Category: Books

  • Seamus Murphy: A Darkness Visible

    Amazing work by Seamus Murphy. Here’s the gallery:

    Seamus Murphy: A Darkness Visible – Digital Journalist.
    Here’s a link to the story introduction:

    Seamus Murphy: A Darkness Visible – Story Introduction:

    Seamus Murphy describes photography as “part history and part magic.” This brief description could be a title for Murphy’s entire archive, as he is the embodiment of the soulful photojournalist. A native of Ireland, he has worked extensively in the Middle East, Europe, Russia and the Far East, Africa, North and South America, and has to date won six World Press Awards. Murphy’s work spans years and continents, but we have chosen to concentrate on the area that captivated him perhaps the most in recent years—Afghanistan. His recent book, “A Darkness Visible,” published in 2008 by Saqi Books of London, is a retrospective of his work in that country since 1994.

  • 5B4: Anna Fox: Photographs 1983-2007

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    5B4: Anna Fox: Photographs 1983-2007:

    The work of Anna Fox may be off your radar but she is an important figure in British color photography that arose from the West Surry College of Art and Design in the mid 1980s. Her highly charged photographs, lit by flash, are a mix of social observation and personal diaristic projects which placed her apart from the male crowd of Paul Reas Martin Parr, and Paul Graham who were forming the ‘second wave’ of color photography. A recent mid-career retrospective book Anna Fox: Photographs 1983-2007 published from Photoworks covers 25 years of her work.

  • photo-eye Bookstore | Ralph Gibson: Nude

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    photo-eye Bookstore | Ralph Gibson: Nude | photobooks:

    A decade after his first TASCHEN book, Deus ex machina, master photographer Ralph Gibson returns with an exquisite collection of nudes, combining the best of his recent work with an in-depth interview by Eric Fischl. Strikingly graphic, meticulously composed, and loaded with subtle provocations, Gibson’s mysterious, dreamlike images pay homage to greats such as Man Ray and Edward Weston, while continually pursuing new frontiers.

  • Photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans: America exposed

    Photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans: America exposed |guardian.co.uk:

    In 2001, Henri Cartier-Bresson reflected on the long moment in the early 1940s when he had briefly considered turning from photography to film-making. “If it had not been for the challenge of the work of Walker Evans,” he wrote, “I don’t think I would have remained a photographer.”

    It’s this quote that provides the epigraph for Photographing America 1929-1947, a fascinating book that focuses on these two masters of 20th-century photography.

  • The Rencontres d’Arles Contemporary Book Award 2009

    The Rencontres d’Arles Contemporary Book Award 2009 – photo-eye | Magazine:

    The Arles Contemporary Book Award for 2009 goes to JH Engström and Anders Petersen’s collaborative book From Back Home

  • we english . . . . a week in the life

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    whats the jackanory ? – we english . . . . a week in the life:

    If you haven’t been following Simon Roberts (he of Motherland fame) blog for his latest book project ‘We English‘, shame on you. Simon has spent over a year traveling around England in a motorhome, documenting its landscape on a large format 5×4 camera. Informed by the photography of his predecessors and by the romantic tradition of English landscape painting, he depicts the English at leisure within pastoral landscapes. His photographs explore the notion that nationhood – that what it means to be English – is to be found on the surface of contemporary life, encapsulated by banal everyday rituals and activities.

  • Hamburger Eyes issue 13 available online

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    Alex Bartsch: Hamburger Eyes issue 13 available online

  • Darius Himes: Tips for creating successful photo books

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    RESOLVE — the liveBooks photo blog » Archives » Darius Himes: Tips for creating successful photo books:

    Darius Himes is a founding member of Radius Books, where he is an acquiring editor; prior to that he was the founding editor of photo-eye Booklist. In 2008, he was named by PDN as one of fifteen of the most influential people in photo book publishing. This year he is the lead judge of the Photography.Book.Now International Juried Competition. With the deadline approaching — July 16, 2009 — we thought we’d pick Darius’ brain about the contest, self-publishing, and what makes a photo book successful.

  • 365 Portraits, The Book

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    365 Portraits, The Book | Thomas Hawk Digital Connection:

    In 2007 Photographer Bill Wadman traveled around the United States and Europe with a single mission. Each day he photographed, edited and posted online a different portrait of a different person. It was a mammoth effort meticulously followed that resulted in one of the most authentic collection of portraits I’ve ever seen.

  • Book Review: Roger Ballen – Boarding House

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    Roger Ballen – Boarding House « The PhotoBook:

    For most of the photobooks I review, they usually are stand alone books, but I feel that Roger Ballen’s recent book Boarding House needs to be placed into a larger perspective.  Specificly to the content of his two previous books, Shadow Chamber, published in 2005 and Outland, published in 2001, both by Phaidon Press. Otherwise, it feels like I have walked into the middle of an fascinating and entertaining discussion, but I am left at a loss of what the topic is.

  • Malcolm Gladwell reviews Free by Chris Anderson: Books

    Malcolm Gladwell reviews Free by Chris Anderson: Books: The New Yorker:

    Anderson is very good at paragraphs like this—with its reassuring arc from “bloodbath” to “salvation.” His advice is pithy, his tone uncompromising, and his subject matter perfectly timed for a moment when old-line content providers are desperate for answers. That said, it is not entirely clear what distinction is being marked between “paying people to get other people to write” and paying people to write. If you can afford to pay someone to get other people to write, why can’t you pay people to write? It would be nice to know, as well, just how a business goes about reorganizing itself around getting people to work for “non-monetary rewards.” Does he mean that the New York Times should be staffed by volunteers, like Meals on Wheels?

  • Book Review – 'The Last War,' by Ana Menéndez

    Book Review – ‘The Last War,’ by Ana Menéndez – Review – NYTimes.com:

    The narrator of “The Last War” has received an anonymous letter accusing her war correspondent husband of infidelity. So, unfortunately, did the book’s author. It speaks to Ana Menéndez’s maturity — as a woman and a writer — that her novel doesn’t go where it might have. It doesn’t constitute literary payback.

  • 5B4: Playas by Martin Parr

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    5B4: Playas by Martin Parr:

    If I understand correctly, Martin Parr and the publishers of his new book Playas, Editorial RM and Chris Boot, left all creative control of the book to the printer they employed in Mexico. That is, the design, sequencing, format, everything. This decision was made after asking several different low cost printers to design a cover and then Martin picked the best (or worst depending on how you look at it) and that company won the job to do the whole production. The result may be the best Martin Parr book in quite a while.

  • 'Digital Barbarism – A Writer’s Manifesto,' by Mark Helprin

    ROSS DOUTHAT – NYTimes.com:

    Mark Helprin could have ignored the barrage; he could have sifted it for arguments worth replying to. Instead, he decided to write a furious treatise against the comment-happy horde. The resulting book, “Digital Barbarism: A Writer’s Manifesto,” is a vindication of the aphorism about the perils of wrestling with a pig. (You get dirty; the pig likes it.) Helprin can be a wonderful wordsmith, and there are many admirable passages and strong arguments in this book. But the thread that binds the work together is hectoring, pompous and enormously tedious.

  • Interview with Lisa Kereszi

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    photo-eye:

    Lisa Kereszi’s first monograph, Fantasies, interweaves images of the empty interiors of strip clubs with photographs of new burlesque dancers to create a narrative in between the environment of a fantasy and the expression of one. The tawdry nocturnal spaces are an emotional void, paralleling the possible emptiness of those who occupy the stages of the strip clubs, as well as those who fill the seats as patrons. According to Kereszi, the new burlesque performances have a more palpable joy than stripper routines, but Kereszi’s images of the burlesque dancers in persona still exude a certain sadness and a reality that is rough around the edges. Kereszi draws back the curtain on fantasy and reveals its details, enticing the imagination of the viewer, yet simultaneously exposing the reality of fantasy’s ephemeral nature.

  • Superficial Snapshots Zine 3: Things I Like About Texas

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    SUPERFICIALsnapshots

  • 5B4: Visible World by Fischli & Weiss

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    5B4:

    Fischli and Weiss’ Visible World (Sichtbare Weld) published in 2001 by Walther Konig is another worthwhile exploration of the book as mass of information.

    No text and with 8 photographs per page, Visible World is a globetrotting description of landscape and cityscape contained in a few hundred pages.

  • Edition One Studios Makes Books For Photographers

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    A Photo Editor:

    Ben Zlotkin is the founder of Edition One Studios, a company that makes books for photographers (here). I wanted to ask him a few questions about publishing short-run photography books, because I feel like there’s not a lot of good information available on the subject. Also, I was curious if it really is that hard to satisfy a photographers needs when it comes to DIY books.

  • 5B4: School by Raimond Wouda

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    5B4: School by Raimond Wouda:

    Wouda started to observe the relationships among groups of teenagers while they were on the school playground across the street from his studio. Something about those observations drew him to approaching the institutions in order to gain access to their hallways and common areas with his view camera and strobes. It wasn’t the classroom he was interested in but what was happening when the students were on their own and what that might reveal if photographed. His newest book School from Nazraeli published this year brings together a tight edit of 35 of these images.

  • 'The Photographer,' by Emmanuel Guibert, Didier Lefèvre and Frédéric Lemercier

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    NYTimes.com says:

    It is impossible to know war if you do not stand with the mass of the powerless caught in its maw. All narratives of war told through the lens of the com batants carry with them the seduction of violence. But once you cross to the other side, to stand in fear with the helpless and the weak, you confront the moral depravity of industrial slaughter and the scourge that is war itself. Few books achieve this clarity. “The Photographer” is one.