Our Favorite Photobooks of 2023!

By Elin Spring and Suzanne Révy

At What Will You Remember? we gravitate to photographic art that explores the nature and depths of human connection, whether to each other, the land, the stars, or the sea. Our Favorite Photobooks of 2023 express a range of approaches to such essential relationships, from absurd to sublime and representational to abstract. We feel these photobooks invite immersion into emotionally engaging worlds that enhance our appreciation of meaningful relationships. In our brief reviews that follow, we hope that you make some delightful discoveries!

In our first section, we present thirteen new monographs; in the second section, we feature seven retrospectives and exhibition catalogs; and in the final section, we list the seven books that we reviewed last year in three themed, comparative articles. All listings are in alphabetical order by author’s last name and include a link in blue to a site where the publication can be purchased, just in case you have gift list with someone special on it.

NEW MONOGRAPHS

“The North Fork” by Trent Davis Bailey

Trent Davis Bailey: The North Fork

Photographs by Trent Davis Bailey, essay by Rebecca Solnit poem by David Mason, Trespasser, 2023, 12.5 x 10.2 inches. 96 pages. 48 color plates. Paper-over-board slipcase. Softcover with thread-stitched signatures and rough linen. $75.

Many of the photographs in The North Fork, a softbound book in a case, incorporate a screen that encumbers our vision. Whether through a dirty windshield or the dust of the prairies, these photographs seem to be grasping for something edenic, but they are in fact rooted in the reality of the rural life found in the plains of Colorado. Bailey’s seductive use of pastel colors creates a redolent rhythm that never becomes saccharine. The pictures feel like memories, and Bailey’s story of the time he spent in the North Fork area as a child and his return as an adult are illuminating. 

“On Listening To Trees” by Albarràn Cabrera

Albarràn Cabrera: On Listening To Trees

Artwork by Albarrán Cabrera, introduction by Yves Darricau and Herman Hesse, RM Verlag in collaboration with Atelier EXB, 2023, in French, English or Spanish, hardcover, 21.2 x 29 cm, 184 pages, 101 color photographs €49.

The Spanish duo Ángel Albarrán and Anna Cabrera employ an alchemical approach to photography in their collaboration which began in the mid-90’s. Inspired by Herman Hesse’s writings on trees, Albarrán Cabrera endow their images with a meditative yet playful reverence that is a visual feast of color, form and texture. The book meanders between a serene Asian aesthetic to more expressive and cacophonous compositions without ever losing sight of the magnificence and majesty of their subject. 

“Ghostlight” by Keith Carter

 Keith Carter: Ghostlight

Photographs by Keith Carter, Story by Bret Anthony Johnston, University of Texas Press, 2023, 12”x 12”, 184pp., $50.

Writer Bret Anthony Johnston sets the murky, mysterious tone in Ghostlight with a gothic short story that offers a haunting intonation to Keith Carter’s otherworldly wet-plate B&W photographs. Whispering, humid southern wetlands of moss-draped cypress trees and dark waters breathe spectral light, divulging ghostly apparitions and the gators, owls and other wild things secreted within. Carter’s caressing imagery is a stunning, atmospheric impression of southern mythology.

“The Enigma of Belonging” by Binh Danh

Binh Danh: The Enigma of Belonging

Photographs by Binh Danh, Texts by Binh Danh, Joshua Chuang, Andrew Lam, Boreth Ly & Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, Radius Books, 2022, 2 Volumes, 9.75”x 11.75”, 276pp, 130 images, $65.

As an American refugee from Vietnam who was not old enough to have any memories of his family’s homeland, Binh Danh reclaims his cultural heritage and asserts his American identity in two riveting volumes enveloped in a slipcase. In the first, Danh’s physically and emotionally arresting images of vintage Vietnam War news photos printed onto indigenous tropical plant leaves underscore how the war has been engraved into the land. Paired with this work is Danh’s series of Daguerreotypes, an alternative process that simultaneously depicts his scenic vistas across the American west with reflections of the viewer, gently insisting that America belongs to all. The second volume contains vintage family photographs and memorabilia, along with Danh’s B&W images from re-visits to sites along the path of his family’s emigration, media images, essays and an interview that contextualize Danh’s exquisite images exploring the idea of homeland and his passage to America that is at once unique and shared by thousands.

“cousins” by Kristen Joy Emack

Kristen Joy Emack: cousins

Photographs by Kristen Joy Emack, Text by Dr. Alisa Victoria Prince, L’Artiere, 2023, 6.5”x 9.5”, 96pp, $60.

Following a decade of close observation, Kristen Joy Emack’s Cousins achieves something rare and beautiful: an intimate and affirming view of Black American girlhood. With an unabashedly loving bias, Emack reveres the growth and interdependence of her daughter and three cousins in repose and during their wanderings through childhood and coming of age. The sensuous tonalities in her B&W images echo the full range of their emotions, just as entangled branches emulate intertwined arms and stalwart trees and hard surfaces convey strength. The subtlety with which she enlists shadows, light and glass that can obscure or reflect, hints at the girls’ inner stirrings. That Emack chooses to photograph the cousins engaged in ordinary activities only accentuates the extraordinary bonds revealed through her sensitive, intelligent lens.

“Remember Me” by Preston Gannaway

Preston Gannaway: Remember Me

Photographs and interview by Preston Gannaway, Gost Books, 2023, hardback, 230 x 294 mm
132pp, 71 images (printed 4-colour) $64.

Remember Me is structured like a musical score. The overture ahead of the title page includes a penetrating sequence of images that follow the relationship between a dying mother and her toddler son: she sits on the couch while he gazes out a picture window, followed by an image that reveals her gaunt face while she lies in bed, and finally, gut wrenchingly, her grave. What follows is the trajectory of the toddler, EJ’s life into adulthood without a mother. Gannaway emphasizes the intimacies of day to day while building an arc of growth across the seasons An interview with EJ’s father, Rich, offers insight into how memories and relationships changed between a son, his father, late mother and a caring photographer. 

“The Need To Know” by Michael S. Honegger

Michael S. Honegger: The Need To Know

Pictures by Michael S. Honegger, Texts by Brenton Hamilton, Barbara Honegger, Aline Smithson, and George A. Reisch, Blow Up Press, 2023, 100pp., 54 images, 6.5”x 9”, $72.

Michael Honegger divulges one thing for certain: his father worked as a spy for the US Air Force during the Cold War. From there, it is all mystery and intrigue. In this superbly crafted visual puzzle of a memoir, Honegger leads us through a personal journey steeped in clandestine Cold War geopolitics, juxtaposing and intertwining provocative vintage photographs with his own suggestive imagery. These are combined with inserts and fold-outs bearing evidence: sample pictures of miniature spy cameras, documents in German and Russian, and coded transcripts secreted between sealed pages, that intermingle with tantalizing tension. Following that, writings by his mother Barbara, Brenton Hamilton, Aline Smithson and George A. Reisch are rich with clues, but no answers. By combining documents with interpretive imagery stained by time and imbued with nostalgic family lore, Honegger creates a riveting narrative that entices like a game of keep away, alluring and eluding us with The Need to Know.

“Voice” by Jungjin Lee

Jungjin Lee: Voice

Photographs by  Jungjin Lee, Nazraeli Press, 2023, hardcover, 12” x 15”, 110 pages, 46 quadratone plates, $85.

Voice by Jungjin Lee is a large book of black and white landscape photographs made in the western U.S. that opens with Pablo Neruda’s “La Poesía” in its original Spanish. Lee employs textured papers and a tonal range that emphasizes the tactile characteristics of the trees, rocks or cacti in the images. The sequence is punctuated by the occasional all black spread, and the work is at times abstracted to the point of looking like charcoal drawings. Like Neruda, Lee seems to be searching for the poetry of the land through a mesmerizing journey of self-discovery in these wild and barren places. 

“Catholic Girl” by Andrea Modica

Andrea Modica: Catholic Girl

Images and text by Andrea Modica, L’Artiere, 2023, 48pp, 7.75”x 9.5”, softcover in slipcase, $70.

In Catholic Girl, we witness the birth of Andrea Modica’s signature style of intimate platinum portraits made with an 8”x 10” view camera. Created while earning her MFA at Yale in 1984, she photographed girls at her own largely Italian-American Catholic girls’ high school in Brooklyn and later at similar schools near New Haven, CT. On one level, this series can be viewed as an anthropologic study of a focused group constricted by uniforms and rules, all signs of personal flair consigned to amusingly dated hairstyles and that nearly tribal teen lockstep in accessory choices. But those elements only serve to accentuate what Modica does best, which is to evoke an essence of the teenage self through gesture and expression. What she draws out of these girls caught in the hormonal throes of intense transformation are barely concealed internal tensions that ring eternal.

“Sex. Death. Transcendence.” by Linda Troeller

Linda Troeller: Sex. Death. Transcendence.

Images by Linda Troeller, Essay by Darcey Steinke, TBW Books, 2023, 96pp., 28 images, 13”x 9”, $50.

If you agree that chasing youth is a wasteful distraction from “your one wild and precious life,” you are likely to find Linda Troeller’s memoir of self-portraits a bracing antidote to the slick fantasies offered by the fashion and beauty industry. Never mind that the title Sex. Death. Transcendence. seems designed to sell books. Spiritually akin to John Coplans’ revolutionary, outsized B&W “non-verbal confessional” of his aging body, Troeller is promoting self-acceptance, a much more difficult idea to sell, especially to women. Here, her impressive fifty year archive of self-portraits has been deftly trimmed into a mixed sequence that spans the transition from a comely nymph who leverages her prodigious experience as an artist’s model to an inquiring exploration of a seventy year-old self who willingly owns her entirety. Daring, provocative, and above all honest, Troeller’s book is a vital, unabridged appraisal of femininity.

“From Where They Came” by Katherine Turczan

Katherine Turczan: From Where They Came

Photographs by Katherine Turczan and short story by Sophia Andrukhovych, Stanley Barker, 2023, 128 pages, 290 x 230 mm, cover, flexibound/blind stamped, $52.

In 1991, Minnesota-based photographer Katherine Turczan sought to connect with family in Ukraine, following her parents’ dementia and the death of her grandfather. He had fled Ukraine after fighting the Bolsheviks, leaving seven siblings, and Turczan felt adrift from her past and her family. Returning with an 8”x10” camera over several years, Turczan was welcomed by aunts, uncles and cousins as she created a collection of delicate and sensitive portraits. With an ongoing and unjustified war raging in Ukraine, the precious connections in Turczan’s work seem especially prescient and relevant. 

“Dislocations” by Alex Webb

Alex Webb: Dislocations

Pictures and text by Alex Webb, Aperture, 2023, 128pp., 80 images, 12”x 10”, $50.

Dislocations is not merely an expansion of astonishing photographs but a distinct evolution in inferences from its original iteration, a 1998 experiment in bookmaking by Magnum photographer Alex Webb. In the twenty years since, Webb’s astute eye has discerned intriguing dissonances in city streets, plazas, and rooftops across the globe. His pulsating compositions puzzle, delight, and converse, even as they point to recent, forced separations and a continuing plague of displacements. No small part of Webb’s genius is the way he bathes his images in joyful vibrancy and regards his subjects with ardent empathy.

“A Room for the Night” by Alex Yudzon

Alex Yudzon: A Room for the Night

Images and text by Alex Yudzon, Interview by Sharon Core, Radius Books, 2023, 128pp., 54 images, 9.75”x 12”, $55.

In A Room for the Night, Alex Yudzon dispels the misguided but widespread notion that fine art and humor cannot coexist. His wildly inventive furniture rearrangements perpetrated in hotel rooms across the world combine cunning composition with sly messaging regarding the precarious balance between belonging and foreignness. Resembling a form of “breaking and entering,” his secret nocturnal designs are invitations for our shared subversion. Yudzon ventures that hotels represent both “an alluring destination for romance and adventure or a space for moral transgression and criminal activity.” This duality suggests that hotels, like America itself, are places where anything can happen. Whether in bold B&W or a cacophony of color, Yudzon’s images harness the contradictory promises of hotel rooms with delicious mischief, jeopardy and panache.

RETROSPECTIVES and EXHIBITION CATALOGS

“A Long Arc: Photography and the American South” by Sarah Kennel and Gregory J. Harris.

“A Long Arc: Photography and the American South” by Sarah Kennel and Gregory J. Harris.

By Gregory J. Harris and Sarah Kennel, Essay by Imani Perry, Aperture and the Hight Museum of Art, 2023, hardback, 304 pages, 275 images, 8.07 x 11.43 inches. Additional texts by Makeda Best, LeRonbn P. Brooks, Rahim Fortune, Grace Elizabeth Hale, Maria L. Kelly, Scott L. Matthews and Brian Piper, $75.

This catalogue for a show that is currently on view at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta through January 14th, 2024 and opening at the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, MA on March 1st, 2024, is an exhaustive look at the violence, beauty and history of the south through photography. It opens with several early Daguerrotypes and is organized into roughly ten to twenty year increments, from searing portraits of the formerly enslaved in the Civil War era to the poverty of the 1930’s and the cultural and societal transformations from the 1950’s to the 1980’s. It includes contemporary works that underscore the myriad legacies of southern culture. The personal impact of history and the story of photography are contextualized with a collection of insightful essays. 

“A Nimble Arc: James Van Der Zee and Photography ” by Emilie Boone

“A Nimble Arc: James Van Der Zee and Photography ” by Emilie Boone

By Emilie Boone, Duke University Press, 2023, Pages: 288, Illustrations: 76 color illustrations, 1 map, $27.95

Strictly speaking, this is not a photography book, but anyone interested in James Van Der Zee and expanding the annals of photography to include a broader swath of voices will find this richly illustrated historical account illuminating. Boone weaves chronicles of the Harlem Renaissance with vernacular traditions in photography, providing enlightening insights into Van Der Zee and the significance of his work in the photographic canon. 

“As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic” Selections from the Wedge Collection

“As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic” Selections from the Wedge Collection

Selections from the Wedge Collection, Aperture 2021, hardback, 184 pages, 142 images, 9.6” x  11.4” x 0.8” Preface by Teju Cole, Introduction by Mark Sealy, Interview with Dr. Kenneth Montague by Liz Ikiriko, with texts by  Isolde Brielmaier, Sandrine Colard, Letticia Cosbert Miller, Julie Crooks, Daisy Desrosiers, Liz Irkiriko, O’Neil Lawrence, Kenneth Montague, Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, Teka Selman, Zoé Whitley and Deborah Willis, $50.

Dr. Kenneth Montague, a first-generation Jamaican Canadian dentist with a passion for photography and music, enjoyed a middle-class upbringing in Ontario. He didn’t see anyone who looked like him in photographs until his parents brought him to the Detroit Institute of Arts as a ten-year old in the 1970’s. There, he was struck by a glamorous portrait of a couple wearing raccoon coats by the famous New York photographer James Van Der Zee. It was an epiphany. When he grew up and began practicing dentistry, Dr. Montague bought that photograph and then others, and still more, forming what is now the Wedge Collection. A large selection of the collection was organized into three themes: Community, Identity and Power and installed at the Peabody Essex Museum, still on view until the end of December 2023. The collection, exhibition and this catalog include work by over a hundred artists, enlarging and celebrating the experiences of Black lives across the diaspora. 

“Elegy” by Dawoud Bey

Dawoud Bey: Elegy

Photographs by Dawoud Bey, curated by Olivia Cassel Oliver, additional texts by LeRonn P. Brooks, Imani Perry and Christina Sharpe. Aperture and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, 2023, 176 pages, 75 images, 11.5 x 12 x 1 inches, $65.

At Paris Photo earlier this month, we saw an advance copy of the catalog for Dawoud Bey’s exhibition, Elegy, currently on view at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) in Richmond. Known for powerful portraits and street photographs made in Harlem, here Bey looks at Black History through landscape in three series: “In This Here Place” which contemplates daily life of the enslaved on plantations in Louisiana; “Night Coming Tenderly, Black” which probes the perils of escaping enslavement along the Underground Railroad in Ohio; and the recent, VMFA-commissioned “Stony the Road” which looks at the place where Africans arrived in bondage in Richmond to be enslaved in a new land. Employing rich blacks and ominous light, Bey’s landscapes are both emotionally charged and revelatory.

“In Light of Everything” by Debbie Fleming Caffery

Debbie Fleming Caffery: In Light of Everything

Artwork by Debbie Fleming Caffery, essays by Russell Lord and Brian Piper, Radius Books, 2023, hardcover, 21,2 x 29 cm, 184 pages, 101 photographs, $60.

Another advance copy we were fortunate to see at Paris Photo is this catalog of Debbie Fleming Caffery’s first museum career retrospective at the New Orleans Museum of Art. It is an enormous tome filled with the photographer’s trademark chiaroscuro and expressive blur from each of her longterm projects. She brings her gothic southern sensibility from New Orleans to all her imagery: sugar cane workers and burning fields in the south, prostitutes in Mexico, animals, and images from Europe and the American southwest. Caffery’s photographs are by turns humorous and melancholic, revealing an artist with a deep sensitivity and emotional range. 

“Rodney Smith: A Leap of Faith” by Paul Martineau

“Rodney Smith: A Leap of Faith” by Paul Martineau

Images by Rodney Smith, Texts by Paul Martineau, Rebecca Senf, Leslie Smolan and Graydon Carter, Getty Publications, 2023, 248pp., 224 images, 9.5”x 11.5”, $65.

Some of the world’s most influential photographers have sprung from the fashion industry and while the name Rodney Smith (1947-2016) may not be as familiar as Irving Penn or Richard Avedon, his distinctive images are instantly recognizable. Playful and alluring, sophisticated and stylish, Rodney Smith’s trendsetting photographs belie a complex and unsettled character. While it is common for artists to exorcise a troubled childhood with wrenching images, Smith sought light, order and beauty to soothe his soul. His virtuosity is manifest in the way his exacting techniques and metaphysical ponderings generated photographs with such a sense of spontaneity, fun and delicious wit. Accompanied by engaging text and context, A Leap of Faith is a radiant retrospective of Rodney Smith’s life and imagery.

“Shehuo: Community Fire” by Zhang Xiao

Zhang Xiao: “Shehuo: Community Fire”

Photographs by Zhang Xiao, Texts by Zhang Xiao, Ilisa Barbash and Ou Ning, Aperture/Peabody Museum Press, 2023, 192pp., 150 images, 7”x 9.25”, $65.

In this unusual book – a captivating blend of anthropology,  geopolitics, and fine art – Chinese photojournalist Zhang Xiao explores Chinese Lunar New Year celebrations, or Shehuo (Community Fire), in rural northern provinces across time. The exhibition at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology through April 14th, 2024 and this catalog are an illuminating reckoning of seismic cultural changes over the past decade. From his evocative, dreamlike images of festival participants in 2007, Zhang jumps ahead a decade to discover a bright, showy commercialization prompted by Chinese policies to capitalize on tradition and encourage tourism. Zhang’s incisive images are a startling, often amusing, and always intriguing discourse on the rapid changes in China, as mirrored in a revered and venerable tradition.

BOOKS WE REVIEWED IN 2023

Who Are You? Published February 8, 2023

Who are you? I am an American, and in a land of immigrants, that can imply as many permutations as there are languages and dialects spoken across this vast land. Our identities are complex, incubated in family history, impacted by cultural influences and moderated over our lifetimes. Three recently published photobooks by artists who immigrated to the United States explore the knotty web of generational and cultural forces on the formation of personal identity: The Answers Take Time  by Annu Palakunnathu Matthew (Minor Matters/sepiaEYE, 2022), Embrace, by Rohina Hoffman (Schilt Publishing, 2023), and Spin Club Stories by Astrid Reischwitz (Kehrer Verlag, 2022).

The Answers Take Time by Annu Palakunnathu Matthew – Minor Matters/sepiaEye

Embrace by Rohina Hoffman – Schilt Publishing

Spin Club Stories by Astrid Reischwitz – Kehrer Verlag

Be It Ever So Humble Published March 22, 2023

Snippets of other people’s lives flash through my backseat window as the family car glides toward home under the cloak of night. Illuminated spaces emit staccato clues as we pass by. Each dwelling seems to be calling for my eager animation, baiting me with that eerie blue television light, a funky lamp or the whisper of movement within. This childhood pastime has never left me and I know I am not alone. Two recently published books catapult this fascination with our inhabited spaces into absorbing inquests: Personal History by Sarah Malakoff (Kehrer Verlag, 2023) and Dune Shacks of Provincetown by Jane Paradise (Schiffer Publishing, 2022). In distinctive ways, each photographer expresses that enigmatic, powerful allure of places that say “home.”

Personal History by Sarah Malakoff – Kehrer Verlag

Dune Shacks of Provincetown by Jane Paradise – Schiffer Publishing

Living In The Material World Published October 19, 2023

I found myself drawn to the lush studies of earthy botanicals by Tanya Marcuse when I came across them on social media. When I learned late last spring she was offering a one day workshop through the Center for Photography at Woodstock, I rather impulsively signed up. We had a productive day exploring a pastoral property in upstate New York, and inspired, I purchased her book, Fruitless, Fallen, Woven (Radius 2019). More recently, I discovered that a former professor of mine, Ann Mandelbaum, published a book called Matter  (Hatje Cantz, 2023). Both books sat side-by-side on a table for several weeks, and as I perused them I discovered some interesting parallels between the work and the structure of each book. 

Fruitless, Fallen, Woven by Tanya Marcuse – Radius

Matter by Ann Mandelbaum – Hatje Cantz