Detroit Disassembled
Andrew Moore
I find something incredibly satisfying about Moore’s photos of a decaying post-apocalyptic Detroit. While the building are crumbling to nothing, nature is reasserting herself. Man has not conquered nature, nor ever will. We may be doing our damnedest to overpopulate and pollute the planet, but nature will have the last laugh.
The photos are also history in action. Often archaeologists unearth ruins and state in a purposeful (confused) tone that “trade routes must have changes and the social dynamic made people leave, yadda yadda.” It sounds so fancifal, Why would people leave a perfectly good city and move elsewhere? Why wouldn’t they take their stuff? You can’t just leave a city and walk away… can you?...
What I Eat
Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio
Photographers Menzel and D’Aluisio have outdone themselves - again – with their fantastic new book What I Eat. Their incredible work was first brought to my attention through their book Material World. The husband and wife pair bring make the most mundane exotic and riveting. By getting ordinary people to open up and share their lives, they give us a glimpse of how other people live. In earlier books, Menzel and D’Aluisio have gotten their subjects, everyday people in every corner of the world, to spread their earthly possessions out for scrutiny and photos. Here we can see the daily diets of street child in Bangladesh, a Chinese farmer and a Japanese sumo wrestler, mixed with the more mundane and...
Face to Face: Polar Portraits
Huw Lewis-Jones
This is a brilliant and gripping collection of photos, some almost 150 years old, of the brave (and possibly insane) women and men who explore the poles. The book gives a wide range of vignettes – the big names like Robert Scott and Ernest Shackleton – but also their crew, modern explorers and scientists, Inuit residents and guides and other integral people. Beautiful, often unreal, photos accompanied by gripping ...
Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals
Christopher Payne
This collection of photos is a true Rorschach test for the reader. The decrepit Victorian-era buildings are both beautiful and sinister. Abandoned rooms show both care and terrifying restriction – gardens, beautify parlors, movie theaters, coffee stands, barred doors and rooms of straightjackets. As one after another of these large state hospitals falls nuder the wrecking ball, Payne has made it his job to document what were once common institutions. Most were closed in the 1970s in what was arguably a poor move for the mentally ill and indigent. What is left gives a glimmer of sadness and but also a stability that many of the mentally ill no longer have. Once housed in asylums like these, virtual cities unto themselves, many of...
Armed America: Portraits of Gun Owners in their Homes
Kyle Cassidy
Cassidy attempts to give an even-handed overview of the average gun owner in their home. Accompanying the gun owners are quick bios on the types of guns, professions of the owners and their pets and children’s names. From utili-kilted Rambo wannabes to teen girls with their shotguns, armed America is here. Check out their guns, reasoning, politics, cats and tchotchke collections.
Photography in Japan: 1853-1912 -
Terry Bennett
The actual text of this book is dull beyond words. It chronicles the various European photographers who first photographed Japan, along with later European and japanese photographers and their studios. Yep, dull.
The images are magnificent. They show an exotic and beautiful world, now long gone. Narrow winding streets, geisha in full kimonos, castles with rice-paper windows and samurai in their mustached helmets are captured as their country is being engulfed by the west. Check out this marvelous website for some of the images:...