The Waiting Room
Posted: 05/02/2012 Filed under: Books | Tags: Belarus, Bill Crandall, black and white photobooks, little Minsk bookshelf, photobooks from the US 3 CommentsIndependent photobooks, yes please! After all, who’d condemn photobooks to dependence or serfdom? And hooray for The Independent Photobook, an excellent browse. But all too often I read its descriptions of new publications merely for the unintended humour. The current top four:
Some of these may be good, but I wouldn’t know because I didn’t look: the very blurb somehow managed to make each sound no more whelming than does the modish mainstream. But the other day among all the art-school stuff there appeared:
“This unique country” being Belarus.
At last, somebody (Bill Crandall) who actually spent time and effort trying to get the best photographs of something. Most refreshing. A quick look at the photographs to which this linked confirmed the good impression. Minutes later, I ordered the book. And a very few days afterwards, it arrived. Read the rest of this entry »
day-to-day life in Asakusa, Ikegami and South Wales
Posted: 30/01/2012 Filed under: Books | Tags: BeeBooks, black and white photobooks, day-to-day life, KayLynn Deveney, Kishikawa Yōko, Koga Eriko, old age, photobooks from Japan, photobooks from the US 5 Comments
When Dan Abbe invited me to contribute my list of the top ten of 2011 to the 2011 street level eyecurious Japanese photobook extravaganza blowout, I was flattered but nonplussed. It was easy to come up with ten I liked, but hard to come up with more than three that thrilled (and of which no more than one was by any one photographer). Thinking that I might have forgotten this or that masterpiece and wanting to jog my memory, I took a quick look at the website of every photobook publisher I could think of. No, no masterpiece there that I’d forgotten — but there was word of a book I’d never seen but that looked good: Asakusa Zenzai (浅草善哉), by Koga Eriko (古賀絵里子). Read the rest of this entry »
microcord 