Category Archives: Reviews

Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes’ The Sweet Flypaper of Life is a classic that I heard of many times, but never really looked too hard for. I can’t say why, really, but when Alec Soth mentioned it during his “Pictures & Words #2,” I ended up jumping on it.

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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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‘Ghost Guessed’ by Tom Griggs and Paul Kwiatkowski.

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.