If you’re not a subscriber to Jim Grey’s excellent newsletter or regular visitor to his blog, stop reading right now and do yourself a favor: subscribe directly. At least go visit his blog. Grey writes about his life: his career, his family, and his experience with both, alongside camera reviews, film reviews, and, occasionally, the great little photobooks he makes.

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6 Feet Back From Life: A Homeless Man’s Photo Essay On Life During Coronavirus is a collection of Bumdog Torres’ photographs and writings from 2020 and early 2021. Much of the writing and many of the photographs previously appeared on LAist, Medium, and perhaps elsewhere, so you may already be familiar. I became aware of Torres thanks to swerdnaekalb’s great interview with him, and I encourage you to read that and Torres’s other writing. He’s doing great things.

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I was aware of Wim Wenders thanks to some sort of avant-garde interview thing I only dimly recall: a woman’s voice reciting questions and breathlessly saying “Vim Vindehrrrs” over and over and over, and Wenders replying with some sort of images flashing across the screen and all of it auf deutsch. I think I have it on DVD somewhere maybe, probably bootlegged or otherwise duped. At the time, I was deeply invested in my art and/or grad school education, and so dug the (to me) nonsense interview. I couldn’t understand a word of it (despite 4 years of Deutsch in die Hoch Schule). smh. And guess what? I never saw a Wenders film… Not Paris, Texas, not the Buena Vista Social Club, none of them. :facepalm:

So when I started seeing Wenders mentioned on the @filmphotographic or @jasonlee Instagram, I knew the name and had an idea, I thought, but I didn’t know he was a photographer and it took awhile before I bought a book. Written in the West Revisited was the first one I went for, or the first one I grabbed off the to-review shelves anyway.

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Lauren Withrow made the pictures for Somewhere at the Edge of the World out in West Texas, I think, and as a native Texan, I couldn’t resist, and I’m not disappointed.

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I Dream of Dust is Ben P. Ward‘s exploration of the prairie half of Colorado, that bit of country that most people forget about when they consider the state. It’s not all mountains, as anyone who’s ever driven from, say, Eureka Springs, AR to Denver, as Mom and I did recently, and after growing tired of the amber waves of Kansas, we still had 100 miles or more of them in Colorado before we hit the Rockies. Anyway. Ward’s book gives a view into the communities that we just sped by.

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