By Elin Spring and Suzanne Révy
Here we are at holiday time, steeling ourselves for a winter of shrunken, separate celebrations during one of the most surreal and trying periods in our collective memory. More than ever, we long for personal companionship and the look and feel of genuine articles. Thankfully, great books offer respite in happy and harrowing times alike. Objects of beauty that we can hold and page through, repeatedly, leisurely, greedily, books can alter our perspective, launching us on voyages into other lives and eras or offering a grounding sense of peace.
Our favorite photobooks of 2020 are a confluence of artistic expression, the weighty ethos of this past year and our own sensibilities. Veering inward, they look at the world with a philosophical slant. The photobooks we’ve chosen this year are expressive exclamations and ruminations about the big stuff – life and death, what tears us apart and what holds us together.
As in previous years, we offer a short explanation of why we think each book is exceptional and a link in blue if you’d like to order it. There are three sections: New Monographs, Retrospectives & Catalogs, and the Books We Reviewed in 2020, along with links in blue to those reviews. Monographs are listed alphabetically by author.
NEW MONOGRAPHS
Yukari Chikura: Zaido
Yukari Chikura: Zaido
Photographs, drawings, paintings and text by Yukari Chikura, Steidl Publishers, 2020. In English, 164 pages, 69 images, four color process in clothbound slipcase, 35×23.2 cm. EU85.00
Following a serious accident, the death of her father, and the horrific tragedy of the Tohuko earthquake and tsunami of 2011, Japanese photographer Yukari Chikura felt overwhelmed by the the weight of despair and sorrow. In a dream, her father told her to travel to the northern towns where he once lived and visit the ancient shrine where a dance is performed to cleanse the spirit. In this handsome and carefully designed book, Chikari’s photographs of a snowy retreat and its winter rituals are magical, a spiritual affirmation of the human capacity for connection and continuity across centuries .
Debi Cornwall: Necessary Fictions
Debi Cornwall: Necessary Fictions
Photographs by Debi Cornwall. Text by Makeda Best and Nomi Stone and Roy Scranton and Sarah Sentilles, Radius Books, Santa Fe, USA, 2020. In English. 172 pp., 70 illustrations, 9×12″. $55.00
Debi Cornwall’s bright, bleak and spare imagery wrestles with an inherent paradox: the artifice and necessity of war games. With a rare perspective, at once entranced and dispassionate, Cornwall examines staged desert landscapes, enemy role players and soldiers-in-training with discerning detail and a visual sensibility for composition and palette that is splendidly sophisticated. This deeply researched and thoughtfully designed volume succeeds in provoking bigger questions regarding the necessity of conflict.
Matt Eich: Seasonal Blues
Matt Eich: Seasonal Blues
Photographs by Matt Eich, Volume 5, Winter 2020; Little Oak Press, 8×6.75 inches, Perfectbound, 76 pages, 48 images in an edition of 300, $35.00.
This quiet paperback is filled with the muted light and mood of winter. One of a series of self-published books that Eich has released quarterly, it gathers images made during the course of a single season. Its mixture of interior studies of light, portraiture, and landscape is a meditative rhythm of prosaic moments. This small, pensive book contemplates the circadian nature of love, life and death.
Jason Fulford: Picture Summer on Kodak Film
Jason Fulford: Picture Summer on Kodak Film
Photographs by Jason Fulford, Poetry by Gillian Frise and Heather Frise, Mack Books, 2020, Buckram hardback, 28×21.5cm, 112 pages, $45.00
The title alone is hard to resist and the journey within its pages does not disappoint. Through an exquisite sequence, Fulford guides readers on a trek of kaleidoscopic light, juxtaposing textures, and perceptual puns from California to Mexico, Canada and Thailand – in the process satisfying the wanderlust that has grown during this pandemic. An accompanying poem by sisters Gillian and Heather Frise adds to the sensation of feeling alone, getting lost, and finding comfort in the mundane and at times humorous scenes along the way.
Sarah Hadley: Lost Venice
Sarah Hadley: Lost Venice
Photographs by Sarah Hadley, Essay by Karen Haas, Interview with Susan Burnstine, Damiani Editore, April 2020, 18.3 x 23.3 cm / 7/15 x 9/16 inches, 56 pages, 25 color and b&w, $35.00
It is rare for a city to feel intimate, but through Sarah Hadley’s lens, Venice does. Her lengthy history with the city, coupled with the premature loss of the father who introduced her to Venice, has allowed her to harness the city’s tenuous condition with subtle intensity. Hadley’s dreamy, ethereal sepia images shiver with transience and emanate longing. We are extended a personal invitation to enter into a glowing, mystical world, one that these days seems more alluring than ever.
Brenton Hamilton: A Blue Idyll
Brenton Hamilton: A Blue Idyll, Cyanotypes and Dreams
Photographs by Brenton Hamilton, essay by Lyle Rexer, published by Schilt Publishing, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2020, 30x24cm, hardback with cloth cover, 112 pages with 93 images in full color, EU50.00.
Assembling over two decades of work, Maine-based Brenton Hamilton reveals his passion for history, science, and nature along with a fervent fascination with early photographic processes, especially cyanotypes. His collages are layered with classical figures, flora, and fauna, often swimming in rich, deep blue hues that conjure fantastical and surreal dreams. An essay by Lyle Rexer contextualizes Hamilton’s historical approach to photography and proffers a future that celebrates nature.
Brian Kaplan: I’m Not On Your Vacation
Brian Kaplan: I’m Not On Your Vacation, Greetings from Cape Cod
Photography by Brian Kaplan, Text by Brian Kaplan, Richard Russo and Henry David Thoreau, Kehrer Verlag, 2020, 116pp., 46 illustrations, 11×12”, $50.00
With a detective’s eye for enticing clues, Brian Kaplan investigates the commonly overlooked people and landscapes of the popular summer destination of outer Cape Cod. Rather than plying spirited vacationers and teeming hot spots, he offers captivating, bittersweet portraits of the Cape’s largely immigrant seasonal workers and contemplates the area’s barren winter landscape with a melancholy equal to its spare beauty. Kaplan’s poignant, wry and at times humorous photographs explore feelings of separation and alienation that are ever more affecting during our era of isolation.
Raymond Meeks: Ciprian Honey Cathedral
Raymond Meeks: Ciprian Honey Cathedral
Photographs and text by Raymond Meeks, Mack Books, 2020, hardcover with printed PVC jacket, 30x24cm, 90 pages, $55.00.
The book opens with a poem inspired by Nick Cave lyrics, which sets the tone for the intimate love letter to follow. Meeks imparts a reverence for human connection and the quotidian details of the domestic sphere. He uses a long mid-tonal range in most of the black and white pictures, but the sequence is interspersed with several soft color images that embrace the reader in a loving blanket of familial comfort.
Kyle Meyer: Interwoven
Kyle Meyer: Interwoven
Photography by Kyle Meyer. Foreword by Todd J. Tubutis, Interview by Andy Campbell. Radius Books, Co-published with Yossi Milo. Hardcover / 11 x 12.75 inches, 80 images / 192 pages, ISBN: 9781942185680. $65.00
Kyle Meyer has usurped exuberant fabrics from the traditional, restrictive eSwatini culture (formerly Swaziland) and woven them together with his haunting, majestic portraits of the stifled members of its LGBTQ community. The result is a magical, buoyant vision forming a literally and figuratively interwoven society. At once individual and collective, lush and mystical, Meyer has married message and method in a most uplifting way, at a time when we desperately want to envision hope.
Rebecca Norris Webb: Night Calls
Rebecca Norris Webb: Night Calls
Photography and Text by Rebecca Norris Webb, Radius Books, 2020, 8.5 x 9.75 inches, 128 Pages, 61 Images, $50.00
Rebecca Norris Webb revisits the rural Indiana landscape of her earliest memories as she evokes the footsteps of her 100 year-old father, a family doctor who tended to the births, the ailing and the dying that frequently called for him during the dark overnight hours. Layered, introspective portraits and dramatic natural settings are bathed in breath-taking, ethereal light that quivers and quakes with Norris Webb’s hand-scribed prose. Night Calls feels like a reverent ode to the mysteries of life and death, entwined with a daughter’s tender dual-portrait of kindred spirits who “learned to listen to the ache between the words.”
Mimi Plumb: The White Sky
Mimi Plumb: The White Sky
Photographs by Mimi Plumb, published by Stanley/Barker, London, 2020, hardback, foil stamped, 300x240mm, 136 pages, £45.00.
Mimi Plumb mines a deep archive of black and white photographs made in the suburbs of California near San Francisco during the 1970’s. Teens smoking cigarettes, tract housing, abandoned cars and swimming pools among the arid landscapes foreshadow the environmental degradation of the golden state which has led to its recent, devastating forest fires. Weaved throughout are images of children whose free-range play, unencumbered by digital devices, elicits a whiff of nostalgia… as a native of California who was a teen at that time, this reader recognizes those freckled faces, and I swear, I had the same dress one of Plumb’s young girls is wearing.
Amani Willett: A Parallel Road
Amani Willett: A Parallel Road
Photographs by Amani Willett. Overlapse Books, London, November 2020, Softcover, 5×7” portrait, 112 pages, Hand-sewn single signature binding with buckram tape, uncut fore edge, printed wrapper, 85 new photographs, archival images and digital screenshots, $25.00
Amani Willett elaborates a moving, often menacing visual narrative from collages of new and archival photographs overlaying pages from the indispensable “The Negro Motorist Green-Book,” first published in 1936 to offer advice on avoiding the treacherous dangers of “driving while Black.” Equal parts enlightening and enraging, Willett intrigues with portraits by turns delightful, reflective and devastating of a people who were forced into traveling a parallel road simply to partake in the pleasures afforded their white counterparts. Willett conjures the sentimental style of a personal scrapbook and retains the dimensions of the original Green-Book to craft a stinging account that feels like an homage to resiliency, a plea for human compassion and an indictment of wrongs that sadly persist today.
RETROSPECTIVES & CATALOGS
African Cosmologies: Photography, Time and the Other
African Cosmologies: Photography, Time and the Other
Edited by Steven Evans, Max Fields, and Mark Sealy, Schilt Publishing with FotoFest Biennial, 2020. 352 pp., 6¾x9½x1¼”, $60.00
This catalogue from the FotoFest Biennial 2020 exhibition in Houston, TX brings together the work of 33 artists across the African diaspora, offering an exciting contemporary perspective on the pan-African experience. Admittedly focused on social, cultural and political conditions, the views of contributing artists like Carrie Mae Weems and Zanele Muholi question, contest and reframe traditional depictions with their pointed revisions of Black identity and representation.
Rebecca Senf “Making A Photographer: The Early Works of Ansel Adams”
Making a Photographer: The Early Work of Ansel Adams
Photography by Ansel Adams. Text by Rebecca A. Senf, Foreword by Anne Breckenridge Barrett, Yale University Press, New Haven, USA, 2020. 280 pp., 8×10″, $50.00
From the Chief Curator at the Center for Creative Photography – home to the Ansel Adams archive – Rebecca Senf has leveraged her unparalleled access and curious, analytic eye to bring us something completely new and interesting about one of America’s best-recognized photographers. Senf presents an academic but accessible visual and historic context for Adams’ famous photographs by looking at the first decades of his career, shedding light on his artistic development and evolution into an environmentalist and entrepreneur.
Dawoud Bey: Two American Projects
Two American Projects
Photographs by Dawoud Bey. Text by Corey Keller and Elisabeth Sherman. Contribution by Claudia Rankine and Imani Perry and Steven Nelson and Torkwase Dyson, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2020. In English. 128 pp., 32 duotone, 25 tritone, and 29 color illustrations, 9¾x11″, $29.95
This exhibition catalog conjures meaningful connections between Dawoud Bey’s affecting, paired portraits of young and old Alabamans in The Birmingham Project (2012) with his immersive, pondering landscapes along the Underground Railroad in Night Coming Tenderly, Black (2017). Then and now, portrait and landscape, history and consequence, all converge in Bey’s timeless B&W photographs that convey the Black American experience with insightful and contagious empathy.
Imogen Cunningham: A Retrospective
Imogen Cunningham: A Retrospective
Photographs by Imogen Cunnigham Text by Paul Martineau, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, USA, 2020. In English. 256 pp., 9½x11″, $50.00
This stunning exhibition catalogue from the Getty Museum features flowing, enlightening essays by Paul Martineau and Susan Ehrens that magnify the visual splendor of nearly 200 of Cunningham’s images. Organized chronologically, Cunningham’s photographs reflect a fiercely independent visionary who embraced both Pictorialism and Modernism and mastered every genre from still-life to portraiture. This must-have volume presents Cunningham’s virtuosity and versatility to spine-tingling effect.
Mark Klett: Seeing Time
Seeing Time: Forty Years of Photographs
Photographs by Mark Klett. Text by Anne Wilkes Tucker, Rebecca Senf, and Keith F. Davis, University of Texas Press, Austin, TX, 2020. In English. 480 pp., 10½x11½”. $75.00
Seeing Time is the first retrospective from a photographer who has redefined landscape photography, with over four decades of inventive questioning about how human intervention has changed the American West. With award-winning photographs from thirteen different individual and collaborative projects, Mark Klett’s erudite eye expands our perceptions, contextualizing landscape both temporally and culturally.
Dorothea Lange: Words and Pictures
Dorothea Lange: Words and Pictures
Sarah Hermanson Meister, published by the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, 2020, in English, 10.7″x9.3″ 176 pages, hardcover, $55.00
If you were unable to see this exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art earlier this year, then this beautifully constructed catalog will allow your immersion into a thoughtfully curated show that paired Lange’s various works with the publications and writing that accompanied them. Lange fiercely advocated for her photographs to be presented with words, and the catalog sheds light on the power of her writing.
Paul Mpagi Sepuya
Paul Mpagi Sepuya
By Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Wassan Al-Khudhairi, Malik Gaines, Lucy Gallun, Ariel Goldberg, Evan Moffitt and Grace Wales Bonner, published by the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis and Aperture, New York, NY, 2020, in English, paperback, 10″x8″, 96 pages, 77 images, $22.75
This exhibition catalog traces the artist’s work over a ten year period, from early portraits made in the intimacy of his bedroom to more recent studio portraits of close friends, where he plays with layers, mirrors and still-life. The visual threads in his work lead finally to a series of works depicting hands, arms and legs embracing a camera lens draped in black velvet, raising the questions, who is the sitter? And who is the artist?
Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph
Photographs by Ming Smith. Contribution by Arthur Jafa and Emmanuel Iduma and Greg Tate and Hill Janet Talbert and Maya Yxta Murray and Namwali Serpell and Neelika M. Jayawardane and Ulrich Hans Obrist, Aperture, New York, USA, 2020. In English. 236 pp., 8½x10½”, $35.75
The first woman admitted into Roy DeCarava’s pioneering Kamoinge Workshop of Black photographers and the first African-American female photographer to have her works collected by MoMA, Ming Smith’s 40-year retrospective highlights a style marked by lyrical, energetic imagery drenched in longing and rage. Included is signature work ranging from her early fashion photography to her continual self-portraits musing on Black feminine identity to her later conceptual projects channeling stories of Black lives penned by August Wilson and Ralph Ellison.
Predicting the Past: Zohar Studios, The Lost Years
Predicting the Past: Zohar Studios, The Lost Years
A Photographic Tale rendered by Stephen Berkman, essay by Lawrence Weschler, Published by Hat and Beard Press, Los Angeles, CA, 2020, in English, hardcover, 14″x11″, 368 pages, $100
This large tome revels in the Victorian era’s fascination with alchemy, science, illusion and magic. Los Angeles-based artist Stephen Berkman weaves a fantastical tale through a series of surreal wet-plate images that are accompanied with long, sometimes hilarious texts that leave readers wondering, did the Zohar studio really exist or is this a work of bewitching fiction? An essay by Lawrence Weschler offers insights to the artist’s process and sheds light on the mystery.
BOOKS WE REVIEWED IN 2020
THE CIRCLE OF LIFE – published 2.27.20
I need a kiss before they leave
Photographs with text by Mathilde Helene Pettersen
Essay by Anna-Kasia Rastenburger
Kehrer
https://www.kehrerverlag.com/en/mathilde-pettersen-i-need-a-kiss-before-they-leave-978-3-86828-963-3
The Days are Long, The Years are Short
Photographs by Ashly Stohl
Forward by Lynn Melnick
Peanut Press Books
https://peanutpressbooks.com/collections/books/products/days-years
Family Car Trouble
Photographs by Gus Powell
TBW Books
https://www.tbwbooks.com/products/family-car-trouble
Abendlied
Photographs by Birthe Piontek
Text by Nich Hance McElroy
Gnomic Book
https://gnomicbook.com/Abendlied
With Dad
Photographs and text by Stephen DiRado
Davis Publications
https://www.davisart.com/products/davis-select/davis-select-art-books/with-dad/
KEEPER OF THE HEARTH – published 4.2.20
Keeper of the Hearth: Picturing Roland Barthes’ Unseen Photograph
Edited by Odette England and published by Schilt Publishing.
https://www.schiltpublishing.com/shop/books/new-releases/keeper-of-the-hearth/
TRAPPED IN A WORLD THAT WE NEVER MADE – published 4.7.20
The Rest Between Two Notes
Photographs by Fran Forman
Essay by Paula Tognarelli
Published by Unicorn Publishing Group, Distributed by University of Chicago Press, 2020
https://www.franforman.com/the-rest-between-two-notes
THE COLLECTOR’S EYE – published 4.16.20
Frazier King “The Collector’s Eye”
https://www.schiltpublishing.com/shop/books/new-releases/the-collectors-eye/
UNLOCKING THE DIARY – published 6.18.20
Pleasant Street
Photographs and text by Judith Black
Published by Stanley/Barker, London 2020
https://www.stanleybarker.co.uk/collections/frontpage/products/pleasant-street
Girl Pictures
Photographs and text by Justine Kurland
Story by Rebecca Bengal
Published by Aperture, NYC 2020
https://aperture.org/shop/justine-kurland-girl-pictures/
REVEAL: THREE MONOGRAPHS – published 7.28.20
“REVEAL” includes volumes by Cig Harvey, Andrea Modica, and Debbie Fleming Caffery. The set “considers what the photograph exposes and what it keeps secret, what the viewer is meant to know and what the artist wants to hold close.”
http://www.yoffypress.com/reveal
SEARCHING NEAR AND FAR – published 8.18.20
Fernweh
Photography and essay by Teju Cole
Fragments of text are adapted from Switzerland: Handbook for Travelers by Karl Baedecker, 1872
Published by MACK Books, London 2020
https://mackbooks.co.uk/collections/frontpage/products/fernweh-br-teju-cole
Enough
Photographs by Laurent B. Chevalier
Essay by Cyrus Aaron
Poetry by Dr. Jamila Lyiscott
Published by Kris Graves Projects, LLC 2020
https://www.krisgravesprojects.com/book/enough
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