Articles / Best-Ofs

Coney Island is an American icon celebrated worldwide, a fantasyland of the past with an evolving present and an irrepressible optimism about its future. It is a democratic entertainment where people of all walks of life and places are brought together.

There isn’t anywhere else like it, and that is much of its appeal. Here 170 evocative black-and-white images taken by eminent photographer Harvey Stein from 1970 through 2020 simultaneously look back in time while giving a current view to the people and activities of this “poor man’s Riviera.” The images capture the wonder and intimacy of Coney Island. There is no photo book that has been published that documents a 50-year time period of a famous location taken by one photographer. Being in Coney Island is like stepping into another society, rather than just experiencing a day’s entertainment.

"I Hope You Find What You're Looking For" 96 pages, including 55 B/W Duotones Hardbound Essays by Douglas Beasley, Julian Anderson and Gloria Baker Feinstein Poems by Kim Stafford, Oregon's former poet laureate printed at Verona Libri in Veron, Italy published by Yellow Bird Press

This book from award-winning Magnum photographer Harry Gruyaert collects his most cinematic images to date.
A master of color-saturated atmospheres, Harry Gruyaert has roamed the world searching for the perfect light for more than forty years. His intuitive and physical relationship to places immerses the spectator in a world that borrows from the cinematic universe and from that of the painter. “A good photo is a photo that says a lot of things about the place and the moment it was taken,” says Gruyaert. Space―its complexity, the perception that we have of it, its plasticity―is a major component of Gruyaert’s images, as if the duality between color and spatiality was dissolving in order to create a work where the only thing that matters is the pleasure of immersion.
Harry Gruyaert: Between Worlds dissolves the boundaries between exterior and interior spaces, a closed world and one that is open to elsewhere. From shops, cafés, subway platforms, and hotel roomsin Europe, the Middle East, the United States, and Africa from the1970s to today, Gruyaert deploys the very essence of visual writing:a luminous alchemy suspended in time. A collection of seventy-five images that connect one realm with the next, this volume shows that beyond the marvelous colorist that he is, Gruyaert’s images also depict a photographer’s vision of the world.

Father and son collaborate on a photographic panorama of humanity Famed photojournalist Steve Schapiro (1934–2022) and his son Theophilus Donoghue (born 1982) have collaborated on a photo project that is 70% Schapiro, 30% Donoghue. Seventy Thirty depicts the various faces and expressions of humanity, from metropolitans to migrants, homeless people to conspicuous celebrities such as Alec Guinness, Allen Ginsberg, Muhammad Ali, Robert De Niro, René Magritte, Janis Joplin and Andy Warhol. Schapiro photographs early New York skateboarders while Donoghue documents current Colombian breakdancers. Schapiro includes his classic photograph Man on Iceberg, which was the opening spread of a Life story on existentialism. Similarly, Donoghue contributes his contemplative photograph Hindsight Intersection, recently featured in ARTSY’s 20 21 Artists in Support of Human Rights Watch benefit auction. Shooting in monochrome with an occasional dash of color, Schapiro and Donoghue portray the proud and lofty as well as the humble and humorous.