I’ve made no secret about being a rather massive Hiromix fan. I credit an encounter with her work in 2010 or so that really got me interested in photography, and it’s all been downhill from there…. Girls Blue is Hiromix’s first book, as far as I know, and for many years I thought it was out of reach, monetarily-speaking. Then, sometime in 2020 or 2021, about the time I started my previously mentioned Moriyama binge, I also went on a Hiromix binge, and found a fairly clean, if rather smelly copy of Girls Blue for an acceptable price.

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It was 2020-21, and I was an impulsive photobook-buying so-and-so. Over about 16 months, I bought nearly a dozen Daido Moriyama books. It might just be these purchases that led me to essentially stop buying photobooks entirely….

Continue reading “Daido Moriyama – Record #45 & Record #46”

‘Microphones in 2020‘ is a 2020 album from alt-folk band “Microphones” (now known as “Mount Eerie”). Microphones in 2020, though, is a collection of 761 photographs that sorta follow the music; it’s a photobook, sure, and also a sort of stop-motion music video. tl;dr: it’s maybe the most interesting and inspirational thing I’ve pulled off the “to review” shelf in many many months.

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Donna Ferrato’s Holy is a celebration of women, in all shapes, sizes, colors, and genders-at-birth, made over several decades and on many continents, and I’m privileged to have a signed copy.

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Back in 2011/12, when I first got (back) into photography, Colin Westerbeck and Joel Meyrowitz’s Bystander: A History of Street Photography was an oft-mentioned bit of unobtanium, with copies of the 2001 edition running a few hundred dollars. I wrote it off as one one of those books I’d just never see and quickly forgot about it. Years came and went, and if not for the Laurence King Publishing email list, I might never have known of the 2017 expanded edition, which I believe I got on sale. If you’re a capital-S, capital-P Street Photographer or Street Photography aficionado, Bystander is a must have. Insofar as I’m neither, well… I am (or was) something of a photobook collector, and it therefore makes total sense.

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In November 2022, Janko Bosch reached out to me and offered to send a copy of his new book/zine, Dressed. Most email I receive at this address is of the canned meat variety, and so it’s a thrill to receive actual comments from actual humans.

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Victor Burgin’s Between collects interviews and occasional writings around a double handful of Burgin’s photo/art projects from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. The book originally appeared in 1986 and was out of print for a couple of decades until Mack reprinted it in 2020. As someone interested in art history & theory (I hold a master’s degree in same from Stony Brook: if you know, you know), as a conceptual art-o-file, and as a fan of work that mixes image and text, it was a no-brainer.

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