I found a first edition copy of Paul Graham’s A1: The Great North Road in a used book store in Kansas City. At the time, I was well aware of Paul Graham thanks to The Whiteness of the Whale, but hadn’t head much about his early, self published work. But the price was right ($7.50) …
Author Archives: James Cockroft
Dawoud Bey – ‘Portraits 1975-1995’
Dawoud Bey’s large format polaroid diptych and multi-panel portraits absolutely knock me out. I learned of these from his excellent Aperture Photography Workshop Series title on Photographing People and Communities, and went on a hunt for a book of this work. The only one I could find was Portraits 1975-1995, the catalog from an exhibition …
Morning Light
A couple of years ago, I picked up my beloved Niko 50mm f/1.8 E and found the focus ring unusably stiff. Within seconds, I was on the ‘bay to acquire another, but found prices outrageous. For about $20 more than the average price of a good, tested, guaranteed E-Series, I scored a Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 …
The Beatles – ‘Get Back’
Get Back is largely the 2021 Peter Jackson film of same name in book form, featuring photographs from Linda McCartney and Ethan A. Russell, as well as frames from Michael Lindsay-Hogg & crew’s film footage, and a script put together from the audio recordings by John Harris. I mostly came for the pictures, and as …
Shomei Tomatsu – ‘Chewing Gum and Chocolate’
Chewing Gum and Chocolate is a collection of Shomei Tomatsu’s photographs made throughout Japan, and mostly in and around Okinawa, between 1959 and 1981, with the vast majority coming in the 1960s. It’s not really a greatest hits collection, and not really a proper, unified monograph either, and I probably came across it while working …
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Svema Color 125 in 120?
Many years ago, I acquired 3 rolls of Svema Color 125 from the good people at the FPP. I shot two of them straight—the first one, never shared, with many, many operator errors; the second beautifully, albeit with some processing errors—and a third redscaled, and almost pulled the trigger on a bulk roll a handful …
Joachim Brohm – ‘Ohio’
I learned of Brohm only thanks to a joint book he did with Alec Soth, Two Rivers, which I only learned of thanks to, well, I don’t recall. Ohio collects some of his available-light work from a Fulbright Scholarship he won that brought him to study at OSU at the same time that Allan Sekula …
