Alejandro Cartagena‘s A Small Guide to Home Ownership tickles my situationist nerves. Cartagena took a legitimate advertisements and guides, and modified them with archival advertising and images from a long-term photographic project on suburban sprawl in Juarez and Monterrey. It’s a sort of détournement that I really appreciate and, of course, as a scarce object …
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Happy 4th of July to all my US-based and ex-Pat readers, if any. Simon Kossoff’s Altered States of Agoraphobia came to my attention thanks to @swerdnaekalb and I preordered the book about halfway through the November 2021 interview. Altered States gives a good picture of a rather documentaryish-photogenic part of the United States, and seems …
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Jesse Lenz is the founder and director the wonderful Charcoal Book Club. After a couple of successful years with the club, Charcoal branched out into book publishing with Charcoal Press. The Locusts is Lenz’s first book and it was the Charcoal photobook of the month for… let me count back… November 2020.
Scaffold to the Moon is the sort of expanded version of Huw Alden Davies‘ excellent send up/celebration of his dad, Prince, which I loved. I ordered it without question as soon as I heard of it, and it makes a great addition to my library.
In 1975, Arturo Carlo Quintavalle arrived at the Museum of Modern Art in New York with a bundle of photographs from four Italian photographers and an album by Luigi Ghirri called Paesaggi di Cartone: Photographie sud 1971-1973. The Museum happily received the work, logged it, and shoved it all into the archives, never to be …
Off for a Family Drive is David Alan Harvey’s 2020 retrospective book. It arrived during the slow-motion crash of Harvey’s cachet and esteem in photo land, broadly considered, and I almost hesitate to talk about it now, in 2022, long after the Twittering went silent. Will this reopen barely-scabbed-over wounds? Will it stir the sleeping …
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Jona Frank’s Cherry Hill is an interesting book. It’s mostly a memoir, and one Frank illustrates with staged photographs, employing actors to portray her younger self and family members. If Diana Markosian’s Santa Barbara was a book I wished I could make, Cherry Hill goes one step further…
