Richard Misrach – ‘on Landscape and Meaning’

Richard Misrach on Landscape and Meaning is the latest (as of 2021) entry into Aperture’s “The Photography Workshop Series,” and, like others in the series, it’s something like a visiting artist’s lecture at a small state college somewhere in middle America, where almost no one has heard of the person. There are wildly useful and …

Debi Cornwall – ‘Necessary Fictions’

I’m not sure where or how I came across Debi Cornwall‘s Necessary Fictions. I suspected Jörg Colberg, but nope. I thought maybe Charcoal. Nope. It could’ve been an email from Radius Books, or maybe someone mentioned it on a podcast or something. Allahu Alim. However it got into my hot little hands, I’m glad enough …

Nick Waplington – ‘Anaglypta’

Nick Waplington‘s Anaglypta was the Charcoal Photobook of the Month selection for April, 2021, but I didn’t receive it from Charcoal, as I preordered this signed copy from Dashwood almost a year ago.* I’m not sure where I heard about it… maybe an email from Dashwood, even, but it’s been sitting on the to-be-reviewed shelf/shelves …

Richard Bram – ‘Short Stories’

Richard Bram began making street photographs in the early 1980s and was a founding member of In-Public (the part that split off to form UPPhotographers). If you’re aware of all that, then you sort of have an idea of what his pictures might look like: he knows what he’s doing and knows how to do …

Roy DeCarava & Langston Hughes – ‘The Sweet Flypaper of Life’

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.

Gordon Parks – ‘The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957’

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 …

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 …