Thursday, May 23
reviewed by Adam Bell Art fairs are corrosive beasts. The convenience they provide collectors by gathering so much work in one space is often at odds with actually seeing work in any intelligent fashion...

Monday, May 20
reviewed by George Slade 'Pictures should leap from the camera like rabbits.'

Must be an intriguing artist who writes a statement like this...

Thursday, May 16
reviewed by Colin Pantall It's hard to know what the last refuge of the photographer-scoundrel is. Could it be Street View screenshots? Perhaps it's apples, either fresh and shiny, hanging from the limbs of overburdened trees or rotting windfalls scattered on the grass beneath the boughs from which they fell...

Thursday, May 9
reviewed by John Mathews Glancing through the pages of ABC one can quickly get a sense of Klein's frenetic and inquisitive eye. These qualities are particularly evident within a series of lively New York street portraits from 1956, which depict an assortment of gregarious characters...

Monday, May 6
reviewed by Adam Bell It begins with an encounter in a museum, ruins and a stolen camera. The images aren't entirely gone...

Thursday, May 2
reviewed by Karen Jenkins I thought the tacit presence of Madrid would matter more in my reading of Antonio M. Xoubanova's photographs of Casa de Campo, that city's massive, wooded park...

Monday, April 29
reviewed by Tom Leininger Rural small towns are part of America's heritage. Seeing them now makes one wonder, how has this town survived? Who are these people? What are their lives like? Matfield Green, Kansas is one of those towns...

Thursday, April 25
reviewed by Daniel W. Coburn Kate Breakey follows in the footsteps of major figures in the history of photography. In her latest monograph Las Sambras, aka The Shadows, she makes a series of cameraless photographs...

Monday, April 22
reviewed by Adam Bell From the relatively new fear of terrorist attacks and catastrophe to the maddening inconvenience of flight delays and endless security lines, commercial air travel elicits a combination of fear, frustration and tedium. Nevertheless, flight is miraculous...

Thursday, April 18
reviewed by Alexandra Huddleston In his lively and erudite essay in Walker Evans' first book American Photographs, Lincoln Kirstein writes, 'The American reading public is fast becoming not even a looking-public, but a glancing or glimpsing public.' Written for the first edition of the book in 1938, this statement has become even more relevant in our digital age, just as Evans' photographs still manage to defy the impatient eye of a modern viewer and draw her into a world in which deep looking and deep thinking are equally rewarded...

Monday, April 15
reviewed by Blake Andrews There are two kinds of photo books, those concerned with the primacy of the image -- in which the book is merely a secondary vessel-- and those more concerned with the book itself as an artistic form.

And I suppose there's a third kind too, books that aren't concerned with being photo books at all...

Thursday, April 11
reviewed by Sarah Bradley If you hadn?t seen Mike Brodie?s photographs when they first made the internet rounds in 2008, they are hard to miss now with his new book titled A Period of Juvenile Prosperity and several exhibitions with the same name. The beautiful and romantic photographs of natty, if dirty, young vagabond train hoppers -- cultural outsiders living a life of freedom most dare only fantasize about -- are captivating...

Monday, April 8
reviewed by Colin Pantall The idea of Return to Sender is very simple. Photographer and retoucher, Sipke Visser sent envelopes containing a picture, a stamped addressed envelope and a handwritten letter asking for people to respond to the picture; 'Write whatever like something about the letter, yourself, the weather...

Thursday, April 4
reviewed by Joscelyn Jurich 'Don't be scared of photographing a storm-out, crying fit or strop?' British photographer Martin Parr advised readers in a 2010 Guardian column about vacation photography. 'I would argue that the more valuable document is the honest one...

Monday, April 1
reviewed by George Slade I seldom spend much time looking at endpapers. They are typically about as interesting as theater lobby carpets...

Thursday, March 28
reviewed by Shane Lavalette Jessica Backhaus? latest monograph Once, Still & Forever is a painterly reflection on time, place, and emotion. Those familiar with Backhaus? earlier titles...

Monday, March 25
reviewed by Tom Leininger Paul Graham was awarded the 2012 the Hasselblad Award and the book that celebrates his photographic career brings together two of his series of pictures A1 - The Great North Road from 1981...

Monday, March 18
reviewed by Adam Bell Despite its complex indexical nature, photography allows us to document and record the world unlike any other medium. However, the lens not only captures, but also transforms the world around us...

Thursday, March 14
reviewed by Karen Jenkins It's hard to imagine a prevailing depiction of Cuban culture from without that does not hinge upon the idea of access. Closing off and opening up happen ideologically, geographically, architecturally there, and this notion provides the conceptual framework for American Andrew Moore's photographs of Cuba made over a fourteen year period...

Monday, March 11
reviewed by Blake Andrews Any discussion of Enrique Metinides will deal with the Weegee factor at some point, so let's get that out of the way first. The comparison is probably inescapable...

Thursday, March 7
reviewed by George Slade How can a country with spell-check-busting town names like Mollymook, Ulladulla, Bendalong, and Dubbo reject individualism? How can an island that doubles as a continent, populated by fantastic creatures like kangaroos, koalas, and Crocodile Dundee, be inclined to suppress the exceptional?

But -- tall poppy syndrome -- there it is. Things that stand out must be cut down to size...

Monday, March 4
reviewed by Adam Bell Spread throughout Europe, the Roma constitute one of the largest ethnic minorities in the region. More commonly known as gypsies, the Roma are also among the most routinely persecuted and reviled...

Thursday, February 28
reviewed by Blake Andrews I recently found myself eye to eye with a buff male model slouched and nearly naked on a tile floor. He had been tarred and feathered, and stared directly at me through a clump of soiled hair with the blank and unreadable expression typical of a perfume or underwear ad...

Monday, February 25
reviewed by Judy Natal Nic Nicosia truly understands, nay passionately embraces, the artifice of the image and the fact that photography is a hybrid medium. It's not motion picture, but it does tell a story through narrative in time and space...

Thursday, February 21
reviewed by Colin Pantall Dirty greens, charcoal greys and dusty browns. A landscape that consists of barren brambles, rambling ivy and mutilated trees...

Monday, February 18
reviewed by Tom Leininger Brian Finke's trademark bright colors and dramatic light are at play in his new book Construction. Finke is interested in the daily drama of the work site...

Thursday, February 14
reviewed by Adam Bell Although seemingly self-evident, the domestication of wild animals was central to our survival as a species and development of modern civilization. Despite its long history and importance, this axiom is often forgotten as all but a few animals have disappeared from most of our daily lives...

Monday, February 11
reviewed by Blake Andrews Look at any photograph and the question naturally arises. What does it describe? The world in front of the camera, or the world inside the photographer's head? This tension -- between objective and subjective -- is fundamental to photography...

Thursday, February 7
reviewed by Janelle Lynch John MacLean sees with an awakened eye. His New Colour Guide is as much about artful visual perception as it is a query into the power of color...

Monday, February 4
reviewed by Karen Jenkins The phrase 'found photography' seems entirely too passive a label for the anonymous images that Eric Kessels has culled from so many antique shops or auction lots and presented anew in Album Beauty. Anyone who shares his enthusiasm for vernacular imagery will recognize some recurring themes among those orphan photos and albums collected within, including the ill-conceived vacation snap, the propped-up baby and the often stilted formal wear by mantelpiece portrait...

Thursday, January 31
reviewed by Christopher Johnson Stand By is an anthology of photographs centered on Belarus and the Belarusian national identity. It features the work of nine different photographers from the Sputnik Photo Collective...

Monday, January 28
reviewed by Tom Leininger Tomasz Wiech and Michal Olszewski roam Poland looking for the bland and boring. With Wiech's photographs and Olszewski's writing they present a country in transition and willing to try anything...

Thursday, January 24
reviewed by Adam Bell Gardens have a long and fascinating history. As transformed landscapes, gardens just as often provide nourishment as they do manicured sites of contemplation...

Monday, January 21
reviewed by Christopher Johnson Distant Place is an attempt by five photographers of the Sputnik Photo collective to bring attention back to the Vistula river in Warsaw. This attempt was aimed at the local Polish citizenry by the Copernicus Science Centre in Warsaw who contacted Sputnik as well as a handful of writers in order to document and celebrate a natural resource that had fallen into disuse...

Thursday, January 17
reviewed by Joscelyn Jurich A man unlocking a morgue door is the first image in Left Behind. The next is a two-page spread of bodies stacked one atop another in a morgue, one with a red tag attached by a string to the body bag zipper with 'Doe, John' written on it in black marker...

Monday, January 14
reviewed by David Ondrik Michael P. Berman's Gila is an homage to southwestern New Mexico's Gila Wilderness, and in the pages of this two volume book he shows his respect and dedication to New Mexico's first, largest, and last wilderness...

Monday, January 7
reviewed by Winston Riley History Repeating is a thorough and conceptually exhaustive book that handsomely exhibits the major movements of Gersht's work. Gersht works in both moving and in still images, and the book represents both elegantly...

Tuesday, January 3
reviewed by Adam Bell A pivotal photobook of the late 20th century, Luigi Ghirri's Kodachrome was originally published in 1978 and is key to the history of European and color photography....

Monday, December 31
reviewed by Colin Pantall Jem Southam's pictures are quiet and unspectacular. They feature rural landscapes where changes happen over a period of days or months or years...

Thursday, December 27
reviewed by Faye Robson In a close wooden shack - strewn with clothing and bedding, door open to the elements - a small family are seated, the mother looking down at her barely clothed toddler, while her son leans, sullen, against the mattress that is packed between the walls. There is, perhaps, an atmosphere of resistance in this image, the large bed forming a barrier that cuts across the composition and highlights the photographer's awkward presence in what is patently a cramped, private space...

Monday, December 24
reviewed by David Ondrik Cancellations is a collection of photographs made by Thomas F. Barrow from 1973 to 1981 with an essay by Geoffrey Batchen...

Thursday, December 20
reviewed by Christopher Johnson Human Zoos is an inexhaustible resource of period photographs and promotional materiel. The book is the companion piece to the Musee du Quai Branly's exhibit 'Exhibitions: The Invention of the Savage' that was held between November 2011 and June 2012 in Paris, France...

Monday, December 17
reviewed by Karen Jenkins Mark Klett and frequent collaborator Byron Wolfe bring the rephotography project to the rim of the Grand Canyon in Reconstructing the View. Primarily photo-based depictions of this natural wonder ? from modernist abstractions to garish tourist postcards ? are both conspicuously inserted and insinuated into their composite imagery...

Thursday, December 13
reviewed by Blake Andrews Paul Strand's impact is well established. Among other achievements, he is probably more responsible than anyone for photography's shift to straight modernism in the early decades of the last century...

Monday, December 10
reviewed by Faye Robson 'I found an address book on the Rue des Martyrs. I decided to photocopy the contents before sending it back anonymously to its owner, whose address is inscribed on the endpaper...

Wednesday, December 5
reviewed by Tom Leininger Arthur Grace is a photographer who knows how to get his point across. Working as a wire service photographer in the 1970s trained him to sum up situations with a neutral, direct photographic language...

Monday, December 3
reviewed by Colin Pantall Tell Eugene Smith to make a family album and you might end up with something like Marc Asnin's Uncle Charlie; a book that is like one of those good, old-fashioned mega-projects without beginning and without end. Uncle Charlie consists of several hundred black and white pictures spread across 370 pages...

Thursday, November 29
reviewed by George Slade I was immensely saddened by Larry Sultan's death in 2009. I had only encountered him once or twice in person, for brief exchanges after lectures and over books being signed...

Monday, November 19
reviewed by Karen Jenkins Doug Rickard has learned much of what he knows of the history of photography online. With his website American Suburb X, he created his own niche archive—a sort of scholarly Pinterest where the past meets present practice in a seamless platform...

Monday, November 12
reviewed by David Ondrik I was both excited and apprehensive to learn that Chris McCaw's photography was being published in his first monograph, Sunburn. I've been a fan of his one-of-a-kind photographic objects for a while now, and was nervous about how the images would translate to the printed page...

Thursday, November 8
reviewed by Blake Andrews The first thing one notices about Mikhael Subotzky's Retinal Shift is its size. At 490 pages, two inches thick, and weighing just over 5 pounds, Retinal Shift is among more mammoth photobooks I've encountered...

Monday, November 5
reviewed by Adam Bell Photography is one of the most alchemical of the arts. Beginning with the world as it is, photography can transforms even the most mundane details into something beautiful, strange or perplexing...

Thursday, November 1
reviewed by Tom Leininger Joe's Junk Yard is more than a photographic recollection of a family business. Lisa Kereszi presents a rich portrait of her heritage along with a narrative about the shifting economics of car culture...

Monday, October 29
reviewed by Colin Pantall A Possible Life is a book about an illegal immigrant to the Netherlands. His name is Gualbert and with the photographer Ben Krewinkel, he's the co-author of the book...

Friday, October 26
reviewed by Tom Leininger Space and silence occupy Caleb Cain Marcus' soul and he translates those ideas in photographs.

Monday, October 22
reviewed by Adam Bell From the decentralized production and exchange of commodities to radical shifts in migration, globalization has transformed the world in numerous ways. What is often lost in these abstract discussions is the effect these changes have on people throughout the world...

Thursday, October 18
reviewed by Karen Jenkins As someone who has seldom faced a room full of students, I was seduced and a little startled by the (nearly) undivided attention Julian Germain elicited from pupils the world over in his series Classroom Portraits. This tenor of concentration seems to reflect his role not as stand-in for an absent instructor, but as stranger and interrupter of the norm...

Monday, October 15
reviewed by George Slade

Was einem Heimat war is a conceptual work; the short letter at the beginning of the book is the emotional counterpart to the unspectacular photographs.—Peter Granser

The title of Peter Granser's newest book derives from that letter, written in 1937 by the Bürgermeister of a village in southern Germany...

Thursday, October 11
reviewed by Winston Riley Yaakov Israel's The Quest for the Man on the White Donkey is a thoughtful meditation on the relationship between land and social history in his home country of Israel. Traveling by car and inspired by the American photo road trip, he assembled and collected these images from his chance meetings with the land and its people...

Monday, October 8
reviewed by Adam Bell It's easy to lose track of all the Springfields. They populate the United States' landscape as the American ur-town — ubiquitous, instantly recognizable, yet mysteriously opaque in their sameness...

Thursday, October 4
reviewed by Kate Sampsell-Willmann Framed within a flexible definition of 'atrocity,' this edited volume of short essays commenting on a mixture of immediately recognizable images and less overtly traumatic photographs presents to the reader an opportunity to visually engage the remarkably blood-soaked record of the long twentieth century (without any visible blood). Although idiosyncratic, this volume would be equally at home on the bookshelf of the amateur scholar of photography or the syllabus of a visual studies course...

Monday, October 1
reviewed by Colin Pantall It's exciting times in the photobook world. There are new ways of printing, distributing, editing, selling; new inks, new papers, new publisher, new inserts, new everything...

Thursday, September 27
reviewed by Judy Natal Little Brown Mushroom (LBM) is the imprint alter ego of wunderkind Magnum photographer, book publisher impresario, blogger and writer, Alec Soth. In an ongoing exploration of everything conceivable that is photobook, Soth expands our ideas of book, photograph, fiction and nonfiction, what is believable or not, and why we should care, and how photographs and books can fit together...

Thursday, September 20
reviewed by Colin Pantall Hide & Seek is the product of two years photographing creators of performing art at L—L in Brussels. The book should be the normal mix of theatre photography; the onstage-offstage mix that centers on the personality of the performers and their pre-performance rituals...

Monday, September 17
reviewed by Tom Leininger Lise Sarfati's latest book, She published by Twin Palms, is a finely crafted book of photographs for those who appreciate pictures with meanings that may not be clear on the first reading. It also features a dynamic essay by Quintin Bajac, the Chief Curator of Photography at MoMA...

Thursday, September 13
reviewed by Colin Pantall After 15 years of making self-portraits, Elina Brotherus notes on the back of her new monograph, Artist and her Model: 'It's a strange feeling to look back at the work done and to look at that young person I used to be. What has happened— What has changed— The apartments, the boyfriends; the face has grown older...

Monday, September 10
reviewed by George Slade 'War. What is it good for? Absolutely nothin...

Thursday, August 30
reviewed by Adam Bell Postcards occupy a unique space within the history of photography. Firmly rooted in photography's vernacular and populist nature, they show us distant lands, tourist traps, beautiful vistas and landmarks...

Monday, August 27
reviewed by Judy Natal David Pollock, by his own admission, has been staring down at dirt for quite some time. In his recent photographic book Fertile Geometry, he is an expert at it while making quiet, contemplative, large format, color landscape photographs that invite the viewer to join him up to ankles in mud, while considering the state of the earth, our imprint on it, and our lack of generosity toward it...

Monday, August 20
reviewed by Christopher Johnson Lovesody is Motoyuki Daifu's first photobook. It documents his brief stint as the lover of a young single mother during the time of her second pregnancy...

Thursday, August 16
reviewed by Sarah Bradley I suppose it's possible to approach something without expectations yet still be surprised by it, as I was with Issue 2 of Amc2 Journal from Archive of Modern Conflict. A small amount of investigation reveals that this issue is (nearly) an entirely different animal from the first, not simply in form, but also in tone and content...

Monday, August 13
reviewed by Karen Jenkins A simple, tattooed outline on the arm of Jacob Walker, coupled with the phrase 'bottom of the da boot,' gives Kael Alford's collection its title and most concrete, immutable rendering of Louisiana's southeastern coast. Her photographs speak to both the immediate fallout of Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and the pernicious environmental losses endured by this wetland region over decades...

Thursday, August 9
reviewed by Antone Dolezal Bruce Haley can tell a dark and lonely story. The darkness often comes from the reality of the subjects he photographs, while the loneliness is inevitably his own...

Monday, August 6
reviewed by Tom Leininger Do not think of this book as a chance to see Rebecca Norris Webb's home state of South Dakota. It is not...

Thursday, August 2
reviewed by Karen Jenkins If I could enter Lynn Cohen's photographs with the eye of an archeologist exploring a foreign or forgotten culture, I might detect a certain unarticulated power, through sheer recurrence of form, in the drop ceiling or the potted tree. In the absence of any definitive demonstration of function, the unoccupied rooms she photographs take on a mysterious significance, and my imagination runs wild in the face of their uncanny presence and nebulous purposes...

Monday, July 30
reviewed by George Slade Once upon a time in Italy, a Milanese child grew up amid stories and situations that led him, later in life, to construct his own realities and tell his own tales using a medium famous for its factual tendencies. How this boy, Paolo Ventura, came to terms with photography's descriptive stubbornness has been borne out in his work since the mid-aughts...

Thursday, July 26
reviewed by Adam Bell Portraiture is always an exchange, wanted or unwanted, between the artist and the subject. More often than not, the subject is willing and submits...

Thursday, July 19
reviewed by Faye Robson What defines a place? Is it the people; their faces, their clothes, their gestures and habits? Is it the buildings these people inhabit; their houses, places of work and social hangouts? Or is it a different kind, an ethical architecture? If, in the twentieth century, what moulds the fate of a place is its economic, social, political circumstances, then how can photography go about documenting such forces? Can a place really be seen?

A quick glimpse at the cover of Golden Section's Time and Space on the Lower East Side suggests one set of answers to these questions. With its carnival atmosphere — the fluttering streamers in the top third of the frame, multi-coloured buildings and cars, and the dynamically positioned boy who swings a baseball bat right into the centre of the image — the image seems to suggest a clarity of vision to match the clarity of composition...

Thursday, July 12
reviewed by Karen Jenkins Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective is a broad and orderly collection that underscores the artist's repetitive use of the conventions of formal portraiture across her series of photographs and video installations. And in the end, it shows this approach to be surprisingly expansive; paging through the ample reproductions, I was struck by the nuance and understated power to be found in such a uniform survey of series and forms...

Monday, July 9
reviewed by David Ondrik Israeli filmmaker Ori Gersht's Artist Book is pretty much exactly that: it's not a photography book in the traditional sense, an artist's photographs reproduced in book form. It is instead a three-volume companion piece to Gersht's films, Evaders, Will You Dance for Me, and Offering...

Monday, July 2
reviewed by Karen Jenkins It's easy to imagine why Thatcher Hullerman Cook was drawn to the Fergana Valley of Kyrgyzstan. Having honed his photographic vision in the service of humanitarian aid groups and other non-governmental organizations, he has traveled the world in the wake of life's harsh offerings...

Monday, June 18
reviewed by George Slade Upon first learning that Cig Harvey's wondrously whimsical photographs were being published I was skeptical. Not all photography needs to be seen in book form, and I was less than clear about how Harvey's images would fare on paper...

Thursday, June 14
reviewed by Colin Pantall For such a small country, the Netherlands punch above their weight when it comes to the photobook. Perhaps the compact size of their country is connected to Dutch skills in the book arts...

Monday, June 11
reviewed by Colin Pantall The Latin American Photobook is the latest survey of photobooks to follow on from Parr and Badger's two pioneering volumes.

The format is familiar; books are grouped into themed sections and described through key images and notes on how and where the photographer fits into a broader social, cultural and visual history of a region...

Thursday, June 7
reviewed by Sarah Bradley I've been a bit enamored with the publications of the Archive of Modern Conflict since...

Monday, June 4
reviewed by Tom Leininger A photographer in a foreign land for a road trip is a classic tale that is often told in photography books. What is gained from theses books? Sometimes it is a masterpiece of the medium (The Americans by Robert Frank)...

Thursday, May 24
reviewed by Liz Kuball I wore a red dress to my prom and had my hair done in a French twist. I brought the VHS tape of Pretty Woman with me to my small-town beauty parlor and told the hairdresser that I wanted to look like Julia Roberts...

Monday, May 21
reviewed by Adam Bell The hazy, almost imperceptible, line that separates man from nature is a difficult and well-trod territory for photographers. It is also a fiction...

Thursday, May 17
reviewed by Colin Pantall The first thing you notice about Paul Graham's new book, The Present, is the cover. It's silk; if the light shines one way it's brown, it shines the other way and it's golden...

Monday, May 14
reviewed by George Slade Hello, Sisyphus. My name is Sisyphus...

Thursday, May 10
reviewed by Karen Jenkins I like Rania Matar's new monograph A Girl and Her Room more and more each time I move through this bright series of portraits of teenage girls, at home in their most private and personalized spaces. The initial pull of these often chaotic images of girls and their stuff yields to a nuanced look at that space between child and adult, innocence and self-awareness...

Thursday, May 3
reviewed by Antone Dolezal It was refreshing to see photolucida's coveted Critical Mass Book Award go to only one recipient in 2010. Jeff Rich certainly deserved it...

Monday, April 30
reviewed by Alexandra Huddleston The cover photograph of Viviane Sassen's new book Parasomnia shows of a young boy floating facedown in flowing water. Only his outstretched arms and his curly hair emerge from the milky-blue current...

Monday, April 23
reviewed by John Mathews In a quest to profile Polaroid as a serious and cutting edge art form, its inventor Edwin H. Land and the photographer Ansel Adams established the Polaroid Collection in the late 1950s...

Thursday, April 19
reviewed by Antone Dolezal There is something secret and sinister lurking in the depths of Dirk Braeckman's photographs. An omen that brings an uncanny atmosphere and uneasy tension I cannot quite put my finger on...

Monday, April 16
reviewed by Adam Bell Books on books seem to have become a genre unto itself within the expanding world of photobooks. Beginning with Fotografía Pública and The Book of 101 Books, the genre was given its most comprehensive treatment with Gerry Badger and Martin Parr's groundbreaking work, The Photobook Vol...

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