The Photographic Essay was introduced to me via a conversation on Twitter, if I recall. It was a couple of years ago, I think, and maybe I just read it but didn’t participate and that’s why I can’t find it now. No matter. William Albert Allard was a National Geographic photographer in the 1960s, and then a freelance photographer for the Geographic in the prime years for freelance National Geographic photographers and well into the magazine’s Fox-owned decline.*

In my YouTube blurb for the unboxing, I call The Photographic Essay “… a sort of master class on documentary photography and creating photographic essays….” After spending some time with it, well, I guess I stand by that. Sort of.

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John Szarkowski’s Atget was recommended, or, rather, referenced in Geoff Dyer’s The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand, if I recall, as the model on which Dyer based his 100-comments-about-100-pictures arrangement of that book. It’s quite similar to Szarkowski’s classic Looking at Photographs, which I picked up cheap at a Half Price Books years ago, but still haven’t worked all the way through, and shame on me.

In brief, Atget is Szarkowski’s pick of 100 images from MOMA’s Atget collection, paired with essays that speak around the photographs and Atget’s life. It had me laughing and looking closely, and I wholeheartedly recommend you get one through interlibrary loan or something, if you have any interest at all in writing about photography (or writing in general).

But allow me to go on a bit…

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Two Rivers. Joachim Brohm / Alec Soth is an exhibition catalog from an exhibition of the same name at the NRW Forum, Dusseldorf, 29 March – 7 July 2019. I don’t recall who or what recommended it to me, and I have all of the Soth works included in their full books (mostly reprints), but was unfamiliar with Brohm and wondered what sort of conversation their works might have with one another.

After reading the essays (three, from Ralph Goertz, Vince Leo, and Wolfgang Ullrich) and looking through the selected photographs from about 25 years of image making from both artists, well…

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Sakiko Nomura: Ango is a sort of three-way collaboration between author Ango Sakaguchi, photographer Sakiko Nomura, and designer Satoshi Machiguchi, and it follows Daido: Ango, which readers of this blog may remember.

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Still Feel Gone is a split zine/photobook thing from Tim Carpenter and Nathan Pearce and Deadbeat Club Press. It reminds me a bit of old split 7″ punk records, and in more than mere form, somehow.

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For Displaced: Stories from the Syrian Diaspora, Majd Taby and Sara Kerens (writer and photographer, respectively) traveled alongside Syrian refugees, fleeing war and the Islamic State, from Turkey to Greece and up through Europe during the height of the refugee crisis. The book weaves together narratives, interviews, and photographs to tell a more human, individual story than the quick takes we got from the western media.

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I follow John Sevigny on Twitter, and when he announced availability of his “Hymnal” zine, I quickly picked up a copy.

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