Author Archives: James Cockroft

Jesse Lenz is the founder and director the wonderful Charcoal Book Club. After a couple of successful years with the club, Charcoal branched out into book publishing with Charcoal Press. The Locusts is Lenz’s first book and it was the Charcoal photobook of the month for… let me count back… November 2020.

Scaffold to the Moon is the sort of expanded version of Huw Alden Davies‘ excellent send up/celebration of his dad, Prince, which I loved. I ordered it without question as soon as I heard of it, and it makes a great addition to my library.

In 1975, Arturo Carlo Quintavalle arrived at the Museum of Modern Art in New York with a bundle of photographs from four Italian photographers and an album by Luigi Ghirri called Paesaggi di Cartone: Photographie sud 1971-1973. The Museum happily received the work, logged it, and shoved it all into the archives, never to be …

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Off for a Family Drive is David Alan Harvey’s 2020 retrospective book. It arrived during the slow-motion crash of Harvey’s cachet and esteem in photo land, broadly considered, and I almost hesitate to talk about it now, in 2022, long after the Twittering went silent. Will this reopen barely-scabbed-over wounds? Will it stir the sleeping …

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Jona Frank’s Cherry Hill is an interesting book. It’s mostly a memoir, and one Frank illustrates with staged photographs, employing actors to portray her younger self and family members. If Diana Markosian’s Santa Barbara was a book I wished I could make, Cherry Hill goes one step further…

I’m not sure where or how Diana Markosian’s Santa Barbara came onto my radar, but it’s near enough to exactly the sort of book I’d like to make, more or less, and I’m a bit jealous (in a good way). The project came to fruition with the help of Lynda Miles, a former scriptwriter for …

Continue reading “Diana Markosian – ‘Santa Barbara’”