Some time in late 2020, I started feeling uneasy about my photobook addiction predilection. It took another year before I did anything about it, and one of the first things I did was to stop opening emails from Mack. I got pretty good at this in 2022 and delete-before-reading helped me avoid buying many photobooks. Sadly or, rather, fortunately… I opened a Mack email in January 2023 and a couple of weeks later, Gail Rebhan‘s About Time arrived on the doorstep.

There’s only one thing I have to say about this misstep, this relapse, this backslide: “Gail Rebhan? Where have you been all my life!”

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Farewell Photography is the book that really cemented Daido Moriyama’s name. Sure, he was already famous for his work with Provoke, but Farewell Photography was a statement. This version is the 2020 AkioNagasawa canvas-bound reprint of the 2012 edition, and now with 1 image per page (according to text at the end of this version).

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I’ve made no secret about being a rather massive Hiromix fan. I credit an encounter with her work in 2010 or so that really got me interested in photography, and it’s all been downhill from there…. Girls Blue is Hiromix’s first book, as far as I know, and for many years I thought it was out of reach, monetarily-speaking. Then, sometime in 2020 or 2021, about the time I started my previously mentioned Moriyama binge, I also went on a Hiromix binge, and found a fairly clean, if rather smelly copy of Girls Blue for an acceptable price.

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It was 2020-21, and I was an impulsive photobook-buying so-and-so. Over about 16 months, I bought nearly a dozen Daido Moriyama books. It might just be these purchases that led me to essentially stop buying photobooks entirely….

Continue reading “Daido Moriyama – Record #45 & Record #46”

‘Microphones in 2020‘ is a 2020 album from alt-folk band “Microphones” (now known as “Mount Eerie”). Microphones in 2020, though, is a collection of 761 photographs that sorta follow the music; it’s a photobook, sure, and also a sort of stop-motion music video. tl;dr: it’s maybe the most interesting and inspirational thing I’ve pulled off the “to review” shelf in many many months.

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Donna Ferrato’s Holy is a celebration of women, in all shapes, sizes, colors, and genders-at-birth, made over several decades and on many continents, and I’m privileged to have a signed copy.

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Back in 2011/12, when I first got (back) into photography, Colin Westerbeck and Joel Meyrowitz’s Bystander: A History of Street Photography was an oft-mentioned bit of unobtanium, with copies of the 2001 edition running a few hundred dollars. I wrote it off as one one of those books I’d just never see and quickly forgot about it. Years came and went, and if not for the Laurence King Publishing email list, I might never have known of the 2017 expanded edition, which I believe I got on sale. If you’re a capital-S, capital-P Street Photographer or Street Photography aficionado, Bystander is a must have. Insofar as I’m neither, well… I am (or was) something of a photobook collector, and it therefore makes total sense.

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