We have selected the best of photographer monographs, biographies and artist series. Select a letter to discover our A to Z glossary of must-read monographs and art books:
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1207A new installment in Miles Aldridge's ongoing homage to, and plea for the revival of, Polaroid film
The sequel to Miles Aldridge's (born 1964) Please Return Polaroid (2016), this book presents new and vintage Polaroids from the British photographer's more than 20-year archive, in a seemingly random sequence shaped by a dreamlike logic and surprising juxtapositions.
Please Please Return Polaroid explores Aldridge's dedication to analogue processes where cut-and-paste is still a manual process, made with scissors, gaffer tape, intuition and not a little patience. Aldridge continues to use Polaroids as part of his work-in-progress “sketches,” often scratching, tearing and taping them together, even drawing over them; each mark part of the creative act.
Known for creating immaculate photos of a less than perfect world, Aldridge revels in these unpolished images, transforming some into extreme enlargements filling double pages with their reworked and damaged surfaces.
1292A newly expanded edition of Sternfeld’s popular portrayal of the High Line’s early days.
With nine additional photos, a larger format and an expanded, up-to-date timeline, this is the new and revised edition of Joel Sternfeld’s Walking the High Line, which documents the overgrown elevated freight rail line above New York’s West Side before it was transformed into the cherished High Line public park in 2009.
In the dark days following the September 11 attacks in New York in 2001, Joel Sternfeld came to Gerhard Steidl with the hope of quickly making a book. For the previous two years Sternfeld had been photographing the abandoned railroad and working with a group, the Friends of the High Line, that wanted to save it and turn it into a park. Powerful real estate and political interests seeking to tear it down and commercially develop the land beneath it were using the chaos of the period to rush forward their plans. Steidl agreed―six weeks later there were finished books in New York. It was a small volume but it played a crucial role in allowing New Yorkers to see for the first time the beauty of a secret railroad in all the seasons.
Like the photographs made by William Henry Jackson in the 1870s of Yellowstone that led Congress to establish a national park, the pictures proved pivotal in the making of the High Line’s reputation.
1318South African photographer Lindokuhle Sobekwa (born 1995) began this project after finding a family portrait with his sister Ziyanda’s face cut out. He describes her as a secretive, rebellious and rough presence and recalls the dark day when she chased him and he was hit by a car: she disappeared hours later and returned only a decade later, ill. By this time, Sobekwa had become a photographer and realized the family had no picture of her. However, Ziyanda died before he could photograph her.
Employing a scrapbook aesthetic with handwritten notes, I Carry Her Photo with Me is a means for Sobekwa to engage both with the memory of his sister and the wider implications of such disappearances―a troubling part of South Africa’s history. The book complements his wider work on fragmentation, poverty and the long-reaching ramifications of apartheid and colonialism across all levels of South African society.
1324Macadam Paname is the first book of Laurent Delhourme. This editorial project is the culmination of many years spent capturing the strangeness of reality in the streets of the French capital. The photographs concentrate humor, burlesque situations, and incongruities of everyday life. If the photographer takes care of his frames, by choice, he never designs a production. He is sure that the behavior of passers-by is interesting enough to let them express themselves in their entirety.
He grabs his images on the fly. Instantaneity is his motto. He plays with street furniture, light, and movement always in a benevolent state of mind.
714'Kill, rape, control' is the motto of the notorious Mara Salvatrucha gang (MS-13). The street gang, along with its rival, Barrio 18, has become infamous across Central and North America for its brutal violence and deep control of communities. Particularly well established in El Salvador, both gangs have developed extensive and sophisticated networks of extortion and domination across the region.
Photographer Tariq Zaidi spent three years documenting and traveling across El Salvador with unprecedented access to prisons and holding cells across the country providing a rare look inside the country’s penal system. With the help of the police force, was also able to document the state’s war against the gangs.
439Maggie Taylor’s digital creations are emblematic, afterimages that invite, transport, and are unforgettable. Taylor’s images are built, layer by layer and object by object, through a disciplined studio process of trial and error. It is only through looking at dozens of these images, and spending time with them, that one begins to unravel the artist’s sensibilities and distinct fascinations that emerge through the repetition of certain images and tropes.
Internal Logic highlights Taylor’s sense of what makes an image “work” and offers insights into the shape and contours of her inspirations. Her deep archive of images that return to her art are a lexicon through which to communicate her multi-layered imaginings. Each image contains the keys to understanding the corpus of other images.
1179Freedom, adventure, romance; a spellbound audience, bright-eyed children, rolling drums, a brass band playing lively music; intrepid acrobats in colorful costumes and garishly made-up clowns. The same old stereotypes about the world of the circus are trotted out on many occasions. Over a period spanning more than 15 years, the photographer Oliver Stegmann visited different circuses to take photos of what happens behind the curtains.
His muted images attempt to break the usual stereotypes. Again and again, the photographer captured protagonists in moments of unawareness, showing scenes that the audience would normally never get to see from the edge of the ring. Above all, Stegmann is interested in the atmosphere of tense expectation and utmost concentration when the artists are about to perform their hair-raising acts. Using neither color nor flash, he creates an enigmatic atmosphere reminiscent of expressionist films.
For his circus series, Stegmann develops a kind of imagery that has rarely been applied to the small world of the circus as consistently and confidently as in this case. In terms of subject-matter, design, and production, Circus Noir takes a different approach to this genre by adding an entirely unromantic perspective that focuses on the true essence of what it means to work in a circus. Text in English and German.
926Coney 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.
1416For the past few years, artist Mark Steinmetz has photographed in, around, and above Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, through which approximately 100,000,000 passengers, 1,000,000 flights, and 650,000 tons of cargo pass every year. Using the world’s most heavily trafficked airport as his home base, Steinmetz closely considers the activity and interactions that take place at this crossroads of the contemporary South. The exhibition is comprised of over 60 never-before-exhibited photographs.
Steinmetz’s approach is improvisational, and he is particularly masterful at capturing the ordinary-yet-fascinating human dramas that play out in the public spaces throughout the airport. His black-and-white photographs lend a poignant perspective on how this gateway to the wider world is a place of delightful paradoxes: a massive modern complex that sits in the midst of a sublime natural environment, a bustling global transit hub that is the site of solitary individual experiences, and a stifling bureaucratic tangle that is a portal to possibility and opportunity.
Based in Athens, GA, Mark Steinmetz is a leading Southern artist whose lyrical photographs capture the distinctive character of the region’s people and the peculiar beauty of its built environment. Since the 1980s, he has created an exceedingly compelling and quietly poetic image of contemporary American life. Mark Steinmetz: Terminus is the latest chapter in the ongoing Picturing the South project, for which the High Museum commissions artists to create original bodies of work that offer new perspectives on the South’s social and geographical landscapes.
53“To me, it’s all about people … what they do, what they believe, their dreams, hopes, visions and virtues.” -- Anders Petersen
Since the 1960s, Anders Petersen (born 1944) has traveled extensively and photographed life beyond the margins of polite society for his acclaimed City Diaries. The first of this series received the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook of the Year Award in 2012.
53Petersen discovers the gritty in the beautiful and the beautiful in the gritty.
This is the sixth installment in Anders Petersen’s (born 1944) acclaimed series. Petersen’s world of prostitutes, transvestites, alcoholics and night-time lovers indicates his passion to identify and engage with subcultures and “life in the shadows.”
1238An exceptional and gritty portrait of Japan and its people by the renowned Magnum street photographer Bruce Gilden.
Bruce Gilden first set foot in Japan in 1995. On this trip, the first of several, he explored a hidden side of a country that had long fascinated him; from Tokyo to Osaka, he uncovered a Japan that is little-known to Westerners and captured it in his own inimitable photographic style.
In Bruce Gilden: Cherry Blossom, Gilden tells the story of these travels and the ties he maintains with Japan in a rare introductory text. Every photograph portrays a close and powerful encounter. There are no cherry blossom trees or geishas on these pages; Gilden’s camera points toward the darker sides of Japanese life―the gangsters, the dispossessed, and people experiencing homelessness. As ever, the Magnum photographer’s work is tough and unflinching, his portrait of Japanese society unconventional and compelling.
The stories told alongside these photographs―thirty-four of which are published here for the first time―create a book that’s hard to forget.
61A sumptuous, large-format photographic homage to the end of the analog era.
Since 2006, coinciding with his shift away from analog film to working exclusively with a digital camera, Richard Misrach has been exploring the aesthetic possibilities of the negative image. His latest body of work, debuted in this deluxe, oversize (16.75 by 13 inches), landscape-format volume, comprises dazzling, sublime photographs of landscapes and natural scenes―in negative, but using color with great dexterity and nuance.
Inspired by Ansel Adams’ comparison of the photographic negative to a musical score, and John Cage’s 1969 book, Notations, which compiles music scores as art, Misrach here envisages the photographic image as a score-like negative, teetering on abstraction, that invites a diversity of interpretations. The result is a series of immense beauty unlike any previous Misrach publication.
264The acclaimed documentarian’s last completed book revisits his early-’80s portrait of an English fishing village.
Of all Chris Killip’s (1946–2020) bodies of work, the photographs he made between 1982 and 1984 in the village of Skinningrove on the North-East coast of England are perhaps his most intimate and encompassing―of the community he photographed and of himself. “Like a lot of tight-knit fishing communities, it could be hostile to strangers, especially one with a camera,” Killip recalled, “Skinningrove fishermen believed that the sea in front of them was their private territory, theirs alone.”
Although four images from the series were included in his groundbreaking In Flagrante (1988), Killip resisted collecting all in a single book for over three decades―he had become so invested in them and respectful of his subjects that he needed time and distance to understand their significance. For a photographer whose work was grounded in the urgent value of documenting “ordinary” peoples’ lives, these nuanced images―radiating a vast stillness of light and time, embedded with the granularity of lives lived―reveal Killip’s conviction that no life is ordinary: everyday lives are sublime.
First published in 2018 as a newspaper which he personally and anonymously put into every letterbox in the village, this new Steidl edition includes an introduction by the photographer and previously unpublished photos; it was completed shortly before Killip died in October 2020.
51From one of the most acclaimed photographers working today comes his most personal work to date—an intimate portrait of the seminary boarding school he attended for seven years and which deeply informed his artistic practice.
At age eleven, Michael Kenna developed his first roll of black and white film in a makeshift darkroom at St. Joseph’s College, Upholland, the seminary he attended with the idea of becoming a Catholic priest. Kenna abandoned his religious calling after leaving the seminary, but his experiences there have continued to inform his work for decades. These gorgeous, meditative photographs were taken when Kenna returned to visit the now-shuttered school in the early 2000s. All of the qualities that make Kenna’s work so appealing and evocative are here—richly nuanced tones, studies in contrast, his ability to transform the ordinary into something extraordinary.
But Kenna is also revisiting a way of life that may be disappearing—not only the, at times, ruthless discipline of the British boarding school, but also the somber beauty of religious practice. In page after page of richly toned images, Kenna’s camera captures the architecture of the school’s built environment as well as its spiritual architecture. Kenna’s richly detailed biographical essay about his experiences and observations at St. Joseph's reveal much about the way Kenna thinks and works.
A critical essay by Vincent Miles focuses on the 110-year history of the college, contextualizing Kenna’s time there. At once captivating and haunting, this series is truly one of the photographer’s most personal and powerful projects to date.
1103Fighters made of bronze, gigantic wall reliefs depicting heroic cosmonauts, and socialist pomp: When you enter subway stations in Eastern Europe and in countries that were once part of the USSR today, time seems to stand still. The stations are chronicles of the history and art of a long vanished world power. In this volume, photographer Frank Herfort presents around 20 metro systems of the Soviet era from Moscow to Bucharest, from Baku to Tbilisi.
His focus is on the details, capturing over 700 works of art with his camera. They were conceived as prestige projects, thousands of kilometers apart and created under different conditions in different times. The stations in his photographs come together to form a holistic and comprehensive representation of socialist art that does not stand alone but relates to the everyday life of people today.
1265A powerful photographic survey of the impact of irrigation systems on the landscape of the United States.
In The One Hundred Circle Farm, renowned photographer Emmet Gowin (b. 1941) presents stunning aerial images of center-pivot irrigation systems in the western and midwestern United States. This type of farming involves a method of watering crops in which equipment rotates around a centrally drilled well, creating enormous, distinct circles of irrigated land, often in the midst of dry terrain. Anyone who has taken a cross-country flight has likely seen countless acres of these iconic symbols of industrial agriculture. Through a faithful yet personal photographic survey, Gowin’s powerful images not only bear witness to the ambitions humans wield in shaping the landscape, but also attest to how such primal elements―circles, pivots, and lines―symbolize water depletion and the fragile environment.
The stark photographic compositions, more than one hundred in all, were created over the course of a decade. Fields resemble lost civilizations; crops gape like strange new suns. Hauntingly beautiful, the images highlight Earth’s nourishing geology, visual evidence of our labors. Inscribed onto the earth, these lines are reminders of the technology extracting unimaginable amounts of water that cannot be replaced, and raise questions about what large-scale irrigation must answer for when the water runs out.
With an afterword by anthropologist Lucas Bessire discussing the history and impact of pivot irrigation on American farming, The One Hundred Circle Farm stands as a poetic visual record, evidence of the tenuous connections between human enterprise and our planet’s most precious resource.
779As a Lebanese-born American artist and mother, Rania Matar's cross-cultural experiences inform her art. She has dedicated her work to exploring issues of personal and collective identity through photographs of female adolescence and womanhood-both in the United States where she lives, and in the Middle East where she is from.
Rania Matar: She focuses on young women in their late teens and early twenties, who are leaving the cocoon of home, entering adulthood and facing a new reality. Depicting women in the United States and the Middle East, this project highlights how female subjectivity develops in parallel forms across cultural lines. Each young woman becomes an active participant in the image-making process, presiding over the environment and making it her own. Matar portrays the raw beauty of her subjects-their age, individuality, physicality and mystery-and photographs them the way she, a woman and a mother, sees them: beautiful, alive.
1124In this new edition of London, including previously unpublished photographs and visual references, Sergio Larrain presents a powerful portrait of a city on the brink of a new era.
In the winter of 1958, Sergio Larrain traveled to London. He spent just a few months there, photographing subjects that interested him and embracing the shadows of the city. In the cold and damp, his images captured a tangible darkness in which he could 'materialize that world of phantoms.' A few years later, he joined Magnum Photos and set off around the world, before retiring to the Chilean countryside and leaving photography behind.
The book also features a text by the late Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño - written in 1999 specifically to accompany these images - as well as a new essay by Agnès Sire, artistic director of Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, detailing Larrain's stay in London.
416The legendary photojournalist's early '80s New York photographs, published alongside his autobiographical musings in an elegant clothbound edition
From 1979 to 1986, the city of New York functioned as a kind of refuge for photographer Frank Horvat (born 1928). Born in present-day Croatia, for years Horvat lived and worked rather nomadically, traveling extensively through Asia and Europe on photojournalist excursions with a brief stopover in Paris where he shot fashion photography for Jardins de Mode and Elle. Eventually he found himself in New York; during this period, he allowed himself to surrender to the daily hustle and bustle of the city streets. In between commissions, Horvat created a prolific series of photography and writing that was not intended for public consumption, instead functioning as a reflection upon his own craft as well as the significance of photography itself.
Frank Horvat: Side Walk publishes many of these photographs for the first time alongside the photographer's writing. The elegant presentation of this clothbound volume is representative of the great pride that Horvat took in the creation of his personal projects as well as his professional pursuits: the photojournalist's texts are published on thin Munken offset paper and his photographs are printed on deep matte photo paper. This publication is both a compelling depiction of a beloved city and a portrait of the sensitive man behind the camera.
In Vanishing Points, Michael Sherwin locates and photographs significant sites of indigenous American presence, including sacred landforms, earthworks, documented archaeological sites and contested battlegrounds. The sites he chooses to visit are literal and metaphorical vanishing points. They are places in the landscape where two lines, or cultures, converge. They are also actual archaeological sites where the sparse evidence of a culture's once vibrant existence has all but disappeared. While visiting these sites, Sherwin reflects on the monuments modern culture will leave behind and what the archaeological evidence of our civilization will reveal about our time on Earth.
Photographed in Zimbabwe and Kenya in late 2020, The Day May Break is the first part of a global series by acclaimed photographer Nick Brandt, portraying people and animals that have been impacted by environmental degradation and destruction.
The people in these photographs were all affected by climate change, displaced by cyclones and years-long droughts. Photographed at five sanctuaries, the animals were rescues that can never be rewilded. As a result, it was safe for human strangers to be close to them, photographed so close to them, within the same frame. The fog on location is the unifying visual motif, conveying the sense of an ever-increasing limbo, a once-recognizable world now fading from view. However, despite their respective losses, these people and animals have survived, and therein lies possibility and hope.
This Peanut Portfolio Book includes one signed and numbered original photograph and one signed and numbered hardcover book, 40 pages, 18 color plates.
Aline Smithson's award-winning portraiture has been shown in numerous exhibitions and publications internationally and is held in many public and private collections. Smithson has also exhibited her portraits at the National Portrait Gallery in London and was commissioned to create a series of portraits for the Smithsonian Art and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.
Fugue State asks us to think about the permanence of photographs. Both digital and analog images can be destroyed by time, and here, Smithson hastens the process herself. When has destruction been so beautiful?
If Cartier-Bresson's decisive moment reflects a situation perfectly in tune with the photographer's intuition, flawlessly combining the elements of composition and timing, then Ed Kashi's abandoned moment is the result of an imprecise instant of surrender.
This collection of photographs, made over a 40-year period, reveals imprecise glimpses of transitory events filled with frenetic energy – the chaos of everyday life. Embodying photography's intrinsic power, they preserve moments that can never occur again in exactly the same time and space. When geometry, mood, and possibility unite to unintentionally create something new, the magical and fictional qualities of still photography capture the unplanned essence of existence.
In contrast to my journalistic approach of deep personal connection and keen observation, this work is about capturing the untamed energy of a moment with abandon.
At a time in global history when connection with others has been tested from two years of separations and quarantining, Erica Reade's photographs resonate well beyond the beach atmosphere of the image settings. Her black and white photos are focused on intimacy and physical connections between couples at beaches in New York. She focused particularly on the Rockaways, Fort Tilden and Coney Island, and has called this project "an NYC summer love story." Expressions of love and sensuality are made visible in these nostalgic black and white photographs.
June' 22 sees the launch of a new colour, 68 page photographic coffee table book by British photographer - Rankin- An Exploding World that highlights the importance of creativity as a tool for mental well being.
The New York City subway system shuttles many of the over 8 million NYC residents from here, to there, and photographer Ed Hotchkiss journeyed on every line, criss-crossing the city and its boroughs, discovering and noticing. The subway cars gather and hold for a finite amount of time a seemingly random group of people, all with their own unique lives, hopes, and plans, and who each disperse and disappear upon exiting the train. This setting provides a unique opportunity to observe the vast array of humanity that signifies New York. These images reflect the value Ed saw in what he found.
Nearly half a century after he left his native Tanzania, Pradip Malde returned with a large-format camera to document the lives of women affected by female genital mutilation and cutting (FGM/C). With Sarah Mwaga, founder of the Anti Female Genital Mutilation Network (AFNET), he traveled more than 3,000 miles over three years, visiting remote communities to converse with and photograph activist women —victims of FGM and former ngariba (Swahili for “circumcisers”)—, the sacred sites where these rituals take place, and the cutting tools used by ngariba who have renounced the practice.
Nancy A. Scherl's color photographs of people dining alone evoke a certain curiosity. What are the individuals thinking? What are they observing as they eat their meals and watch fellow diners? Is this a favorite pastime to collect their own thoughts, or are they waiting for someone, or are they lonely? The viewer does not know their stories, though they have them, everyone does.
Film photography is back with a bang, and whether you're returning to the genre after switching to digital, or you've just discovered this amazing medium, there's never been a more compelling argument for going analogue with your photography
KINGS ROAD by MONA KUHN, published by Steidl,is out now available from all good book stores. The exhibition is at the Art, Design & Architecture Museum in Santa Barbara, California, USA until May
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