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Best Books 2011
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reviews
Our most recently published reviews
Thursday, February 16
reviewed by Karen JenkinsPontiac
I must leave it to a different expert to say whether the car on the cover of Pontiac, with its solid body and custom wheels, is the namesake of this Michigan town and its now-defunct auto brand. Regardless, it's a funny sort of portrait, proud but behind the times, an uneasy emblem of a beleaguered industry town on the decline...
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Monday, February 13
reviewed by Karen JenkinsSalt & Truth
The Appalachian hollers of Eastern Kentucky are a restorative realm for Shelby Lee Adams and photography a tonic. Having dwelled there as a child, he has returned to photograph for nearly forty years...
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Thursday, February 9
reviewed by Tom LeiningerNotes from a Quiet Life
What does it mean to be a 'photographer'? Today it can be as simple as making a picture with a mobile phone, or a digital camera or it can mean that you are dedicated to a particular process that is no longer in the main stream. It does not necessarily mean that one is interested in making intentional images where the everyday is changed into something more...
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Monday, February 6
reviewed by Adam BellThe Significant Savages
As more and more of our lives are lived online, the spaces and networks within which we communicate and express ourselves become critical stages and playgrounds for the formation and construction of our identities. Facebook and other such social networks are not merely places where we connect with friends and family, but they are spaces where we make public our imagined and real selves...
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Thursday, February 2
reviewed by Faye RobsonMore Cooning With Cooners
As a British citizen, I have to confess I didn't know much about 'coon hunting before I opened this book. Now having closed it, I'm not sure how much better informed I am...
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Monday, January 30
reviewed by Adam BellWatch the Weather Change
Quiet and meditative, Watch the Weather Change is a loosely structured collection of personal images that meander through Hong Kong, Taiwan and the Netherlands. An impressionistic journal, van Duyvendijk's book weaves together such seemingly disparate images as a puppet-maker in his workshop, Hong Kong cityscapes and portraits of an attractive Asian model to make this modest, but elegant book...
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Thursday, January 26
reviewed by Colin PantallSasha
Chasing or Following?
Sasha is a story of a girl becoming a woman. Sasha?s mother, Claudine Doury, starts the book with a picture of Sasha gazing into a shiny ball, looking at what the future might hold...
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Monday, January 23
reviewed by Daniel W. CoburnBifröst
In Norse Mythology the word Bifröst is used to describe a burning rainbow bridge that spans between earth and the realm of the gods. In his recent monograph, Espen Krukhaug uses the term Bifröst and a series of photographs in an effort to describe what it's like to suffer from insomnia...
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Thursday, January 19
reviewed by Karen JenkinsOceanomania
The ocean for me is the lyrical vision of Hiroshi Sugimoto ? magnetic, impenetrable fields of horizon and sea. It is also an enveloping realm of childhood adventure, persisting in nostalgia?s muted recollection...
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Monday, January 16
reviewed by George SladeRedheaded Peckerwood
Several years ago I reviewed Christian Patterson's book Sound Affects in this space. I enjoy extrapolating the accomplishments of newer material from past efforts...
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Thursday, January 12
reviewed by Nicholas ChiarellaIlluminance
Rinko Kawauchi?s Illuminance demonstrates the transcendence of media over message. Her overwhelming, complex volume of images undermines expectation, supplanting it with excitement, as photograph after photograph carries the viewer from simple to sublime, seemingly without effort...
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Monday, January 9
reviewed by Adam BellRedwood Saw
As sentient animals, we arrogantly pride ourselves on our dominion over the land and its creatures. Entering the 21st century, the demands we have placed on the earth are reaching their limits...
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Monday, December 26
reviewed by John MathewsPlaces, Strange and Quiet
Places, Strange and Quiet is a visual diary of journeys taken throughout Europe, Japan and North America by the German filmmaker Wim Wenders. The locations are possibly discovered through reconnaissance for potential film locations and may act as a way of consolidating Wenders' distinctive cinematic vision...
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Thursday, December 22
reviewed by Adam BellOculus
Blurring the boundaries between a philosophical essay and photobook, Ken Schles' new book Oculus is a beautiful meditation on the role of images, memory and perception in our lives. In many ways, Schles' work builds upon the questions and concerns of his last two books...
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Monday, December 19
reviewed by Colin PantallDaniel Meadows
In 1973, Daniel Meadows got a UK Arts Council grant of £750. He bought a double-decker bus, converted the top deck into a bedroom, fitted a toilet, kitchen and darkroom and converted the bottom deck into an exhibition space...
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Friday, December 16
reviewed by Tom LeiningerFrom Uncertain to Blue
The cover of From Uncertain to Blue jumps out at you. Keith Carter's reissue of his seminal early work of small-town Texas feels contemporary in design since Pentagram Austin's DJ Stout and Barrett Fry bring current touches to pictures that helped define Texas to a wider audience...
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Monday, December 12
reviewed by David OndrikThe Half-Life of History:The Atomic Bomb and Wendover Air Base.
The Half-Life of History: The Atomic Bomb and Wendover Air Base, published by Radius Books, is a collection of photographs by Mark Klett and text by William L. Fox that explore Wendover Airbase, where in the 1940s the US Army Air Corps trained to drop atomic bombs from Boeing B-29 Superfortress aircraft...
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Thursday, December 8
reviewed by Karen JenkinsHistory's Shadow
We want to see more, know how, figure things out. Surface only gets us so far, so we look inside hoping the revelation of these parts will illuminate the whole...
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Monday, December 5
reviewed by Colin PantallLowlife
Chipped paint, fuzzy television screens and naked women. That sums up Scot Sothern's Lowlife, a series of pictures of prostitutes that Sothern visited in the 1980s...
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Thursday, December 1
reviewed by Faye RobsonAbout Love
'Through photography, I have learned about love.' The words that open this anthology of Gay Block's work, and give it its title, really are the best possible introduction to her warm and sympathetic photographs...
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Monday, November 28
reviewed by Karen JenkinsCiociaria
Douglas Stockdale spends a lot of time looking at and thoughtfully writing about books of contemporary photography as a fellow reviewer for this magazine and as founder of The PhotoBook blog among other projects. His own photography has now been collected in his first commercial book, Ciociaria from Rome's Punctum Editions...
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Monday, November 21
reviewed by Joscelyn JurichDies Irae
I felt compelled to listen to the 13th century hymn
Dies Irae while looking at Paolo Pellegrin's collection of the same name. The hymn's first lines describe the apocalyptic world the listener is about to enter: Dies iræ! Dies illa/Solvet sæclum in favilla:Teste David cum Sibylla! (Day of wrath! O day of mourning! See fulfilled the prophets' warning, Heaven and earth in ashes burning!)...
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Thursday, November 17
reviewed by Adam BellA
These days America's Rust Belt seems to be growing ? the long collapsed centers of American industry have metastasized and are merging with the larger landscape of economic woes plaguing the United States. Most often evoked by politicians to decry the stagnant state of the American economy or to celebrate past greatness, it is a landscape often heralded, but rarely visited or known...
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Tuesday, November 15
reviewed by Adam BellTraces
Over the past twenty years, large swaths of China's landscape have been transformed and denuded of their natural resources in an effort to propel the country into the 21st century. The skyscrapers of Shanghai or Beijing superficially display progress, but powerful political forces and willful ignorance often hide the environmental cost of such rapid development...
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Thursday, November 10
reviewed by Tom LeiningerAsk the Cat
In Ask the Cat, Satoru Toma wanders the area surrounding Brussels as a cat would -- straying into open areas, crawling through the underbrush of the woods and along the edges of society -- looking for photographs. He is drawn to the warm sharp light specific to the region...
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Tuesday, November 8
reviewed by George SladeSuburban Dreams
No matter how many people appear in Beth Yarnelle Edwards' photographs, or how captivating the circumstances, the titles are simple -- one or two names, a country or a state (California, a country of its own), and a year. There is one telling exception to the title rule, however, in a pair of pictures titled
Home Theatre I from 2000 and
Home Theatre II, 2005, in which we see a shot/reverse shot from both ends of a center aisle in a room full of fashionable recliners, video projection apparatus, and popcorn...
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Thursday, November 3
reviewed by Ellen RennardAnimals Are Outside Today
My great-grandfather wrote two books titled
Our Great Outdoors -- one volume on reptiles, another on mammals. Thus it is in the spirit of family tradition that I feel I could, on occasion, as Whitman wrote, 'turn and live with the animals...
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Tuesday, November 1
reviewed by Tom LeiningerTopographie
My photographic background is in newspaper journalism, which has instilled in me a belief that a strong picture should be able to stand on its own without the aid of words. Topographie by Andreas Gehrke challenged that notion...
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