Khalik Allah – ‘Souls Against the Concrete’

Several years ago, I took a screengrab of a photo for my ‘Inspiration/To Try’ collection. I’ve returned to it many times, wondering how to get the light, the focus, the blur. I had no idea who took the photo, and at the time, I really didn’t care. It’s a portrait of an older man, close …

Jo Ann Walters – ‘Wood River Blue Pool’

Jo Ann Walters’ Wood River Blue Pool is a collection of her photographs of mostly women and girls, photographed around Alton, IL and all up and down the Mississippi river, mostly in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It comes with a companion volume, Emma Kemp’s Blue Pool Cecelia, a wonderful meditation on violence and the Blue …

John Irvine – ‘Partition’

Growing up as a purple-haired punk rocker in the 1990s, I was aware of the divisions between the Catholics and Protestants, (the winding down of) the Troubles, Bobby Sands, the IRA, the Sinn Féin, the Good Friday Agreement, and all that, but had no idea, beyond what I read in some Punk and Anarchist zines, …

Harry Gruyaert – ‘East/West’

When I first flipped through East/West, I was convinced something had gone wrong with the printing. Everything looked much more saturated and contrasty than the 2015 Harry Gruyaert monograph, and I felt disgusted and ripped off, and I shoved East/West onto the shelf, determined to wait a few years (until it went out of print) and then sell …

Todd Hido – ‘Intimate Distance’

I’m a Todd Hido fan. His work has something, a suggestive, narrative, open-ended quality that I find fascinating and intriguing. I’ve thusfar been unable to acquire any of his monographs—House Hunting,  Excerpts from Silver Meadows, Khrystyna’s World, etc.—so, for now, Intimate Distance: Twenty-Five Years of Photographs, A Chronological Album, a retrospective of sorts, will have to do.

Harvey Benge – ‘One Day’

In November of 2009, Harvey Benge struck up a conversation with Gerry Badger about print on demand publishing and the opportunities to produce a photobook, start to finish, in one day. The idea gestated for awhile, as Benge talked with other photographers and thought about it some more, and by May 2010, at the Kassel …

Ioana Marinca – ‘Home is Somewhere (and everywhere in between)’

Home is Somewhere (and everywhere in between) is a collection of Ioana Marinca‘s photographs taken in Romania, Ireland, and England, with some text and poems from Yann Ryan, exploring the idea of ‘home.’ Is ‘home’ your place of birth? your parent’s house? your first apartment? a dorm room? Is ‘home’ a town or city, a …