15
Omaha Sketchbook by Gregory Halpern (Mack)
American photographer Gregory Halpern’s much anticipated follow-up to 2016’s acclaimed ZZYZX, which was a meditation on Los Angeles as a heightened state of mind as much as an actual place. With Omaha Sketchbook, Halpern explores the notion of American masculinity, his setting the midwestern Nebraskan city of the title where fundamentalist Christian values predominate. The book is designed to look like one of his work-in-progress notebooks, while his portraits and landscapes have a sense of suspended time as if the meaning of the place and its people remains somehow elusive despite the deep fascination he feels for them.
14
On the Barricades (Mörel)
Originally published on Bastille Day, 1968, by City Lights in San Francisco, On the Barricades is a sturdy zine-type publication that juxtaposes grainy images from the student uprising in Paris that year with the often elliptical situationist slogans that appeared daily on the city’s walls. It makes for an interesting, if surreal, blend of image and text, with lines such as “The smoke of grenades in the meadow of our eyelashes” accompanying photos of stone-throwing students facing off against cops firing teargas. This faithful facsimile from the ever-inventive Mörel books is an artefact from another, more revolutionary, time and a reminder of the impromptu creativity that attended the now distant youth protests of May 68.
13
American Origami by Andres Gonzalez (Fw:Books)
A complex photobook on every level, American Origami is an exploration of the psychological aftermath of seven American mass school shootings which combines Andres Gonzalez’s own detached, low-key photographs of now familiar towns and communities with a surfeit of statistical and forensic documents. Resembling a packed folder, the book unfolds to reveal a wealth of other related materials: news clippings, handwritten notes, drawings, memorabilia and an inventory of objects that speak of mass grieving. (More than 65,000 teddy bears were sent to Sandy Hook elementary school alone in the wake of the shooting there.) An ambitious attempt at understanding – and visualising – the fallout from a senselessly recurring American tragedy.
12
Made in Dublin by Eamonn Doyle (Thames & Hudson)
A single retrospective volume that comprises Irish photographer Eamonn Doyle’s three self-published and now highly collectible photobooks, i, On and End. The first was described by Martin Parr as “the best street photobook in a decade”. Doyle’s often disorienting images of Dublin’s passing strangers are here paired with characteristically surreal prose by the Irish novelist Kevin Barry and the bold design is by the photographer’s longtime collaborator Niall Sweeney. The result adds up to a heady remix of Doyle’s small but vital back catalogue, its iconoclastic spirit more attuned to his parallel career as an electronic music producer and record label boss.
11
Mother by Paul Graham (Mack)
A deceptively simple photobook that comprises just 14 portraits of Paul Graham’s elderly mother as she sits in an armchair in a retirement home. The muted colour tones and floral patterns of her clothes, bathed in natural light from a nearby window, seem almost universal in their evocation of old age and fragility. Graham’s point of view remains constant, his camera recording the slightest shifts in mood and expression. An intimate and meditative, but never intrusive, series of portraits that speak quietly of family ties, ageing and encroaching mortality.
10
The Unforgetting by Peter Watkins (Skinnerboox)
Peter Watkins was nine years old when his mother took her own life by walking into the sea. His long-term project, The Unforgetting, is part elegy, part meditation on the tides and long shadow of grief. Watkins creates sculptural still lifes from the things left behind, whether an unopened handbag or a cassette tape, each carrying its own secrets and imbued with a talismanic presence. Whether self-portraits or constructed tableaux, his starkly formal images reverberate with a sense of absence. A book about remnants, traces, memories and the unsettling power of photography.
9
Light Break by Roy DeCarava (David Zwirner Books)
Alongside the recently published The Sound I Saw, which gathers Roy DeCarava’s beautifully meditative portraits of jazz performers including John Coltrane and Billie Holiday, Light Break offers a wider perspective on the life and work of a singular, somewhat elusive 20th-century American photographer. A master of often luminous street scenes and quiet, deeply observational portraits, DeCarava is perhaps most well known for Sweet Flypaper of Life, his collaboration with Langston Hughes. This illuminating retrospective shows the full range of his work and the consistency of his vision.
8
Elf Dalia by Maja Daniels (Mack)
The village of Älvdalen, in the west of Sweden, still has its own ancient language, Elfdalian. The place and its people cast a spell on Swedish-born photographer Maja Daniels, who spent her childhood summers there, roaming free in the woods. Her book is a meditation on memory, mystery and belonging that contrasts her own often impressionistic landscapes and portraits with the work of a pioneering local photographer and eccentric, Tenn Lars Persson, who was born there in 1878. It is this visual dialogue between old and new, strange and commonplace, that lends the book its quiet cumulative power.
7
Slant by Aaron Schuman (Mack)
Prefaced by an Emily Dickinson poem – “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant” – Aaron Schuman’s book couples his own wryly revealing photographs (all taken within a 30-mile radius of the poet’s home town of Amherst, Massachusetts) with clippings from the police report section of the local newspaper. To give just one example: “A man shoveling snow on State Street told police he saw a strange orange glow coming from the eastern sky that might have been something on fire. Police determined the glow was probably the sun coming up for the day.” Slant is a witty, deadpan meditation on small-town America that carries a darker undertow in the age of fake news, post-truth politics and alternative facts.
6
The Park by Kohei Yoshiyuki (Yossi Milo/Radius Books)
Some photobooks stand alone for their subject matter and the audacity of their approach. The Park is a case in point. In the early 1970s, Kohei Yoshiyuki captured the illicit sexual encounters that took place in Tokyo’s parks at night, creeping close to furtive couples and the voyeurs that observed them. His infrared camera lends these clandestine acts another layer of transgression, capturing the desperation and essential loneliness of these fleeting encounters as well as the creepiness of those watching. A compelling if unsettling book, reissued with additional previously unseen images.
5
The Second Shift by Clare Gallagher (self-published)
“The Second Shift is the term given to the hidden shift of housework and childcare primarily carried out by women on top of their paid employment,” writes Irish artist Clare Gallagher in her short introduction to a beautifully designed book of deftly observed images. They evoke the quotidian work rituals of home and family, and her own anger at what is taken for granted. For all that, Gallagher is a quiet photographer, a creator of intimately observed details that can often approach the dreamlike: unwashed laundry overflowing from a basket, a tangle of electrical wires emanating from an extension socket, vegetable peelings, eggshells, food residue soaking in an oven dish. Her images illuminate a domestic grind so familiar and habitual that it all but goes unseen.
4
California Trip by Dennis Stock (Anthology)
In 1968, Dennis Stock, best known for his iconic portraits of James Dean, took a five-week road trip through California to document the hippie counterculture of rock festivals, communes and drug-fuelled mind expansion. To the sceptical photographer, California had become a “head lab” for the adventurous and impressionable. The more he travelled, though, the more his fascination grew. His images of hippies, bikers, surfers, protesters and utopian dreamers remain resonant, becoming reflections of a freer, more questioning US bathed in the glow of collective optimism and that fabled California sun.
3
Ex-Voto by Alys Tomlinson (Gost Books)
Tomlinson has been acclaimed for her images of contemporary pilgrims in religious sites in France, Poland and Ireland. Ex-Voto gathers her stark monochrome portraits of pilgrims, large format landscapes and mysterious still lifes of offerings left in rocks and trees at Lourdes, Ballyvourney and Grabarka. The results possess a kind of serene calmness that befits the subject matter, her portraits in particular capturing the reverent otherness and simplicity of the devotional life.
2
The Pillar by Stephen Gill (Nobody Books)
Close to where he lives in rural Sweden, English photographer Stephen Gill drove a tall wooden stake into the ground near a stream in a flat landscape of spreading fields. On an adjacent wooden pillar, he mounted a motion-sensor camera. From that simple idea, The Pillar was born: a book of photographs of wild birds in close-up, alighting and taking flight, resting, feeding, preening and watching. “I’d never seen birds in this way before,” writes Karl Ove Knausgård in his accompanying essay, “as if on their own terms, as independent creatures with independent lives … and so infinitely alien to us.”
1
The Coast by Sohrab Hura (Ugly Dog)
An evocation of “the loneliness and suspicion of the Indian night”, The Coast is a vivid, unsettling merging of the fictional and the real. Hura’s free-flowing visual narrative echoes both the overload of social media imagery and the edginess he encountered on unfamiliar Indian streets at night.
Playing with ideas of privacy, voyeurism and trust, the young Indian photographer creates an almost hallucinatory world where spectral figures loom out of the enveloping dark, people grapple in the rubble and religious revellers give way to abandonment, their faces daubed with powdered paint.
The context is what Hura describes as the “increasing dissonance” of India’s Hindu nationalist politics. The Coast possesses a visual dissonance of its own through his use of unforgiving flash, colour saturation and frequently jarring juxtapositions of the real and the staged. “For me,” says Hura, “the notion of photography as fiction is a given.” For all that, his unreal images convey an essential truth about our turbulent times.
