a sensitive examination of homelessness that simultaneously challenges traditional views of public space and how photography functions within it...

Saturday, February 6
reviewed by Charles Dee Mitchell Photographer Thomas Dworzak first went to Georgia to cover the civil war in 1993. Several years later after becoming a member of Magnum, he returned to make Tbilisi his home...

Friday, February 5
reviewed by Antone Dolezal Taken between 2003 and 2008, Mitch Epstein?s images in American Power are inherently political. Not only is this a book of photographs, it is a story of a photographer operating in a state of Patriot Act paranoia, where setting up one?s view camera can create an eminent sense of confrontation in a landscape already violently reconstructed by an entity much larger than any individual...

Thursday, February 4
reviewed by Alex Sweetman Violet Isle, color photographs by Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb, was published in 2009 by Radius books, a distinctive new not-for-profit publisher of books of ?artistic and cultural value.? Texts are in Spanish and English...

Tuesday, February 2
reviewed by John Mathews The Contact Sheet provides a brief insight into the editing processes of forty international photographers by compiling their working contact sheets from shoots that have resulted in a single definitive or iconic image. The book?s layout is straightforward and the text on each of the photographers is concise, insightful and accessibly presented in four languages...

Monday, January 25
reviewed by George Slade Look closely at this book, as you would at one of those 'name ten things that are wrong with this picture' illustrations in a kid's activity book (or the recent Photoshopped image pairs LIFE publishes as 'picture puzzles'). There are a number of things 'wrong' with it...

Monday, January 25
reviewed by Charles Dee Mitchell Artlessness is an oxymoronic virtue. No artist wants to produce work truly lacking in artistic value, nor can a true artist pretend to be the naïve producer of ingenuous work free from any historical, aesthetic awareness...

Tuesday, January 19
reviewed by Charles Dee Mitchell Thoughts on the genre of the still life follow a sad trajectory: abundance - overabundance - excess - vanity - decay - death. The Dutch established themselves as masters of the genre centuries ago, and Dutch photographer Holger Niehaus is the latest to put the 'morte' into nature morte...

Monday, January 18
reviewed by Susan Burnstine Ordinary Lives, is a remarkable collection of images from three of Rania Matar's interconnected bodies of work: The Aftermath Of War, The Veil and The Forgotten People. The first focuses on the aftermath of the Lebanese Civil war that lasted from 1975-1990, the war between Hezbollah and Israel in the Summer of 2006 and the conflict between the Lebanese army and suspected terrorists who infiltrated Nahr al-Bared refugee camp in Tripoli in 2007...

Monday, January 18
reviewed by George Slade By Fredrik Marsh's accounting, there's a lot of ruin in Dresden. Or should I say 'ruins,' as in time's effect on architecture, culture's physical artifacts, over centuries? Is Dresden a ruined city, or a city of ruins? Neither, probably, but both in this version of its story...

Monday, January 18
reviewed by Sarah Bradley Simon Roberts produced the images for We English during a year visiting popular recreational sites across England. It's an intriguing way to investigate a country, one which served my family well when living in England while I was 13 (we actually visited some of Robert's locations)...

Friday, December 18
reviewed by Shane Lavalette Viviane Sassen's Flamboya brings together photographs from her recent visits to Africa. Though predominantly raised in the Netherlands, from the ages of two to five Sassen lived in a Kenyan village with her father, a doctor who worked at a neighboring polio clinic...

Thursday, December 17
reviewed by Douglas Stockdale 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 the fight to keep a tangible presence of who they were while dealing with the grief of their loss...

Wednesday, December 16
reviewed by George Slade Whether Barnes's work is about logic, instinct, nature, or artifice is a question that should be arbitrated in higher courts than this. Zoologists, museum professionals, biologists, semioticians, linguists, and philosophers should address the implications of these images...

Wednesday, December 16
reviewed by Nicholas Chiarella Terri Weifenbach's Another Summer is a delicate and unassuming book, even before one opens it. Her ninth volume of photographs and her first with The Thunderstorm Press, the 5'x7...

Wednesday, December 16
reviewed by John Mathews Trinity consists largely of musings and historical snippets about the shifting social- political climate of the Arizona and New Mexico deserts over the last four hundred years. The text by Charles Bowden explores a diverse range of subjects including the treatment of native peoples, mining booms and wars to its use as a nuclear testing site...

Monday, December 7
reviewed by Douglas Stockdale Bette Gordon's famous, perhaps infamous, 1983 independent film Variety evolved from an earlier series of cinematic narrative photographs created by Nan Goldin. While a few of the photographs from Goldin's Variety were incorporated in her earlier opus, The Ballard of Sexual Dependency, this is the first cohesive publication of the entire Variety project...

Monday, December 7
reviewed by Sara Terry Bruce Connew's limited edition of On the Way to an Ambush is a clever bit of packaging. Originally published by Victoria University Press in 1999, Connew is offering what his website calls the 'last 100-copy limited edition, multi-media' version of the book...

Tuesday, December 1
reviewed by Richard Gordon In the past few years some of Robert Adams's seminal and hard to find (or very expensive) early books have been reprinted. The latest effort is an expanded version of Summer Nights, now re-titled, Summer Nights, Walking...

Monday, November 30
reviewed by Shane Lavalette Iris Editions Ltd., the collaborative effort of NYC-based Kristopher Graves and London-based Sergio Fernández, has released the first of what is likely to be a remarkable series of luxury edition large-format books...

Saturday, November 28
reviewed by Douglas Stockdale Spending time with Duane Michals recent book, 50, was essentially re-experiencing much of my own photographic life, having come of photographic age with his Somnambulistic period. His fascination with dreams, dreamlike states and dream-walking precedes our current interest with making connections to memories...

Saturday, November 28
reviewed by George Slade This little book has got me all riled up. It purports to be about nothing-things that do not happen, entry zero in an imagined sequence, no captions or dates, and a text that, translated into English from Italian, has only the barest hints of meaning...

Tuesday, November 24
reviewed by George Slade My dear, departed friend and mentor Ted Hartwell (1933-2007), the founding curator of the photography department at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, assembled a collection that includes several thousand prints that reflected Ted's passion for 'pictures that tell a story.' He was drawn to great photojournalists and documentary photographers who chose to inform the world about truths going untold...

Tuesday, November 24
reviewed by Charles Dee Mitchell Thanks to the ever-increasing amounts of artificial light that floods our cities, photographers such as Brassai, Weegee, and Saul Leiter, along with many others, have chosen the night as their subject matter. But on November 5, 1965, Swiss photographer Rene Burri had nighttime thrust upon him...

Thursday, November 19
reviewed by Sara Terry The first image in Shelley Calton's Hard Knocks, is a wonderful set-up for the brief, wild ride into the kinetic world of women's roller derby that is to come. Titled 'Agent Belligerent,' the opening portrait is of a woman who looks set for combat - and she is...

Wednesday, November 18
reviewed by Charles Dee Mitchell Rome. Winter, early 21st century...

Tuesday, November 17
reviewed by Douglas Stockdale There is something amiss with Deanna Templeton's self published book, 17 Days, the photo documentary she created while accompanying a product promotional tour through Europe in 2008. I am bedeviled by all that bothers me, and I think that it is best described as an overall unevenness in the body of work, almost like a Flickr download of vacation snapshots...

Tuesday, November 17
reviewed by George Slade Accompanying this wry volume's many accomplishments, Reiner Riedler deserves credit for reminding us that the United States does not monopolize the global marketplace for vicarious experiences available at cost. Yes, Orlando and Las Vegas hold places of honor in this collection...

Monday, November 16
reviewed by Richard Gordon Edward Hopper & Company is a beautiful book: elegant and restrained, intelligent as the exhibition it records. The exhibit, now closed, was a treat for the eye and the mind...

Tuesday, November 10
reviewed by Aline Smithson I recently sat in a darkened screening room, tears streaming down my face, as I watched the documentary, Changing the Truth, about photographer Gloria Baker Feinstein and how, inspired by a photo workshop in Africa, she returned to adopt an entire Ugandan orphanage. Full disclosure here, Feinstein is a friend of mine, and I have watched with amazement and pride as she created Change the Truth, a non-profit organization that has transformed the lives of countless Ugandan orphans...

Monday, November 9
reviewed by Shane Lavalette Published on the occasion of her Spring 2008 exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Colnaghi, Roni Horn's catalog Bird highlights a selection of close-up studio portraits of taxidermied Icelandic birds, a typology that Horn worked on for more than ten years. The usually wild animals are each seen here set in front of white backdrops, lit evenly and shown from behind, a revealing point of view that somehow transforms the birds into strangely beautiful, non-figurative surfaces...

Thursday, November 5
reviewed by Antone Dolezal A young man with straight posture and a broad smile stands wearing a sheath with several knives and holding an animal corpse in his arms. He is a slaughterhouse worker, and judging from his body language, he takes immense pride in his work...

Tuesday, November 3
reviewed by George Slade The astounding thing about Maggie Taylor is that she pushes forward by reaching backward. It was a treat while looking at the early images in this book to recall that at one point my Yale classmate (an undergraduate philosophy major and freshman admirer of Chaucer's smale foweles) was making fairly straightforward images of collected objects...

Tuesday, November 3
reviewed by Richard Gordon Circus is a beautifully crafted book, as is always the case with any offering by The Eakins Press. The question remains as to whether all the effort and expense of beautiful reproduction and classically understated, intelligent book design (by Catherine Waters) was worth it...

Wednesday, October 28
reviewed by Charles Dee Mitchell "Eddie Adams," writes his widow Alyssa Adams in her Author's Note to Vietnam, "would never had let this book be published if he were alive." It is a strange way to open a monograph on one of the most honored photojournalists of the Vietnam era.

Tuesday, October 27
reviewed by Shane Lavalette With an open-ended book commission from Charlotte Cotton of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, artist Shannon Ebner decided to approach the work with the innovative design team Dexter Sinister (a.k.a. David Reinfurt and Stuart Bailey) and produced what is perhaps one of the most intriguing photographic books to surface this year.

Monday, October 26
reviewed by Susan Burnstine In this latest monograph, Josef Hoflehner takes us on a far more buoyant, and perhaps complex, journey than any of his former works. The images in Jet Airliner express the childlike wonder many of us experienced as we gazed toward the sky and caught an exhilarating glimpse of something that amazed us for the very first time.

Thursday, October 22
reviewed by Eddie Marsman A little gem containing exactly 29 images, all of them in B&W, all of them showing female backs and occiputs. Which is basically all there is to say with certainty about the content of Bombay Beauties...

Wednesday, October 21
reviewed by George Slade Capitolio—a district in central Caracas. Caracas—the capital and, with over three million residents, the largest city of República Bolivariana de Venezuela (Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, the country's official name since 1999)...

Tuesday, October 20
reviewed by Alex Sweetman American Surveillance is an important, nervous book. In it, photographer Richard Gordon takes a hard look at America, and America, literally and ironically, looks back—in the form of the fixed, vacant, glass-eye stare of video surveillance cameras...

Thursday, October 15
reviewed by Charles Dee Mitchell British photographer Martin Parr's previously recorded trip to the beach was to the Liverpool suburb of New Brighton, a holiday spot well past its sell-by date when he made his mid-1980's visits. In The Last Resort, his monograph of those visits, he captured the English working class having a desperate go at enjoying themselves, their white skin for the most part impervious to what sun there was...

Wednesday, October 14
reviewed by Susan Burnstine Shoot, Photography Of The Moment is a compelling look at a wave of photographers who deliberately present seemingly offhand images in a fine art or editorial context, and thus strive to create 'perfectly imperfect' images. The photographers presented in this book are from all over the world and do not have a unified approach, but all are influenced by a movement that began twenty-five years ago with the personal documentary work of Stephen Shore and Nan Goldin...

Tuesday, October 13
reviewed by Aline Smithson My first reaction to Dutch photographer Otto Snoek's new book, Why Not, was that Rotterdam was off my travel list. Even so, it's immediately evident that Mr...

Monday, October 12
reviewed by George Slade As a rule, I'm a fan of the built environment. The choices and structures we make as a species are bewildering, arrogant, inorganic, and full of illusions about what is necessary to allow our continued evolution...

Wednesday, October 7
reviewed by Alex Sweetman Douglas Holleley has written a book that every photo-educator should read: Your Assignment: Photography, described as an interactive resource for students and teachers of photography. To my knowledge, it is the only book that speaks intelligently about the role and meaning of photo-assignments, some of which are routine across the field, and it does so in lucid, plain English...

Tuesday, October 6
reviewed by Charles Dee Mitchell Sushma Prasad is an assistant clerk to the Cabinet Secretary of the State of Bihar, India. Her desk is relatively neat, but behind her is a chaotic pile of irretrievable facts buried in hundreds of tattered paper files. Prasad is one of fifty civil servants Jan Banning photographed in Bolivia, France, Yemen, Russia, Liberia, India, China, and Texas...

Friday, October 2
reviewed by Richard Gordon 2nd Tour Hope I Don't Die is at once a hauntingly beautiful, passionately engaged, angry, and a necessary book. Few are. This is The Disasters of War for first decade of a relentlessly creepingly, creepy century...

reviewed by Richard Gordon Agape. Yes, why not start there. Let us begin with unconditional love. In my forty some years of looking at photographs and books, this has not been the first word that pops unbidden into this Jew's mind. Midway through my first look at Home, agape came to mind among cascading layers of emotions and thoughts. I've never used that word in conversation or print (unless for some long forgotten college paper) before now. Rachmonis, yes — for you Lutherans, Yiddish for a broad sympathy...

reviewed by Richard Gordon Barbara Crane for obvious (and not so obvious) reasons, is one of the few working photographers who can honestly be compared to Harry Callahan. Among the near-endless virtues of Callahan as a photographer was his quest to explore the plastic picture possibilities of camera-made photographs — a cornerstone of Crane's own distinguished career.

The photographs in this book celebrate not only flesh and heat made visible, but also the eternal human comedy of desire...

reviewed by Richard Gordon Writing this review for Brought To Light has been simmering on my back burner for too long. Since I finished reading the first volume of Janet Browne's beautifully written, "magisterial" biography of Darwin yesterday—Happy Birthday Charley—with the airwaves full of Darwiniana...

reviewed by Melanie McWhorter Indie Publishing: How to Design & Publish Your Own Book, the newest title edited by Ellen Lupton for Princeton Architectural Press, has already proven to be wildly popular — indeed, it's already in its second printing, the first sold out almost immediately upon release...

reviewed by Michael More Richard Benson has been teaching at Yale for thirty years. He was named Dean of the Art School in 1995, and when he stepped down from that job in 2006, a tribute by photographer Tod Papageorge in the Yale Art Gallery Bulletin described his career as "crooked" and "careening..."

reviewed by Ryon James For ten years, Joshua Lutz has been exploring the meadowlands in northern New Jersey, a vast swath of wetlands abutting one of the most populated areas in the US. Meadowlands, Lutz's first monograph, presents this decade long project begun under the pretense of finding Jimmy Hoffa...

reviewed by George Slade How often are you compelled to quote a photographer's printed writings? I have two favored references: the first, chronologically and in number of conscious appearances, is Robert Frank's pithy and enduring comment that "it is always the instantaneous reaction to oneself that produces a photograph...

Rupert Jenkins reviews Crude Reflections and Curse of the Black Gold Oil has been much in the news lately, and two recent books bring the impact of its exploitations vividly to light...

reviewed by Mark Hillringhouse In House Calls with William Carlos Williams, MD, Robert Coles writes: "Dr. Williams would look at buildings, doors, windows, long and hard before he actually entered a place to meet people." When you open the pages of this book, you encounter those same buildings, doors, windows and people in the more than sixty duotone photographs from Thomas Roma accompanying Coles's text...

reviewed by George Slade Memphis, Tennessee. A lovely, mid-summer glow graces an alley between utterly banal buildings in a photograph titled 'Bill's Twilight.' Even without this tip of the hat, and a back-matter acknowledgment to 'friend' William Eggleston, Christian Patterson's first major monograph pays significant and worthy homage to the Memphis-based master...

reviewed by Phil Harris Lee Friedlander's windows to the world have been coming at us at a steady clip for about five decades now, a series of news bulletins from the under-mapped monochrome continent, Friedland...

reviewed by Charles Dee Mitchell Michael Farris, the constitutional lawyer who fought hard for the legislation that has allowed the homeschooling movement to flourish across America, founded Patrick Henry College in 2000...

reviewed by George Slade Several of Fazal Sheikh's monographs have appeared in a trim size, about 8 inches tall by 6 inches wide, and a modest thickness that makes them seem almost like pocketbooks — items one could easily tote on a long journey. The unassuming dimensions of these books, however, belie the profundity of the images they contain...

reviewed by Stephen Hahn George Tice is best known as a photographer of urban scenes, chiefly in New Jersey, mainly with a large format view camera, and entirely in black and white. Several of these aspects come together in Ticetown, a book comprised of just over three dozen images, some picturing remnants of historical Tice family effects...

reviewed by Charles Dee Mitchell Geert van Kesteren's Baghdad Calling begins with the kind of roll call of depressing figures we have come to associate with the current Iraq War: Over 120 armed groups are operating in Iraq. At least 4 million Iraqis have left the country. Since the U.S. occupation began, 209 journalists have been killed in the fighting or executed by insurgents....

reviewed by George Slade Fountain, a beguilingly slim collection based on Andrea Modica's extended relationship with a family and their business in Fountain, Colorado, is an expansion and a welcome revisiting of a photographic program first laid out in her 1996 book Treadwell. It's a pleasure to imagine Modica working on these projects...

reviewed by Aaron Rothman I first came to know of Ed Templeton sometime around 1990, when he began appearing in national skateboarding magazines as an up and coming young pro. Like Templeton, I was a teenager who had immersed myself in skateboarding and photography as means of self-expression, discovery, and escape from the trials of suburban American adolescence...

Paul Fusco: RFK reviewed by Will Steacy My mother, an Irish Catholic who grew up outside Boston, used to read Greek myths to me before putting me to bed. My favorite was the tale of Orpheus's quest through the Underworld to find his beloved Eurydice after her death...

reviewed by Charles Dee Mitchell Editor Liu Heung Shing began gathering images for this forty-year survey of Chinese photography in 1997. He searched China for photographers once employed by the Maoist government either as official photographers or with the state-run media, elderly men and women who still had negatives in shoeboxes under their beds and prints they had shown no one for decades...

reviewed by Mary Anne Redding The first three photographers awarded monographs in 2005 by Critical Mass, Photolucida's annual juried competition, were Hiroshi Watanabe, Louis Palu, and Sage Sohier. The three small books were published in 2007...

reviewed by Charles Dee Mitchell Modern physics teaches us that what we perceive as solid mass is composed mostly of empty space. It's a difficult concept to get your mind around, especially when you stump your toe or fill a cup with coffee, but the photographs German photographer Michael Wolf has taken in Chicago depict our urban skyscraper environments as a model of that concept...

reviewed by Ryon James Katy Grannan has always been drawn to "lost souls" as subjects. In her earlier work, she allowed her subjects to find her through indirect means such as classified ads and word-of-mouth (Model Americans, Aperture 2005). With The Westerns, Grannan has taken the initiative and sought out the desired individuals, approaching people in public that spark her interest...

reviewed by John Cohen Lead Belly: A Life in Pictures is a celebratory view of the great musician, filled with testimonials, poems and memories from Huddie Ledbetter's family, friends and admirers, such as Tom Waits, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Kurt Cobain, Janis Joplin and many others who saw the greatness of Lead Belly's music...

reviewed by Alex Sweetman For a long time it was said that anyone meeting Robert Frank would be well advised to steer clear of the subject of The Americans. It had a way of making Robert irritable. But not anymore, not since Gerhard Steidl became involved in “The Robert Frank Project,”...

by John Cohen Steidl has just reissued a little book, Pull My Daisy, loaded with photographic power, a document from a phase in Robert Frank’s long career when Robert abandoned still photography to make his first film...