The Photobook Thread

MattKing said:

For clarity, are you asking about published books that include mostly photographs? .

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images39 said:

I've given up trying to repress my photo book collecting habit.

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logan2z said:

I haven't seen a Photrio thread dedicated to photobook collecting so I thought I'd start one.

Let's use this thread to discuss new photobooks you've purchased, share book reviews (photos of spreads, videos of flip-throughs encouraged), links to photobook collecting resources (blogs, review sites, YouTube flip-throughs and other book-related channels, etc), book sales, and anything else photobook-related you can think of.

I'll kick things off with news of an incredibly good book sale on now until June 23 from Yale University Press (no affiliation other than a regular customer). Books are 50% off site-wide (there are a few exclusions for out of stock books and pre-orders) and shipping is free. Probably one of the best sales I've seen in a long time and Yale University Press has published a huge selection of excellent photography and art books.

I just ordered five books (saved $130) but might go back and get a few more before the sale closes.

Yale University Press 50% Off Book Sale

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Alex Benjamin said:

For W. Eugene Smith fans, Sam Stephenson's Dream Street: W. Eugene Smith's Pittsburgh Project and The Jazz Loft Project: Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue, 1957-1965 have been reissued, with added material, by the University of Chicago Press.

I have both, they cost me a small fortune at the time—found the Pittsburgh one in Paris in a small used book store totally devoted to photography—, but totally worth it.

W. Eugene Smith

About W. Eugene Smith from the University of Chicago Press website.

press.uchicago.edu

Stephenson's Gene Smith's Sink is also a great read, especially if you're into be-bop.

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Alex Benjamin said:

For W. Eugene Smith fans, Sam Stephenson's Dream Street: W. Eugene Smith's Pittsburgh Project and The Jazz Loft Project: Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue, 1957-1965 have been reissued, with added material, by the University of Chicago Press.

I have both, they cost me a small fortune at the time—found the Pittsburgh one in Paris in a small used book store totally devoted to photography—, but totally worth it.

W. Eugene Smith

About W. Eugene Smith from the University of Chicago Press website.

press.uchicago.edu

Stephenson's Gene Smith's Sink is also a great read, especially if you're into be-bop.

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images39 said:

Some photo books have pretty astounding print quality. Just one example:


Dale

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Mike Lopez said:

one could do a lot worse than to check out anything from Lodima.

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logan2z said:

I haven't seen a Photrio thread dedicated to photobook collecting so I thought I'd start one.

Let's use this thread to discuss new photobooks you've purchased, share book reviews (photos of spreads, videos of flip-throughs encouraged), links to photobook collecting resources (blogs, review sites, YouTube flip-throughs and other book-related channels, etc), book sales, and anything else photobook-related you can think of.

I'll kick things off with news of an incredibly good book sale on now until June 23 from Yale University Press (no affiliation other than a regular customer). Books are 50% off site-wide (there are a few exclusions for out of stock books and pre-orders) and shipping is free. Probably one of the best sales I've seen in a long time and Yale University Press has published a huge selection of excellent photography and art books.

I just ordered five books (saved $130) but might go back and get a few more before the sale closes.

Yale University Press 50% Off Book Sale

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agentlossing said:

Thank you for the tip, I ordered Robert Adams's What We Bought. Been meaning to get some of his work, I'm quite partial to the New Topographics movement.

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agentlossing said:

Thank you for the tip, I ordered Robert Adams's What We Bought. Been meaning to get some of his work, I'm quite partial to the New Topographics movement.

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Pieter12 said:

I highly recommend the catalog from the Smithsonian's exhibit, American Silence. It is a pretty comprehensive overview of his work.

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Alex Benjamin said:

I wish I hadn't... Now I'm longing for the complete set of the Lodima Press Portfolio Books...

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An expansive look at portraiture, identity, and inequality as seen in Dorothea Lange’s iconic photographs

Dorothea Lange (1895–1965) aimed to make pictures that were, in her words, “important and useful.” Her decades-long investigation of how photography could articulate people’s core values and sense of self helped to expand our current understanding of portraiture and the meaning of documentary practice.

Lange’s sensitive portraits showing the common humanity of often marginalized people were pivotal to public understanding of vast social problems in the twentieth century. Compassion guided Lange’s early portraits of Indigenous people in Arizona and New Mexico from the 1920s and 1930s, as well as her depictions of striking workers, migrant farmers, rural African Americans, Japanese Americans in internment camps, and the people she met while traveling in Europe, Asia, and Latin America.

Drawing on new research, the authors look at Lange’s roots in studio portraiture and demonstrate how her influential and widely seen photographs addressed issues of identity as well as social, economic, and racial inequalities—topics that remain as relevant for our times as they were for hers.

Published in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington

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Robert Frank’s and Todd Webb’s parallel 1955 projects to photograph America are considered in the context of mid-twentieth-century American culture

In 1955 two photographers were awarded grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation to embark on trips across the United States. Robert Frank (1924–2019) drove coast to coast, photographing the highways, bars, and people that formed the basis for his widely admired publication The Americans (1958). Todd Webb (1905–2000) walked across the country, searching for “vanishing Americana and what is taking its place.”

Unaware of each other’s work, the photographers produced strikingly similar images of the highway, parades, and dim, smoky barrooms. Yet while Frank’s grainy, off-kilter style revealed many inequities of American life, Webb’s carefully composed images embraced clear detail and celebrated the individual oddities of Americans and their locales.

This revelatory book is the first to publish Webb’s 1955 photographs and connects these parallel projects for the first time. More than one hundred images accompany text illuminating Frank’s and Webb’s different perspectives and approaches to similar subjects and places; the difference in reception of Frank’s iconic work and Webb’s relatively unknown series; and the place of the road trip in shaping American identity at midcentury.

Published in association with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

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