I love photo books. There’s nothing like them, especially in the days of computer screens and phone feeds. It’s the best way to share and view work, but traveling away from home all year during my Major City project makes it difficult to pick up many new ones. Still, I make sure I stay on top of the all the new releases, while also having a few purchased online waiting for me each time I make it back home. So, in honor of it being a new year once again, here’s a list of some of the best photo books published in 2018 that should appeal to any photographer, but especially street and documentary photographers. (Click here to check out the lists from 2016 and 2017)
25 PhotoBooks from 2018
(Selection information quoted from links)
1. Lars Tunbjörk : Lars Tunbjörk
Initially inspired by Swedish masters such as Christer Strömholm, as well as Stephen Shore and William Eggleston, Lars Tunbjörk (1956–2015) was one of the great and truly original European photographers. Tunbjörk’s international breakthrough came in 1993 with the photobook Country beside Itself. Celebrated by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger as “an acute observer of modern life,” Tunbjörk’s color images amplified the mundane and the absurd in a quietly surreal fashion using the hard light of flash photography, which became his signature style and influenced a subsequent generation of photographers. His best-known photobook series include Office (2001), which depicts office workers in bizarre chance positions, and Home (2003), in which everyday items such as flowers or armchairs are made to reveal a quiet absurdity in Swedish suburbia. With more than 250 images, this volume constitutes the most substantial overview of his work.”
2. Joel Meyerowitz: Where I Find Myself: A Lifetime Retrospective
Where I Find Myself is the first major single book retrospective of one of America’s leading photographers. It is organized in inverse chronological order and spans the photographer’s whole career to date: from Joel Meyerowitz’s most recent picture all the way back to the first photograph he ever took. The book covers all of Joel Meyerowitz’s great projects: his work inspired by the artist Morandi, his work on trees, his exclusive coverage of Ground Zero, his trips in the footsteps of Robert Frank across the US, his experiments comparing color and black and white pictures, and of course his iconic street photography work. Joel Meyerovitz is incredibly eloquent and candid about how photography works or doesn’t, and this should be an inspiration to anyone interested in photography.”
3. The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand
Garry Winogrand—along with Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander—was one of the most important photographers of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as one of the world’s foremost street photographers. Award-winning writer Geoff Dyer has admired Winogrand’s work for many years. Modeled on John Szarkowski’s classic book Atget, The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand is a masterfully curated selection of one hundred photographs from the Winogrand archive at the Center for Creative Photography, with each image accompanied by an original essay.
Dyer takes the viewer/reader on a wildly original journey through both iconic and unseen images from the archive, including eighteen previously unpublished color photographs. The book encompasses most of Winogrand’s themes and subjects and remains broadly faithful to the chronological and geographical facts of his life, but Dyer’s responses to the photographs are unorthodox, eye-opening, and often hilarious. This inimitable combination of photographer and writer, images and text, itself offers what Dyer claims for Winogrand’s photography—an education in seeing.”
4. Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings
For more than 40 years, Sally Mann (b. 1951) has made experimental, elegiac, and hauntingly beautiful photographs that explore the overarching themes of existence: memory, desire, death, the bonds of family, and nature’s magisterial indifference to human endeavor. What unites this broad body of work—portraits, still lifes, landscapes, and other studies—is that it is all “bred of a place,” the American South. Mann, who is a native of Lexington, Virginia, uses her deep love of her homeland and her knowledge of its historically fraught heritage to ask powerful, provocative questions—about history, identity, race, and religion—that reverberate across geographic and national boundaries. Organized into five sections—Family, The Land, Last Measure, Abide with Me, and What Remains—and including many works not previously exhibited or published, Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings is a sweeping overview of Mann’s artistic achievements.”
5. Masahisa Fukase
Among the most radical and original photographers of his generation, Masahisa Fukase was famous for The Solitude of Ravens (1991), in which these birds of doom, in flocks or alone, blacken the pages of the book in inky, somber, calligraphic clusters; in 2010 it was voted the best photobook of the past 25 years by the British Journal of Photography. Fukase also has a lesser-known corpus of collages, self-portraits, photographs reworked as sketches, black-and-white prints, Polaroids and more. This book brings together all of his work for the very first time.
Its editors, Simon Baker, director of the Maison européenne de la photographie, Paris, and Tomo Kosuga, director of the Masahisa Fukase Archives, Tokyo, have assembled 26 series from Fukase’s oeuvre, including Memories of Father; The Solitude of Ravens; his portraits of cats; his famous self-portraits taken in a bathtub with a waterproof camera; and many previously unpublished works. Fukase tried his hand at everything, and this essential volume, at more than 400 pages, at last reveals the full breadth of his imagination in an English-language publication.”
6. Ralph Gibson : The Black Trilogy
An iconic American fine art photographer renowned for his highly surrealist vision, Ralph Gibson is a master of the photography book, which he considers an art form in its own right. In 1970, he founded Lustrum Press, a publishing house dedicated to photography books, and inaugurated it with three volumes—The Somnambulist (1970), Deja-Vu(1973), and Days at Sea (1974)—that showcased his own work in an uncompromisingly radical and demanding way. These books came to be known as Gibson’s “Black Trilogy” and are now considered classics of the twentieth-century photobook genre.
Making a clean break with the prior conventions of the photography book, “The Black Trilogy” created a new visual syntax—page layouts, the pairing of photographs face-to-face, graphic and thematic echoes—that provided a unique language for photographic communication. It soon became the model for a generation of young photographers, including Larry Clark, Danny Seymour, Mary Ellen Mark, Yves Guillot, and Arnaud Claass. “The Black Trilogy” volumes went out of print long ago and have become highly collectible. This reissue, with a new essay by the distinguished photographer and curator Gilles Mora, includes all three books in a single volume.”
7. Dawoud Bey: Seeing Deeply
Recipient of a 2017 MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” Dawoud Bey has created a body of photography that masterfully portrays the contemporary American experience on its own terms and in all of its diversity.
Dawoud Bey: Seeing Deeply offers a forty-year retrospective of the celebrated photographer’s work, from his early street photography in Harlem to his current images of Harlem gentrification. Photographs from all of Bey’s major projects are presented in chronological sequence, allowing viewers to see how the collective body of portraits and recent landscapes create an unparalleled historical representation of various communities in the United States. Leading curators and critics—Sarah Lewis, Deborah Willis, David Travis, Hilton Als, Jacqueline Terrassa, Rebecca Walker, Maurice Berger, and Leigh Raiford—introduce each series of images.
Revealing Bey as the natural heir of such renowned photographers as Roy DeCarava, Walker Evans, Gordon Parks, and James Van Der Zee, Dawoud Bey: Seeing Deeplydemonstrates how one man’s search for community can produce a stunning portrait of our common humanity.”
8. Saul Leiter: In My Room
The fruit of fantastic recent discoveries from Saul Leiter’s vast archive, In My Roomprovides an in-depth study of the nude, through intimate photographs of the women Leiter knew. Showing deeply personal interior spaces, often illuminated by the lush natural light of the artist’s studio in New York City’s East Village, these black-and-white images reveal a unique type of collaboration between Leiter and his subjects. In the 1970s Leiter planned to make a book of nudes, but the project was never realized in his lifetime. Now, we get a first-time look at this body of work, which was begun on Leiter’s arrival in New York in 1946 and honed over the next two decades. Leiter, who was also a painter, allows abstract elements into the photographs and often shows the influence of his favorite artists, including Bonnard, Vuillard and Matisse. Leiter, who painted and took pictures prolifically up to his death, worked in relative obscurity until he entered his eighties. He preferred to be left alone, and resisted any type of explanation or analysis of his work. With In My Room, Leiter ushers viewers into his private world while retaining his strong sense of mystery.
Saul Leiter was born in Pittsburgh in 1923. In 1946 he moved to New York to become a painter, but was encouraged to pursue photography by the photographic experimentation and influence of his friend, the Abstract Expressionist Richard Pousette-Dart. Leiter subsequently enjoyed a successful career as a fashion photographer spanning three decades, and his images were published in magazines such as Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle and British Vogue. His work is held in many prestigious private and public collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Leiter died in November 2013.”
9. Luigi Ghirri: It’s Beautiful Here, Isn’t It…
Luigi Ghirri was an extraordinary photographer, as well as a writer and curator whose career was so rich and varied that it seems like a lesson in the contemporary history of the medium. Although well known in his native Italy, Ghirri does not yet have the international audience his work merits–perhaps because he died so young. “It’s Beautiful Here, Isn’t It…”–the first book published on Ghirri in the U.S.–will establish him as the seminal artist he was. Uncannily prescient, Ghirri shared the sensibility of what became known in the U.S. as the New Color and the New Topographics movements before they had even been named. Like his counterparts in Italian cinema, Ghirri believed that the local and the universal were inseparable and that life’s polarities–love and hate, present and past–were equally compelling. Not surprisingly, his interests encompassed all the arts: he worked in Giorgio Morandi’s studio and with architect Aldo Rossi, while influencing a generation of photographers, including Olivo Barbieri and Martin Parr. This dynamic new book includes a selection of Ghirri’s essays published in English for the first time, as well as a selected chronology.”
10. Elliott Erwitt’s Scotland
In 2013, Elliott Erwitt was asked to be a part of the distinguished Macallan Masters of Photography series. Armed with his trusty Leica camera, he embarked on an exploration of Scotland in hopes of capturing its people’s particular spirit and allure, calling it his “great Scottish adventure.” Going beyond what is simply picturesque, this magnificent collection of photographs candidly reveals both the sum and its parts of the varied landscapes, the characters–and of course, the dogs!–that are unique to Scotland.”
11. Guy Martin : Parallel State
After nearly losing his life documenting conflict in Libya, photographer, Guy Martin, turned his attention to a seemingly less dangerous project: documenting on set of Turkish soap operas. After a failed coup against the Turkish government in 2016 and the protests that ensued, Martin began photographing protesters taking part in the demonstrations. Parallel State alternates between images of TV set productions and pictures of street protests, resulting in a multidimensional body of work.”
12. Dave Jordano : A Detroit Nocturne
In a continuation of Dave Jordano’s critically-acclaimed Detroit: Unbroken Down (powerHouse Books, 2015), which documented the lives of residents, Detroit Nocturne is an artist’s book not of people this time, but instead the places within which they live and work: structures, dwellings, and storefronts. Made at night, these photographs speak to the quiet resolve of Detroit’s neighborhoods and its stewards: independent shop proprietors and home owners who have survived the long and difficult path of living in a post-industrial city stripped of economic prosperity and opportunity.
In many rust-belt cities like Detroit, people’s lives often hang in the balance as neighborhoods support and provide for each other through job creation, ad-hoc community involvement, moral and spiritual support, and a well-honed Do-It-Yourself attitude. With all the media attention about Detroit’s rebirth and revival, it is important to note that many neighborhoods throughout the city have managed to survive against the odds for years, relying on local merchants and businesses that operate on a cash only basis who have stuck it out through decades of economic decline.
Determination and a strong sense of self-preservation: Detroit’s citizens manage to survive by maintaining a healthy sense of connection without the fear of giving up. All of these places of business and residences, whether large or small, are in many ways symbols representing the ongoing story that is Detroit, and a testament to the tenacity of those who are trying desperately to hold on to what is left of the social and economic fabric of the city. These photographs speak to that truth without casting an overly sentimental gaze.
These nocturnal images offer a chance to view the locations in an unfamiliar light, and offer a moment of quiet and calm reflection.”
13. Vivian Maier: The Color Work
The first definitive monograph of color photographs by American street photographer Vivian Maier.
Photographer Vivian Maier’s allure endures even though many details of her life continue to remain a mystery. Her story—the secretive nanny-photographer who became a pioneer photographer—has only been pieced together from the thousands of images she made and the handful of facts that have surfaced about her life. Vivian Maier: The Color Work is the largest and most highly curated published collection of Maier’s full-color photographs to date.
With a foreword by world-renowned photographer Joel Meyerowitz and text by curator Colin Westerbeck, this definitive volume sheds light on the nature of Maier’s color images, examining them within the context of her black-and-white work as well as the images of street photographers with whom she clearly had kinship, like Eugene Atget and Lee Friedlander. With more than 150 color photographs, most of which have never been published in book form, this collection of images deepens our understanding of Maier, as its immediacy demonstrates how keen she was to record and present her interpretation of the world around her.”
14. Stanley Kubrick Photographs: Through a Different Lens
Before becoming the critically acclaimed filmmaker responsible for such iconic films as Dr. Strangelove and The Shining, Stanley Kubrick spent five years as a photographer for Look magazine. The Bronx native joined the staff in 1945, when he was only 17 years old, and shot humanist slice-of-life features that celebrate and expose New York City and its inhabitants.
Through a Different Lens reveals the keen and evocative vision of a burgeoning creative genius in a range of feature stories and images, from everyday folk at the laundromat to a day in the life of a debutant, from a trip to the circus to Columbia University. Featuring around 300 images, many previously unseen, as well as rare Look magazine tear sheets, this release coincides with a major show at the Museum of the City of New York and includes an introduction by noted photography critic Luc Sante.
These still photographs attest to Kubrick’s innate talent for compelling storytelling, and serve as clear indicators of how this genius would soon transition to making some of the greatest movies of all time.”
15. Stephen Leslie : Sparks: Adventures in Street Photography
A family is brought close to ruin by a pet python; an Icelandic advertising agency has a problem with a campaign involving a dead seagull; a chiropodist desperately wants to stop examining people’s feet and dreams of becoming a pirate… Stephen Leslie has always tried to capture images that hint at wider, hidden narratives – suggestive moments rather than decisive ones – and Sparks is a book that imagines the weird and wonderful stories behind his original street photographs. It is a love-letter to photography, pairing eighty beautiful colour images – shot on film – with these stories, as well as the author’s recollections of twenty years spent looking through the lens.”
16. Mark Power : Good Morning America, Volume One
Magnum photographer Mark Power has travelled expansively throughout the United States. A UK native, Power’s perspective is that of an outsider. Observing the vast environmental and political landscape of the United States, Power has photographed the industrial heartlands of Appalachia, locations connected to climate change including one of the world’s largest solar farms, an earth systems research facility, a major dam on the Colorado River and a Navajo Native American reservation among other diverse locations”
17. Jem Southam : The Moth
The Moth derives from one black-and-white picture that Jem Southam made in about 1983: a solitary man standing on Gwithian beach in St Ives, Cornwall. From this singular, meditative moment, the book of otherwise unpeopled, colour photographs unravels like a succession of memories, drifting back and forth through time. Over the course of 30 years, Southam intermittently returned to the west of Cornwall to explore a place steeped in marine and mining history, and in the mythology of Celtic saints who exiled to Cornish shores. His poetic sequence of images, inspired by the alliterative verse of the old English poems The Wanderer and The Seafarer, moves from vistas of meadows to water streams, forgotten homes and farm dogs awaiting their food. Now and then, Southam’s fluctuating current of pictures is punctuated by a sublime moment in the rural landscape, only to be eclipsed by the hazy memory of The Moth.”
18. Gerry Johansson : American Winter
The Moth derives from one black-and-white picture that Jem Southam made in about 1983: a solitary man standing on Gwithian beach in St Ives, Cornwall. From this singular, meditative moment, the book of otherwise unpeopled, colour photographs unravels like a succession of memories, drifting back and forth through time. Over the course of 30 years, Southam intermittently returned to the west of Cornwall to explore a place steeped in marine and mining history, and in the mythology of Celtic saints who exiled to Cornish shores. His poetic sequence of images, inspired by the alliterative verse of the old English poems The Wanderer and The Seafarer, moves from vistas of meadows to water streams, forgotten homes and farm dogs awaiting their food. Now and then, Southam’s fluctuating current of pictures is punctuated by a sublime moment in the rural landscape, only to be eclipsed by the hazy memory of The Moth.”
19. William Eggleston: Black and White
Black and White is an updated and expanded edition of William Eggleston’s (born 1939) Before Color (Steidl, 2012), the first publication to comprehensively present Eggleston’s early black-and-white photos and explore his artistic beginnings.
In the late 1950s Eggleston began photographing his hometown of Memphis, discovering many of the motifs that would come to define his seminal work in color: the diners, cars, gas stations, supermarkets, domestic interiors and the seemingly mundane gestures and expressions of his fellow citizens. Also here are his unconventional, sometimes tilted croppings, and above all his emphasis on the beautiful in the banal. In the mid-1960s Eggleston began working with color and after experimenting with different exposure settings he was soon pleased with the results―“And by God it all worked. Just overnight.” He subsequently abandoned black-and-white photography but its influence on his original vision of the American everyday remains fundamental.”
20. Lynsey Addario : Of Love & War
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist and New York Times bestselling author, a stunning and personally curated selection of her work across the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa
Pulitzer Prize–winning photojournalist and MacArthur Fellow Lynsey Addario has spent the last two decades bearing witness to the world’s most urgent humanitarian and human rights crises. Traveling to the most dangerous and remote corners to document crucial moments such as Afghanistan under the Taliban immediately before and after the 9/11 attacks, Iraq following the US-led invasion and dismantlement of Saddam Hussein’s government, and western Sudan in the aftermath of the genocide in Darfur, she has captured through her photographs visual testimony not only of war and injustice but also of humanity, dignity, and resilience.
In this compelling collection of more than two hundred photographs, Addario’s commitment to exposing the devastating consequences of human conflict is on full display. Her subjects include the lives of female members of the military, as well as the trauma and abuse inflicted on women in male-dominated societies; American soldiers rescuing comrades in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan, and Libyan opposition troops trading fire in Benghazi. Interspersed between her commanding and arresting images are personal journal entries and letters, as well as revelatory essays from esteemed writers such as Dexter Filkins, Suzy Hansen, and Lydia Polgreen. A powerful and singular work from one of the most brilliant and influential photojournalists working today, Of Love & War is a breathtaking record of our complex world in all its inescapable chaos, conflict, and beauty.”
21. Matthew Genitempo : Jasper
Inspired by the life and work of the poet and land surveyor, Frank Stanford, these photographs of hermetic homes and men living in solitude were taken in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas and Missouri. By capturing the foggy landscapes, cluttered interiors, and rugged men that are tucked away in the dark woods, Jasper explores a fascination with running away from the everyday. The work bounces between fact and fiction, exhibiting the reality and myth of what it means to be truly apart from society.”
22. Michael E. Northrup : Dream Away
Dream Away by Michael E. Northrup is a love story about life, vision, and love itself. The 66 images in the book present a developing portrait of both an artist and his subject. It’s about Northrup’s obsession with “the photograph”, his vision, and the significant, funny, and unique images he’s able to make from life itself.
“We met in 1976, got married in 1978 and divorced in 1988. She was both wife and muse. For me, creating images is all about my daily life, those meaningful pictures I’m able to extract from it, and the personal vision I bring to those visual narratives.” – Michael N. Northrup”
23. Steven Bollman: Almost True
Thirty years in the making, but covering just a few seconds in real time, Almost True is Steven Bollman’s highly anticipated new photobook.
Almost True, draws from over three decades of work from many different projects. 81 black and white photos in nine groups that tell their own story but, through the magic of sequencing, offer new stories.
The diverse images included in Almost True were taken in Cuba during Fidel Castro’s time, at religious processions in Sicily, and during the elections in Haiti in 1987, plus street photos from Mississippi, New York, Oakland, Portland, Santa Fe, Seattle, Italy, Portugal, and Spain.”
24. Tavepong Pratoomwong : Good day Bad Day But EveryDay
GOOD DAY BAD DAY BUT EVERYDAY represents the first Photobook of internationally-acclaimed photographer, Tavepong Pratoomwong. The photobook encompasses the curation and compilation of Pratoomwong’s most outstanding photos during his daily street jaunt since 2014. Several eye-struck photos have experienced award after award. Pratoomwong, therefore, drapes the refined continuation of the self-categorized photos into this limited-hardcover photobook.”
25. Charalampos Kydonakis (Dirtyharry) : WARN’D IN VAIN
‘Warn’d in Vain’ is a is a NYC story inspired by the Argonautic myth. It is a twin book of ‘Back to Nowhere’, a parallel Minotaur tale from Crete, hopefully to be out soon in the future. ‘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. ‘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.”
Bonus: Compilations
Magnum China
This lavishly illustrated book is the history of China, spanning the pre-revolutionary years to China’s present day rise as a global power as told through the Magnum photo agency’s legendary photographs.
Magnum Photos first covered China on assignment in the 1930s, when Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson established what has become a long-standing cultural engagement with the ever-changing country. Magnum’s long history with China puts the agency in the unique position of being able to provide an in-depth photographic account of China, its people, and the changes they have witnessed over the last nine decades.
Featuring an outstanding selection of photographs, Magnum China is a thorough illustrated history of a vast, enigmatic country, fascinating for China-watchers and novices alike.
Chronologically organized into four parts, charting the history of China from 1933 to the present day, Magnum Chinapresents in-depth portfolios by individual photographers, accompanied by introductory commentaries on the featured work and group selections that curate individual photographs to illustrate the diverse state of China. Each part also features an introduction by respected scholar Jonathan Fenby, as well as “key dates” timelines and lists of the photographers’ travels, setting the socio-political and historical context for the photography on show.”
Hopefully, you all can find something to add to your photo library, or someone else’s. And if you have any recommended books from 2018 to add to the list, please comment them below.
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