PDN Notable PhotoBooks of 2018 Photography

PDN Notable PhotoBooks of 2018
december 3, 2018

Throughout this year, in reviews, features and interviews, we’ve highlighted a remarkable collection of new photo books. From reissues of classic titles newly relevant to our contemporary culture, to retrospectives by legendary photographers, to conceptual projects that make us reconsider the creative potential of the photo book, these are the titles that caught our eyes. To read more about these projects, use the links below.

Nothing Personal
By Richard Avedon and James Baldwin
Essay by Hilton Als
Taschen
160 pages
$69.99

Self-portrait with James Baldwin, September 1964. Photograph by Richard Avedon/© The Richard Avedon Foundation

A rerelease of Nothing Personal, the collaborative book by Richard Avedon and James Baldwin first published in 1964. Combining Avedon’s images of civil rights activists and white supremacists, politicians, artists and patients at a Louisiana mental hospital, and a 20,000-word essay by Baldwin, the book ruminated on American identity. The new Taschen edition is a reprint of the original, slip-cased with a 72-page booklet that includes an essay by critic Hilton Als.

Drowned River: The Death and Rebirth of Glen Canyon on the Colorado

Photographs by Mark Klett, Byron Wolfe
Text by Rebecca Solnit
Radius Books
212 pages,
$65.00

The area of the Colorado River around Glen Canyon and Lake Powell is the subject of this book of photographs by Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe, with text by Rebecca Solnit. Drowned River: The Death and Rebirth of Glen Canyon on the Colorado takes Eliot Porter’s 1963 photo book about the area as a starting point, reproducing many of its pages. Porter’s book served as a guide for the trio’s research as they investigated what has happened to the river since it was dammed.

Sally Mann’s “Deep South, Untitled (Stick), 1998,” from her book A Thousand Crossings. © Sally Mann /Courtesy of the New Orleans Museum of Art: Collection of H. Russell Albright, M.D.

Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings
Abrams
Essays by Hilton Als, Malcolm Daniel, Drew Gilpin Faust
230 photos, 320 pages
$55

This catalogue was produced to accompany the retrospective exhibition of Mann’s work organized by the National Gallery of Art and the Peabody Essex Museum. Essays by Hilton Als, Malcolm Daniel and Drew Gilpin Faust are illustrated with both Mann’s work and images by Emmet Gowin, Harry Callaghan, Timothy H. O’Sullivan and other photographers who photographed family, landscape and historic sites. The comparisons show how Mann photographed in a way that is uniquely her own.

Resurrection City, 1968
By Jill Freedman
Essays by John Edwin Mason, Aaron Bryant
Damiani
176 pages, 141 b&w images
$45

This new edition of Freedman’s 1971 book marked the 50th anniversary of the Poor People’s Campaign, which included a seven-week occupation of the Washington Mall in 1968. Before his assassination, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had launched the Campaign to address American poverty.

The Hunt
By Álvaro Laiz
Dewi Lewis Publishing
108 pages
$50

Laiz tells the story of a poacher whose attempt to kill an Amur tiger disrupted the peaceful coexistence of people and animals in a remote region in Russia’s Far East, using his images, stories gathered from local hunters and a small number of archival photos.

Merrie Albion: Landscape Studies of a Small Island
By Simon Roberts
Dewi Lewis Publishing
152 pages, 66 photographs
$62

Roberts uses landscape photographs to consider the past decade of British political and cultural history. His tableaux of political campaigns, parades, protests, festivals, celebrations, public markets and the like are drawn from previous projects. His extended captions relate the images to both recent and historic events.

Transcendental Concord
By Lisa McCarty
Essays by Rebecca Norris Webb, Kirsten Rian
Radius Books
124 pages, 50 photographs
$55

McCarty explores the history of the Transcendentalists by making photographs of the places that were important to them in the 1830s and ’40s, using techniques inspired by their writing.

Sory Sanlé: Volta Photo
Text by Attawan Byrd, Florent Mazzoleni
120 pages, 100 photos
Steidl/Art Institute of Chicago
$45

This catalogue accompanies an exhibition of photos by Burkina Faso-born photographer Sanlé Sory, who shot album covers for Volta Jazz and other popular bands and made portraits for an array of customers. Many of his sitters wanted portraits that captured their hip style and he posed them with props such as a motorcycle, a telephone, a record player and painted backdrops that showed a beach, an airplane, classical pillars or a city street. Outside his studio, Sory photographed numerous concerts and house parties.

Pompeii Archive
By William Wylie
Essay by Sarah Betzer, afterword by Jock Reynolds
Yale University Art Gallery
120 pages, 83 illustrations
$35

Wylie’s black-and-white photographs of Pompeii, the Roman city buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79, show the marble columns and brick façades of partially destroyed buildings; the remnants of murals, sculptures and other artworks; the preserved bodies and bones of Pompeii’s residents; and artifacts unearthed as excavation and preservation of the site has continued.

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Portraits
Text by Maria Hambourg and Hiroshi Sugimoto
Damiani and MW Editions
120 pages, 70 photographs
$45

Sugimoto’s images, elegantly lit and shot against black backdrops, depict wax figures of famous people and historic figures—such as Napoleon, Henry VIII and Shakespeare—whom we know only from paintings or illustrations. Thebook plays with the real and the imagined, mixing Sugimoto’s portraits of living people among his images of wax tableaux.

Manifest
By Kristine Potter
Text by Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa
TBW Books
92 pages, 48 images
$45

Through large-format, black-and-white portraits of men who live and work close to the land in the West, and landscape images that depict rugged, inhospitable terrain, Potter’s book challenges the unique mythology created by westward expansion, and the idealized concept of American masculinity it begat.

El Libro Supremo de la Suerte
By Rose Marie Cromwell
TIS Books / Light Work
188 pages, 89 images
$65

Cromwell’s mysterious, non-linear book of photographs of Cuba combines both staged and documentary images with photographs of small, photocopied booklets of La Charada, a Cuban-Chinese number system that Cubans use to play the lottery.

“Iwo Jima, 2012,” from David Levinthal’s series “History.” © David Levinthal/George Eastman Museum, gift of Donald Rosenfeld Jr.

David Levinthal: War, Myth, Desire
Foreword by Bruce Barnes
Text by Lisa Hostetler, Joanna Marsh, Dave Hickey
George Eastman Museum
240 pages, 170 images
$49.95

The catalogue to the first retrospective exhibition of Levinthal’s work in more than 20 years includes all of Levinthal’s major series, and commercial and editorial works. “His art is particularly eloquent on the subject of the tales that we tell ourselves about who we are and how we fit into the world,” writes George Eastman Museum photography curator Lisa Hostetler, who curated Levinthal’s exhibition.

H+
By Matthieu Gafsou
Text by David le Breton
Kehrer Verlag
152 pages, 79 images
$50

Matthieu Gafsou uses the visual language of science and technology to explore Transhumanism, the belief that that human body needs to be enhanced, and perhaps even overcome. Gafsou’s book includes a combination of portraiture, still lifes and documentary photographs of Tranhumanist people, facilities, tools and technology.

PINE
By Eirik Johnson
Minor Matters
80 pages, 40 images
12-inch vinyl record
$50

PINE investigates messages carved into the bark of trees. Through large-format photographs made at night with long exposures and light-painting techniques, Johnson’s photographs explore the urge to create a lasting record of love, inspiration or simply one’s place in the world. Includes a vinyl record of music inspired by the photographs.

The Beat Scene
Photographs by Burt Glinn
Texts by Sarah Stacke and Michael Shulman
Essay by Jack Kerouac
Reel Art Press
160 pages, 150 images
$39.95

A book of Magnum photographer Burt Glinn’s images of Beatnik culture, made in the years 1957-60. Glinn, who passed away in 2008, documented the Beat milieu in New York and San Francisco on assignments for Esquire and Holiday magazines.

And Time Unfolds
By Vanessa Winship
Essay by David Chandler
Mack Books
256 pages
$45

A book published to accompany a retrospective of Winship’s work at the Barbican in London, And Time Unfolds includes images from throughout her career images. It includes the documentary-style images she shot in the Balkans on 35mm in the early 1990s, and then her shift to medium-format, which coincided with her move to more contemplative landscapes and portraits.

To Survive on This Shore
Photographs and text by Jess T. Dugan
Text by Karen Irvine, Vanessa Fabbre
Kehrer Verlag
164 pages
$55

The result of a five-year project by Jess T. Dugan and social worker Vanessa Fabbre, To Survive on This Shore documents the underrepresented community of aging transgender and gender nonconforming people through portraits and stories.

Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness
Aperture
212 pages, 100 images
$75

Visual activist Zanele Muholi, acclaimed for their portraits of the South African LGBTQ community and their work to combat homophobic violence in South Africa, has now turned to self-portraits. Part visual autobiography and part political manifesto, the book features 100 self-portraits Muholi made using props close at hand—yarn, plastic, tape and safety pins, to name just a few items—to represent moments of personal history and process feelings about their encounters with racism.

Mind The Gap
By Joshua Lutz
Schilt Publishing
160 pages
$50

Lutz uses photography and text to create a story about anxiety and mental health in contemporary American society.

“Eve, 2008” from Alex Prager’s Silver Lake Drive. © Alex Prager

Silver Lake Drive
By Alex Prager
Introduction by Michael Govan, interview by Nathalie Herschdorfer
Chronicle Books
224 Pages
$60

It’s hard to believe it’s been just over a decade since Alex Prager’s cinematic images of young women in retro costumes first gained attention. Her first retrospective book gathers all of her work to date.

Flowers for Lisa
By Abelardo Morell
Essay by Lawrence Weschler
Abrams
144 pages, 100 images
$60

Morell turns a common, fleeting romantic gesture—giving flowers to a loved
one—into something lasting and permanent: a series of 76 hypnotic photographs, made using a variety of techniques, that commemorate his love for his wife.

Fish Town: Down the Road to Louisiana’s Vanishing Fishing Communities
By J.T. Blatty
Essay by Craig E. Colten
GFT Publishing
200 pages, 137 images
$39.95

Blatty’s book about life in southeastern Louisiana’s fishing communities is a compelling and unpretentious document of a region and its people, surviving in the face of economic decline and rising, warming seas.

The American Fraternity: An Illustrated Ritual Manual
By Andrew Moisey
Essays by Cynthia Robinson, Nicholas L. Syrett
Daylight Books
144 pages, 96 images
$45

Moisey’s book combines his insider images of an unnamed college fraternity with texts drawn from a 1950s fraternity ritual manual, which includes the organization’s history and official rules, and scripts for meetings and initiations, highlighting its high-minded ideals. At the heart of the book is the dissonance between the fraternity’s ideals and its reality.

Mistral: The Legendary Wind of Provence
By Rachel Cobb
Introduction by Bill Buford
Damiani
192 pages, 90 photos
$50

A collection of colorful, evocative images documenting the effects of the northerly wind that, the author writes, “funnels down the Rhone Valley between the Alps and the Massif Central, gaining speed as it reaches the Mediterranean.”

Daylight Ghosts: History, Myth, Memory
By David Lurie
Text by James Sey
Hatje Cantz
72 pages, 29 photographs
$60

South African photographer David Lurie uses landscape photography to evoke the complicated history of South Africa’s Cradle of Humankind, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Located about 30 miles northwest of Johannesburg, the Cradle is a paleontological site, where some of the earliest hominid fossils—dating back 3 million years—have been discovered.

War is Only Half the Story: Ten Years of the Aftermath Project
Edited by Sara Terry
Dewi Lewis Publishing
268 pages, 121 images
$45

Stories supported by the post-conflict storytelling grant program founded in 2008 by Sara Terry, this book features the work of more than 50 photographers from 15 countries, including Nina Berman, Andrea Bruce, Jim Goldberg, Stanley Greene, Jessica Hines and Danny Wilcox Frazier.

I Am Inuit
By Brian Adams
Text by Julie Decker
Bentelli
208 pages, 150 images
$50
Inuit photographer Brian Adams visited 16 Inuit villages and four Alaskan cities to gather portraits and stories that shares what it’s like to me an Alaskan Inuit. Adams’s environmental portraits were shot of 6×6 color film.

Where I Find Myself: A Lifetime Retrospective
By Joel Meyerowitz
Text by Colin Westerbeck
Laurence King Publishing
220 pages, 400 images
$65

The first major, single-book retrospective of Meyerowitz’s work, the book spans the artist’s entire career to date.

One, Two, Three, More
By Helen Levitt
Text by Geoff Dyer and Helen Levitt
powerHouse Books
204 pages
$40

Helen Levitt, who died in 2009, was a photographer with an eye for life’s wonders and disillusionments, which she captured with spirit and humor in her photographs of everyday life on city streets. This new collection gathers her earlier work, including many previously unpublished images.

Over My Eyes
Images by Ali Arkady, Aram Karim, Bnar Sardar, Seivan M. Salim, Hawre Khalid, Rawsht Twana, Twana Abdullah, Sebastian Meyer, Dario Bosio
Text by Fred Ritchin, Stefano Carini, Dario Bosio
DARST
164 pages
$65

Through the eyes of a young generation of Iraqi photographers, Over My Eyes presents moments of daily life in Iraq, a country trapped by conflict. The book and traveling exhibition aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of a region facing a major humanitarian catastrophe by offering atypical images of Iraq.

The Last Tattooed Women of Kalinga
By Jake Verzosa
Text by François Cheval, Natividad Sugguiyao
Steidl
96 pages, 44 images
$45

Winner of the Steidl Book Award Asia 2017, Verzosa’s book of black-and-white portraits celebrates a dying tradition of tattooing in villages throughout the Cordillera mountains in the northern Philippines.

We are Indestructible
By Mads Nissen
GOST Books
192 pages, 162 images
$60

Danish photographer Mads Nissen has documented the civil war in Colombia since 2010. This book is the culmination of Nissen’s work, providing a portrait of a war-torn country navigating the complexities of newfound peace.

Priya Ramrakha
Edited by Erin Haney, Shravan Vidyarthi
Texts by Sana Aiyar, Erin Haney, John Edwin Mason, Morley Safer, Paul Theroux, Drew Thompson, Shravan Vidyarthi
Kehrer Verlag
$45

After Kenyan photojournalist Priya Ramrakha was killed on assignment in Biafra, Nigeria, in 1968, his photographic legacy and archive vanished. Four decades later, Erin Haney and Shravan Vidyarthi found his prints and negatives in Nairobi. This is the first book to present photographs from Ramrakha’s recovered archive.

Yo Soy Fidel
By Michael Christopher Brown
Text by Martin Parr, John Lee Anderson
Damiani
160 pages, 110 images
$50

In late 2016, Michael Christopher Brown photographed the funeral cortège transporting Fidel Castro’s ashes from Havana to his birthplace, Santiago. From a truck traveling with the military convoy, Brown photographed hundreds of thousands of Cubans waiting alongside the highway for Castro’s remains to pass.

Mediations
By Susan Meiselas
Foreword by Carles Guerra, Marta Gili. Text by Ariella Azoulay, Eduardo Cadava, Carles Guerra, Marianne Hirsch, Kristen Lubben, Isin Onol, Pia Viewing
Damiani/Jeu de Paume/Fundació Tàpies
184 pages, 100 images
$35

Published to accompany Meiselas’s exhibition at Jeu de Paume, Mediations brings together a selection of series from the 1970s to the present, calling attention to Meiselas’s photographic approach and her lifelong commitment to engage in a “cycle of return” with her subjects, going back to the communities she has photographed and sharing the work with them.

BOOKS WE MISSED

Try as we might, we couldn’t write about every great book this year. Here’s a few we missed.

Dawoud Bey: Seeing Deeply

by Dawoud Bey
Essays by Sarah Lewis, Deborah Willis, David Travis, Hilton Als, Dawoud Bey, Jacqueline Terrassa, Rebecca Walker, Maurice Berger, Leigh Raiford
400 pages
$65

This retrospective includes critical essays that put each of Bey’s long-term projects into context, showing how they represent his interests in community, identity, history and creating reciprocity between photographer and subject. It traces his move from 35mm street photography to more formal portraits shot on medium format cameras and how his collaborations with his subjects deepened. Taken together, the essays show how Bey has sought not only represent communities but to use photography to foster community.

On Abortion: And the Repercussions of Lack of Access
By Laia Abril
Dewi Lewis Publishing
196 pages, 114 images
$50

The first book in Abril’s long-term project “A History of Misogyny,” On Abortion is an accomplished work of research that combines portraiture and still life photographs with historical images and texts. The book discusses methods women have used in illegal abortions and tells the stories of several women, some of whom have survived abortions and others who have not. This deeply affecting work demonstrates how access to abortion has affected women’s lives both historically and in contemporary society.

Jasper
By Matthew Genitempo
Twin Palms
96 pages, 51 images
$85

Genitempo’s series made in Jasper, Arkansas, a small town in the Ozark mountains, where he followed a few singular men who have chosen to lead sequestered lives there.

Littoral Drift + Ecotone
By Meghan Riepenhoff
Texts by Charlotte Cotton, Joshua Chuang
Radius/Yossi Milo
224 pages, 100 images
$65

In Riepenhoff’s two series of camera-less cyanotypes, waves, surface water, wind, sediment and other elements leave physical inscriptions through direct contact with photographic materials. The book features two volumes bound together.