Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is one of those books/events that probably needs no introduction. The book has been in near-continual reprint since the 1980s, and the project is Goldin’s most well known. If you’re unfamiliar, well, whatever I have to say about it won’t do it justice and I’ll link to some competent reviewers below. In the mean time, do yourself a favor and go pick up a new or used copy.* It’s a masterwork.

Ron Jude‘s Lago came onto my radar some years ago. I’m not quite sure why I waited so long to pick up a copy, nor why I picked up a copy when I did (sometime during the pandemic-related glut of photobook purchasing in the lost year of 2020), but I did, and now it’s finally time to take a look at it.

The Haddon Hall is a lovely portrait of the aged residents of the titular hall, taken between 1999 and 2002 by Naomi Harris. It was Charcoal Book Club’s photobook of the month for September, 2021, and, in 2019, took Second Prize at the Kessel Dummy Award and won the FUAM Dummy Book Award. It was copublished by MASA and Void, and seems largely, and sadly, sold out.

Girl Pictures was Charcoal Book Club’s photobook of the month for July, 2020… As a long time Kurland fan, at least since I laid eyes on Highway Kind, I preordered a signed copy from Aperture as soon as it was announced, so I contacted Charcoal and traded Girl Pictures for George Georgioiu’s Americans Parade. This is one of the perks of Charcoal membership: if you already have (or just don’t want) a particular book, just email them and say “please swap xxxx for yyyy” (where ‘xxxx’ is the just-announced photobook-of-the-month and ‘yyyy’ is any book in stock in Charcoal’s store) and it’s no problem. They’ll often even include the card and print from the book you declined.* I’m a big fan of Charcoal and what they’re doing.

But this isn’t a review of Charcoal…