Tuesday, August 31
reviewed by Nicholas Chiarella The goal of Sunshine Pulse, as Aki Tanaka states, is to capture feelings of 'wavering between hope and anxiety.' Presented in a contemporary style - color images printed full-bleed and bound in a slick hardcover - Tanaka's photographs convey a deeply traditional message...

Thursday, August 26
reviewed by Rena Silverman Throughout her thirty-year career, artist Kiki Smith has repeatedly employed techniques warranting the recognition of her artistic process. Her photographs fulfill a similar purpose, documenting everything from the onset of inspiration to the final result...

Wednesday, August 25
reviewed by Mary Goodwin Touchless Automatic Wonder: Found Text Photographs from the Real World revels in establishing unexpected connections between the written word and its surroundings. The book marks Lewis Koch's twenty-five-year search to extricate the thrill of hidden messages buried amid the chaos of our everyday visual landscape...

Tuesday, August 24
reviewed by Douglas Stockdale The retrospective monograph The Photographs of Frederick H. Evans, curated by Anne Lyden and complemented by Hope Kingsley's essay, provides a wonderful tribute to this renowned English photographer...

Friday, August 20
reviewed by David Ondrik Mercy Mercer, the second book of New Zealander Derek Henderson's photographs, is a weighty volume of 128 pages. When first holding it, it has a great object-presence...

Thursday, August 19
reviewed by John Mathews This book explores a range of Angus McBean's black and white photography work from the 1930's to the 1950's during which time he documented countless landmark theatre and film productions within Britain for publicity purposes. Successfully using dramatic chiaroscuro lighting and imaginative props, McBean captured the styles and opulence of these productions...

Wednesday, August 18
reviewed by Jonathan Blaustein Why do we look at photographs? What drives the compulsion? I think there are several answers, of course. But chief among them is a desire to see things we haven't seen, to understand the world through someone else's eyes...

Friday, August 13
reviewed by Tom Leininger China is a popular topic for photographers. The country's economic transformation, large factories and the environmental fall out of this progress have fueled the majority of the imagery...

Thursday, August 12
reviewed by George Slade Without a doubt, Tim Davis is one of the top five most savvy, wry photographers working today. His images make no bones about coming at you, forcefully, and making you wrestle with the issues he nonchalantly tosses at you...

Wednesday, August 11
reviewed by John Mathews Wien 2 is a collection of 140 photographs taken in Vienna, Austria between 1995 and 2009. Many of the images are exterior architectural views that deal with the process of urban regeneration...

Monday, August 9
reviewed by Sara Terry Magnum photographer Abbas was in Siberia on 9/11, half a world away from the crumbling of the Twin Towers - but fully aware of the questions that would echo for years to come about the nature of Islam, and the fundamentalists who caused such destruction in Allah's name. In Whose Name: The Islamic World after 9/11 is a collection of 173 black-and-white photographs made by Abbas in 16 countries over a seven-year period as he explored the Muslim world's response to the 'jihadists in their midst...

Friday, August 6
reviewed by Tom Leininger Olof Jarlbro's book, Stonefactory, shows the lives of Nepalese workers in a pair of stone mills outside of Kathmandu where bare hands and strong backs are the tools. Jarlbro's black and white images highlight hardworking people going through their lives with dignity...

Thursday, August 5
reviewed by Colin Pantall Mix Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel's Evidence with some of Cindy Sherman's Film Stills, add a whole lot of Joan Fontcuberta, print the results on the cheapest paper you can find and you'll still be a million miles away from Koen Hauser's latest book, De Luister van het Land. Koen Hauser specializes in strange manipulations; of children, anatomy models, archive pictures and himself...

Tuesday, August 3
reviewed by Mary Goodwin The community of Baseco, located at the mouth of the Pasig River near the harbor of Manila, Philippines, is a haven for those coming to the metropolis from the countryside. New residents construct houses for themselves out of the city's refuse, erecting huts that act as life rafts on the sandy shores until their builders can establish themselves on firmer ground...

Saturday, July 31
reviewed by Alex Sweetman American Photography 25 (not to be confused with the monthly magazine of the same name) is the 25th silver anniversary edition of one of the most interesting annuals ever published. AP25 is very serious, elaborately produced, full of professional photography -- much already published in leading media outlets -- and selected by an all star print media/art jury lead by Kathy Ryan of the New York Times...

Friday, July 30
reviewed by Charles Dee Mitchell Confronted with an essentially text-free book, I scour it for any clue to what I am dealing with. On the colophon page of Pamela Pecchio's 509, we learn that the photographs were taken in 2005 in Burlington, North Carolina...

Thursday, July 29
reviewed by Joscelyn Jurich 'No photographer in their right mind had ever meticulously brought back home a sample of stinky Coney Island trash,' write Sophie and Bruce Gilden in their slim wax paper catalogue (written in French and English) for Baptiste Lignel and Johnny Miller's evocative Coney Island. Coney Island, which won a prize at this spring's New York Photo Festival, is like the real Coney Island -vivacious, brazen and decidedly unsanitized (and maybe even unsanitary!)...

Tuesday, July 27
reviewed by George Slade It sometimes seems miraculous that compelling photographs can be made anywhere on earth, even in the most unpromising environs. It may even seem so to the photographer making the photographs, that a place and its people may remain visually recalcitrant despite all one's skills and will...

Saturday, July 24
reviewed by Antone Dolezal Several years ago, a self-published photography book could cost an arm and a leg to produce, carrying the potential to be so costly as to deter artists from attempting the leap of photographic publication. But low and behold came the arrival of the print-on-demand book - an exciting new avenue for emerging or mid-career photographers hoping to show their work to a wider audience...

Friday, July 23
reviewed by Charles Dee Mitchell You've got to love the name: Wonder Valley. It's part of the Morongo Basin east of Twentynine Palms in Southern California, and despite the evocative moniker it is thousands of inhospitable desert acres owned by the federal government...

Tuesday, July 20
reviewed by Nicholas Chiarella Attributable only by its title and the thumbprint of an anonymous photographer, Quebec is a work which plays with the viewer's notions of identity. This quality is surprising since the works within are not portraits, but landscapes...

Friday, July 16
reviewed by Shane Lavalette 'I was hit by the fictitious smell of the sea,' writes Jonas Wettre about the moment he discovered a box of glass slides from the '40s and '50s that were passed down within his family. Jonas became fascinated by the colors and the quality of the images, in particular a set from a journey that his father, Staffan Wettre, took with Gunnar Stenström in 1959 aboard a three masted topsail schooner, The Flying Clipper...

Wednesday, July 14
reviewed by Leslie J. Ureña Lewis Hine as Social Critic, by Kate Sampsell-Willmann, uses a selection of the social documentary photographer Lewis Hine's (1874-1940) work as 'texts' to reintroduce him as a pivotal figure in American culture. Hine was not only the father of documentary photography, but also a Progressive activist, a disciple of the philosopher John Dewey, a supporter of the rights of children and workers, and a follower of the tenets of the Arts and Crafts movement...

Tuesday, July 13
reviewed by Mary Anne Redding Like James Agee and Walker Evans's seminal publication, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the book that introduces the viewer to the landscape of southern poverty during the first great American depression, Down Country begins with the images. And so it should -- to begin to know the landscape of the Galisteo Basin in north central New Mexico, one must walk it as intimately as Lucy Lippard and Edward Ranney have for the past 35+ years...

Saturday, July 10
reviewed by Sebastian Arthur Hau I've enjoyed Homma's books from outside Japan (his work in Poland, Denmark and Russia) for his sensitive response to light and architecture in often seemingly bland motives. The book 'Widows' sprung from a commission of the Rapallo photofestival and is a small treasure and sight to behold: two soft cover books in a jacket, held together with an elastic band...

Saturday, July 3
reviewed by John Mathews Club 13 is the first published work by the Swedish photographer Nils Petter Löfstedt. The book documents the mayhem and antics of youthful partygoers in an anonymous city...

Wednesday, June 30
reviewed by Joscelyn Jurich 'Widowed at the young age of twenty-four,' writes photographer Kathy Hettinga in the introduction to her visually evocative and lyrically composed book, 'I found comfort in the shared sorrow of the cemeteries.' Hettinga's documentary study of homemade grave markers in southern Colorado's San Luis Valley is a personal, spiritual and cultural study of the most thoughtful, probing and perceptive sort...

Saturday, June 26
reviewed by Tom Leininger Renato D'Agostin's Tokyo Untitled is a beguiling book. At first glance, I wanted to dismiss it...

Thursday, June 24
reviewed by Larissa Leclair In the midst of all the press surrounding the new 'New Topographics' exhibition organized by the George Eastman House and the Center for Creative Photography now on international tour through at least 2012, Joe Deal, one of the original photographers and curators involved in the pivotal 1975 show has added to his oeuvre with a fantastic body of work and book, 'West and West.' Joe Deal introduces the plates in the book with a wonderfully written essay about the Great Plains and reflections on his own photography over the years...

Friday, June 18
reviewed by Renée Jacobs 'The Bathers' by Jennette Williams is visual comfort food. A lovely collection of black and white images taken by Williams of women in the communal baths of Budapest and Istanbul, 'The Bathers' was selected by Mary Ellen Mark as the 2009 winner of the Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography and she provides a generous introduction...

Friday, June 11
reviewed by George Slade Do you know who the third largest cotton producer in the world is (or was, in 2008/2009, according to figures cited in Cotton Worldwide)? The United States. Do you know which two countries produce over fifty percent of the world's cotton? China and India...

Wednesday, June 9
reviewed by Douglas Stockdale The aerial perspective and tight framing of Michael Light's Bingham Mine / Garfield Stack introduces a vertigo similar to what I feel when riding the ski lifts in the Rockies. As I am carried over a ridge and momentarily suspended mid-air crossing a deep canyon to an apposing ridge, looking down I feel slightly unhinged and vertigo induced terror...

Saturday, June 5
reviewed by Mary Anne Redding The first time I was handed Framing the West: The Survey Photographs of Timothy H. O'Sullivan, I distractedly started to look through the pages while talking to two contemporary southwestern landscape photographers who have themselves been enormously influenced by O'Sullivan's images, Edward Ranney and Michael P...

Saturday, May 29
reviewed by Tom Leininger Rugby is a tough, violent sport where bodies collide with force. Highlighting the pushing, pulling, lifting and support of the team, Daniel D'Ottavio photographed the New York Athletic Club Rugby team at home matches in 2008, the year they won the Rugby Super League Championship...

Tuesday, May 25
reviewed by George Slade An exhibition catalogue typically advances either scholarly insight or popularity; a museum's interests are bound up in extending its reputation and/or improving its bottom line. For readers, the end product of all that backstage ado usually pays minimal attention to organizational goals...

Saturday, May 22
reviewed by John Mathews La Photographie N'est Pas L'art ('Photography is Not Art') is a limited edition facsimile reprint of a book that was originally published by Guy Levis-Mano in France in 1937. The book is composed of twelve loose-leaf photographs within a portfolio style slipcase and includes a short, poetic text by the surrealist artist Andre Breton entitled 'convulsionaires'...

Saturday, May 15
reviewed by Colin Pantall Britain's history is of an overcrowded island. The overcrowding was compounded in the 18th and 19th centuries by land grabs that concentrated property in the hands of a few large landowners at the expense of the rural poor...

Wednesday, May 12
reviewed by Aline Smithson Dona Schwartz's In the Kitchen has something to do with cooking, but it's more a stew of familial observations. I was already familiar with this body of work, but seeing it in book form made it even more meaningful...

Wednesday, May 12
reviewed by Sara Terry 'Yousuf Karsh: Regarding Heroes,' is the gorgeous volume that was created to accompany the exhibition celebrating the centenary of the birth of one of photography's greatest portraitists. David Travis, the former curator of photography at the Art Institute of Chicago, drew the exhibition's selection of 100 photos from a collection of 200 master prints given to the museum by Karsh's widow, Estrellita...

Saturday, May 8
reviewed by John Mathews Show documents the flamboyant performers of the neo-burlesque movement in a variety of US cities between 2001 and 2009. The term neo-burlesque is a press tag used to describe a new type of transgressive burlesque that has emerged over the last ten years, which combines old time vaudeville or sideshow entertainment with the ethos of post feminism and gender bending...

Wednesday, May 5
reviewed by Antone Dolezal When I first flipped through the pages of RJ Shaughnessy's book Deathcamp, I felt an immediate familiarity with the images that I couldn't quite put my finger on. Was it the nature of the images themselves? Photographs of relatively self-destructive behavior have been popular for the last few decades, so what ultimately separates these images from those of Jonnie Craig, Larry Clark, or Dash Snow? Or could it be that these photographs felt eerily parallel to my own experience of attending art school? (Certainly the cause of my initial pretentiousness...

Saturday, May 1
reviewed by Sara Terry When I picked up Stacia Spragg-Braude's remarkable book 'To Walk in Beauty: A Navajo Family's Return Home,' I was in the middle of a schedule so jammed with things to do that contemplation of anything -- deep, quiet, soul-nurturing reflection -- seemed completely impossible. It is a measure of the power of her work that I sat quietly for quite some time, taking in the images and the stories from her black-and-white project documenting the life of a Navajo family and the rebirth of their cultural values...

Wednesday, April 21
reviewed by Han Schoonhoven Archivo explores remarkable archives. The first seven issues of the quirky photo magazine Archivo are now bundled into one solid folder...

Wednesday, April 14
reviewed by Douglas Stockdale Edward Burtynsky's impressive book Oil is exquisite with an environmentally difficult narrative portrayed with mesmerizing details in sublimely beautiful photographs. This large scale book is befitting of his use of a large format camera and his even larger scale exhibition prints...

Tuesday, April 6
reviewed by George Slade We search endlessly to find what it is that we are looking for. We must realize and accept that this process cannot be forced and instead allow it to happen naturally...

Tuesday, March 30
reviewed by George Slade The spirit of pietra viva guides this volume. 'Living stone' -- an oxymoron, but one uniquely descriptive of Italian marble and of the photographs created by William Wylie over six years in the Cava di Gioia quarry...

Tuesday, March 30
reviewed by Nicholas Chiarella Martin Fengel and Bernd Zimmer's Mobil 100 is a visual puzzlement. Juxtaposing snapshot-style photographs (Fengel's) and a variety of paper-based work (Zimmer's), the book is a candid collaboration, hanging together on coincidence and surprise...

Saturday, March 27
reviewed by Charles Dee Mitchell The northernmost part of New Zealand, where Tim White took these photographs, is approximately as far south of the equator as Dallas, Texas, where I am writing this review, is north of the equator. That may seem like a pointless comparison, but it highlights the fact that here in the US we need to abandon most of the images we association with 'the North,' before we look at White's book...

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...