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 seen again. Never, that is, until Quentin Bajac, then the new director of the Department of Photography at MoMA, (probably with the help of some interns) went on a hunt for Ghirri work that he thought might be in the archives somewhere…

Rediscovered sometime in the 2010s, Moma helpfully reproduced the album as Cardboard Landscapes: Photographs from 1971-1973, and I snagged a copy.

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 giants of PhotoTwitter land? Will this get me blacklisted too?

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 the “Santa Barbara” television show. She and Markosian wrote a script, interviewed and hired actors, and sorta made a “Santa Barbara” episode version of her young life, first in Yeltsin-era Russia, then in 1990s Santa Barbara, CA. If you don’t have a copy, go buy one now, or, scratch that… scroll down and watch my unboxing first, then go buy a copy.