I’m not sure what prompted me to buy Rinko Kawauchi‘s Illuminance. From the packaging, I suspect I bought it from Target, but I can’t find the receipt or any record of the purchase, and the sources that usually drive (or drove) my photobook acquisition strategy were silent on it in the weeks and months before I filmed the unboxing.

Anyway. However I happened to pick it up, I’m glad I did…

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I picked this Aenne Biermann 60 Fotos reprint up after a recommendation from (who else) Jorg Colberg, and like many other books before it, I’m glad I did.

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The Whispering of Things: Excerpts from a photography journal, 2008-2016 is just what the title describes: excerpts from Thomas Krempke’s photography journals. The written entries vary from descriptions of the project to observations on life and photography (and living through photography, photographing as proof-of-life), and the photography is mostly of the snapshot variety.

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Everything old is new again, all thanks and praise be to God.

Iain McKell‘s latest book, New Girl Order, revolves around a group of young female artists and performers, and they look like the raver- and hippy-kids I grew up around, all happenings and experimenting with clothes and hair and ways of being… I honestly thought smartphones and social media killed it all, and it’s good to see the kids still being the kids.

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What to say about Sohrab Hura‘s The Coast: Twelve Parallel Short Stories…

Well, it was, I believe, the July 2019 photobook-of-the-month from the excellent Charcoal Book Club, and if I recall, it got a bunch of press, not all of it entirely positive, around its release. It’s made some best of lists for 2019, and, in fact, it won the 2019 Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation Photo Book of the Year award.

So… If I say “it’s not really my cup of tea” right off the bat, well, it’s not, really, but insofar as The Coast is Hura’s fourth book, and insofar as Hura is an associate Magnum photographer, and given the various awards noted above, your idea of good tea is probably different from mine…

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Andy Warhol loved America, warts and all, and America is his homage, his love letter, to it, to us, to US.

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