I can’t always say why a certain book arouses my interest. In the case of “I, Oblomov”, I believe it was the press release that stated that “Ikuru Kuwajima explored the post-Soviet space of Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan through the lens of ‘oblomovism’”. Since these are countries I haven’t visited but have seen numerous pictures
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Forty Portraits in Forty Years by Nicholas Nixon is one of the most impressive, and touching, documentary projects I’ve ever come across for it makes me see, and feel, a reality that I’m rarely aware of. The passing of time, that is. This series had such a strong impact on me that I’ve never really
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When Brooklyn-raised photographer Joseph Rodriguez first debuted his body of work shot in Spanish Harlem in the 1980s, it changed the face of documentary photography. Grit, elegy, celebration, pride, lurking cataclysm—all embedded in the portrait of a place and the people. Now, three decades later, Rodriguez and powerHouse Books are revisiting that groundbreaking series: unearthing
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Cig Harvey’s third monograph is a vibrant and bold book, capturing moments of awe, icons of the everyday, and life on the threshold between magic and disaster. The breathless moments of beauty in her images propel us to fathom the sacred in the split-seconds of everyday. A raw awareness of fragility permeates this work. I
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Found Polaroids is a collection of the best stories from the Found Polaroid Project, a personal archive of over 6,000 orphaned images collected since 2011. The concept behind the project is simple, to breathe new life into long-forgotten images by asking creative minds to write stories about them. Eerily distant yet warmly familiar, the stories, and
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Legend has it that the “Potemkin Village” originated in an effort by Russian Field Marshal Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin “to conceal from Empress Catherine the Great the shabby state of the villages in the recently annexed territory of Crimea in 1787. Walter Moser, Chief Curator for photography in the Albertina, Vienna, one of the contributing writers
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I love the concept of this book and do think it an excellent idea to photograph people who take photographs of other people – and felt instant sympathy when glancing through the pages of this tome. Very probably because I have taken such pictures myself. And also, because these photographs show the ones portrayed as
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ObjectImage introduces British artist Sarah Tulloch’s idiosyncratic approach to working with the photographic image. Tulloch uses photo collections left by her grandfather and daily newspaper imagery to explore themes that reflect on our shared habits of consuming photographic media. From the social history of documenting family to the juxtaposition of recycled media imagery she probes and questions both object and image to create
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The black-and-white photos in Mean Streets, collected in print for the first time, offer a look at the infamous hardscrabble New York City of the 70s and 80s, captured with the deliberate and elegant eye that propelled Grazda to further success. Grazda has photographed the world over in Mexico, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Latin America and a
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Svalbard – An Arcticficial Life by Paris-based Julia de Cooker, born 1988, a French/Dutch photographer, educated at ECAL, the School of Art and Design in Lausanne, Switzerland, portrays an archipelago in the very north of mainland Europe. According to Wikipedia, Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean, about midway between continental Norway and the
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