The rise of photography books seems unstoppable in the hasty era of Instagram, with a rich and varied offer that ranges from the most sober and traditional proposals to the most experimental and risky.
Publications through which their authors support the book format not only as one of the most affordable ways to disseminate their work, but also as a way that provides the reader with more intimate and personal access to singular universes that contribute to shaping our visual codes. .
Thus, artists, gallery owners, photographers, publishers, curators, and festival managers comment on some of the titles that in their opinion have stood out in this coming year.
Interior of the book 'Travels through Sweden', by Sigurd Lewerentz. PUENTE EDITORES
Interior of the book 'To look without fear', by Wolfgang Tillmans.MoMA Design Store
Interior of the book 'Matter', by Aleix Plademunt.
Aleix Plademunt (Ca l'Isidret / Spector Books)
Inside the book 'Pending Record', by Mònica Roselló and Jordi Guillumet. Ediciones Anómalas
Interior of the book 'The Waiting Game III', by Txema Salvans. Editorial RM
Interior of the book Blind Spot', by Julie van der Vaart.
MYRTO STEIROU (Void)
Interior of the book 'Hunt the Wren', by Andrew Nuding.
Interior of the book 'On Rape: and Institutional Failure', by Laia Abril.Dewi Lewis Publishing
Interior of the book 'Big Fence / Pitcairn Island' by Rhiannon AdamBlow Up Press
Interior of the book 'Gueari: The Life of the Photobook Designer' by Andi Ari Setiadi Gueari Galeri
Cover of 'Contact High', by D'Angelo Lovell Williams.
mack
Interior of the book 'SCUMB Manifesto', by Justine Kurtland.
mack
Interior of the book 'Mänk'áčen', by Sergio Valenzuela Escobedo.
Laura JONNESKINDT (Palais Book)
Cover of 'Home is not a Place', by Johny Pitts and Roger Robertson.Harpers Collins
Dressmaking workshop, Manchester, Royaume-Uni, 1962. Image belonging to 'Les Anglais / The English', by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Martin Parr.Henri Cartier Bresson / Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum Photo (Delpire & Co)
Hairdresser, Wolverhampton, 2012. Image belonging to 'Les Anglais / The English', by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Martin Parr.
Martin Parr / Magnum Photos (Delpire & Co) (© Martin Parr/MAGNUM PHOTOS)
Interior of the book 'The Unseen Saul Leiter', by Saul Leiter. Editorial RM
Interior of the book 'Some Say Ice', by Alessandra Sanguinetti.MACK
Interior of the book 'The Drawer', by Vince Aletti.SPBH Editions
1. Juan Baraja
Photographer
“Any Wolfgang Tillmans exhibition deserves at least two visits, this year's one, organized by MoMA, gave me three, on different days.
His photographic installations encourage you to discover voraciously and almost without savoring all the rooms while they encourage you to calmly return another time.
The catalogue, a 320-page billet with 400 photographs, achieves exactly the same thing, taking the reader into the universe of the photographer and his particular staging through a combination of the photographs present in the exhibition with images of previous installations. .
The mixture of full-page photographs where we can recreate ourselves in the details, with smaller images, which show complete series, allows us to go through the book in many ways, going back or skipping the pages without any order,
“After the wonderful
Viaje a Italia
, which inevitably refers us to
Viaggio in Italia
(Il Quadrante, 1984), and despite being a completely different book, Puente Editores has compiled in a second volume the photographs that the architect Sigurd Lewerentz took during his travels through Sweden and that seem to work as notes.
A whole compilation of images in black and white, some out of focus and with imprecise framing that show us paths, groups of houses, churches, slopes, details of buildings or gardens, where the architect's gaze is unquestionable.
In short, Sigurd Lewerentz achieves a whole catalog of great interest preserved in the Arkdes archives, in Stockholm”.
2. Bleda and Rosa
María Bleda and José María Rosa, a duo of photographers
“We learned about the
Matter
project through the extraordinary exhibition display that took place at the Canal de Isabel II this summer;
a kind of inventory of images and texts that revolved around one of the most universal issues that concern humanity: origin.
Matter
is also a publication, a very powerful piece in itself that has a markedly encyclopedic character and in which the hundreds of photographs that make up this singular project are compiled and confronted in a complex and suggestive way”.
“We were fortunate to visit the
Pending Registration
exhibition in
Can Manyé,
a small space for art and creation located in Alella, Barcelona.
By means of a singular, almost magical device, the exhibition invited the viewer to go through and walk around a set of fragments of memory and travel records that they quickly felt as their own.
The book, subtle and careful, is not obsessed with transferring the exhibition experience to this other medium, rather it is transformed to maintain the spirit of leisurely and reflective reading latent in the work”.
3. Joan Fontcuberta
Photographer, essayist, critic and teacher
“
The Waiting Game
culminates a long-running photo essay on the concept of waiting.
The first volume was dedicated to roadside prostitutes, the second to anglers, and the latter to solitary dogs with no other occupation than to await the arrival of their owner.
The book boasts a sober presentation, without graphic design
gadgets
and which yields all its visual eloquence to the power of the images and a subtle story for refined palates.
If photography is the art of stopping time, here it abandons itself to situations of watching time go by”.
“The learned Horacio Fernández says that making a good photobook is like cooking the perfect potato omelette: it seems easy but all the ingredients have to be just right.
Blind Spot
is a magnificent example that begins with the combination of a young artist and an independent publisher willing to bet on talent.
In the book, pages of bodies and caves go by, the organic and the geological confronted in torn, dark, dirty, sinister and yet sublime images, which poetically question the entrails of nature and those of photography itself”.
4. Ángel Luis González
Designer, photographer and director of PhotoIreland Festival
“
Laia Abril's project,
A History of Misogyny
offers its second chapter this year after
On Abortion
(2018).
Titled
On Rape: and Institutional Failure
,
the edition published in English by Dewi Lewis presents a visual investigation in the considered and understated style characteristic of Abril's work, replete with historical and contemporary examples of the systemic control of women.
It is an important work that makes the photobook a space not only for cultural dissemination but also for critical and creative protest”.
“In the year that brought photobooks by Irish artists like Mark Duffy, Bernadette Keating, Brian Teeling, Gregory Dunn, Helio León and Eamonn Doyle, the latest gem to arrive is this first book by Andres Nuding.
Cleverly conceived mixing documentary and studio strategies, the work focuses on pre-Christian Irish traditions around the Puck Fair and the celebration of Wren's Day.
The theatrical nature of these rituals, the spectacular costumes and Wren's exquisite touches of creativity in the studio, offer a unique retelling of Irish folklore."
5. Yumi Goto
Curator, editor and researcher
“This is an extraordinary book that I unexpectedly found this summer in Arles.
It describes the life of Andi Ari Setiadi from his birth until he becomes a photobook designer complete with colorful images and graphics”.
“It would be very nice if that place that as children paints us as a dream paradise was like this.
It is to that perception that Rhiannon points to in this deep-rooted book, to that
paradise
in which she herself has been trapped and on which she has carried out a detailed investigation.
6. Ira Lombardía
Artist and researcher
“Justine Kurland has turned her practice around in her latest book,
SCUMB Manifesto
.
A publication that collects a collection of collages that the artist created by cutting up and reconfiguring photobooks, while she went through the process of purging her own library of approximately 150 books by straight white men who have monopolized the photographic canon.
Kurland's collages represent a recovery of history, a dismemberment of patriarchy and an electrifying exercise of freedom”.
“D'Angelo Lovell Williams is a graduate of Syracuse University in New York State, the university where I work and where I discovered his practice as a student.
His photography focuses on the representation of queer
black people
and is guided by his life experience, addressing questions about the representation of race, class, sexuality, gender and intimacy.
The title
Contact High
refers to the importance of touch and gesture in Williams' work, in a poetic and visceral book.
7. Elisa Medde
Curator and editor-in-chief of
Foam Magazine
.
“
Mänk'áčen
is an exceptional publication, the editorial result of extensive research carried out by the artist and researcher Sergio Valenzuela Escobedo, on the arrival of photography in South America in 1840. The book consists of a leporello (accordion) of 5 meters that mixes archival and contemporary images, which offer a new perspective on the photographic mechanisms, and the mysticism and superstition among the natives of South America”.
“
Home is not a Place
is a fascinating and seminal book, a journey through Black Britain through compelling photography and intense poetry.
It presents the journey carried out by Johnny Pitts and the poet Roger Robinson in search of British blackness, their common denominator and their shared experience.
8. Miguel Ángel Sánchéz
Founder and director of the ADN Gallery
"We belong to two different solar systems."
This is how Henri Cartier-Bresson articulated the reconciliation with Martin Parr and settled the bitter controversy surrounding his integration into the Magnum agency.
The exhibition links black and white works by the French hunter of transcendent moments, with the colored impudence of everyday life in the British.
Meeting point of an amazing
paragone
: work and leisure in the north of England in the 1960s and 1980s and the second decade of the 21st century.
This exhibition and its catalog provide unpublished photographs by Cartier-Bresson of the commission he accepted in 1962 for the British television channel ITV / ABC, which harmonize disturbingly with Parr's color saturations in the same socio-graphic exercise.
The catalog works to shorten the distance between two solar systems that, however, share a galaxy”.
“Also previously unpublished are the sixty-six images selected from ten thousand slides in the Saul Leiter archive.
Images of New York taken between the late forties and mid sixties.
The selected photographs of this staunch defender of color take us to a New York at street level in the East Village, where he "likes to capture mundane things and find something in them."
In this publication we will find more than something.
Personally I am fascinated by images, with intersecting planes and surfaces, taken from architectural interiors and vehicles, in which the transience of the moment is highlighted;
as well as the sensation that the images have been shot from a camera obscura operated by the clandestine gaze of the photographer with the painter's eye”.
9. Aaron Schuman
Photographer, writer, curator and teacher
“Since its publication in 1973, Michael Lesy's
Wisconsin Death Trip
has been among the cult classics of photobook enthusiasts.
Lesy tells the wild and tragic stories that took place in Black River Falls, a small Wisconsin town, during the late 19th century, using both historical documents and photographs taken by Charles Van Schaick, a German immigrant who worked as a photographer. in the village.
In
Some Say Ice
, Sanguinetti returns to Black River Falls nearly a century and a half after Shaick began his work, to be heartbroken to discover a place and a community still haunted by its past, still struggling to survive in hostile wilderness under a lingering dark cloud of superstition, economic decline, crime, disease, violence and harshness and the constant threat of the ghost of death.
“A complex and addictive deep dive, page by page, into the life, career, perceptions, passions, and desires of one of photography's great critics and curator, Vince Aletti, through multi-layered compositions like
collage
, created spontaneously using thousands of torn pages, press clippings, gallery invitations and advertisements and other types of memorabilia that the author has been collecting for almost fifty years.
It reads both as an unorthodox visual history of photography and as a serious, provocative and inspiringly personal scrapbook.
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