The Charcoal Book Club is a book-of-the-month club for photobooks. After my 1990s experiences with Record-, CD-, and Book-of-the-Month clubs, I was a bit suspicious/dubious, but still intrigued, and so I decided to give it a try…
Category Archives: Photobook
Unboxing Larry Sultan’s ‘Pictures from Home’
For Pictures from Home, Larry Sultan spent much of the 1980s photographing his parents and trying to come to grips with his own transition into adulthood, “confronting my confusion about what it is to be a man in this culture” (26) and trying “to take photography literally. To stop time. I want my parents to live …
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Unboxing Nancy Rexroth’s ‘IOWA’
In Nancy Rexroth’s IOWA, Iowa is not a place, it’s a state of mind.*
Unboxing Jungjin Lee’s ‘Opening’
Honestly, I don’t know quite what to make of Jungjin Lee’s Opening. Dark, gritty, almost Provoke-style are-bure-bokeh, but even beyond anything Moriyama ever put out, landscapes, or bits thereof, presented in this groovy accordion-style book. It’s really fantastic, if somewhat hard to see or read…
Unboxing ‘All about Saul Leiter’
All about Saul Leiter is a catalogue, published alongside the “Photographer Saul Leiter: A Retrospective” exhibition that’s currently on view at the Itami City Museum of Art (through May 20, 2018). It’s a reasonably thorough exploration of Leiter’s fashion, street, and nude photography, as well as his painting, and makes an excellent introduction to Leiter’s …
Unboxing Stephen Gill’s ‘Night Procession’
Stephen Gill’s Night Procession was on a whole bunch of Best Of and Photobook of the Year lists in 2017, and it’s no wonder, really. If you’re unaware, Gill set some motion activated cameras up in the forest near his home in Sweden, added some infrared flashes to them, and photographed the birds, deer, wild hogs, …
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Unboxing ‘Shadows of the State’
Insofar as it’s “A photobook about numbers stations, covert transmissions between intelligence agencies and their undercover operatives,” Lewis Bush‘s Shadows of the State is one of the more interesting photobooks in my collection. It’s a one-stop shop for information on all the current and former numbers stations—radio transmissions thought to be used by spies and counterintelligence …
