I preordered Alec Soth’s Gathered Leaves Annotated within seconds of the Mack announcement hitting my Inbox. It was one of the last, if not the last buy-it-now, impulse, knee-jerk photobook purchases of my crazed, fomo-driven, debt-creating photobook collecting hobby (now thankfully on hiatus, if not gone forever). What was I afraid of missing out on? Read on to find out…

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‘An -My Lê On Contested Terrain‘ is (or was) a retrospective exhibition of An-My Lê’s work from the mid 1980s through the late 2020s that began at the Carnegie Museum of Art in 2020 and travelled all over. On Contested Terrain is the exhibition catalog, co-published by Aperture, and it was the Charcoal photobook of the month for October 2020.

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Alejandro Cartagena‘s A Small Guide to Home Ownership tickles my situationist nerves. Cartagena took a legitimate advertisements and guides, and modified them with archival advertising and images from a long-term photographic project on suburban sprawl in Juarez and Monterrey. It’s a sort of détournement that I really appreciate and, of course, as a scarce object (a first edition of 600) from a professional photographer with a few dozen books to his credit, it’s less a détournement than a recuperation, but still. It’s a nice book.

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Happy 4th of July to all my US-based and ex-Pat readers, if any. Simon Kossoff’s Altered States of Agoraphobia came to my attention thanks to @swerdnaekalb and I preordered the book about halfway through the November 2021 interview. Altered States gives a good picture of a rather documentaryish-photogenic part of the United States, and seems an appropriate way to shoot off some fireworks on this most patriotic of days.

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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.

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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.

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