Martin Bogren‘s August Song is a lovely collection of half frame, black & white photographs taken at rural dances in the Swedish countryside, and was the Charcoal Book Club photobook of the month for April 2020.

Ben Brody‘s Attention Servicemember was on everyone’s radar when it first appeared in 2019, and quickly sold out. Not being one to be particularly interested in war or fighting or pictures of either, I didn’t jump on it. Thankfully, it was Charcoal Book Club’s photobook of the month for January 2020, and so I ended up with a signed copy of the first, Red Hook Editions edition. Brody has since reissued the book, with some new pictures added, on Mass Books, his imprint with Peter Van Agtmael.

I always thought that if I were to make a war story about these conflicts, it would be about a unit that goes on patrol. Their vehicle gets blown to pieces by an improvised explosive hidden in the road, burning to death several soldiers and taking the limbs off of others, who barely survive. The rest of the unit searches desperately for something to shoot. They fail and return to base, where they go to the dining hall and decide which of the ten varieties of pie they’d like to eat.

Van Agtmael, Peter. Sorry for the War. Mass Books, MA. Unpaged, in the discussion of an image titled “Atlanta, Georgia. USA. 2016.”

If I wasn’t fairly sure of Peter Van Agtmael‘s view of the various wars and interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan after his excellent Disco Night Sept 11, the quote above, from Sorry for the War, makes it absolutely clear.

Peter Van Agtmael‘s Disco Night Sept 11 was on the shortlist for Aperture’s Book of the Year back in 2014. I missed it at the time, and I picked this copy up, if I recall, during a Magnum book sale in 2019 or 2020. I botched the unboxing video, lost track of the book, and it wound up on the “already reviewed” shelves somehow.