Being in Pictures
Joanne Leonard

Leonard's roles as feminist artist, academic, single mom, identical twin, and daughter of an Alzheimer's patient all play a part in her work. The book is arranged in wonderful groupings of photographs, collages and montages, all enlivened with short, articulate prose that interweaves a personal life story with the art.

Marianne Hirsch

Daily Pilgrims
Virgilio Ferreira

City dwellers are portrayed as blurry, anonymous ephemeral phantoms photographed against backdrops of sparkling cityscapes of towering steel and glass and multicolored glowing lights. To make this series, Portuguese photographer Virgilio Ferreira traveled and photographed in six Asian cities in 2006, capturing the changing territory and behavior. This is a limited edition artists' book.

Virgilio Ferreira

Noch mal leben vor dem Tod
Walter Schels and Beate Lakotta

Few experiences are likely to affect us as profoundly as an encounter with death. Yet most deaths occur almost covertly, at one remove from our everyday lives.This book contains images of terminally ill people before and immediately after their deaths. Although this book is currently only available in German, it's beautifully printed and important work.

Heiner Schmitz

Till the Cows Come Home
Dan Nelken

Nelken documents a fading pastime in New York state: the county fair. Using available light, he captures the folks, animals and events that create farm culture. He depicts the complexities of the seemingly-simple American farmer, who has lost relevancy with the increase in factory farming. Nelken's photography touches the untouched pockets of thriving agrarian Americana, showing the realities of a "Best in Show" lifestyle.

Roy Flukinger

Serial No. 3817131
Rachel Papo

At eighteen years old, Israeli teenage girls leave behind the frivolties of youth to enter the Israel Defense Forces, a mandatory, two-year military commitment. Fifteen years after the end of her own service, Papo returns to several Israeli bases to photograph soldiers approaching womanhood against the background of a regimented and masculine war environment. She finds the individuality of each soldier while reconnecting with her own experience.

powerHouse Books

Higley
Andrew Phelps

Phelps travels to Higley, Arizona to bear witness to the developing suburban sprawl that defines most metropolitan areas. He captures family photos, tumbleweed, dilapidated kitchens, new constructions and church services. His work encapsulates a town that for some, has little to offer, but that for others, holds the promise of the American Dream.

Alec Soth

The Roma Journeys
Joakim Eskildsen and Cia Rinne

An in-depth insider’s perspective of the daily lives of Roma Gypsies who live in communities in seven very different countries. We are able to soak up the visual richness of the Roma’s personal surroundings and unique ways of living while they adapt to (and resist) the influence of the dominant cultures of Hungary, India, Greece, Romania, France, Russia and Finland.

Book Introduction

Saul Leiter
Photos by Saul Leiter

Saul Leiter, a successful fashion photographer in the 1950s and 60s, was also an avid shooter of quirky street photography. His black-and-white photos of the 40s-50s-60s began to be celebrated in the mid 1970s, but it was only in the 1990s that he began to look back at his remarkable color work (slides stored away in boxes) and started to make prints. His sense of color and densely compressed urban life represents a truly unique vision of those times. This book offers a wonderful overview of this recently discovered work.

Saul Leiter

The Mother of All Journeys
Dinu Li

Photographer Dinu Li re-traces the steps of his mother's life as she moved from China to Hong Kong to England. This family history is told through a deft mixture of old family photos, oral history, and new photos of the places that were significant in her past, but shown as they are today.

Colleen Leonard

A Short History of Photography
Harvey Benge
with text by Gerry Badger

The photo books of Harvey Benge are always thought-provoking, fun and challenging. His new book, "A Short History of Photography" is no exception. The cover is like a visual poem, invoking the names of 40 of today's most famous photographers. But when you understand the premise of the book, it brings to mind some questions we all face. Is this work original? Is it unconscious influence or something more intentional? Can you trademark a "style" in photography?

Gerry Badger

Eyes of an Island:
Japanese Photography 1945-2007
Marc Feustel

This book traces the evolution of Japanese photography since the end of World War II. It charts three stages of development of Japanese photography: from post-war documentary bearing witness to the destruction of war; turning inward to personal and subjective interpretations of the rapid changes in Japanese society; to a contemporary movement which consistently pushes the boundaries of the photographic medium.

Marc Feustel

Paris-New York-Shanghai
Hans Eijkelboom

Here is even more proof that the differences in exotic cultures have already been conquered and eliminated by globalization — at least in three large cities on three different continents. Dutch photographer Hans Eijkelboom has documented the sameness of fashion and trends and every-day urban living in 21st century Paris, New York, and Shanghai.

Tony Godfrey

Slide Show
Helen Levitt

Helen Levitt is one of the true pioneers of capturing the theater of the street. She earned her reputation with black-and-white photos of New Yorkers in the 1930s and '40s. But this book reveals her genius as a color photographer, as well. Forty of these color photos were shown as a slide show at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1974 — one of the first times photographs were formally displayed this way in a museum, and one of the first exhibitions of serious color photography anywhere in the world (just prior to the arrival of Eggleston).

James Agee

On the Beach
Richard Misrach

This is one of those exquisitely printed, oversized photo books that takes you out of yourself and out of your own immediate environment, and allows you to experience the weightless free-flying giddiness of a dreamlike vacation.

Richard Misrach, in his afterword

Drift
Wolfgang Zurborn

These photographs have a wry sense of humor, and a kind of Zen amazement at what we can find right in front of our eyes. Drift is like that famously simple saying by Garry Winogrand. To paraphrase: Photography is about the way things look when they are photographed. I think Zurborn drifts through our modern cluttered environment with an alert eye, and chooses his visual collisions very well.

Peter V. Brinkemper

Welcome to Pyongyang
Charlie Crane

Promoted as a "tourist's guide" to North Korea, Charlie Crane’s portraits, interiors and landscapes of Pyongyang, the capital city, are perfectly bleak and honest. The chatty caption text for each photo is verbatim propaganda as told by the city’s official tourist guides. The combination provides a chilling look at how the nation wants to be seen by outsiders.

Martin Parr

Satellites
Jonas Bendiksen

This remarkable book delivers a personal eye-witness account (with incredible color photos and poignant text) of several of the outlying areas of the former Soviet Union. Bendiksen's insightful and often sadly humorous text refers to them as "half-forgotten enclaves and restless territories." And the breadth of photographs, taken over 7 years of exploration, drive that message home.

Adam Goldman, Associated Press

Intimate Enemy
Scott Straus and Robert Lyons

The book's subtitle is Images and Voices of the Rwandan Genocide. Formal portraits (by Robert Lyons) of confessed murders, collaborators, and some of the surviving victims are reproduced here, one per page, without identification, at first. So, we are forced to study these faces — did they commit genocide, or are they traumatized victims who witnessed it and suffered great loss? Co-author Straus interviewed dozens of the murderers to try to understand what happened. Transcriptions of the interviews reveal human nature at its weakest and most honest.

Gerald Caplan

Motherland
Simon Roberts

Roberts and his wife traveled throughout Russia between July 2004 and July 2005, making pictures in over 200 locations and creating one of the most extensive, comprehensive photographic accounts of this vast country by a Westerner. They covered over 75,000 kilometers across 11 time zones. He talks about their discoveries and adventures inside contemporary Russia in an audio interview in Lens Culture.

Simon Roberts
In his Afterword

Buried
Stephen Gill

Witty, whimsical and serious at the same time, Stephen Gill made photos of the people and surroundings at a transient flea market just outside London. After he printed the photographs, he buried them underground near the locations he had photographed. The results are muddied, marred, beautiful, and thought-provoking.

Stephen Gill

Chernobyl: The Hidden Legacy
Pierpaolo Mittica

This book's compelling combination of powerful images and well-written text drives home the continuing, ongoing horror in the aftermath of a nuclear accident that happened 21 years ago. Its well-documented research and personal reporting present a convincing and unforgettable argument against nuclear energy. It brings to mind the work of Lewis Hine, Dorothea Lange, and Sebastio Salgado. It's an important message.

From the back cover notes

The Photobook: A History, Volume 2
Martin Parr and Gerry Badger

This second volume categorizes contemporary photo books into company photo books, artists' photo books, editors’ compilations (rather than photographers), art photo books, American and European photo books, “New Objective” books, and finally, those chronicling “Modern Life”.

Ken Light
Photography professor, UC Berkeley

The "Ultimate" List of Japanese Photobooks
Ferdinand Brueggemann

This is not a review of a single book. It is a compilation of 64 significant photobooks by Japanese photographers. It began as a blog entry by the author, who is an art historian. Since his first posting, the list has grown and continues to grow.

Ferdinand Brueggemann

The Chain.
Photographs by Chien-Chi Chang
Text by Cheryl Lai

700 psychiatric patients live chained together in pairs, and are forced to tend more than one million chickens at the largest chicken farm in Taiwan. Portraits of the players in this real yet surreal drama were photographed with kindness, respect and compassion by Magnum photographer Chien-Chi Chang.

From the publisher's notes

Figure and Ground
by Richard Renaldi

Richard Renaldi reveals faces and places of America in the 21st century, as he travels around the country with his 8 x 10 view camera. The environmental context seems key to these photos. When viewed as they are presented in Renaldi’s aptly-named book, we are able to soak up the details of these moments in America, and feel how real they are.

Richard Renaldi
From the interview for Lens Culture

Made in Italy
by 5 photographers, 4 writers

Beyond the realm of media censors and glossy tour guides, Trolley Books has published a brutal condemnation of contemporary life in Italy. This is part photobook and part philosophical rant, including contributions from five award-winning Italian photographers, and four philosopher commentators. It's a book filled with anger, confusion, sadness and rage. And beauty, too.

Curzio Maltese
In his essay, "The Italian Decline"

reGeneration: 50 Photographers of Tomorrow
Catalog of young photographers

In this highly subjective collection, it seems like there is nothing new under the sun, it’s all be done, it is all derivative. Page after page we are treated to technically proficient photographs (crisp, colorful, evenly lit) that are completely lacking in soul and ideas.

Roberta Smith
in The New York Times

Life in Death
by Eva Persson

"Life in Death" transports you to a very small village named Death (Kuolema) in Finland, and introduces you, in an intimate way, to the people who live there and have lived there all of their lives. Through the seasons of dark grey winters and bright flower-filled summers, the power of the photograph conveys more than words ever could.

Eva Persson
From the introduction to the book

A Couple Ways of Doing Something
by Chuck Close

For this project, Close teamed up with daguerreotype expert Jerry Spagnoli to photograph many of his familiar artist-friends. The old-world daguerreotypes are then converted into super-sharp beautiful large modern prints with high-resolution digital scans, matte black and silver inks. Nineteenth century meets 21st century, with some 1950s-style beat poetry by Bob Holman thrown into the mix.

Jim Casper
Editor of Lens Culture

William Christenberry
by William Christenberry

William Christenberry documents vernacular architecture and signs from the southern United States year after year, to show the deterioration and changes brought about by time and nature and human intervention. The sequencing of images in this beautiful book allows you the shock of recognition at the passing of 20-plus years of time, year by year, of some of the same subject matter.

Howard N. Fox
Curator of modern and contemporary art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Portraits
by Ingar Krauss

With his black-and-white portraits of children and teenagers in Germany and Russia, Ingar Krauss reveals quietly intense moments of transformation and the emotional turmoil just below the surface of life’s thresholds. His young subjects seem to have knowledge and wisdom beyond their years. They have already seen too much, and the innocence lost is painfully etched into each of these images.

Ingar Krauss
Interview in Lens Culture

China
by Edward Burtynsky

From 2002 to 2005, Edward Burtynsky was granted unprecedented access to photograph inside China with a large format camera. His new book delivers a visual report on many aspects of contemporary China. In an exclusive audio interview for Lens Culture, he talks about his experiences there, and his fears for China and the world.

Mark Kingwell
From one of the many excellent essays in the book.

Unseen UK: Photographs
by people at the Royal Mail
edited by Stephen Gill

In this age when many photographers strive to capture the mundane, the banal, the everyday reality of our existence, it's like a breath of fresh air to come upon these truly delightful photos of ordinary day-in-the-life experiences taken by the men and women who deliver the mail throughout Great Britain. This project offered the free use of disposable cameras to every member of the Royal Mail. Hundreds accepted the offer, and as a result, we are able to view an everyday England unlike the stereotypes that fill our media-fed consciousness.

Stephen Gill
as quoted in the introduction to the book

Bordello
Photographs by Vee Speers, text by Karl Lagerfeld

The romantic decadence of Paris nightlife in the 1920s and 30s (eternalized most famously, perhaps, by the photographs of Brassai) comes to life afresh in this series of sensuous photos shot on location in former bordellos where the lavish decors have survived intact. Vee Speers, an Australian fine-art photographer who has lived near the infamous Rue St. Denis red-light district in Paris for 14 years, has created edgy photos that play with seduction, sensuality and femininity.

Karl Lagerfeld
From the Foreword to Bordello

Killing Time in Paradise
by Harvey Benge

American Beat Poet, Allen Ginsberg said, “Shakespeare suggests that, as Buddha does, the interesting thing to discover is that consciousness is discontinuous. It’s not a continuous stream of consciousness where one thought follows another thought. There’s a gap in between and we really don’t know where the thoughts come from or how they link… so we have the notion of Surprise Mind, because we never know what we’ll be thinking in one minute. It will rise on its own so the mind is a complete surprise… You don’t have to go further in order to create a work of art.”

Jim Casper
Lens Culture

Jeff Cowen
by Jeff Cowen

This 128-page monograph presents an overview of the early years of this talented photographer. The prints are beautiful, but distressed. Tone seeps beyond the rough edges of the frame, the paper is folded, ripped, taped back together. Images are torn apart, reconstructed with other images, taped together, photographed and printed again. Seductive, threatening nudes look out of the photos directly into your eyes. There are moments of melancholy, horror, tenderness, beauty, perversion, intellectual meditation.

Jeff Cowen
The artist talking about his process

Années de Guerre
by Christine Spengler

Since the early 1970s, Christine Spengler has photographed wars — Northern Ireland, Beirut, Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, and more. She shows the gritty reality of the victims of war, but with none of the usual cliches. She reports from a woman's point-of-view, and delivers haunting, unforgettable images of women and children trying to live in the midst of madness.

Jim Casper
Lens Culture

Afterwar: Veterans from a World in Conflict
by Lori Grinker

This is a fifteen-year project documenting the physical and psychological wounds of frontline war veterans from World War I to the war in Iraq. With support from magazine assignments and grants, Lori began seeking out veterans’ stories around the world — from Eritrea to El Salvador, from Pakistan to Russia — a journey that eventually took her to over thirty countries. One unifying concept comes through loud and clear: These victims' lives are forever changed no matter if their "side" won or lost.

Lori Grinker
The artist in an interview

DL 07: stereotypes of war
Photographs by Jens Liebchen, text by Ian Jeffrey

Liebchen has constructed a series of untitled black-and-white photos of a city under siege– menacing helicopters buzzing abandoned buildings, furtive figures scrambling down deserted streets, smoke-filled skylines, blood-stained walls and sidewalks, too-young children armed with machine guns… Yet he took all of these photos in a city (Tirana, Albania) while it was at peace.

Ian Jeffrey
from the text written for the book

Landscape with Figures
by Massimo Vitali

Vitali sets up his custom-made perch 20 to 30 feet in the air, frames the landscape background he plans to capture with his 8 x 10 or 11 x 14 camera, and then waits for the landscape to fill up with people and their individual dramas. When the moment is right — when the field is filled with complexity and a multitude of interactions — he releases the shutter.

Jim Casper
Lens Culture

William Klein Retrospective
by William Klein

A beautifully printed, large-format retrospective book is available only in a French version. And like many retrospective works, with a desire to give a sense of "everything" Klein has accomplished to date, it pales in comparison to rich narrative flow of the early original photo books Klein designed and made himself: New York, Rome, Moscow and Tokyo.

John Szarkowski
The New York Museum of Modern Art, 1980

Mona Kuhn Photographs
by Mona Kuhn

Mona Kuhn's photographs of groups of beautiful nudists lounging around in apparent lazy luxury have sparked international interest. An attractively printed book including both color and black-and-white work demonstrates her talent for composition, selective focus, and capturing a certain kind of impossible hedonism.

Mona Kuhn
From the audio interview for Lens Culture

Diary Nr 1
by Mischa Keijser

Mischa Keijser is a professional photographer living and working in The Netherlands. He recently self-published a very handsome limited edition book of personal photos as a visual meditation on death, falling in love, and the birth of his first child. In between are moments of majesty in local Dutch landscapes, and meditations on the treatment of animals and the environment in modern society.

Jim Casper
Lens Culture

ma poupée japonaise
by Mario A

Obviously in love with Japanese aesthetics, and obsessed with the perfection of surfaces, this series of work, taken over the period of a full year, is a meditation on the formal beauty of women, especially Japanese women. What is disturbing about these images is that we realize these are real, living women, who appear to be dolls — a twist on the work of Hans Bellmer.

Mario A
The artist in an interview with Lens Culture

Boris Mikhailov: A Retrospective
by Boris Mikhailov,with essays by several scholars

For more than 40 years, Boris Mikhailov has used photography to document and come to grips with the turmoil of life under the Soviets, and after the Soviets. In this heavy-weight retrospective book, we are able to trace both Mikhailov’s personal history as well as the evolving photographic techniques he used in so many ways in his efforts to try to explain, document and understand the world around him.

Larissa Harris
From one of several illuminating essays in the book

Mr. Mkhize's portrait & other stories from the new South Africa
by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin

It’s a deceptively simple photo book that engages the reader from the very first page. It’s a series of history lessons paired with portraits and brief up-to-the-minute real-life stories that explain many of the consequences of living in post-Apartheid South Africa.

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin
The opening sentences from the book

Sleeping by the Mississippi
by Alec Soth

Beds, brothels, prisons, quirky personal environments (and the individuals who inhabit them) are the subjects of an arresting series of photographs by Alec Soth featured in recent exhibitions and this new book.

Anne Wilkes Tucker
Houston Museum of Fine Arts

Alexey Titarenko
by Alexey Titarenko, with text by Gabriel Bauret

Titarenko chronicles his personal vision of his hometown, St. Petersburg, from the early 1990s (just after the fall of the Soviet Union) to the present. His long-exposure photographs, often made of moving masses of people, are imbued with a down-trodden moodiness reminiscent of the stories of Dostoyevsky. They document a time of change, yet hope is a rare commodity, and the people blur into grey shadow figures in a ghost-like crowd, with perhaps a solitary hand or shoe standing still in time.

Gabriel Bauret
The University of Paris

Rene Burri Photographs
by René Burri

This career retrospective of over 400 duotone photographs is a history book of the major political events and key personalities of the 20th century seen through the eyes of one photographer. Burri, a Magnum photographer, is one of the most influential photographers of our time. In 21 thematically organized chapters, we accompany Burri across Europe to the Middle East, Vietnam, Brazil, Cuba and beyond; we visit Picasso, Le Corbusier, Yves Klein and Giacometti in their studios; we witness political figures such as Che Guevara in repose, and Fidel Castro at the helm. The book begins with an introduction that describes the history, politics and artistic influences that have colored Burri’s work.

René Burri
In an audio interview for Lens Culture

Temporary Discomfort: Jules Spinatsch
by Jules Spinatsch with essay by Martin Jaeggi

Temporary Discomfort is artist Jules Spinatsch's documentation of three cities in a transitory state of emergency lock-down during two global economic summits (WEF and G8). It combines different photographical genres: landscape photography of the site, photojournalism, and police photography, but with the camera lens turned, atypically, on the security forces. Spinatsch's new approach to documentary photography is theorized here by essayist Martin Jaeggi and presented through beautiful photographs with strong political undertones.

Martin Jaeggi
In an essay from the book

Photography Speaks: 150 Photographers on their Art
by Brooks Johnson (Editor)

A favorite with photographers and requisite course material for many students, the discourse on art and artistry contained in this volume is of unprecedented scale, collecting the writing of such diverse photographers as William Henry Fox Talbot, Eugène Atget, Alfred Stieglitz, Lewis Hine, August Sander, Man Ray, Weegee, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Robert Heinecken, and Lucas Samaras.The contributors expound on topics such as their method and intentions, the state of the arts, or the medium itself. Photography Speaks has been and will continue to be a vital reference source, an enduring testament to the art of photography and an engrossing text for artists and enthusiasts alike.

Garry Winogrand
A brief excerpt that says a lot