Aaron Schuman

Photographer / Writer / Editor / Curator

The Present.
PAUL GRAHAM

Graham pushes the double — and occasional triple — take to the extreme, proving once again that the street-photography tradition (on the streets of New York no less) is far from dead, and still possesses the potential to evolve, be fresh, and maintain poignancy within the twenty-first century. With subtle, gut-wrenching motifs of the blind and the blinded throughout, and an exquisite design that uses fold-outs to preserve the richness and surprise contained within each image and their intricate relationships, The Present is one of the most engaging, poetic and acute photography books I've ever seen.

The Father of Pop Dance.
TIANE DOAN NA CHAMPASSAK

Imagine going through a pile of your deceased father's old things, and discovering a self-made book — spiral-bound, edition of one — of him, age fifty, dancing in various proto-hippy outfits around a Los Angeles photography studio in 1967. Champassak's facsimile of his discovery — complete with trippy multiple-exposures, dad-moves that could kill, and the evidence of rips and tears that Champassak himself made when trying to unstick the original's pages from one another — is both a ticklish and touching tribute to his father, and to the insight and abandon that photography can offer both its subject and its viewer across the generations.

The River Winter.
JEM SOUTHAM

If you've ever rambled through the English countryside in winter, you know that, despite the dampness of the surroundings and drabness of the light, there is a quiet, tranquil, hibernating beauty to be found within it — to recognise this is one thing; to photograph it is quite another. In The River Winter, Southam once again reaffirms his mastery of both his chosen medium and the British landscape, unveiling within the fallen leaves and twisting naked branches along the River Exe a world of true elegance, serenity and transcendence.

Index of Time.
TEREZA ZELENKOVA

A duo's spelunking, photographic adventure within a Moravian cave — where, one hundred and forty years ago, an Austro-Hungarian archeologist discovered the bejeweled Paleolithic remains of one man and forty women who had been ceremoniously killed, beheaded and dismembered... and more. Zelenkova and Watkins's hand-made publication (accompanied by an insert with three short stories by Shamlou) is as intriguing, mesmerizing, and mysterious as it sounds.

Concrete Geographies.
XAVIER RIBAS

Ribas's intimate exploration — of the rubble, monoliths and sharp edges found at abandoned industrial sites, where the once smooth concrete surface has been violently destroyed in order to prevent the sixty Gypsy families that once lived there from returning — is a sad but striking (and beautifully photographed) testament to displacement and discrimination, subtly discovered by Ribas within the shapes and forms of an easily overlooked contemporary landscape.

NYLPT.
JASON EVANS

A hypnotic and psychedelic encounter with some of the world's most photographed cities — New York, London, Paris and Tokyo - Evans trumps the black-and-white 35mm photographic histories, traditions and references that might interfere with seeing such streets afresh by exposing his rolls of film up to five times, during multiple visits over the course of months or even years. In doing so, he relocates the "decisive moment," as he has explained it, from "out there" to "behind the lens, onto the film plane," and reinvests such photographic images with the vital elements of spontaneity, chance and surprise.

Most Popular of All Time.
MACDONALDSTRAND

A refreshingly simple, playful, engrossing and clever means of forcing readers to re-familiarize themselves with — and then re-engage, reevaluate, and potentially re-imagine — the ten most popular (and therefore often most taken for granted, ignored, and overlooked) photographs of all time. Give it to your kids, and see what happens!

Looking for Love, 1996.
ALEC SOTH

A beautiful, retrospective elegy to both a young man's — and a young photographer's — yearning, confusion, frustration and loneliness, as well as to the recognition of how one's inner-most emotions can seep into one's work and transpose themselves onto the wider world through the photographic medium alone. (Additionally, for the dedicated Soth fan, Looking for Love 1996 also provides incredible insight, and serves as a wonderful precursor, to many of the themes and projects that follow in his later works.)

New Colour Guide.
JOHN MACLEAN

MacLean makes colour his primary subject, dynamically exploring the spectrum of photographic potential that it offers — in the natural world (forests, rivers, skies, etc.), in the 'photo-world' (schools, offices, darkrooms, museums, artist's studios, laboratories, crime-scenes, and so on), and inherently within photographs themselves.

Down These Mean Streets.
WILL STEACY

In making this book, Steacy has transformed what started off as an effective but relatively straight large-format photographic series — which explored America's inner cities at night; "The part of town you drive through, not to," as he first described it — into a dynamic and mind-twisting scrapbook made up of a series of elaborate collages (using the original photographs themselves, along with press clippings, journal entries, drawings, ephemera, and more), which frantically and obsessively tries to preserve, document, dissect, contemplate, understand, and unravel the last seven decades of American social, economic, and political and history — and the rise and fall of the American Dream — in an attempt to figure out what the hell went wrong.

Aaron Schuman is a photographer, writer, editor and curator. His photographic work is exhibited internationally, and he regularly contributes photography, essays and interviews to a wide-range of publications — including Aperture, Foam, Photoworks, British Journal of Photography, and more — and has published essays in a number of recent books, including Pieter Hugo: This Must Be the Place (Prestel, 2012), Photographs Not Taken (Daylight, 2012), and Melinda Gibson's The Photograph as Contemporary Art (Self Published, 2012). He has also curated several exhibitions in recent years, including "Whatever Was Splendid: New American Photographs" (2010 Fotofest Biennial), "Other I: Alec Soth, Wassink Lundgren, Viviane Sassen" (Hotshoe Gallery, London, 2011), and "In Appropriation" (Houston Center of Photography, 2012). Schuman is currently a Senior Lecturer in Photography at the University of Brighton and the Arts University College at Bournemouth, and is also the founder and editor of the online photography journal, SeeSaw Magazine. For more information, please visit: www.aaronschuman.com

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