I have a modest photobook collection, something in the neighborhood of 150 volumes, give or take, and not counting theory books or zines. I’ve tried to be rather democratic in my collecting, picking up books from professionals and amateurs, masters and novices, documentarians and artists, but upon reading Anil Mistry’s review of Pages from the Glossies on 35mmc, I realized something was missing from my collection: fashion.

Sure, I have books from Klein and Avedon, but the books I have from them are their books of social commentary: (Life is Good and Good for You in) New York and Nothing Personal (with James Baldwin). So I figured I needed some proper fashion photography in my collection, and jumped on Pages from the Glossies. 

Continue reading “Helmut Newton – ‘Pages from the Glossies’”

For The American Monument, Lee Friedlander turned his attention to public monuments, photographed in situ (sometimes more situ than in), with all of our forgetting, misremembering, and disregard fully on display. Thousands of negatives, shot over a 12 year period, were edited down to 213, presented singly, or in groups of 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, or 9, and followed by Afterwords from Leslie George Katz (the 1976 edition) and Peter Galassi (for the 2017 one, shown here). All together, it’s a mammoth book, definitely worthy of its subjects.

Continue reading “Lee Friedlander – ‘The American Monument’”

Jeffrey Saddoris‘ Photography by the Letter is a lovingly designed dictionary of all things photography, from Aperture to Zoom Lens, with all kinds of stuff in between and a set of interviews with well-known professionals at the end.

Continue reading “Jeffrey Saddoris – ‘Photography by the Letter’”