I’m not sure where or how I came across Debi Cornwall‘s Necessary Fictions. I suspected Jörg Colberg, but nope. I thought maybe Charcoal. Nope. It could’ve been an email from Radius Books, or maybe someone mentioned it on a podcast or something. Allahu Alim. However it got into my hot little hands, I’m glad enough …
Category Archives: Reviews
Nick Waplington – ‘Anaglypta’
Nick Waplington‘s Anaglypta was the Charcoal Photobook of the Month selection for April, 2021, but I didn’t receive it from Charcoal, as I preordered this signed copy from Dashwood almost a year ago.* I’m not sure where I heard about it… maybe an email from Dashwood, even, but it’s been sitting on the to-be-reviewed shelf/shelves …
Richard Bram – ‘Short Stories’
Richard Bram began making street photographs in the early 1980s and was a founding member of In-Public (the part that split off to form UPPhotographers). If you’re aware of all that, then you sort of have an idea of what his pictures might look like: he knows what he’s doing and knows how to do …
Roy DeCarava & Langston Hughes – ‘The Sweet Flypaper of Life’
Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes’ The Sweet Flypaper of Life is a classic that I heard of many times, but never really looked too hard for. I can’t say why, really, but when Alec Soth mentioned it during his “Pictures & Words #2,” I ended up jumping on it.
Gordon Parks – ‘The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957’
The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957 presents images Gordon Parks made while working on “The Atmosphere of Crime,” a 1957 photographic essay in Life magazine, and that are now in the holdings of The Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA). I started reading the essays and looking through the images a few days before jurors …
Continue reading “Gordon Parks – ‘The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957’”
Jenia Fridlyand – ‘Entrance to Our Valley’
Jenia Fridlyand‘s Entrance to Our Valley started out as a highly lauded, extremely low edition, self published marvel and a couple of years later, TIS Books reprinted it in a very fine trade edition that promptly sold out. Quite coincidentally, I’m sure, Charcoal Book Club named Entrance to Our Valley as the photobook of the …
Continue reading “Jenia Fridlyand – ‘Entrance to Our Valley’”
David Campany – ‘Gasoline’
David Campany’s Gasoline is a great book, and something of a masterclass in sequencing, pacing, and overall book/zinecraft. The project collects photographs of gas stations Campany acquired over several years from newspapers as they sold off their archives in the conversion to digital, and Campany makes them into a tale of the long-term disaster that …
