Helmut Newton – ‘Pages from the Glossies’

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 …

Lee Friedlander – ‘The American Monument’

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 …

Andrew Bellamy – ‘Analogue Photography’

Andrew Bellamy’s Analogue Photography: Reference Manual for Shooting Film is exactly what the title says: a film photography reference manual. It reminds me a good deal of the first photography-related book I bought—Technical Manual of Basic Photography, TM 1-219, July 1, 1941, a manual published by the War Department for the Army Air Forces—crossed with a …

Geoff Dyer – ‘The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand’

The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand is Geoff Dyer‘s new-ish homage to John Sarkowski, whose Atget and Looking at Photographs form the jumping off point for Dyer’s exploration of the Winogrand archive.  As a Winogrand monograph, it might fall a bit short, though it does include 18 previously unpublished color(!) photographs and a contact sheet from Winogrand’s …

Michael Watson – ‘The Wrestlers’

Michael Watson’s The Wrestlers: Polaroid Portraits 2015-2018 collects a bunch of Polaroids (or, really, Impossible Project black frame black & whites) of amateur wrestlers, shot backstage at various events in Chicago and the Midwest, California, and Florida, in costume/character and more relaxed. I helped to kickstarter it back in January 2018, and it arrived in my …