Link: Photo Booth

No document gives greater insight into how a photographer shoots and edits than a contact sheet—the direct print, from a roll or negatives, where a film photographer often first sees her work, grease pencil in hand, and marks her best frames. A new book from Thames & Hudson collects a hundred and thirty-nine notable contact sheets made by Magnum photographers, from the nineteen-thirties to the present, some of which are currently on view at the International Center of Photography

Link: Eric Kim

I am pleased to have street photographer Kramer O’Neill share in this guest blog post his experiences about self-publishing two of his books. It is an incredibly difficult process–check out what he learned through the process in the post below!

Link: Foto8

Pieter Hugo resolved to visit, ‘photographing and contemplating’ the sites of Rwanda’s carnage. The results of that journey are now published as Rwanda 2004: Vestiges of a Genocide offering, he writes, “a glimpse of what I saw there before the reburials took place.”

Link: LPV Magazine

A few weeks ago I went to Dashwood books for the first time to pick up three books that I’d eventually giveaway to our 2011 subscribers. While browsing the inventory I found Halpern’s A. There was no way I couldn’t page through it. After I closed the book I decided to buy it. Not for the giveaway, but for myself.

Conscientious

By now, you have probably seen Redheaded Peckerwood being picked the most by the various people (me included) who compiled a “best of 2011” list. As subjective as such lists are, I’d like to point at one very simple fact: In Marc Feustel’s tallying of these lists, the book was picked by 19 out of the 50+ lists, far ahead of all the other books

Alec Soth, Little Brown Mushroom:

And one commenter, John Gossage, tossed a couple follow-up questions back at me:

“Is there one book in your list that changed you as an artist? One of these that allowed you to take something from it that you could use to move forward?”

In the era where retweeting and ‘liking’ is the most interaction I normally expect online, Gossage’s question provoked me to go deeper. And so I did. I looked over my list and asked myself Gossage’s questions. The answers are complicated (several of the books changed me in incremental ways). But since this is a blog post, and not a conversation, I’ll try to keep it simple. The book that changed me the most this year was, in fact, not on my list