Raymond Meeks’ ‘ciprian honey cathedral’ is a meditation on home and family, and it’s the sort of book I’d like to make, more or less. Looking through it makes me want to pick up the camera again, start looking again, and I know it’s impossible for me to make Meeks’ book, so the cameras continue gathering dust even though I know I’ll only make my book by making pictures…

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I’m not exactly sure where or how I came across Joe Greer and his 2020 book nyc, i love you…, but I did. And I guess I’m glad I did, as it’s sold out now and Google auto-suggests “joe greer nyc I love you for sale,” which suggests there’s some demand…

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After spending time with Shinya Fujiwara’s American Roulette, I just had to have more, and so I went on a hunt. His 1978 travel guidebook Kashmir popped up and I think I paid all of $7 for it… Win!

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I’m so out of the photobook-reviewing game… Apologies in advance to Mr. Soth, for whom I have a great deal of respect and admiration, and get ready for a few long-overdue, rambling, and internally inconsistent comments on A Pound of Pictures.

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I preordered Alec Soth’s Gathered Leaves Annotated within seconds of the Mack announcement hitting my Inbox. It was one of the last, if not the last buy-it-now, impulse, knee-jerk photobook purchases of my crazed, fomo-driven, debt-creating photobook collecting hobby (now thankfully on hiatus, if not gone forever). What was I afraid of missing out on? Read on to find out…

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‘An -My Lê On Contested Terrain‘ is (or was) a retrospective exhibition of An-My Lê’s work from the mid 1980s through the late 2020s that began at the Carnegie Museum of Art in 2020 and travelled all over. On Contested Terrain is the exhibition catalog, co-published by Aperture, and it was the Charcoal photobook of the month for October 2020.

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Alejandro Cartagena‘s A Small Guide to Home Ownership tickles my situationist nerves. Cartagena took a legitimate advertisements and guides, and modified them with archival advertising and images from a long-term photographic project on suburban sprawl in Juarez and Monterrey. It’s a sort of détournement that I really appreciate and, of course, as a scarce object (a first edition of 600) from a professional photographer with a few dozen books to his credit, it’s less a détournement than a recuperation, but still. It’s a nice book.

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