Wednesday, January 02, 2008

Some Goodies for 2008


I hope everyone had a good New Year and that 2008 is something for you look forward to.

My favourite photobook review site - 5B4 - has a list of some upcoming books to be published in the coming year. If this is just a selection, then 2008 already looks like it's going to be an exciting(and expensive...) year as far as the photobook is concerned.

Here are a few of my favourites from those he lists - including some new editions of old favourites:

First, Fredrick Law Olmsted Landscapes by Lee Freidlander. A few years ago, Friedlander took part in a project for the Canadian Centre for Architecture along with Geoffrey James and Robert Burley photographing the parks and landscapes of Olmsted. That led to a very nice little book Viewing Olmsted. I don't know if this book is a new presentation of the pictures he took then (probably many of which were never published in the original book) or if he has continued to work on the subject in the meantime. Either way, it's a book I'm looking forward to seeing.



Next there is a book of Luigi Ghirri's colour photographs It’s Beautiful Here Isn’t It (with an introduction by William Eggleston). Ghirri's work is hard to come by, especially in N. America, but he is one of the seminal colour photographers of the last 40 or 50 years and was an important influence on what became known as the "New Colour" photographers, laying the groundwork for Shore, Sternfeld, Meyerowitz, Christenberry and the next generation of Parr, Soth and so much of the colour work we see today.


There are also re-issues of Robert Adams The New West (Aperture) and Robert Frank's The Americans (50th Anniversary from Steidl) - works any photographer should really have in their library (although, as a friend of mine says - after looking through The New West you sort of feel the only solution left is to slit your wrists. Perhaps even more so, as what Adams depicts and highlights has only got worse since the 70's when he did the work...).




(BTW, there's also a Robert Frank colouring book online...)



Karin Appolonia Müller's sublime book Angels in Fall is also being re-issued. It's hard and expensive to find right now (a previous post on Müller here)


There are also two new Sudek books out The Window of My Studio and Portraits




And finally, one I discovered while hunting these books down - Silicon Valley by Gabriele Basilico, which interestingly seems to include a number of colour photographs - a rarity for Basilico.



But check out the other releases listed on 5B4 as well

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