The photography books of the year

Glass life
Sara Cwynar, Aperture
In her new book, Sara Cwynar creates a dizzying confusion in the chaos of our consumerist visual world to bring us face to face with the complex relationship we have with images. The volume brings together Sara Cwynar’s multilayered portraits made of accumulated photographs and consumer objects, and images from films Soft Film (2016), Rose Gold (2017) e Red Film (2018). It is a book saturated with images and each image is full of bright colors, at the limit of endurance, as if to generate a reaction of the reader pushed to reflect on consumer culture and on the role that photography has played in shaping it. (Veronica Daltri)

Happy pills
Arnaud Robert e Paolo Woods, Delpire & co
Can chemistry improve the human condition? From Niger to the United States via Switzerland, India, Israel and the Peruvian Amazon, journalist Arnaud Robert and photographer Paolo Woods have traveled the world in search of happy pills, those medicines that promise healing and better physical performance and mental. “The goal of this work”, explain the authors, “is to reflect on the way in which the pharmaceutical industry uses science, the market and communication to offer a standardized response to the pursuit of happiness, which has long been a prerogative. of religions, philosophies and politics “. (Elena Boille)

The poverty line
Chow e Lin, Lars Müller Publishers
Three cabbages, one fish, six bananas: what can a person who lives in poverty buy himself to eat? In about ten years, photographer Stefen Chow and economist Huiyi Lin have traveled through 36 countries or territories to photograph food that can be purchased at a daily per capita figure based on each country’s definition of the poverty line and official national statistics. This year their long work has become a book in which each leaf is both a surprise and a denunciation of inequalities. (Elena Boille)

Holy
Donna Ferrato, PowerHouse books
Fifty years dedicated to the story of women, to their battles, to the discrimination and violence they suffer but also to the ways in which they think and desire. The corpus of the American photojournalist’s work is condensed in this book, which collects her most famous series, above all Living with enemy, seminal work on domestic violence from 1991. Holy it reminds us what women have fought for and why we must continue to do so. (Giovanna D’Ascenzi)

Scalandrê
Marco Zanella, Cesura Publish
Marco Zanella’s project on Cotignola, a small Romagna village with an agricultural tradition, investigates the displacement generated by the end of peasant civilization and the advance of the new technological society. It testifies to the commitment of a community to keep pace, preserving ancient traditions and collective memories from accelerated change. (Veronica Daltri)

Archive
Bertien van Manen, Mack Books
Bertien van Manen has crossed the history of the last fifty years with his photographs: from Europe to China passing through the former Soviet Union, he has told the macro events and the complexity of the world through empathic stories, full of respect for life everyday life of his subjects, mostly ordinary people he met while traveling. The book, edited by the designer Hans Gremmen, collects various works by the Dutch photographer including unpublished sections of her archive and some pages of her diary. (Veronica Daltri)

What they saw: historical photobooks by women, 1843–1999
A cura di Russet Lederman e Olga Yatskevich, 10×10 Photobooks, NYC
An essential volume born from the need to fill a gap in the story of photographic publications made by women: not only published books but also fanzines, personal albums, clippings and portfolios from all geographical origins, for a total of 250 works. A research that does not end here, but wants to emphasize what was excluded in the past and what can be included in the future. (Giovanna D’Ascenzi)

American geography
Matt Black, Contrasto
The American photographer has set himself an extraordinary goal: to map the communities in his country that live below the poverty line. In 2015 he embarks on a 160-kilometer journey, starting from Central Valley, California, where he was born, and continues for six years, undressing, one photo after another, the American dream of his myth. Goal achieved. (Giovanna D’Ascenzi)

The San Quentin project
Nigel Poor, Aperture
This work collects an unprecedented documentation of life inside one of the oldest and largest prisons in America, San Quentin state prison in California, where the author Nigel Poor began teaching the history of photography to inmates in 2011 without have cameras or books available. He invited them to compose “verbal photographs” of their experiences. He then provided them with copies of famous images and inmates wrote their memories, thoughts and elaborations on them. He also had access to the prison’s photographic archive which was later used in the workshops with his students. His work is now being used to teach visual literacy and elaborate on the experience of incarceration. (Veronica Daltri)

I made them run away
Martina Zanin, Skinnerboox
A first-person book, which uses text and photography to rework and overcome memories full of anger and pain. Zanin, Friulian born in 1994, seeks a catharsis through photography by combining the family album and her mother’s letters with more recent shots in which she proceeds by mental and visual associations. (Giovanna D’Ascenzi)

As we rise: photography from the black Atlantic
Various authors, selected from the Wedge Collection, Aperture
A path of cultural re-appropriation within the African diaspora, where more than one hundred photographs taken by black artists from both sides of the Atlantic find space. “Too often we have seen images of blacks immortalized in their own pain, despair or brutal isolation. As we rise he prefers to present them as human beings, protagonists of their world ”, writes Teju Cole in the introduction. A book that restores power and dignity. (Giovanna D’Ascenzi)

England !? the English have landed!
Robin Maddock, Fire/Hole
This book is the result of five years of photographing the UK, the photographer’s home country, after the Brexit vote. The work explores a country torn by issues of identity, social inequality and the weight of its own history. It does so in a whirlwind of images, styles and different media: collage, more classic documentary photography and manipulation and painting interventions on the images, demonstrating the author’s love and hatred and frustration towards his own country. The work is accompanied by an essay by Johny Pitts and each copy is hand finished with an original painted cover. Interesting: if £ 47 is too much, on the website you can download the pdf for £ 1.75, with the proceeds destined for Save the children. (Veronica Daltri)

Photo no-nos: meditations on what not to photograph
Edited by Jason Fulford, Aperture
“Since I started taking color photos in the 1970s, I have a deep ambivalence towards sunsets,” writes photographer Alex Webb. “On the one hand they are very seductive, on the other I would like to resist their stereotypical beauty. I remember once I showed Josef Koudelka one of my first photos. It was a group of guys at a Bob Marley concert in Jamaica. I had them portrayed in silhouette against an orange sky. Koudelka told me: ‘Too much sugar’. He was right, it wasn’t just too sweet, it was also too easy. Every so often, however, I find something that distinguishes that setting sun from the others. So I put my anxiety aside, and I allow myself to take a picture of him “. Webb is just one of more than two hundred photographers and photographers who have responded to Jason Fulford’s request to tell what their taboo topics are: subjects and themes they try to avoid, but to which they are attracted and whose pitfalls they reveal. From the A of abstraction to the Z of zoom screenshots, the result is an original and often amusing series of personal reflections on the meaning of photography. (Elena Boille)

The forgotten

Anaïs Boudot, Pablo Picasso, Brassaï, The Eyes
The young Anaïs Boudot converses with Picasso and Brassaï who in turn had exchanges around glass plates engraved, and used as a matrix and negative. Using cut-out images of women of the time and gold-painted glass plates, Boudot subtly recalls that Picasso was very hard on them. The book portrays the complexity of this exchange in a cultured and intelligent way. (Christian Caujolle)

The two of us (Nous Deux)
Pentti Sammallahti, Atelier EXB / Éditions Xavier Barral
From one of the greatest Finnish photographers here is his first monograph, which crosses a black and white work of pure poetry. The incredible complicity with animals, the continuous attention to detail, the permanent availability towards the world allow Sammallahti to find instants of grace in the construction of spaces, always elegant and surprising. (Christian Caujolle)

But
Vasantha Yogananthan, Common Thing
A myth of two souls (2013-2021) proposes a contemporary reinterpretation of the epic poem Rāmāyaṇa, a journey through time and space. But (which means mother in Tamil) is the latest chapter in a project consisting of 437 photos, published in seven books. To celebrate this epic, Chose Commune publishes, in close collaboration with the artist, a book in which all sixty photographs are glued by hand. (Christian Caujolle)

Passenger
Martin Bogren, Lamaindonne Publishing
A magnificent, sensitive and fragile object, in line with the words and feelings of the author. A poetic way of crossing the world, full of relationships with the incomprehensible and sweet amazements in front of details, shapes and instants. (Christian Caujolle)

The idiots delight
Duane Michals, Pierre Bessard Publishing
Awarded at Les rencontres d’Arles as the best book in the Photo-texte category, this intelligent volume, as much as the author is facetious, is capable of inventing a new form to hide and reveal the texts that play, as always in Michals, with pictures. A book of laughter, poetry, gentle provocations and that small philosophy of the time typical of the inventor of the sequence, which he has been practicing for fifty years (awaiting the publication, late as always, of a complete work for Steidl). (Christian Caujolle)