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.

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.”

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.

Link: LightBox

The Postcards from America box book, in a signed edition of 500, is available exclusively at www.postcards.magnumphotos.com 

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

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.

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

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

LightBox

The recent Protest Box, compiled by the British photographer Martin Parr, just published by Steidl, contains five facsimile reprints of some of the most important books of protest produced within the history of the photobook

Here LightBox spotlights some of the best photobooks of the year as chosen by a group of photographers and photography experts from around around the world…. and of course a few from the photo editors of TIME.  From the selection one can see the art of the photobook continues to flourish in all genres from reportage to fine art photography, fashion and everything in between. This year’s books range from luxurious tomes like Catherine Opie and Alec Soth’s collaboration for Rodarte to smaller precious books like Fred Hunning’s Drei. Overall the selection shows that even as masses of information come at us from all our digital devices, people still enjoy a singular vision and the process of sitting down with a good book—especially one that pushes the boundaries of the format. Herewith, the photobooks we loved the most in 2011

When considering whom to invite for our annual Best Books list, we try to look at all of the diverse corners of the photography world. Of course, we have our regular favorites who are not only staples in the photography community, but offer an incredibly informed and diverse perspective for what makes a stand-out photobook. This year we have also included numerous independent publishers who are not only rising in popularity, but are also changing the focus of how they publish books.

It was not unlike a political caucus. The candidates — in this case, nearly 100 photography books published this year — took over every inch of available counter space in the photo department, where they were carefully scrutinized by a group of opinionated voters, each of whom was given just 10 Post-it notes as ballots. Impassioned speeches were made. Votes were cast: a few books grew polychromatic bouquets of Post-its — each voter had his or her own individual color — while others sprouted single lonely Post-its. Votes were changed: worthy candidates, including the likes of Diana Vreeland and Gerhard Richter, were abandoned. Finally, after weeks, a group of winners emerged. Like all campaigns, it was brutal. Here are the 10 victors, in no particular order.

Laughing Squid:

The Boombox Project: The Machines, the Music, and the Urban Underground is a photo book by photographer Lyle Owerko featuring fine art photographs of vintage boomboxes

Foto8

Brian Ulrich began his Copia project in response to George W. Bush’s appeal to Americans in the weeks after 9/11 to shop and spend as a patriotic activity, but it developed into something much more far-reaching. The result of a decade’s work, Copia is a project that has grown organically out of its earliest premises. The work examines retail consumerism’s material and cultural legacies and has been shrewdly executed and edited as Is This Place Great or What?, published by Aperture with the Cleveland Museum of Art, where a selection of images from the project is exhibited until 26 February 2012.

While reviewing my favorite photobooks of the year, I noticed that numerous selections could be classified as crime stories. So in creating this year’s list, I thought it would be an entertaining exercise to categorize all of the books by genre. Given the quantity and quality of books being published, it is now feasible to think of photobooks in much the same way as we think of literature and cinema. These genre pigeonholes are reductive, of course, but like year-end lists, they are mostly a lighthearted excuse to analyze and discuss quality work.

PDN Online has published three articles surveying the photo book landscape for 2011

The Online Photographer:

I’ll have more to say about it in due course, but I just thought you’d want to know that I received Vivian Maier: Street Photographer yesterday. (It’s available for pre-order in the U.K.and it’s not in stock at The Book Depository yet.)