In Sochi, every "self-respecting restaurant has a singer," The Sochi Project's Sochi Singers notes (I'll try to limit the use of the word "Sochi" in the following sentences, I promise; this and all following quotes are taken from their website). The city is a tourist resort ("The smell of sunscreen, sweat, alcohol and roasting meat pervades the air."), and of course restaurants have to be competitive. The level of cheerfulness that is - presumably - the intended result of the singing escapes me: "Chansons are Russian ballads, but the comparison with French chansons is only partial. The songs have their origins in the age-old Russian tradition of labour camps and prisons." And: "nowadays the term 'chanson' more often refers to the saccharine genre of Russian-language dance music. It is usually accompanied by a heavy disco beat and occasionally even a dash of techno." Labour camps to a disco beat: I don't want to know what that sounds like. (more)

Sochi Singers is a rather large book, but you need the size to be able to see what's actually going on. Everything that is relevant for the stage/singer is contained in the frames. You will find yourself studying the images, looking at all the various things on or next to the stage. The singers often look directly at the camera while doing their job - so there is that additional element of almost being there.

In the crudest sense of the word, the photographs of the singers (there are some photos of Sochi beaches in the book, too) are shot as a typology. But applying the idea of a typology really takes away from the fun that you'll have looking at this book (I bet you haven't seen the words "typology" and "fun" used all that much in the same sentence, have you?). Mind you, the book is not making fun of these singers. They are presented as what they are, and the text that comes along the photographs provides the necessary background.

With a focus on a very troubled region, The Sochi Project's attention to something that is very much part of that region, but that is not part of any sort of trouble (other than the audible kind), shows that hard-hitting documentary work can indeed be combined with something that is lighter fare. This doesn't mean that things always need to be light. But adding something like the cheesy singers in Sochi restaurants to the many other more troubling aspects of the region shows that what is happening there - and everywhere else - is multi-faceted: Our simplistic ideas of "this is good" and "this is bad" too often miss a more complex picture that, let's face it, we are very familiar with from our own lives.

Sochi Singers, photographs by Rob Hornstra, essay by Arnold van Bruggen, 80 pages, The Sochi Project, 2011

Well, well, well. A Swedish photographer, Gerry Johansson, might have made the most poignant book about the economic distress many American cities (and regions) find themselves in: Pontiac. The book operates in the same way the setting of the movie Ghost Dog works: It looks like an American city, but it could be almost any American city. Of course, Pontiac is a real town in Michigan. You get all the vital statistics right after the book's title page. But Johansson photographs it so that it becomes any of those American cities whose unemployment rate has quadrupled from 2000 to 2010, any of those American cities that have about a quarter of their families living below poverty level. (more)

But the work you need to put into the book is well worth it. For a start, the photographs are amazing. They are often very simple, created with careful attention to detail. You'll start finding things, finding clues what might be going on, and these clues are then connected to other clues in the book. With the locations of the photographs given underneath them, you are taken on a walk around town, a walk that for the most part does not run into other people. There are less than a handful images in the book that have humans in them - in those, the humans are small, anonymous. It's almost as if Pontiac were a ghost town.

Unlike many other books about these kinds of town, Pontiac doesn't seem to focus on one aspect at all. You get to see everything, from the inner city to the old and new suburbs, the churches, parking garages. It's all there. There is a very clear and smart artistic agenda, but there is no obvious political agenda. The more often you look at the book, the more things you discover. It makes you think, but before it does that it makes you feel something. Highly recommended.

Pontiac, Photographs by Gerry Johansson, 64 pages, Mack, 2011

(find my presentation of the book here)

A fair amount of photography from what one could think of as archives is now being released. Some of that work saw the light in a different - or even the same - form before. Some has never been published. Those books always raise certain questions for me. After all, I want to be looking at photobooks for the photographs and the stories they might tell me. (more)

"Nostalgia as both word and concept was invented in the seventeenth century by the physician Johannes Hofer to describe a condition afflicting Swiss mercenaries on long tours of military duty. Nostalgia was literally homesickness, a debilitating craving to return to the native land. [...] As it became de-medicalised, nostalgia also began to be seen not just as an individual emotion but as a collective longing for a happier, simpler, more innocent age. The original nostalgia had been a plausible emotion in the sense that there was a remedy (catching the first warship or merchant vessel back home and returning to the warm hearth of kith and kin, a world that was familiar). Nostalgia in the modern sense is an impossible emotion, or at least an incurable one: the only remedy would involve time travel." (italics in the original, boldface emphasis mine; I'd love to give you the page numbers of these quotes, but I bought the Kindle version of this book for reasons I might talk about some other time)

Another aspect is the aspect of story. Often, the story around some photography is much more interesting than the actual photographs in question. I am sure people will send me angry emails now, but the best case I can think of right now is Vivian Maier: Street Photographer. That's a great - and sad - story: The nanny who photographed on the side, never showing her work to anyone etc. But the strength of that story isn't remotely matched by the photographs. The good images are quite good, but most of the work is, well, mediocre. Compare it with the best practitioners of street photography active at that time, and you'll see.

Of course, without a good story selling books is much harder, and let's face it, we want stories. We want stories inside the books, and we want them around the books. This is not to say that nostalgia and/or a story are bad when looking at photobooks of old photography. But it's just like with photobook design: A photobook is about photographs, and the design must not overpower the photographs.

Friedrich Seidenstücker: Of Hippos and Other Humans, a catalogue of the photographer's work, shot between 1925 and 1958. Seidenstücker was a Berlin street photographer who lived through some very turbulent times. He traversed the city's streets in the 1920s, 30s, and late 40s (the Nazis made street photography basically impossible), taking photographs. He also spent considerable time at the Berlin zoo (hence the hippo in the book's title). The zoo photographs aren't necessarily the strongest images in the book, even though I enjoyed the images of other photographers doing their work there (those are giddily subversive).

The book is a good example of how one can present photography from an artist's archive while for the most part avoiding the problems of nostalgia or of relying too much on an interesting story. Divided into different sections, there are introductions to the parts that are very informative. I have the feeling that most people will prefer some sections over others, simply because of where their interest lies. The street photography from the 1920s and early 1930s is fascinating, even though it very clearly feels like a very different time. The street photographs from the late 1940s is chilling: Life in the ruins of Berlin.

As a book, Friedrich Seidenstücker: Of Hippos and Other Humans provides a well-rounded package, which strikes the right balance between presenting the photographs, talking about the time when they were made, and presenting the man who took these pictures. I think that's probably the best approach to these kinds of books, because it does justice to all the parts of a photographer's life, without overly stressing one at the expense of all others.

Friedrich Seidenstücker: Of Hippos and Other Humans; photographs by Friedrich Seidenstücker; essays by Wolfgang Brückle, Ulrich Domröse, Florian Ebner, Ulrich Griebner, Christoph Ribbat, Sabine Schnakenberg, Antje Schunke; 328 pages; Hatje Cantz, 2012

How do you write about a book like Dirk Braeckman? Ideally, I'd simply show you the book, in person (doing it online has its limits, after all; you can also go to the artist's website). That's how I came across this book. It was a recommendation by a friend, who happened to bring the book to a class we taught together. I was instantly hooked. The problem is going to be to explain why I was - and still am - hooked. (more)

Mind you, these photographs might not be your cup of tea, in which case you might wonder how I could possibly say they're exquisite. But that would be one of those internet-style discussions that are somewhat pointless: Something can be exquisite and not be one's cup of tea at the same time.

Anyway, Dirk Braeckman is also printed very well, and that is key to the experience. If the photographs were reproduced badly this would be a terrible book. If you look at the images in, say, Metropolis (on the artist's website) you'll notice than even on a computer screen, those photographs seem to have a curious depth. This is not black-and-white photography, it's grey-scale photography, with the shades of grey often only very slowly and gradually changing. I suppose a good way to describe the effect of the photographs in the book is to say that because of their tonal qualities there's a photographic space. You're looking at a two-dimensional image, printed on paper, but it makes you feel you're looking at something that has an added, third, dimension.

Most of Braeckman's photographs are in fact photographs of actual spaces - interiors, many of which look like hotel rooms (it's never quite so clear). So there are two kinds of spaces here: The ones depicted, and the one that is being created photographically. When looking at these photographs you will find yourself reacting to both, or maybe more accurately to how the photographer made the two interact. Needless to say, you might wonder whether the two spaces aren't simply the same thing. What's the point of photography if the representation of a space has a different feel than the space itself? Well, what's the point of photography?

But there are also surfaces. The pages of the book are obviously a surface. You look at the photographs, and even though they give you the feeling there is a space you can look into, you can't physically enter that space (that's hardly a mind-blowing observation). Much has been made in the history of writing about photography about that fact. Here, the game gets somewhat more complex since the photographer also produced photographs of other images or photographs, often in such a way that you realize you're looking at just that. So you're constantly reminded - albeit not in an intellectual way - that while you feel as if you could enter that world in reality you can't because it's not there. It just on the paper. It's just a photograph.

This might sound like one of those intellectual exercises theorists love so much. However, I am pretty confident that even if you don't care about photography theory at all you will experience this yourself when you look at these photographs. It's quite amazing actually. Someone - the photographer - will be messing with your mind in ways that occasionally are unsettling. It's a bit like looking into a little lake filled with muddy water when the sun is setting. You see things, or you think you see things, and you don't.

Whether any of this makes sense to you I don't know. I hope it will make at least a little sense. Ideally, it will make you curious enough to look at the book. Dirk Braeckman is one of the most engaging photobooks I've seen in a long time. Highly recommended.

Dirk Braeckman, photographs by Dirk Braeckman, essays by Dirk Lauwaert and Martin German, 400 pages, Roma Publications, 2011

(find my presentation of the book here)

Peter Bialobrzeski has been traveling across Asia (and some other countries) for many years now, taking photographs of countries in transition. The first well-known book to emerge from these travels was Neon Tigers. This new book, The Raw and the Cooked is a follow-up of sorts, another book dealing with, in the photographer's words, "today's rapidly burgeoning, constantly changing cities" (quoted from the book's epilogue). (more)

The technical decisions the artist made - the use of a certain type of camera, a certain time of day, etc. - gives many of these photographs a very seductive quality, while neatly avoiding the tropes of advertizing or architectural photography. There are people in these photographs, many people, but often enough they become a blur - things move too fast for the slow camera (echoing, of course, Louis Daguerre's 1838/9 Boulevard du Temple). Cars are reduced to lines of colour (red or yellow), and even people blend into each other - where they're not standing still.

This often leads to interesting results. On page 74, people, cars and other vehicles are waiting at red traffic lights. Since one barely notices the traffic that is allowed to move (there is a blur in the photograph's lower left corner) everybody looks frozen as if suspended. The photograph on the opposite page makes those waiting for the green light look like spectators of a somewhat absurd spectacle. On the previous page (73) there is a lone woman overlooking the scene (and, since this is a diptych, the spread essentially) from her balcony, looking down on a vast world. What is this world we have created?

I'm stuck by the visual complexity of some of the photographs. Page 33 shows people selling their wares (mostly shoes and plastic goods) on some street in Dhaka. The photograph is organized around a lone pole from which strings with little flags emanate into, it seems, every possible direction. What initially might look like a confusing, crazy mess actually turns into a rather well-organized scene, where there is less chaos than initially thought. And even if you can't get past that chaos... Well, this is life. Maybe not in your part of the world, but somewhere else.

The Raw and the Cooked thus requires time and patience, since there is a lot to be explored in many of the photographs. You don't have to explore - on their own the photographs are powerful. But there is more... Those who like to complain about how "fine art" photobooks are too insular, too much made for some small in-crowd might want to look at books like this: You don't have to be an insider to enjoy it (much like, let's face it, you don't have to be a photobook insider to enjoy many others). But once you take the time, you start seeing a lot of details, and your level of appreciation changes. And that's really what photography is all about: The enjoyment to be had from looking, and the enjoyment to be had from seeing a little bit more, or something a little bit different every time you come back.

The Raw and the Cooked, photographs by Peter Bialobrzeski, essay by Peter Lindhorst, 160 pages, Hatje Cantz, 2012

(find my presentation of the book here)

There's a wonderful, sad story in the essay that comes with 7 Rooms by Rafal Milach (you can see many of the images from the book here). A couple visits Moscow, at some early stage after the end of Communism. On Arbat Street, people are selling painted nesting dolls, samovars, and old icons, but they're also selling Komsomol membership cards, war medals, and red banners. The wife, incredulous, calls a policeman over who "explains to us bumpkins: 'Objects from the era of totalitarianism... may be sold... We only make arrests for narcotics and pornography...'" How do you react to that, as a bumpkin? Here's how the wife reacts to it: "What? A Party membership card for five dollars? Isn't that pornography?" Only about one page into this essay, I was already scrambling to find where that essay was from, given I had seen a reference in the book to something else. Written (compiled) by Svetlana Alexievich, it is from Zacharovannye smertiu (Enchanted with Death), published in Moscow in 1994, which hasn't been translated into English (there's a German translation entitled Im Banne des Tode). (more)

Thankfully, I don't have to talk about this because 7 Rooms is not about that at all. The work was produced over the course of many years, and it portrays the lives of quite ordinary Russians, living in Krasnoyarsk, Moscow, and Yekaterinburg. They are Gala, Lena, Stas, Mira, Vasya, and Sasha and Nastya. We get to know them a little by seeing the photographs, and by reading some of their thoughts, which come with some of them. Their experience is not all that different from our own, their ideas and thoughts aren't that different. The circumstances of their lives are, and it's probably hard to imagine what growing up under one regime and then living under a very different one must be like - unless you did the same (which, lest we forget this, is true for parts of Central and most of Eastern Europe, for example).

So there are stories in 7 Rooms, real stories. Those who read might notice some similarities with what Studs Terkel did, except here it's mostly done photographically, in what I want to call a wonderfully subtle emphatic way (this is one of the things, btw, what irks me so much about photographic stereotyping: There is no real empathy). Of course, personal stories are always just that, personal stories. Take several together, though, and an image might form. And that's what the book will give you, an image of Russia that probably will confuse you because it's not just black and white. And it's stories involving people who only have a first name - instead of those black-and-white ones where people only have a last name.

7 Rooms, photographs by Rafal Milach, text by Svetlana Alexievich, 152 pages, Kehrer, 2011

(find my presentation of the book here)

The pleasure of a truly great photobook is not limited to seeing a set of photographs put together in a way that make the medium shine, that show how so many of the usual debates about photography and its supposed shortcomings are flawed. You also get a perceptive essay or two, to go along the photography. Christian Patterson's Redheaded Peckerwood comes with writing by Karen Irvine and Luc Sante. Sante's essay had me dread writing a review of the book, given it so wonderfully talks about the book. What is there left to say? (more)

In his essay, Luc Sante writes the book contains

"a kind of subjective documentary photography of the historical past. That requires that the individual pictures be true, as close as possible to the physical details as historically established, while remaining ambiguous and unsettling -- because each of them is only an aspect of the story, and because in each of them something is wrong."

Maybe what we should really ask is where we find the truth that we are always so desperately looking for. If anything, Redheaded Peckerwood demonstrates that if we only expect it to find in photographs, we can easily be led down a dark, dark alley. As Sante writes, each of the photographs in the book contains an element of truth, a connection to a historical past, as well as some un-truth. The essence is to combine all these different elements and to then see - I hope you will excuse the cliche expression - the big picture.

This is why Redheaded Peckerwood is such a great book, because it uses photographs of different styles, many of them seemingly simple, some seemingly confusing, to convincingly tell a story, namely how two teenagers ran away from home, killed a bunch of people, and then got caught and punished.

A great photobook will distill a greater truth out of the photographs inside, a truth that requires careful looking and reading, a truth that might not even be fully true. Redheaded Peckerwood does this masterfully and beautifully.

Redheaded Peckerwood, photographs by Christian Patterson, essays by Luc Sante and Karen Irvine, 164 pages, Mack, 2011

(find my video presentation of the book here)

What is there still left to say about consumerism? We all seem to agree that it is bad, that reckless consumption is the direct cause of many of our current problems, but we're still very much engaged in it. Consumerism is what drives large parts of our economy: We don't make things any longer, we buy them, ideally for very cheap. As such, consumerism is very abstract, though. We know what it feels like to consume, but we don't really know what it looks like. And the images of some of the consequences of our consumerism - toxic wastelands here, or vast landfills there - are hard to connect with the shiny big-box stores where we buy our stuff. Brian Ulrich's photographs, now published in Is This Place Great Or What, avoid tackling this gap. Instead, for the most part they focus on us, on people caught up in the act of consumption. (more)

Brian's photographs in the first part of Is This Place Great Or What - Retail - show people lost in a state of consumption, in a vast world filled with mass-produced kitsch and crap (flags, guns, carpets with animal motifs, etc.) And the door to the employment part is never far - employment for whatever minimum wage might be, because our version of consumerism cannot function unless those who work do it for next to nothing, without health benefits or workers rights.

The second part - Thrift - has Brian then look at the world of thrift stores, where yesterday's goods are sold again, this time at a real bargain. Everything becomes a bit more dingy, the shine is gone, but the wheel of consumerism keeps turning. As a matter of fact, if you spend enough time at a thrift shop, you can piece together the post-war history of consumerism, with production sites moving across the globe, to wherever making stuff is cheapest. As before, we see people exposed to this part of the retail industry, shoppers and store employees alike. The portraits are more formal - a different camera, a different approach, and they're as powerful - if not even more so - than those in Retail.

The last part - Dark Stores - falls a bit short for me. Mind you, there is absolutely nothing wrong with those large-format photographs of abandoned malls, of emptied and/or re-purposed stores. This is part of the story, of course, where the stores undergo the same fate as the stuff sold inside: Eventually, they're tossed aside, to be replaced. But there is less of an opportunity for the portrait photographer to shine - the occasional example notwithstanding. Dark Stores suffers from the disconnect that photographs of landfills or toxic wastelands often suffer from - it's hard to connect the images with one's own experience.

It is well known that Is This Place Great Or What features photographs taken over the course of a decade. But this fact needs to be re-stressed: Here is a photographer willing to spend ten years of his life documenting one of the big issues of our times, an issue intimately related to many others (environmental issues, the state of labor/unemployment, debt, etc.). We're all well-advised to look carefully at these photographs, because, ultimately, they are about us. Mindless consumption is not just bad for our wallets, it's bad for our mental health, and it's bad for our society.

Is This Place Great Or What, photographs by Brian Ulrich, essay by Juliet Schorr, 144 pages, Aperture, 2011

We live in what feels like the golden age of the photobook. There currently is enormous interest in the medium, and one can hope there will be for a long time. At the same time, the photobook has produced another industry: Books about photobooks. Things started off slowly, with The Photobook: A History, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 deservedly becoming seminal books. Much could be said about these books - the writing is superb, while one wishes there were better spreads of the books, say. There simply is no way anyone interested in photobooks can be without owning a copy each. A few years after their publication, many other such books have now been published, typically with a geographical focus. Swiss Photobooks from 1927 to the Present is, as far as I can tell, the latest addition to the growing canon. (more)

But what makes Swiss Photobooks such an exciting read is not that it closes whatever gap in knowledge one might possess. Instead, it is how this is being done. The book easily is one of the most massive tomes in my library. After it arrived in the mail, my wife asked me where I would possibly store it, which is a very valid concern. I do have industrial-type shelves to store books (I kid you not), but I'm still waiting for the day when the floor will buckle underneath them. That day cannot be far off once I add this particular book: It has 640 pages and weighs 7.5 pounds, introducing 70 photobooks.

If you're good at math you'll immediately realize that each photobook thus gets more than a mere couple of pages. Instead, there are many spreads and a long in-depth essay for each book. In addition, there are additional essays about different time periods. All of this was done by a team of 23 authors. It really doesn't get any better than that. Swiss Photobooks is a pleasure to look at and read. A truly amazing book.

Swiss Photobooks from 1927 to the Present, various authors, 640 pages, Lars Muller Publishers, 2011

Much could be said about contemporary nude photography, provided we properly defined it first. The contemporary nude seems to be that sliver of work between soft- (or hard-) core pornography and whatever the kind of photography is called where a photographer (often, but not always a male) takes photographs of a naked person (a young woman) to explore the usual cliches of the nude. This is probably the lousiest definition of "contemporary nude photography" you might have come by in quite some time, but let it be good enough. Instead of worrying about definitions, it might simply be much more productive to talk about a specific artist. Let's take Malerie Marder. (more)

The very first photograph sets the tone of the book: A naked woman and a man are facing each other in an indeterminate room, and the viewer is turned into a voyeur of sorts by the fact that the encounter is seen through the room's window (the curtain is pulled aside). I'm tempted to think there is a tenderness and promise in the woman's gaze. The scene is unresolved, something might happen - their hair is too neat for something too have happened already.

So we are made to look, actually to observe, a person or two, often naked, often in what looks like a stage between one moment in time and another, ultimately more carnal one. At times, there is transgression or possible transgression or maybe just imagined transgression. At times, the viewer becomes involved in that she or he is turned into the focus of the naked person's attention. The moment is often, maybe always, unresolved, and the viewer is left to hope for something to happen.

Things are made more complex by the photographer being a model herself in some of the photographs, along with her mother and father, there is a boyfriend, there is a sister, and there are all kinds of combinations (such as a boyfriend with the mother). Yet nothing is sever overly obvious, nothing is ever seedy. In the email exchange diCorcia describes the images as follows:

"very little clothing, no children or animals, a queer almost threatening light, tension between the stark and the dreamlike, a story not told [...] intimacy as a verb, privacy as an adjective, light and color filtered transformed mediated, implicit emotional or physical violence, you." (p. 153; the idiosyncratic punctuation is in the original)

Even though clearly addressing Marder in their exchange, I'm tempted to think that the "you" here in fact applies to the viewer, too. The viewer is made complicit in these photographs. The viewer becomes part of... let's call it the game. It is a game, a clearly very adult game. What makes these photographs so good that it's not a game the viewer is invited to play. It's a game she or he is made to play.

Highly recommended.

Carnal Knowledge, photographs by Malerie Marder, essays/text by Gregory Crewdson, Charlotte Cotton, Malerie Marder, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, 144 pages, Violette Editions, 2011

Sometimes, it's good to go back to the classics to get reminded of how things can be done differently, and well. There is no shortage of contemporary photography of what we do with the land, to the land, much of it done pleasantly and occasionally decoratively. There's nothing wrong with decorative (it helps selling prints). But of course there is the debate about whether or not we want to see ravaged landscapes photographed beautifully. We don't (since it feels wrong, and we want the photographs to illustrate our opinions), and we do (since we love looking at beautiful landscapes). I'm tired of that debate, since however you look at it, it's never about photography, but instead about what we expect to see: as I said, an illustration of our opinions. So it's good to go back to the classics, and here I mean the more recent classics. (more)

It is instructive to see how the photographer prefers his photographs to be shown on the wall. I took a photograph of the installation at Pier 24: It's a grid of smallish prints, with colour and b/w mixed (click on the picture on the side). Here are no oversized, expensively framed prints, aimed at wealthy collectors. Instead, you get what you could call conceptual rigour. It's a different world, a different kind of thinking, a different era maybe.

For me, looking at what people wrote about the work when it first came out feels slightly weird, maybe because I grew up later. I get the idea of Land Art, for example. But what does that really tells us? Does it tell us anything other than critics trying to come to grips with this kind of photography? That struggle still seems unresolved, all these twenty years later.

There's a lot to be said for reevaluating photography after some time has passed. Of course, we also need to realize that in the meantime, this land - our land - is being ravaged more and more, and the planet's temperature is rising, our impotent hand-wringing notwithstanding. At the end of the day we need to realize that there's only so much photography can do.

Candlestick Point, photographs by Lewis Baltz, essay by Wolfgang Scheppe, 128 pages, Steidl, 2011

We don't take photography by tourists seriously, because they're not serious about photography. We don't take photography by tourist information centers seriously, because they're too serious about the photography looking a certain way. In other words, tourism and photography just don't gel. Or so the story goes. But maybe that's wrong. How would we find out? Well, we could simply look at a lot of tourist photographs and brochures produced for tourists. Or we could grab a bunch of serious (aka non-tourist) photographers and tell them to go to the same place to take photographs. The former is simple (and not all that original any longer), the latter is more fun. In a nutshell, that is the idea behind Sight-_Seeing, for which there also is a microsite. (more)

Michael Danner, Dominik Gigler, Monika Höfler, Verena Kathrein, Jörg Koopmann, Andrew Phelps, and Matthias Ziegler went to Tyrol to take photographs. Tyrol, that's incredibly picturesque landscapes featuring mountains and lakes, bored adolescents, incredibly healthy looking individuals wearing folkloristic dress, and mass tourism. The seven photographer ended up taking images across the full spectrum, ranging from what look like high-production value snapshots - kind of what a tourist who has a high-end camera and knows how to use it would produce - to picturesque landscapes to portraits to what for a lack of a better description we could call "fine art photographs."

What is truly amazing is how well everything fits together. Just like photography in general would - if we hadn't subdivided into all the various categories we love dealing with (usually dismissing, btw, the by far largest bits, snapshots and tourist photographs). There is some overlap, where two, three or even four of the photographers work in the same place, which makes things even more interesting. In other words, Sight-_Seeing might be a document dealing with tourism and its depiction, but it also investigates photography itself - showing that the differences between photographers might be more important than whatever style or type of photograph they might be producing. In the book, this point is brought home by the way the photographs are organized, using such categories as "faces" or "street scenes." Occasionally, the design might be a tad too clever (images extend across pages in the signatures, which are then cut into pieces by other pages), but that's just a minor issue.

So if you get a chance have a peek at Sight-_Seeing. The photography, the depiction of one very touristy place, seen through the eyes of seven photographers, makes the book a pretty cool object for a shelf dedicated to photobooks.

Sight-_Seeing, photography by Michael Danner, Dominik Gigler, Monika Höfler, Verena Kathrein, Jörg Koopmann, Andrew Phelps, and Matthias Ziegler, (German language only) essays by Gero Günther, Walter Klier, and Wolfgang Scheppe, 192 pages, Hatje-Cantz, 2011

It's the photographer's nightmare: You have your luggage run through one of the x-ray security scanners at an airport, and your film gets damaged. Of course, you can always try to get your film hand inspected - provided you're using a US airport, say, but things aren't as easy to control when you're in parts of the world where x-ray scanners are everywhere, and where x-ray machines might or might not date from ye olden days. This is the situation Rob Hornstra of The Sochi Project found himself in in Grozny, the capitol of Chechnya: "In the Chechen capital, these scanners are not only placed at the entrance to the airport or government buildings, but also to shops, gyms, restaurants and outside on squares." (more)

Safety First is what The Sochi Project call a Sketchbook, a side product if you want, published in addition to the regular photobooks produced as part of the project. The project entirely relies on donations from supporters and from grants - Rob and his partner/writer Arnold van Bruggen have been actively using crowd-funding before it became popular, before sites likes Kickstarter or Emphas.is were born. The proceeds of the book will go towards funding future work.

Since the photography in the book essentially covers little over a day - none of the other film got damaged - Safety First provides an overview of how the photographer spent his time, whom - and how - he was photographing. Occasionally, photographers publish their contact sheets, and often, the one shot you are familiar with clearly is the only worthwhile image. In contrast, this book is not filled with lots of bad photographs and the occasional good one. Instead, the majority of the images are very interesting. It's not a real contact sheet, of course. But it's still very interesting to see how the images are framed, the different variations, etc. So the book also offers a glimpse into how this particular photographer is working, something we probably wouldn't have seen had the film not been damaged.

Safety First, photographs by Rob Hornstra, essay by Arnold van Bruggen, 48 pages, The Sochi Project, 2011

See my presentation of the book here

A good photobook acts very much like a vortex. It sucks you in, twirling you around, mis- and then re-orienting you, leaving you dizzy, a bit bewildered, and excited (A bad photobook just sucks). Richard Rothman's Redwood Saw is such a vortex. (more)

The forests in Redwood Saw are what is left from earlier times, preserved for our and future generations. The town itself has seen better days, first as a mining town, then as a lumber town, then as a fishing town. All of those resources have now been depleted. This is a familiar story, of course. The shells of formerly booming towns stretch across the continent, from Holyoke, MA, a few miles down the road from where this review is being written, to the struggling towns of what is known as the rust belt, all the way out to Crescent City, CA, right at the Pacific Ocean. This is not the American story, but it is a prominent one. With Redwood Saw, Rothman shines a light on it.

The book starts out with lush photographs taken in the forest. It then slowly moves to the town - the transition being provided by cut trees, with the bulk of the book consisting of a portrait of Crescent City, showing both parts of the town and some of its inhabitants. At the end, the viewer reaches the Pacific Ocean itself. You're as far west as you could get.

For me, the photographs taken in the forest and large numbers of the portraits really make this book. I suppose this is just my personal reading, but as much as we can mess up this planet in the end, it's going to win out, with us just thinking we're the masters. You see this in the forest with its unrestrained power, and you see this in the city itself: things have fallen into disrepair, people pose proudly in front of enormous bushes of weeds.

Really the only thing that slightly frustrates me about this book is that it could have been edited more tightly. With maybe only 80% of its images the book would be more focused. But that's my only concern. Having just received the book, I still keep coming back to it. I must have looked at it dozens of times already, and the vortex keeps swirling.

Redwood Saw clearly will be on my "best of" list this year. Very recommended.

Redwood Saw, photographs by Richard Rothman, with a supplement featuring an extended conversation between Alex Stein and Richard Rothman, 136 pages, Nazraeli Press, 2011

Watch my presentation of the book here

South Africa's recent history is one of those wonderful stories. Apartheid was finally dismantled in the 1990s, and a new country, with everybody having the same rights and the same freedom, was born. At least on paper. The reality is not quite as rosy. Here is the OECD reporting on the situation: "South Africa's high aggregate level of income inequality increased between 1993 and 2008. The same is true of inequality within each of South Africa's four major racial groups. Income poverty has fallen slightly in the aggregate but it persists at acute levels for the African and Coloured racial groups. Poverty in urban areas has increased. There have been continual improvements in non-monetary well-being (for example, access to piped water, electricity and formal housing) over the entire post-Apartheid period up to 2008." There's more: "In the third quarter of 2010, 29.80% of blacks were officially unemployed, compared with 22.30% of coloureds, 8.60 of Asians and 5.10% of whites." (source, with further reference therein) (more)

"The plight of the domestic worker reflects that of the black nation as a whole within South Africa. Most black people are dirt poor and continue to sink deeper and deeper into poverty. The promise of new dispensation may soon evaporate into thin air. Already, throughout the country, rumblings of discontent are beginning to sound - unthinkable in the heady days of 19994. Perhaps nowhere else is the legacy of apartheid as vividly portrayed as in the domestic worker's life."

Now that income inequality and unemployment have become hot topics in the US this book will hopefully speak to more people than when we were pretending that all was just fine. After all, what is keeping South Africa in its current state is the same economic system that has resulted in the situation the US - and many other countries - are in now. Where this discussion will go remains to be seen. But a book like Interior Relations makes it clear that contemporary photography does not always shy away from depicting harsh economic realities. It is much to Van Coller's credit to have thrown some light on the plight of domestic workers in South Africa.

Interior Relations, photographs by Ian van Coller, essay by Sindiwe Magona, 68 pages, Charles Lane Press, 2011