The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957 presents images Gordon Parks made while working on “The Atmosphere of Crime,” a 1957 photographic essay in Life magazine, and that are now in the holdings of The Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA). I started reading the essays and looking through the images a few days before jurors in Minnesota handed down their too-rare guilty verdict. Insofar as the pictures included were made, at time of writing, 64 years ago, they seem, with the clothing and vehicles and grain, like something out of history; insofar as Parks’ photographs point to the ways police operate, largely against economically disadvantaged black and brown people, they seem prescient and timely, even if the cops have a bit of a Sheriff Andy character to them that seem quaint today, in the age of tanks and body armor and tear gas and rubber bullets, not to mention “I can’t breathe.”

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Jenia Fridlyand‘s Entrance to Our Valley started out as a highly lauded, extremely low edition, self published marvel and a couple of years later, TIS Books reprinted it in a very fine trade edition that promptly sold out.

Quite coincidentally, I’m sure, Charcoal Book Club named Entrance to Our Valley as the photobook of the month for October, 2019, and, well, purchased only-they-know-how-many for distribution to members like me… It’s a beautiful book, filled with beautifully complex landscape photographs and fairly straightforward portraits, and once again, I’m thrilled and privileged to be a Charcoal subscriber.

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David Campany’s Gasoline is a great book, and something of a masterclass in sequencing, pacing, and overall book/zinecraft. The project collects photographs of gas stations Campany acquired over several years from newspapers as they sold off their archives in the conversion to digital, and Campany makes them into a tale of the long-term disaster that is/was the American love affair with internal combustion.

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After finding and absolutely loving Paul Kwiatkowski’s And Every Day was Overcast,* I’ve kept half an eye out for other things. Kwiatkowski isn’t the most active, doesn’t seem to have a website, and I somehow stumbled across Ghost Guessed, his 2018 book with Tom Griggs.

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The Unretouched Woman is a 1976 collection/monograph of Eve Arnold’s photographs of women around the world, from the American South and South Africa, to Russia, the Hindu Kush, and Mamie Eisenhower in a funhouse mirror. It’s at turns touching and revelatory, and is available for stupidly cheap prices all over.

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