Category: Books

Guatemala: Eternal Spring, Eternal Tyranny

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Link: Lens

This week, while Mr. Ríos Montt is under house arrest, Ms. Simon is reprinting her book “Guatemala: Eterna Primavera, Eterna Tirania,” a chronicle of the worst of the war years that builds upon her 1988 volume “Guatemala: Eternal Spring, Eternal Tyranny.” This time, she has raised $20,000 through Kickstarter to help produce 4,000 copies on glossy stock and with sewn bindings that will be sold for about $10 each. More important, she has set aside some 1,000 copies to be given away to schools and teachers in Guatemala.

Close Inspection: Magnum Contact Sheets

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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

Rwanda 2004: Vestiges of a Genocide

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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.”

A by Greg Halpern


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.

Leon Borensztein’s ‘American Portraits’

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LightBox

More often than not, some of the best observers of places are those not originally from there. Leon Borensztein was born in Poland, settled in Israel and emigrated only later in life to the U.S. in 1977. But unlike de Tocqueville and other aristocratic travelers of old, he had to make ends meet and stumbled into taking commercial pictures of average, normal Americans as a fly-by-night job to pay the bills. Borensztein’s portraits—comprised in his new book, American Portraits, 1979–1989

Das Book: The Making Of Weird Sports

I’ve got a copy of Weird Sports sitting in the front room of my house and EVERYONE who picks it up, whether they are a photographer or not, loves it. They slowly flip through the pages, laughing hysterically. Definitely recommended. Here’s Sol’s story of putting it together…

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THE WILD WEIRD WORLD OF SPORTS

This past year, for me, has been the year of the book. The year I achieved a dream. The year I gave birth. The year I became a father.

I’ve been a little hesitant to write about my book. Maybe because it still doesn’t seem real. But I’m slowly coming to terms with reality, that it is in fact real. Very real.

Another reason I’ve put off this entry is because of how truly personal this book is to me. Not sure if I can express it in words.

Review: Redheaded Peckerwood by Christian Patterson

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

Moving forward, looking back

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