Photobook Library

Catalogued by title, some of which have been reviewed or featured for Strant Magazine... NOTE: Images not to scale. Some books beat up. All (both noted & lesser known) of great influence.

[photobooklibrary]

FEATURED PHOTOBOOK

Hungry Hungarians - Julia Standovar

(reviewed here)

“The Hungry Hungarians project represents and communicates my extreme disappointent with current Hungarian politics with the form of a cookbook. It criticizes the political and social changes that have occured in Hungary over the past years through a presentation of images, Hungarian recipes and cultural stories. The book explores how Hungary’s political system moves further away from the Western democratic and liberal values. The book contains different elements: personal texts with associated food and family pictures, black and white portraits of and interviews with a women who left Hungary, and at the end of the book, I include the recipes of the dishes I mention in the texts. The women in the portrait images each hold pickles in their hands because it is a typical Eastern European vegetable. Hungarians eat pickles with many national main dishes, so they remind me of home even if I know that they are common in New York, as well. The shape of this vegetable is phallic so in the series they have three functions: cultural signifier, phallic symbol, and to connect the portraits to the recipe book that is central to the work, too. Pickles are ugly and sour but delicious. People love them or hate them. I feel the same way about Hungary.”

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2 1/4 - William Eggleston

"This fascinating monograph reproduces, for the first time, photographs William Eggleston made with a 2-1/4 camera early in his career while his well-known style was evolving. There is an obvious brilliance at work in these youthful images, revealing both moments of discovery and roads not taken."

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A - Gregory Halpern

"In A, American photographer Gregory Halpern (born 1977) leads us on a ramble through the brilliant and ruined streets of the United States Rust Belt. The cast of characters, both human and animal, are portrayed with compassion and respect by this native son of Buffalo (now professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology). The cities he is drawn to— Baltimore, Cincinnati, Omaha, Detroit—share similar histories with his hometown, and in this post-apocalyptic springtime all forms of life emerge and run riot."

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All the Days and Nights - Doug DuBois

"Doug DuBois began photographing his family in 1984, prior to his father's near-fatal fall from a commuter train and his mother's subsequent breakdown and hospitalizations. While these events set a narrative backdrop to his work, the emotional freight is carried by the details as described by the artist: "the pallor of my mother's skin, the glare of my father's gaze and the tactile communion between my sister and nephew constitute a complex and resonant picture of family ties."

More than twenty years later, DuBois's project has developed in remarkable ways. Doug DuBois: All the Days and Nights resonates with emotional immediacy, offering a potent examination of family relations, and what it means to subject personal relationships to the unblinking eye of the camera. Each photograph is rich with color, nuanced gestures and glances enveloping the viewer in a multivalent, emotionally tense world."

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American Photographs - Walker Evans

“Introduction by Sarah Meister. Text by Lincoln Kirstein. More than any other artist, Walker Evans invented the images of essential America that we have long since accepted as fact, and his work has influenced not only modern photography but also literature, film and visual arts in other mediums. The original edition of American Photographs was a carefully prepared letterpress production, published by the Museum of Modern Art in 1938 to accompany an exhibition of photographs by Evans that captured scenes of america in the early 1930s. As noted on the jacket of the first edition, Evans, “photographing in New England or Louisiana, watching a Cuban political funeral or a Mississippi flood, working cautiously so as to disturb nothing in the normal atmosphere of the average place, can be considered a kind of disembodied, burrowing eye, a conspirator against time and its hammers.” This seventy-fifth anniversary edition of American Photographs, made with new reproductions, recreates the original 1938 edition as closely as possible to make the landmark publication available for a new generation. American Photographs has fallen out of print for long periods of time since it was first published, and even subsequent editions—two of which altered the design and typography of the book in small but significant ways—are often available only at libraries and rare bookstores. This version, like the fiftieth-anniversary edition produced by the museum in 1988, captures the look and feel of the very first edition with the aid of new digital technologies.”

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The Americans - Robert Frank 

"It was something in the very bones of the photographs themselves - something about the look of the pictures that suggested that, whereas what was being described had to be described because it was there, it didn't have to be described according to the rules and formulations that was thought of as being good photography... We all knew those things existed... but the way in which they were depicted made them seem more difficult to accept, more pessimistic. There was something approaching a sharp edge of bitterness in the look of the pictures. And of course what was eventually learned from that it was not necessarily the sensibility that gave the picture their bitter taste, but rather the knowledge that the medium itself was much more plastic, and was open to a wider range of invention that we ever realized." -John Szarkowski 

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American Images: New Work by Twenty Contemporary Photographers - Renato Danese (ed.)

"20 major photographers were commissioned to produce new work in the United States. Included are photographs by Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Harry Callahan, William Clift, Linda Connor, Bevan Davies, Roy DeCarava, William Eggleston, Larry Fink, Elliott Erwitt, Frank Gohlke, John Gossage, Jonathan Green, Jan Groover, Mary Ellen Mark, Joel Meyerowitz, Richard Misrach, Nicholas Nixon, Tod Papageorge, and Stephen Shore."

[photobooklibrary]

American Surfaces - Stephen Shore

(featured here)

"AMERICAN SURFACES is a highly influential body of work by a master photographer who helped establish colour photography as a legitimate medium of artistic expression. The book is comprised of a chronological sequence of photographs of vernacular America taken in the early 1970s, most of which are previously unpublished. These photographs have been widely exhibited and discussed throughout Europe and the United States. AMERICAN SURFACES is styled as a photo-diary of Shore's travels across America, bridging the gap between the road trip tradition of Walker Evans and Robert Frank and the fascination with the ordinary exhibited by Bernd and Hilla Becher and Martin Parr."

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The American War - Harrell Fletcher

(reviewed here)

"In June, 2005, while traveling in Vietnam, artist Harrell Fletcher visited The War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. Deeply affected by the exhibit, Fletcher returned to photograph all of the images and text descriptions from the main museum with the intention of re-presenting the exhibition in the United States. Fletcher’s exhibition The American War has been on tour for the last two years, stopping at various U.S. venues including the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at M.I.T. and White Columns in New York City. With this collection of images, Fletcher encourages his audience to reconsider opinions of the War in Vietnam and other American wars that have occurred since."

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Andreas Gursky - Andreas Gursky 

"The first substantial monograph of Andreas Gursky’s work since 1984 this series of large-format color photographs depicts vast panoramic scenes: entire cityscapes, endless horizons, multi-floored office buildings, huge factory corridors and crowded public spaces. Taken from a distance, often with a bird’s eye view, they represent more than a set of photographs of various locations—rather Gursky’s work reflects both the art forms and the everyday aesthetics of 20th-century society. Many photographs are allegories, offering a cultural critique of man’s role in nature, technology, art and society. Other resemble abstract paintings, in which Gursky applies a number of formal elements, such as light, composition and form, to convey a mood or subtle message. In their size and scope, in their reflective mood and social commentary, and in their many layers of meaning and interpretation, these exquisitely reproduced portraits of interior and exterior spaces display the qualities that have made Andreas Gursky one of the most respected landscape photographers of his generation."

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[photobooklibrary]

As Far As I Could Get - John Divola

"Encompassing four decades of work in the field of photography, this publication examines the art of John Divola, one of the most admired photographers working today.

Those interested in contemporary photography will welcome this volume exploring 10 major series by John Divola. Starting with Vandalism, his iconic look at Southern California in the 1970s, and including his most recent work, the Theodore Street project, this collection of beautifully reproduced images shows how expertly Divola moves between medium and technique. Using Polaroids of sculpted objects, appropriated stereographs, and landscapes featuring his own image, Divola's diverse body of work explores painting and conceptual art through his photography. Essays by the accompanying exhibitions' curators explore themes such as existentialism, California and photography in the 1970s, and natural and built environments. Divola's most recent project is discussed in an interview between the artist and Simon Baker."

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[photobooklibrary]

Away - Abner Nolan

From TBW Books - Subscription Series Two (more)

[photobooklibrary]

Bare Witness - Gordon Parks

"Novelist, memoirist, poet, film director, choreographer, and musician, Gordon Parks (1912-2006) was renowned as a man of many talents. He is best known as a photographer, a career he took up in the 1930s. Starting with fashion and portraiture, he honed his skill and his passion for documenting social ills working for the New Deal's Farm Security Administration. During World War II he became the first black photographer employed by the War Office of Information. After the war, he became Life magazine's first black staff photographer and established an international reputation publishing images and photo-essays that helped transform and liberalize American society by informing Americans about the plight of the urban poor. Maren Stange, an authority on documentary photography, provides an introduction to his work, surveying his career and analyzing the distinguished qualities of his compelling images. This catalog accompanies the traveling exhibition organized by the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University."

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Boring Postcards USA - Martin Parr

"In Boring Postcards Magnum photographer and postcard enthusiast Martin Parr brought together 160 of the dullest postcards of 1950s, 60s and 70s Britain to make a book that was, contrary to the conceit of its title, both fascinating and extremely funny. It was one of those ideas that seemed so obvious that no one could believe it hadn't been done before, and it caught the public imagination in a big way. In Britain Boring Postcards was discussed everywhere from daytime TV shows to art and design magazines, from local newspapers and radio stations (outraged that their town should be labelled 'boring') to Time magazine.

Now Parr has turned his attention to the USA for a new book of Boring Postcards. Just as before, for a postcard to qualify as sufficiently 'boring', either its composition, its content, or the characters featured must be arguably boring or the photograph must be absent of anything that might conventionally be described as interesting. As the study of postcards becomes a field of academic interest, this book offers more than amusement: as a folk art recording of the non-places and non-events of post-war America, it reveals poignant insights into its social, cultural and architectural values.

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[photobooklibrary]

Cape Light - Joel Meyerowitz

(reviewed here)

"Originally published in 1979, Cape Light became an instant classic and one of the most influential photography books published in the latter part of the 20th century. Common scenes—tiny figures on a beach, a porch railing against a storm-darkened sky, a blue raft against a summer cottage—all are transformed by the poignant light of the Cape and the photographer's subtle and luminous vision. This exquisitely printed book captures every nuance of color and light in that unique juncture of sky, sea, and land that is Cape Cod. "

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Capitolio - Christopher Anderson

"Capitolio is documentary photographer Christopher Anderson’s cinematic journey through the upheavals of contemporary Caracas,Venezuela, in the tradition of such earlier projects as William Klein’s New York (1954-55) and Robert Frank’s The Americans (1958). It presents a poetic and politicized vision, by one of today’s finest documentary photographers, of a city and a country that is ripping apart at the seams under the stress of popular unrest, and whose turmoil remains largely unreported by Western media. No stranger to such fraught situations (he covered the 2006 conflict between Hezbollah and Israel from its inception), Anderson notates the country’s current incongruities, where the violent and the sensual intermingle chaotically. "The word ‘capitolio’ refers to the domed building that houses a government," writes Anderson, elaborating on the title of this volume; "here, the city of Caracas, Venezuela, is itself a metaphorical capitolio building. The decaying Modernist architecture,with a jungle growing through the cracks, becomes the walls of this building and the violent streets become the corridors where the human drama plays itself out in what President Hugo Chavez called a 'revolution.'"

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[photobooklibrary]

Carrie Mae Weems - Carrie Mae Weems

"The status and place of African Americans in the United States is the primary concern of photographer Carrie Mae Weems. Working in series, she creates art that deals with the issues encircling African American culture and cuts through the veneer of accepted social truths to reveal their deep cultural foundations of prejudice and oppression. In her seriesFamily Pictures and Stories, Weems asserts the realities of African American self-respect, strength, humor, resourcefulness, and home ties while confronting the problems of male aggression, teenage pregnancy, joblessness, and other forms of working class oppression."

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