I love photo books. There’s nothing like them, especially in the days of computer screens and phone feeds. In my opinion, it’s still the best way to share and view work.

2020 has been a rough year and when it comes to photographers, many haven’t been able to get out there to find much inspiration. Fortunately, there’s been a number of photo books published this year to help supply some needed photographic inspiration.

In honor of it being a new year once again, here’s a compiled list of some of the best photo books published in 2020 that should appeal to any photographer, but especially street and documentary photographers. (Click here to check prior year’s lists (2016 , 2017, 2018 and 2019)

30+ PhotoBooks from 2020

(Selection information quoted from links)

1. The Adventures of Guille and Belinda (Alessandra Sanguinetti)
2. Let the Sun Beheaded Be (Gregory Halpern)
3. Pia (Christopher Anderson)
4. Love’s Labour (Sergio Purtell)
5. Perfect Day (Txema Salvans)
6. Side Walk (Frank Horvat)
7. The Book of Everything (Mary Ellen Mark)
8. Santa Barbara (Diana Markosian)
9. Perfect Strangers: New York City Street Photographs (Melissa O’Shaughnessy)
10. Godlis Streets (David Godlis)
11. Last Call (Harry Gruyaert)
12. From the Pope to a Flat White, Ireland 1979–2019 (Martin Parr)
13. Ernst Haas: New York in Color, 1952-1962
14. Tar Beach: Life on the Rooftops of Little Italy 1920–75 (Susan Meiselas)
15. Gordon Parks: The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957
16. The Destruction of Lower Manhattan (Danny Lyon)
17. 101 Pictures (Tom Wood)
18. Ciprian Honey Cathedral (Raymond Meeks)
19. The White Sky (Mimi Plumb)
20. The Locusts (Jesse Lenz)
21. Girl Pictures (Justine Kurland)
22. Wonderland (Jason Eskenazi)
23. Into the Fire (Matt Stuart)
24. The Levee (Sohrab Hura)
25. An Eclipse of Moths (Gregory Crewdson)
26. Ruins (Josef Koudelka)
27. Joel Meyerowitz: How I Make Photographs
28. Night Calls (Rebecca Norris Webb)
29. Trent Parke/Narelle Autio
    1. Crimson Line (Trent Parke)
    2. Place in Between (Narelle Autio)
30. Chris Suspect
    1. Gratuity Included
    2. Leather Boyz
    3. Old Customs

• Notable Mentions:
  • Peanut Press Portfolio Book collection (9)
  • Bump Books zine collection (43 and counting…)

 

1. The Adventures of Guille and Belinda (Alessandra Sanguinetti)

This book presents Alessandra Sanguinetti’s return to rural Argentina to continue her intimate collaboration with Belinda and Guillermina, two cousins who, as girls, were the subjects of the first book in her ongoing series, The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of Their Dreams.

In this second volume, The Illusion of An Everlasting Summer, we follow Guillermina and Belinda from ages 14 to 24 as they negotiate the fluid territory between adolescence and young adulthood. Still surrounded by the animals and rural settings of their childhood, Everlasting Summer depicts the two cousins’ everyday lives as they experience young love, pregnancy, and motherhood – all of which, perhaps inevitably, results in an ever-increasing independence from their families and each other. Similarly, we can sense a shift in Sanguinetti’s relationship to the cousins and the work they make: from insular childhood collaborators to three women with lives branching in different directions. Though the passage of time is one of the most palpable tensions at work in these photographs, An Everlasting Summer deepens Sanguinetti’s exploration of the timeless, universal language of female intimacy and friendship.

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2. Let the Sun Beheaded Be (Gregory Halpern)

In Let the Sun Beheaded Be, Gregory Halpern focuses on the Caribbean archipelago of Guadeloupe, an overseas region of France with a complicated and violent colonial past. The work resonates with Halpern’s characteristic attention to the ways the details of a landscape and the people who inhabit it often reveal the undercurrents of local histories and experiences. Let the Sun Beheaded Be offers a visually striking depiction of place―as it has been worked on by the forces of nature, people, and events―as well as a thoughtful engagement with the complexities of photographing in foreign lands as an interloper. A text by curator and editor Clément Chéroux grapples with Guadeloupe’s colonial past in relation to the French Revolution, Surrealism, and the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire, whose writing inspired the title of the book and much of the imagery itself. A conversation between Halpern and photographer and critic Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa delves into Halpern’s process, personal history, and the politics of representation.

Let the Sun Beheaded Be was produced as part of Immersion, a program of the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès, in partnership with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson.

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3. Pia (Christopher Anderson)

Christopher Anderson’s first child, Atlas, was born in 2008. He began photographing that experience in a completely organic and naive way. It was the natural action of a new father trying to stop time and not let one drop of the experience slip through. As a photographer, he had never photographed his own personal life. It never occurred to him that these photographs would be part of his “work”. They were external from what he considered his Photography. He was about two years into making those photographs when it dawned on Anderson that these photographs were, in fact, his life’s work and that everything he had done up to that point was a preparation for making those pictures.

They became the book, SON, published in 2012 which portrayed a moment in time in Williamsburg Brooklyn, post 911 and the 2008 economic crash when artist lofts still made up the community before the luxury condos squashed the landscape.

Pia could be called the spiritual sequel to that book. But this time, it marks a new era and search for hope in the Trump/ COVID19 reality. This time, Anderson’s daughter, Pia, is the protagonist and muse, and the backdrop is his French family’s return to Paris (Anderson became a naturalized French citizen in 2018).

“The images portray a father-daughter relationship as well as a photographer-subject collaboration as the Pia’s takes control of her character. The passage of time comes with a certain melancholy, but also a declaration of hope that guides the photographs.” – Christopher Anderson

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4. Love’s Labour (Sergio Purtell)

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5. Perfect Day (Txema Salvans)

In Perfect Day, Txema Salvans photographs Spain’s holiday-makers in unexpected corners of the postindustrial landscape. Sunbathers congregate in car parks, swimming pools are nestled between encroaching buildings, and cranes and cooling towers loom over beaches. In these surreal, banal and humorous scenes, Salvans reveals how the pursuit of leisure persists in spite of the ominous pressures of the built environment, expressing a deeply human determination to adapt, and find repose, against the odds. Although many of these photographs were made near the sea, the sea itself remains invisible: a silent, implicit witness and a backcloth that has been inverted. Instead, we see – in a literal sense – what the images’ subjects want to turn their back on. Beneath the surface of these scrupulously composed tableaux are potent questions about class, national identity, and the politics of space: a depiction of simple pleasures advocating our rights to them.

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6. Side Walk (Frank Horvat)

The publication Side Walk takes the reader into an unprecedented journey through Frank Horvat’s emblematic series he produced in New York between 1982 and 1986 combining iconic photographs and unpublished images found in his archives with the complicity of the photographer and his daughter. A personal series he developed with great freedom outside of his assignments that will turn out to be decisive in his transition from fashion photography to more personal work. As a urban stroll, the book is conceived upon visual associations that have emerged over the years. It shows the contemporaneity of this body of work and the extraordinary talent of Horvat as a colourist. 

The photographer documents here a period in his lifetime in the American city where we can already identify his favorite themes: people, the city’s absurdity and its contradictory beauty. A selection of excerpts from his journal take the reader in the intimacy of his New York experience unveiling as well his interrogations as a street photographer. While a fictional correspondence with Horvat specially written for the book by filmmaker Amos Gitai, gives a new light on this multifaceted series.

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7. The Book of Everything (Mary Ellen Mark)

Conceived and edited by film director Martin Bell, Mary Ellen Mark’s husband and collaborator for over 30 years, The Book of Everything celebrates in over 600 images and diverse texts Mark’s extraordinary life, work and vision. From 1963 to her death in 2015, Mark told brilliant, intimate, provocative stories of remarkable characters whom she would meet and then engage with―often in perpetuity. There was nothing casual or unprepared about Mark’s approach; she unfailingly empathized with the people and places she photographed.

For this comprehensive book Bell has selected images from Mark’s thousands of contact sheets and chromes―from over two million frames in total. These include her own now-iconic choices, those published once and since lost in time, as well as some of her as-yet-unpublished preferences. Bell complements these with a few selections of his own. Along with Mark’s photos made in compelling, often tragic circumstances, The Book of Everything includes recollections from friends, colleagues and many of those she photographed. Mark’s own thoughts reveal doubts and insecurities, her ideas about the individuals and topics she photographed, as well as the challenges of the business of photography.

The images of Mary Ellen Mark (1940–2015) are icons of documentary photography. Her 20 books include Ward 81 (1979), Falkland Road (1981) and Indian Circus (1993). Her last book Tiny: Streetwise Revisited (2015) is a culmination of 32 years documenting Erin Blackwell (Tiny), who was featured in Martin Bell’s 1985 film Streetwise and Mark’s 1988 book of the same name. Mark’s humanistic work has been exhibited and published in magazines worldwide.

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8. Santa Barbara (Diana Markosian)

Santa Barbara is the debut monograph by Diana Markosian, a talented artist who works at the intersection of photography and film. The series recreates the story of Markosian’s family’s journey from post-Soviet Russia to the U.S. in the 1990s.

The project pulls together staged scenes, film stills, and family pictures in an innovative and compelling hybrid of personal and documentary storytelling. In it, the artist grapples with the reality that her mother, seeking a better life for herself and her two young children, escaped Russia and came to America. Markosian’s family settled in Santa Barbara, a city made famous in Russia when the 1980s soap opera of that name became the first American television show broadcast there. Weaving together reenactments by actors, archival images, stills from the original Santa Barbara TV show, Markosian reconsiders her family’s story from her mother’s perspective, relating to her for the first time as a woman, and coming to terms with the profound sacrifices she made to become an American.

Picturing the hopes of Markosian’s mother to provide a different future for her children, the project emphasizes the hypercharged symbolism of the opportunities of America and the West, while serving as a personal reflection of the artist’s family history. Images are woven together with a script written by Markosian in collaboration with one of the original Santa Barbara writers, Lynda Myles, and is the basis for a new short film directed by the artist. Encapsulating different styles and storytelling techniques, Markosian proves to be at the forefront of a new generation of photographers pushing the boundaries of documentary.

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9. Perfect Strangers: New York City Street Photographs (Melissa O’Shaughnessy)

Over the last seven years, Melissa O’Shaughnessy has photographed daily on the streets of New York.
As one of a growing number of women street photographers contributing to this dynamic genre, O’Shaughnessy enters the territory with clarity and a distinctly humanist eye, offering a refreshing addition to the tradition of street photography. Through her curious and quirky vision, we witness the play of human activity on the glittering sidewalks of the city. Woven into her cast of characters are the lonely, the soulful, and the proud. She has fallen for them all―perfect strangers.

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10. Godlis Streets (David Godlis)

David Godlis captures the grit and grandeur of 1970s-’80s New York City in his street photography

When he is on the street armed with his camera, photographer David Godlis (born 1951) describes himself as “a gunslinger and a guitar picker all in one.” Ever since he bought his first 35mm camera in 1970, Godlis has made it his mission to capture the world on film just as it appears to him in reality.

Godlis is most famous for his images of the city’s punk scene and serving as the unofficial official photographer for the Film Society of Lincoln Center. For 40 years, his practice has also consisted of walking around the streets of New York City and shooting whatever catches his eye: midnight diner patrons, stoop loiterers, commuters en route to the nearest subway station. With an acute sense of both humor and pathos, Godlis frames everyday events in a truly arresting manner.

This publication presents Godlis’ best street photography from the 1970s and ’80s in a succinct celebration of New York’s past. The book is introduced by an essay written by cultural critic Luc Sante and closes with an afterword written by Blondie cofounder and guitarist Chris Stein.

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11. Last Call (Harry Gruyaert)

New from Magnum Photos member Harry Gruyaert, a collection of photographs of airports and people in transit.

Alongside American photographers such as Saul Leiter, Joel Meyerowitz, Stephen Shore, and William Eggleston, Harry Gruyaert became one of the first European pioneers to explore the creative possibilities of color photography in the 1970s and 1980s. The previous decades had elevated black-and-white photography to the realms of art, relegating the use of color to advertising, press, and illustration. Gruyaert’s work suggested new territory for color photography: an emotive, nonnarrative, and boldly graphic way of perceiving the world.

Harry Gruyaert: Last Call highlights the photographer’s signature ability to seamlessly weave texture, light, color, and architecture into a single frame with his photographs taken at airports. These photographs beautifully record these liminal, yet reliably inhabited spaces in a striking and sometimes surprising fashion.

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12. From the Pope to a Flat White, Ireland 1979–2019 (Martin Parr)

Forty years of transformation and upheaval: compiling Martin Parr’s longstanding love affair with Ireland

Martin Parr (born 1952) has been taking photographs in Ireland for 40 years. His work covers many of the most significant moments in Ireland’s recent history, encompassing the Pope’s visit in 1979, when a third of the country’s population attended Mass in Knock and Phoenix Park in Dublin, to gay weddings in 2019.

Parr lived in the West of Ireland between 1980 and 1982. He photographed traditional aspects of rural life such as horse fairs and dances, but also looked at the first hints of Ireland’s new wealth in the shape of the bungalows that were springing up everywhere, replacing more traditional dwellings. During subsequent trips to Ireland he explored the new estates around Dublin, documented the North and showed how, after the Good Friday agreement, the Troubles became the focus of a new tourist boom.

The final chapter of this book portrays a contemporary Dublin where start-up companies are thriving, the docks area is being gentrified and where icons of wealth and modernity are ubiquitous. Ireland has also now voted to allow both abortion and gay weddings, developments that would have been unthinkable 40 years ago. Parr published a book of his original black-and-white photographs in 1984. A Fair Day had an introduction by Fintan O’Toole, who subsequently became Ireland’s leading cultural commentator.

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13. Ernst Haas: New York in Color, 1952-1962

The first book on master photographer Ernst Haas’s work dedicated to both his classic and newly discovered New York City color photographs of the 1950s and 60s.

Ernst Haas’s color works reveal the photographer’s remarkable genius and remind us on every page why we love New York. When Haas moved from Vienna to New York City in 1951, he left behind a war-torn continent and a career producing black-and-white images. For Haas, the new medium of color photography was the only way to capture a city pulsing with energy and humanity. These images demonstrate Haas’s tremendous virtuosity and confidence with Kodachrome film and the technical challenges of color printing. Unparalleled in their depth and richness of color, brimming with lyricism and dramatic tension, these images reveal a photographer at the height of his career.

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14. Tar Beach: Life on the Rooftops of Little Italy 1920–75 (Susan Meiselas)

Found family photographs from New York’s Little Italy portray a vanished way of life

In Tar Beach, photographer and Little Italy resident Susan Meiselas (born 1948) brings together found pictures that were made, kept and gathered by various families who handed them down from 1940 to the early 1970s. Reflections from the community offer perspectives of multiple generations, as local author Angel Marinaccio says: “If you had an accomplishment―communion, confirmation, wedding, graduation or birthday, you‘d dress up in your best outfit and go to the rooftop to take pictures and celebrate with your family.”

The introduction to Tar Beach is written by renowned filmmaker Martin Scorsese, who grew up on the streets portrayed in this collection. He writes: “The roof was our escape hatch and it was our sanctuary. The endless crowds, the filth and the grime, the constant noise, the chaos, the claustrophobia, the non-stop motion of everything … you would walk up that flight of stairs, open the door, and you were above it all. You could breathe. You could dream. You could be.”

Meiselas, along with two of her neighbors, Angel Marinaccio and Virginia Bynum, collected and curated these vernacular photographs and memories to convey the feeling of this special place and time in the daily lives of Italian immigrants as they made their way to becoming part of American culture.

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15. Gordon Parks: The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957

Gordon Parks’ ethically complex depictions of crime in New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles, with previously unseen photographs

When Life magazine asked Gordon Parks to illustrate a recurring series of articles on crime in the United States in 1957, he had already been a staff photographer for nearly a decade, the first African American to hold this position. Parks embarked on a six-week journey that took him and a reporter to the streets of New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Unlike much of his prior work, the images made were in color. The resulting eight-page photo-essay “The Atmosphere of Crime” was noteworthy not only for its bold aesthetic sophistication, but also for how it challenged stereotypes about criminality then pervasive in the mainstream media. They provided a richly hued, cinematic portrayal of a largely hidden world: that of violence, police work and incarceration, seen with empathy and candor.

Parks rejected clichés of delinquency, drug use and corruption, opting for a more nuanced view that reflected the social and economic factors tied to criminal behavior and afforded a rare window into the working lives of those charged with preventing and prosecuting it. Transcending the romanticism of the gangster film, the suspense of the crime caper and the racially biased depictions of criminality then prevalent in American popular culture, Parks coaxed his camera to record reality so vividly and compellingly that it would allow Life’s readers to see the complexity of these chronically oversimplified situations. The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957 includes an expansive selection of never-before-published photographs from Parks’ original reportage.

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16. The Destruction of Lower Manhattan (Danny Lyon)

First published in 1969, The Destruction of Lower Manhattan is a singular, lasting document of nearly sixty acres of downtown New York architecture before it’s destruction in a wave of urban development.

After creating the series The Bikeriders and moving back to New York in 1966, Lyon settled into a downtown loft, becoming one of the few artists to document the dramatic changes taking place. Lyon writes, “Whole blocks would disappear. An entire neighborhood. Its few last loft occupying tenants were being evicted, and no place like it would ever be built again.” Through his striking photographs and accompanying texts, Lyon paints a portrait of the people who lived there, of rooms with abandoned furniture, children’s paintings, empty stairwells. Intermingled within the architecture are portraits of individuals and the dem¬olition workers who, despite their assigned task, emerge as the surviving heroes. Danny Lyon’s documentation of doomed facades, empty interiors, work crews, and remaining dwellers still appeals to our emotions more than fifty years later, and Aperture’s reissue retains the power of the original.

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17. 101 Pictures (Tom Wood)

The book is a concise and considered look back at Wood’s work selected by Martin Parr, edited and sequenced by Padraig Timoney. “101 Pictures” is the first english language retrospective of Wood’s work, casting light on his 25 year long testament to the people of Merseyside. It includes previously unseen photographs, alongside major works such as the infamous nightclub series, Looking for Love, (1989) and from his seminal Photie Man (2005) publication. “Many of the images that I have selected here are portraits; these are strong, albeit subtle and understated. Tom photographed whole families, groups of workers, couples and individuals, always conveying a sense of dignity and respect.” – Martin Parr

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18. Ciprian Honey Cathedral (Raymond Meeks)

Raymond Meeks is renowned for his use of photography and the book form to poetically distill the liminal junctures of vision, consciousness and comprehension. In ciprian honey cathedral, he brings this scrutiny close to home, delicately probing at the legibility of our material surroundings and the people closest to us. 

Meeks has long been fascinated by the way we construct the world around us; how we carry our possessions, these accumulated comforts, inheritances, markers of material success; how we adorn homes with trees and shrubs, a mantle clock to count the hours. Stumbling across an abandoned house or unkempt lawn becomes a search for common clues to tiny hidden transgressions, 10×8′ self portrait of Adrianna Ault, numbered and signed by Ault & Meeks 

This question of knowledge and understanding is perhaps most drastic in our solipsistic reality. Meeks also photographed his partner, Adrianna Ault, in the early mornings before she awoke, on the threshold at which daily domestic life converges with the deepest state of sleep. This plight of supine trance is a place of reprieve beneath the surface of consciousness, free from the chaos and uncertainty of the sentient world above, and alludes to the veiled threat that, ultimately, we are utterly unknowable to one another.

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19. The White Sky (Mimi Plumb)

“At 13 we wore faded jeans, torn at the knees, tight white t-shirts, long straight hair parted down the middle. We wandered through the suburban landscape hiding in corners, smoking cigarettes, looking for stuff to do.”

“Throughout my childhood years, growing up beneath the shadow of Mt. Diablo in the California suburb of Walnut Creek, I watched the rolling hills and valleys mushroom with tract homes and strip malls, and to me and my teenage friends, they were the blandest, saddest homes in the world.The starkness of the landscape hurt my eyes. The low brown hills coated with dry grass, scratching my ankles, fox tails caught in my socks. I was always looking for a place to hide from the bright, white sky. The raw dirt yards and treeless streets, model homes expanding exponentially, with imperceptible variation.” – Mimi Plumb

In her early twenties, the American Photographer Mimi Plumb looked back to her Californian childhood to make a series of photographs about suburban youth. The resulting photographs collected in her new book “The White Sky’ builds a world in which an unknown trauma hangs heavy in the air, and children rule the roost.

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20. The Locusts (Jesse Lenz)

The Locusts is the first monograph by photographer and publisher Jesse Lenz. His images transport the reader to rural Ohio where his children run wild in the fields, build forts in the attic, and fall asleep surrounded by lightsabers and superheroes. The microcosmic worlds of plants, insects, animals, and children create a brooding landscape where dichotomies of nature play out in front of his growing family. The backyard becomes a labyrinth of passages as the children experience the cycles of birth and death in the changing seasons. The Locusts depicts a world in which beautiful and terrible things will happen, but offers grace and healing within the brokenness and imperfection of life.

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21. Girl Pictures (Justine Kurland)

The North American frontier is an enduring symbol of romance, rebellion, escape, and freedom.At the same time, it’s a profoundly masculine myth―cowboys, outlaws, Beat poets. Photographer Justine Kurland reclaimed this space in her now-iconic series of images of teenage girls, taken between 1997 and 2002 on the road in the American wilderness. “I staged the girls as a standing army of teenaged runaways in resistance to patriarchal ideals,” says Kurland. She portrays the girls as fearless and free, tender and fierce. They hunt and explore, braid each other’s hair, and swim in sun-dappled watering holes―paying no mind to the camera (or the viewer). Their world is at once lawless and utopian, a frontier Eden in the wild spaces just outside of suburban infrastructure and ideas. Twenty years on, the series still resonates, published here in its entirety and including newly discovered, unpublished images.

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22. Wonderland (Jason Eskenazi) *reprint

“The story of Communism is the story of the twentieth century. For many, the Soviet Union existed, like their childhood, as a fairy tale where many of the realities of life were hidden from plain view. When the Berlin Wall finally fell, so too did the illusion of that utopia. Wonderland is a photographic exploration that portrays both the reality beneath the veneer of a utopian USSR and the affirmation of hope that should never be abandoned. And like all fairy tales try to teach us: the hard lessons of self-reliance.”

New edition of this sought-after book.  Larger size than previous editions to match Departure Lounge.  176pp.

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23. Into the Fire (Matt Stuart)

Into the Fire is Matt Stuart’s second book of photographs following on from his critically acclaimed ‘All that life can Afford’.

Into the Fire documents the daily lives of people who live in Slab City, an off-grid community based on a former military base in the Sonoran desert, just north of the Mexican border.

It is home to travellers, dog lovers, thieves, military veterans, artists and inventors. Its population numbers thousands throughout the winter, in the summer, when temperatures can exceed 120°F (49°C) it dwindles into the low hundreds. True ‘Slabbers’ are the people who have managed to survive two summers. These are the people Matt befriended and photographed.

This is a world where people build earth covered bunkers to live in and bathe in muddy desert springs, tyres are used as decorative wreaths, and a fork in the road is signposted with an oversized plywood fork.

Slab City invites people to come as they are. Most Slabbers struggled in a world of paying rent and small talk, disadvantaged by their lack of social conformity. The Slabs provide refuge.

Accepting others flaws is a step towards accepting yourself.

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24. The Levee (Sohrab Hura)

The Levee: A Photographer in the American South presents a body of photographs by Sohrab Hura (b. 1981, West Bengal, India) in which the artist explores themes of connection, perspective and place. The landscapes and portraits of The Levee trace Hura’s travel along the Mississippi River from its confluence with the Ohio to the far reaches of the delta in Louisiana. Hura, who lives and works primarily in India, made the pictures on a road trip he took in 2016 while participating in a loosely collaborative documentary project called Postcards from America. Echoing touchstones ranging from Farm Security Administration photography to Robert Frank’s The Americans to Alec Soth’s Sleeping by the Mississippi, Postcards fostered a reexamination of photographic perspective as well as producing rich documentary reflections on contemporary American life. Hura’s trip along the lower Mississippi coincided with a contentious moment in American politics and social discourse, when the American South was much in the news. Yet The Levee is not a documentary account of political events or a particular social issue. Rather, it is a photographic response to being in a specific time and place, which embraces the complex effects of human perspective and includes the layered, interpenetrating nature of emotion and point of view. Building on metaphor and personal themes of longing and connection, Hura finds a world that looks him in the eye, holds him at the threshold, and buoys up with unlikely tenderness and hope. The Levee: A Photographer in the American South is accompanied by an exhibition catalogue co-published with the Cincinnati Art Museum and enabled in part by Peter and Betsy Niehoff.

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25. An Eclipse of Moths (Gregory Crewdson)

An Eclipse of Moths extends Gregory Crewdson’s obsessive exploration of the small-town, postindustrial American landscape. Each of these sixteen, never-before-published images is composed at a cinematic scale with the artist’s signature auteurial care.

Downed streetlights, abandoned baby carriages, and decommissioned carnival rides set the scene for a cast of classic Crewdsonian characters―full of equal parts yearning and ennui. This collection of images is offered in a limited-edition, slipcased volume, sumptuously produced at a scale that offers an immersive experience of each of these carefully crafted scenes.

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26. Ruins (Josef Koudelka)

Ruins is the newest monograph by acclaimed Magnum photographer and bestselling author, Josef Koudelka.

For more than twenty years, Koudelka has traveled through the Mediterranean―visiting places such as Italy, Libya, Greece, and Syria―to photograph more than two hundred archaeological sites. Stark and mesmerizing panoramic photographs take the viewer to Delphi, Pompeii, Petra, Carthage, and other ancient locations, including sites now greatly altered or destroyed due to recent conflict. Ruins is a monument of architectural and cultural history, as well as civilizations long past. Published to coincide with a major exhibition at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, this volume includes enlightening texts by a Greek studies expert, curator, and agricultural engineer that cast another look at antiquity and its ruins.

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27. Joel Meyerowitz: How I Make Photographs

The ‘Masters of Photography’ series is a new approach to photography how-to. Each volume is dedicated to the work of one key photographer who, through a series of bite-sized lessons and ideas, tells you everything you always wanted to know about their approach to taking photographs. From their influences, ideas and experiences, to tech tips and best shots.

The series begins with Joel Meyerowitz, who will teach you, among other essentials: how to use a camera to reclaim the streets as your own, why you need to watch the world always with a sense of possibility, how to set your subjects at ease, and the importance of being playful and of finding a lens that suits your personality.

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28. Night Calls (Rebecca Norris Webb)

The call of the ocean has long been a focus of Narelle Autio’s work. Spending her childhood growing up in sun-soaked Australia she has had a lifetime relationship with the beach and is fascinated by the need for many of us to return to water. A primeval need connecting us to our ancient ancestors, pulling us back to where we came. The images dive into our collective memories and speak too many of their own personal experiences.

 Cinematic in nature and using the play of light and colour familiar to all her work, she captures the complex relationship and drama of our love for the sea and our willingness to risk our lives to enjoy it. 

“The water at the end of the jetty is dark. It is deep. I dive, down into the quiet and cold. I breathe out the remaining life I have left in me and sink further into the darkness. Looking up I watch the bubbles of air flee towards the light. Surrounded by things unknown, unseen, I wait. Wait and wait for the jumpers to disturb the stillness. My heart is beating, get out, get out, get out of here.”

“The water above me explodes in shock. I love that moment of immersion when the sea first grabs hold of us. Cocooned in a shroud of bubbles and light, suffocated by a cold, insisting watery embrace. There is a sublime moment of suspension, of complete isolation in a place between two worlds. We can live here but not for very long. The sea lets us enter but it might not let us leave.” – NARELLE AUTIO

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29. Trent Parke/Narelle Autio

The very talented Husband/Wife photographer duo of Trent Parke and Narelle Autio both finished off 2020 with highly anticipated book releases:

Crimson Line (Trent Parke)

Born in the Australian steel city of Newcastle, one of TRENT PARKE’S only early childhood memories is accompanying his mother to pick his dad up from work, travelling through a landscape dominated by ship yards, chimneys, and the BHP steelworks.

Throughout his career PARKE has always been interested in the transformative powers of light, but it was the ephemeral changing colours of dawn and dusk, the multitude or different reds that made him curious about the colour crimson. He discovered the colour that is used in commercial products is harvested from the crushed and boiled bodies of the female scale insect, the Cochineal. A tiny minute insect who inhabits the pads of the prickly pear cactus and who are farmed for their crimson dye. A dye now used primarily in cosmetics and food colouring. 

Scarlet, magenta, orange, and crimson, are the coloured dyes produced by the Cochineal and also seem to feature spectacularly in the colours of creation, as seen in an Eagle Nebula during the birth of a new star and recorded by the Hubble space telescope. These colours of birth and blood Parke also remembers from the bath water, the umbilical cord and placenta, at the birth of his sons. 

‘As soon as the female insect is delivered of its new numerous progeny, it becomes a meer husk and dies; so that great care is taken in Mexico, where it is principally collected, to kill the old ones while big with young, to prevent the young ones escaping into life, and depriving them of that beautiful scarlet dye, so much esteemed by all the world.’ – John Ellis, Esq; 1762.

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Place in Between (Narelle Autio)

The call of the ocean has long been a focus of Narelle Autio’s work. Spending her childhood growing up in sun-soaked Australia she has had a lifetime relationship with the beach and is fascinated by the need for many of us to return to water. A primeval need connecting us to our ancient ancestors, pulling us back to where we came. The images dive into our collective memories and speak too many of their own personal experiences.

Cinematic in nature and using the play of light and colour familiar to all her work, she captures the complex relationship and drama of our love for the sea and our willingness to risk our lives to enjoy it. 

“The water at the end of the jetty is dark. It is deep. I dive, down into the quiet and cold. I breathe out the remaining life I have left in me and sink further into the darkness. Looking up I watch the bubbles of air flee towards the light. Surrounded by things unknown, unseen, I wait. Wait and wait for the jumpers to disturb the stillness. My heart is beating, get out, get out, get out of here.”

“The water above me explodes in shock. I love that moment of immersion when the sea first grabs hold of us. Cocooned in a shroud of bubbles and light, suffocated by a cold, insisting watery embrace. There is a sublime moment of suspension, of complete isolation in a place between two worlds. We can live here but not for very long. The sea lets us enter but it might not let us leave.” – NARELLE AUTIO

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Notable Mentions:

Peanut Press: Peanut Portfolio books

Peanut Press published a collection of “Peanut Portfolio books” from nine uniquely talented photographers:

Melissa Breyer
Don Hudson
Sacha Lecca
Jennifer McClure
Lori Nix & Kathleen Gerber
Greta Pratt
Andi Schreiber
Rainy Silvestre
Grace Weston

Check them all out here: https://peanutpressbooks.com

Zines: Bump Books

When it comes to zines, I released one this year through Bump Books, which published a wide and ever growing catalogue of zines from different photographers in 2020 (43 zines at the time of posting) . Check out mine, The Drowned World, and all the rest here.

The Drowned World

 

Hopefully, you all can find something to add to your photo library, or someone else’s. And if you have any recommended books from 2020 to add to the list, comment them below. Best Wishes to everyone in 2021!