I love photo books. There’s nothing like them, especially in the days of computer screens and phone feeds. It’s still the best way to share and view work. In honor of it being a new year once again, here’s a list of some of the best photo books published in 2019 that should appeal to any photographer, but especially street and documentary photographers. (Click here to check out the lists from 2016 , 2017 and 2018)
25 PhotoBooks from 2019
(Selection information quoted from links)
- Harry Gruyaert: Edges
- Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb: Brooklyn, The City Within
- Alec Soth: I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating
- Bruce Gilden: Lost and Found
- Sohrab Hura: The Coast
- Kohei Yoshiyuki: The Park
- Alex Majoli: Scene
- Mark Power: Good Morning America, Volume One
- Sheron Rupp: Taken From Memory
- Gregory Halpern: Omaha Sketchbook
- Dennis Stock: California Trip
- Barry Lewis: Miami Beach 1988-1995
- Henri Cartier-Bresson: China 1948-1949, 1958
- Jeff Mermelstein: Hardened
- Gus Powell: Family Car Trouble
- Jason Eskenazi : Black Garden & Departure Lounge
- Joshua Dudley Greer: Somewhere Along the Line
- Gustavo Minas : MAXIMUM SHADOW MINIMAL LIGHT
- Matt Weber: Street Trip. Life in NYC
- Ashly Stohl: Days & Years
- Mark Steinmetz: Carnival
- Keith Carter: Fifty Years
- Dirtyharrry: Back to Nowhere
- Edas Wong: RE-FORM
- Lili Kobielski: Refuse for the Devil to Take My Soul: Inside Cook County Jail
1. Harry Gruyaert: Edges
In this stunning collection, Magnum photographer Harry Gruyaert explores the visual power of shorelines.
The “edges” that Harry Gruyaert, a preeminent member of the Magnum photo agency, explores in this lush, full-color book are the oceans, seas, and rivers where humans meet the edge of the shoreline and the water begins. This unique volume, which opens from the bottom up, takes the reader to Israel’s Dead Sea, the Niger River in Mali, the North Sea of Iceland, South Korea, and Biarritz, as Gruyaert’s photos record the subtle chromatic vibrations of the edges of the far East and West. Gruyaert juxtaposes the hustle of the city with a pared-down, yet intense, nature. His landscapes are never empty; they are inhabited places where light, color, objects, people, and situations weave a serene, sublime scene.
This beautifully produced photographic manifesto reveals the profoundly poetic character of Gruyaert’s work, and the sensual elegance of his compositions.
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2. Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb: Brooklyn, The City Within
Brooklyn is one of the most dynamic and ethnically diverse places on the planet. In fact, it’s estimated that one in every eight US families had relatives come through Brooklyn when settling in the country. Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb have been photographing this New York City borough for the past five years, creating a profound and vibrant portrait. Alex Webb has traversed every corner of the borough, exploring its tremendous diversity. This parallels his work made in the past forty years, traveling to photograph different cultures around the world―all of which are represented in the place he now calls home. Contrasting with this approach, Rebecca Norris Webb photographed “the city within the city within the city,” the green heart of Brooklyn―the Botanic Garden, Greenwood Cemetery, and Prospect Park, where Brooklynites of all walks of life cross paths as they find solace. Together, their photographs of Brooklyn tell a larger American story, one that touches on immigration, identity, and home.
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3. Alec Soth: I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating
Taking its name from a line in the Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Gray Room,” Alec Soth’s latest book is a lyrical exploration of the limitations of photographic representation. While these large-format color photographs are made all over the world, they aren’t about any particular place or population. By a process of intimate and often extended engagement, Soth’s portraits and images of his subject’s surroundings involve an enquiry into the extent to which a photographic likeness can depict more than the outer surface of an individual, and perhaps even plumb the depths of something unknowable about both the sitter and the photographer. “After the publication of my last book about social life in America, Songbook, and a retrospective of my four, large scale American projects, Gathered Leaves, I went through a long period of rethinking my creative process. For over a year I stopped traveling and photographing people. I barely took any pictures at all. When I returned to photography, I wanted to strip the medium down to its primary elements. Rather than trying to make some sort of epic narrative about America, I wanted to simply spend time looking at other people and, hopefully, briefly glimpse their interior life. In order to try and access these lives, I made all of the photographs in interior spaces. While these rooms often exist in far-flung places, it’s only to emphasize that these pictures aren’t about any place in particular. Whether a picture is made in Odessa or Minneapolis, my goal was the same: to simply spend time in the presence of another beating heart.” – Alec Soth.
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4. Bruce Gilden: Lost and Found
In the thick of New York: Bruce Gilden raw and unseen
After recently moving house, Bruce Gilden discovered hundreds of contact prints and negatives in his personal archives, from work undertaken in New York, his native city, between 1978 and 1984. From these thousands of images, most of which are new even to their author, Gilden has selected around a hundred. Extending from the desire to revisit the work of his youth, this historic archive constitutes an inestimable treasure.
An extraordinary New York is portayed here, revealing an unknown facet of Gilden’s oeuvre. With all the energy of a young man in his thirties, and with no flash (before Gilden became famous for its almost systematic use), Gilden launched an assault on New York in a visibly tense atmosphere. In this extraordinary gallery of portraits, the compositions―mostly horizontal―simmer with energy, bursting with the most diverse characters, as though Gilden intended to include within the frame everything that caught his eye.
In this book, we see the guiding tropes of the work that was to make Gilden famous: sustained movement and tension, unrivalled spirit, and an instinctive and irreverent affection for his subjects, perfectly in cahoots with his city.
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5. Sohrab Hura: The Coast
The Coast opens with an absurd short story that leads into a sequence of images taken along the Indian coastline. While the photographs are made in real situations, the continuous removal and addition of context manipulates the line between what is fact and what is not, in a way not unlike how new realities are increasingly being engineered today. Some might imagine the book to be a fable-like tale while others might recognize in it reality. Either way, the book in its stories alludes to undercurrents in a country that is seeing higher frequencies of violence: religious, caste, sexual or otherwise and the increasing normalization of it, which is far more absurd than the story itself. There is respite toward the end as the book moves to the sea. The margin between land and water becomes a point of release beyond which characters experience fear, surprise, anger, sadness, trust, anticipation, excitement, contempt but also rapture. The short story at the beginning of the book also exists in 11 other iterations, each one changing only a few words at a time like a game of Chinese Whispers. Just like with the images, each story forms a slightly different meaning in every subsequent reading and it becomes one of a dozen different truths. The Coast is the fourth book by Sohrab Hura.
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6. Kohei Yoshiyuki: The Park
For eight years and across several continents, Alex Majoli has been photographing events and non-events. Political demonstrations, humanitarian emergencies, and quiet moments of everyday life. What holds all these images together is a sense of theatre. A sense that we are all actors, all playing the parts that history and circumstance demand of us. Majoli’s photographs result from his own performance. Entering a situation, he and his assistants slowly go about setting up a camera and lights. This activity is a kind of spectacle in itself, observed by those who will eventually be photographed. Majoli begins to shoot, offering no direction to the people before his camera. This might happen over twenty minutes. It might be an hour or so. Perhaps the people adjust their actions in anticipation of the image to come. Perhaps they refine their gestures in self-consciousness. Perhaps they do not. The representation of drama and the drama of representation become one. The camera flash is instantaneous and much stronger than daylight. But all this light plunges the world into night, or moonlight. The world appears as an illuminated stage. Everything seems to be happening at the end of the day. Just when the world should be sleeping, it offers a heightened performance of itself. We never really see people or places: we see the light they reflect. And the quality of that light affects how we understand them.
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7. Alex Majoli: Scene
For eight years and across several continents, Alex Majoli has been photographing events and non-events. Political demonstrations, humanitarian emergencies, and quiet moments of everyday life. What holds all these images together is a sense of theatre. A sense that we are all actors, all playing the parts that history and circumstance demand of us. Majoli’s photographs result from his own performance. Entering a situation, he and his assistants slowly go about setting up a camera and lights. This activity is a kind of spectacle in itself, observed by those who will eventually be photographed. Majoli begins to shoot, offering no direction to the people before his camera. This might happen over twenty minutes. It might be an hour or so. Perhaps the people adjust their actions in anticipation of the image to come. Perhaps they refine their gestures in self-consciousness. Perhaps they do not. The representation of drama and the drama of representation become one. The camera flash is instantaneous and much stronger than daylight. But all this light plunges the world into night, or moonlight. The world appears as an illuminated stage. Everything seems to be happening at the end of the day. Just when the world should be sleeping, it offers a heightened performance of itself. We never really see people or places: we see the light they reflect. And the quality of that light affects how we understand them.
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8. Mark Power: Good Morning America, Volume One
Over the past six years, photographer Mark Power has travelled across the US to create a complex visual narrative of a country in the midst of change. This new book, Good Morning, America (Volume One),represents a personal and timely exploration of both the American cultural and physical landscape, and the divergence of reality and myth.
Good Morning, America (Volume One) is the first in a series of five books by Power, created as the result of this ongoing 10-year project, as he meanders back and forth across the vast country, taking long walks through towns and cities along the way.
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9. Sheron Rupp: Taken From Memory
Taken From Memory is the result of a 25-year long-time project by American photographer Sheron Rupp (b. 1943 in Mansfield, Ohio). Searching for connections to her own biographical past, Rupp took these photographs in rural America looking to find a piece of someone else’s life to give her a sense of »belonging.« Personal in nature, these photographs offer a stirring glimpse into the life in the commonly disregarded rural areas and small towns between the bustling metropolises of the East and West Coast. Without pretense or irony, without assertation or judgment, Rupp’s impressions from the past also work as a commentary on today’s US society. The book includes an introduction by Peter Galassi, former Chief Curator of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York.
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10. Gregory Halpern: Omaha Sketchbook
Throughout his career, Gregory Halpern has explored the elusive, inchoate notion of Americanness. It is both a difficult subject and a lofty prospect for any photographer and it remains an absolutely essential line of investigation, particularly in the context of the current political maelstrom. Traveling to the nation’s heartland-a vague construct increasingly synonymous with the Bible belt-Halpern continues to mine this idea of Americanness in a place bounded by prairie and steeped in pioneer history. His work in the midwestern city of Omaha reveals America as pluralized, fragmented, and teeming with its own ‘brand of hypermasculinity’, as he terms it: adolescents on the cusp of promise or obscurity, land that seemingly leads to nowhere, a sense of unending time and a dark side to domesticity. Halpern’s efforts to visualize America yield an opportunity to learn about the country by staring back at images of it that breed their own complexity.” – Amanda Maddox, J. Paul Getty Museum For the last fifteen years, Gregory Halpern has been photographing in Omaha, Nebraska, steadily compiling a lyrical, if equivocal, response to the American Heartland. In loosely-collaged spreads that reproduce his construction-paper sketchbooks, Halpern takes pleasure in cognitive dissonance and unexpected harmonies, playing on a sense of simultaneous repulsion and attraction to the place. Omaha Sketchbook is ultimately a meditation on America, on the men and boys who inhabit it, and on the mechanics of aggression, inadequacy, and power.
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11. Dennis Stock: California Trip
In 1968, Magnum photographer Dennis Stock took a 5-week road trip along the California highways, documenting the height of the counterculture hippie scene. These black and white photos were compiled to create California Trip, originally published in 1970, and became an emblem of the free love movement that continued to inspire throughout the decades. In print for the first time since its 1970 publication, California Trip is a faithful reproduction of Stock’s timeless work.
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12. Barry Lewis: Miami Beach 1988-1995
Each Christmas between 1988 and 1998, photographer Barry Lewis traveled to South Beach, Miami, to trade the harsh London winter for a tropical paradise. There he photographed the diverse (and eccentric) people who made up the community: fashionistas, newly-arrived Cubans (following the Meriel exodus in 1980), Jewish retirees from New York, drag queens and the gay population who flocked to ultra-cool Ocean Drive for the party scene. Lewis’ images capture the vibrancy of an area coming back to life after years of crime, drugs, and violence.
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13. Henri Cartier-Bresson: China 1948-1949, 1958
The first visual chronicle of a little-known chapter in the career of Henri Cartier-Bresson―one of the great photographers of the twentieth century.
In December 1948, Henri Cartier-Bresson traveled to China at the request of Life magazine. He wound up staying for ten months and captured some of the most spectacular moments in China’s history: he photographed Beijing in “the last days of the Kuomintang,” and then headed back to Shanghai, where he bore witness to the new regime’s takeover. Moreover, in 1958, Henri Cartier-Bresson was one of the first Western photographers to go back to China to explore the changes that had occurred over the preceding decade. The “picture stories” he sent to Magnum and Life on a regular basis played a key role in Westerners’ understanding of Chinese political events. Many of these images are among the best-known and most significant photographs in Cartier-Bresson’s oeuvre; his empathy with the populace and sense of responsibility as a witness making them an important part of his legacy.
Henri Cartier-Bresson: China 1948-1949, 1958 allows these photographs to be reexamined along with all of the documents that were preserved: the photographer’s captions and comments, contact sheets, and abundant correspondence, as well as the published versions that appeared in both American and European magazines. A welcome addition to any photography lover’s bookshelf, this is an exciting new volume on one of the twentieth century’s most important photographers.
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14. Jeff Mermelstein: Hardened
Jeff Mermelstein is an icon in the world of New York Street photographers.
Having recently left behind the holy grail of street photographers — the Leica — Jeff switched to his camera phone and took to the streets of New York. A master of finding the extraordinary in the banal, Mermelstein fuses his photographs with humour and the playfully odd.
Edited by David Campany this series brings together over 300 images from Mermelstein’s latest oeuvre.
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15. Gus Powell: Family Car Trouble
With Family Car Trouble, Gus Powell plays with the form of the novel, both as material object and as narrative vehicle for expressing interior life. The work records and reckons with the arrival of children, the departure of a father, and the maintenance of a difficult 1992 Volvo 940 station wagon
A new classic of the Automotive Bereavement Parenting genre.
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16. Joshua Dudley Greer: Somewhere Along the Line
From 2011 to 2017 Joshua Dudley Greer traveled over 100,000 miles by car, focusing his camera on the massive network of superhighways that has become ubiquitous throughout the United States. Rather than moving quickly through these spaces he made the decision to slowly and deliberately dwell within them, looking at the road as a stage where narratives play out and opposing forces often intersect. The boundaries that line these roadways, whether real or imagined, are examined by looking at the separations between public and private space, privilege and need, the individual and the collective, and the countervailing ideas of home and escape. The resulting compilation of photographs depicts the state of America’s infrastructure as a physical manifestation of its economic, social and environmental circumstances in unforeseen moments of humor, pathos and humanity.
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17. Jason Eskenazi : Black Garden & Departure Lounge
RED HOOK EDITIONS announces two new books by Jason Eskenazi: Black Garden & Departure Lounge, completing a trilogy together with his first book Wonderland: A Fairy Tale of the Soviet Monolith. The cycle closes, coming full circle back to the beginning: 314 photos numbered sequentially through all 3 books with 9 chapters.
The Black Garden moves into the mythological world of opposites and duality, and concentrates on three main themes: subjugation of women, domination over the animal kingdom, and self-destruction through war. 154 photographs including 9 panoramics were made from 2001–2017 in Turkey, Greece, Syria, Iraq, Ukraine, Egypt, Libya, and New York. The Departure Lounge‘s 83 photographs were culled from Eskenazi’s archive, dating from 1991 to the present. The images investigate how we depart from reality, from friends, and from ourselves, using the Departure Lounge as the metaphorical room from which we leave.
18. Gustavo Minas : MAXIMUM SHADOW MINIMAL LIGHT
19. Matt Weber: Street Trip. Life in NYC
Matt Weber has been shooting the streets of New York for the past 40 years, many of his images taken while running fares in his New York City taxi cab. His camera captures New York without pretense and with the love and attention that only a native could afford. Each image documenting the small yet extremely significant moments in the life of a city that never sleeps. Street Trip: Life in NYC is a compellingly curated collection of his finest street photography, an authentic look at daily life from someone who has consistently been ‘in the right place, at the right time’. His images are both timely and timeless and tell the stories of real life in the Big Apple in unfiltered and honest detail.
20. Ashly Stohl: Days & Years
Days & Years, is the second book by photographer Ashly Stohl.
Hardcover, 9.5″x 9.5″, 108 pages
Foreword by Lynn Melnick.This first printing is limited to 750 copies. Of those, 100 are presented as a limited edition including a signed book with one of two prints signed and numbered by the photographer.
21. Mark Steinmetz: Carnival
From 1982-2001 the American photographer Mark Steinmetz travelled to country fairs, urban street carnivals, and small circuses across the United States, to make photographs of the families, teens and carnies that contain all the warmth and frenetic energy of a day at the Carnival.
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22. Keith Carter: Fifty Years
Dubbed a “poet of the ordinary” by the Los Angeles Times, photographer Keith Carter came of age during the turbulent ‘60s and ‘70s, developing a singular, haunting style that captures both the grit and the glory of the human spirit. Showcasing a broad array of his work—which has been shown in more than one hundred solo exhibitions in thirteen countries—Keith Carter: Fifty Years spans delicate, century-old processes as well as digital-age techniques to yield an enduring vision of the world around us.
The interlaced images in Keith Carter: Fifty Years feature contrasts of natural light and darkness as we explore the mythos of time and terrain, the familiar and the magical, and the varied creatures that inhabit our earth. The human form—depleted or energized, solitary or with a beloved partner—becomes a meditation on aging and loss, which have affected Carter profoundly in recent years. Yet these losses have spurred in him a sense of discovery, not despair. Rather than arranging the works chronologically, Carter chose to group them into correlations, echoing the kaleidoscopic effect of memory. The result is mesmerizing; each artifact draws us into an experience of intensity and wonder, enduring long after the page is turned.
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23. Back to Nowhere : dirtyharrry
A Minotaur inspired Cretan story
‘Back to Nowhere’ is a twin book of ‘Warn’d in Vain‘, a parallel Argonautica tale from NYC. ‘B.T.N’ was made between 2009-2017 on my island; the only place I ‘ll never have the chance to see how it looks in the eyes of a stranger. ‘W.I.V’ is a stranger’s questionmark inside the world’s most photographed city; made between the years 2014-2017 that I spent 7 months on the other side of the ocean.
24. Edas Wong: RE-FORM
Edas WONG is an amateur street photographer from Hong Kong. The public may find his name a bit unfamiliar. However, he has been working hard in photography. Besides keeps publishing his photographs on the web, he has also won many international awards and participated in exhibitions overseas.=
The collection of photographs in “RE-FORM” for pre-sale this time is a series of photographs that Edas started taking in 2012. These photographs are different from street photographs taken casually or those that pay much attention to the composition of images. Edas intended to discard all known understandings and restrictive assumptions and use the way of child’s thinking to re-comprehend the world in front of him. Then he reformed all the elements with unlimited imagination and formed all the interesting photos.
25. Lili Kobielski: Refuse for the Devil to Take My Soul: Inside Cook County Jail
This series of photographic portraits and interviews with Cook County Jail inmates as well as jail social workers and psychologists provides a glimpse of life with mental illness behind bars.
In late 2015, Lili Kobielski began taking portraits of inmates at the Cook County Jail in Chicago. Working in collaboration with Narratively and the Vera Institute of Justice with support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge, she began documenting the prevalence of mental illness among inmates at Cook County Jail in an effort to humanize the reality of mass incarceration in this country, often of its most vulnerable citizens.
The Cook County Department of Corrections is one of the largest single-site pre-detention facilities in the world, with an average daily population hovering around eight thousand inmates. It is estimated that 35 percent of this population is mentally ill.
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Bonus: Compilations
Street Photography: A History in 100 Iconic Images
This visually arresting book takes the reader on a journey across the globe by presenting the most candid, immediate, and provocative images captured by the biggest names in street photography from its inception to today.
Capturing daily life in every corner of the world, this sumptuous collection of great street photography shows the very best of the genre. From pre-war gelatin silver prints to 21st-century digital images, from documentary to abstract, from New York’s Central Park to a mountain city in Mongolia, these photographs reveal the many ways street photography moves, informs, and excites us. The book includes work by the likes of Margaret Bourke-White, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Joel Meyerowitz, Gordon Parks, André Kertész, Garry Winogrand, Roger Mayne, and other masters of street photography who pushed the genre’s boundaries and continue to innovate today. Each exquisitely reproduced photograph is presented on a double-page spread and accompanied by an informative text. David Gibson’s insightful introduction traces the history of street photography, reflects on its broad appeal, and looks toward the future of the genre.
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Masters of Street Photography
Masters of Street Photography explores the craft and creative secrets of 16 leading lights of the genre. Through probing Q&A style interviews, beautifully reproduced images, captions telling the story of each picture, and detailed technical information, the reader is given an insight into the photographers’ working practices, from their career paths and inspirations, to the equipment, techniques, tropes and tricks they employ to create their breathtaking and visionary works. The result is a book that combines visual inspiration with tried and tested “street smart” advice from leading professionals, providing everything the aspiring street photographer needs to create their own distinctive urban portfolio. Contributors include The Bragdon Brothers, Melissa Breyer, Giacomo Brunelli, Paul Burgess, Sally Davies, George Georgiou, Ash Shinya Kawaoto, Jay Maisel, Jesse Marlow, Dimitri Mellos, Rui Palha, Ed Peters, Alan Schaller, Marina Sersale, Alexey Titarenko, and Martin U Waltz.
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Magnum Streetwise
The ultimate collection of street photography from Magnum Photos.
Magnum Streetwise is the definitive collection of street photography from Magnum Photos, and an unparalleled opportunity to follow in the footsteps of the true greats of the genre. An essential addition to the street photography canon, this volume showcases hidden gems alongside many of street photography’s most famous images.
Magnum photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson pioneered modern concepts of street photography before the term was even coined. A rich seam of street photography runs through the heart of Magnum to this day, both in the work of recognized masters of the genre―including Elliott Erwitt, Martin Parr, Bruce Gilden, and Richard Kalvar―and in the work of those who may not think of themselves as street photographers, despite their powerful influence on the current generation of budding artists. Magnum Streetwise is a true visual feast, interleaving insightful text and anecdotes within an intuitive blend of photographer- and theme-focused sections. Ambitious in scope and democratic in nature, Magnum Streetwise is an unmissable tour through the photographs and practices that have helped define what street photography is―and what it can be.
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Daido Moriyama: How I Take Photographs
‘The first thing I always tell anyone who asks me for advice is: “Get outside”.’ – Daido Moriyama
Take an inspiring walk with legendary Japanese street photographer Daido Moriyama as he explains his groundbreaking approach to street photography.
For over half a century, Moriyama has provided a distinct vision of Japan and its people. In Daido Moriyama: How I Take Photographs, he offers a unique opportunity for fans to learn about his methods, the cameras he uses, and the journeys he takes with a camera.
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Hopefully, you all can find something to add to your photo library, or someone else’s. And if you have any recommended books from 2019 to add to the list, comment them below.
NEXT WORKSHOP : SAO PAOLO, BRAZIL MARCH 6TH-8TH
Thanks so much for this compilation. It is a worthy list of reads of 2020. The Alex Soth book and the Magnum book are both on my wish list. Now I need cash and a larger bookshelf!
Haha, I hear you on both of those. I’m glad you like the list, there was a lot of good photobooks this last year. Happy new year!