Wessel’s new collection Incidents is a previously unpublished portfolio of 27 scenes that the photographer could not ignore. The monograph follows an exhibition of these images at New York’s Pace/MacGill Gallery.
Click here to read the full review by Pat Padua.
The Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky specializes in industrialized landscapes, but there’s much more than that at work in “Water.”
Click here to read the full review by Dana Jennings.
Hustlers is a real classic, a landmark achievement by an American photographer having a hard look at some of the consequences of his culture. You might have to buy a bigger book shelf, but if you’re interested in contemporary photography, Hustlers is a must buy.
Click here to read the full review by Jörg M. Colberg.
Saul Leiter was immensely talented, revered, and spent much of his life successfully avoiding the limelight. When he died last year, obituarists made much of his pioneer forays into colour, at a time when the practice was considered both vulgar and commercial. But Leiter was never interested in following the crowd. He was a painter before he became a photographer, and his only wish was to record the instances when colours and shapes moved into fleeting geometry. He didn’t give two hoots whether he did so with a brush, a roll of black and white or a roll of colour film.
Click here to read the full review by Lucy Davies.
Irish-born Tom Wood photographed the people of Liverpool for almost three decades — becoming such a familiar sight on the streets that he became known locally as the Photie Man — and his selection from his archives makes up Men / Women. The photographs, moving between different formats and styles, colour and black and white, chart family, friends and strangers as they go about their everyday lives.
Click here to read the full review by Sean Sheehan
Hustlers by Philip-Lorca diCorcia, The Unknown Berenice Abbott and Here Is My Secret by Al-Thani Khalid Bin Hamad Bin Ahmad are featured in The Gueardian's February guide to the best photography shows and books.
Click here to view the audio slideshow edited by Jim Powell.
Afghan Gold by Luke Powell, published by Steidl, comes in a box that offers the reader two separate trips. A large, horizontal book, as precious and delicate to handle as a medieval manuscript, leads us into the towering, colorful mountains Powell discovered at age 27, when he was starting out as a photographer.
Click here to read the full review by Laurence Cornet.
Hustlers begins with a portrait, the lighting of which deliberately obscures the face of its subject. Mike Vincetti, a 24yr old native New Yorker, stands right arm outstretched like a hitchhiker in front of the Capital Records Tower, his own studded black leather jacket and skin-tight jeans capping a cruelly correlated irony about the less glamorous intersections of sex, drugs and cash. $30 to be precise.
Click here to read the full review by Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa
Without water mankind could not exist. The world’s most vital natural resource seems to be everywhere, but over the past century man has harnessed it for energy and redirected it for agriculture and industrial expansion—seriously disrupting Earth’s natural ecosystems.
Click here to read the full review by Paul Laster
While traveling overland to India from Europe in the fall of 1971, Luke Powell ran into the war between India and Pakistan, and he spent the following winter in neighbouring Afghanistan. Powell was stunned by the beauty of the country, the state of preservation of the culture, and by the Afghans’ ability to be totally self-sustaining.
Click here to read the full review by Jose Villareal
The relationship between two of life's certainties, death and sleep, is closer than we might realize. That's the conceit of Fazal Sheikh's recent book Ether, a collection of photographs made while walking at night in Benares, India.
Click here to read the full review by Blake Andrews.
In photographing politically significant walls from all over the world, one thing has become clear to photographer Kai Wiedenhöfer: “Peace begins where walls fall, not where they are erected,” he says.
Click here to read the full review by Rebecca Horne.
Massimo Vitali’s Natural Habitats was one of the larger photobooks in overall size and mass published by Steidl in 2010, which is a nice match up with the large format photographs that Vitali works with.
Click here to read the full review by Douglas Stockdale
Photographer-filmmaker-writer Edward Burtynsky always gives us scale, drama, intelligent overview, unsurpassed comprehensive analysis and insight as he investigates some of the most pressing environmental issues facing our planet.
Click here to read the full review by Jim Casper.
Years ago, at an art school in Paris, Maja Forsslund spent much of her time in the life drawing studio, making quick sketches of nude models. In the photobook, AKT, Forsslund returns to a studio, this time in Krakow, Poland, replacing her pencils and charcoal with a camera. The resulting photographs display a wonderful mix of sensibilities, a testament to her background as both an artist and a photographer.
Click here to read the full review by Alexander Strecker.
Berenice Abbott was one of the most versatile photographic artists of the twentieth century and her work has been published and publicized since the beginning of her career in 1925. She is best known for her Paris portraits of the 1920s and her documentation of New York City in the 1930s but, like most great artists, Abbott’s reputation has rested on a small portion of her life’s work. For every time one of her most famous photographs has been published there are many others that could have served the same purpose but were not used because they are less well known.
Click here to read the full review by Jose Villareal.
The previously unpublished 27 images that make up Henry Wessel’s Incidents, published by Steidl, are aesthetically straightforward black-and-white image. But as the viewer turns each page, the images invite the imagination to examine and then reinvent a number of plotlines, some comical, others a bit more sinister.
Click here to read more.
“These photographs were taken in Shanxi Province in northwest China. They document old customs originating from pagan ritual practices,” says photographer Zhang Xiao about the series “Shanxi” (published by Little Big Man, 2013). “They are, in effect, a voodoo-esque form of totem worship. A number of these ancient customs still survive and remain some of the most important cultural practices during the Lunar New Year throughout most of Shanxi. It appears that the participants have created a dramatic and otherworldly stage—dressing in stunning costumes and exquisitely painting their faces to represent the identities of gods otherwise long forgotten.
Click here to read the full article.
© Zhang Xiao/Courtesy of Little Big Man
Despite their seeming singularity of purpose, in Kai Wiedenhöfer’s new book Confrontier, no two border walls are the same.
The project’s genesis began in 1989, when, as a student, Wiedenhöfer photographed the fall of the Berlin Wall. Born in Berlin in 1966, he had lived his whole life in the wall’s shadow and its sudden destruction made an indelible impression on the young photographer. Like many who watched the Cold War end, Wiedenhöfer thought that historic moment would close the door on an era of human history defined by walls. That optimism would be eroded by years spent working on-and-off in the Occupied Territories, starting in the late 1980s, a place where walls and barriers have come to define the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians.
Click here to read the full article.
