Jenia Fridlyand – ‘Entrance to Our Valley’

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 – ‘Gasoline’

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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Polaroid iType vs. 600…

Is there any difference between Polaroid 600 and iType, well, beyond the battery? Inquiring mind (mine) was mildly curious and I have two really fine, best of class Polaroid cameras on hand (the Mint SLR670-s and the Polaroid OneStep+), so I loaded up a couple of packs and got to shooting.

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Tom Griggs & Paul Kwiatkowski – ‘Ghost Guessed’

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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Eve Arnold – ‘The Unretouched Woman’

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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75-150? Meet 75-150

Last fall, I acquired a beat up old camera bag from my dad. Unpacking it, I found a largely complete Olympus OM 10 kit: 28, 50, 75-150 lenses; flash; manual adapter; filters; brackets and cables to take the flash off camera. It’s almost as if someone went into a Penny’s or Sears’s in about 1980 and got talked into way more than they ever needed.

Back in 2012, when I first picked up the D7000, and on Ken Rockwell’s recommendation,* I acquired a 75-150 Series E. I dropped the camera on it shortly after, creating the one-and-only Zomb-E, and later acquired another copy.

Having tested (minimally, as is my standard) the 28mm f/3.5 G-Zuiko and the 50mm f/1.8 F. Zuiko, I decided it was finally time to see how the 75-150mm f/4 Zuiko fares when pitted against the vaunted Nikon 75-150mm f/3.5 E-Series.

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