Robert Winter and Alexander Vertikoff
Craftsman Style is a good starter overview coffee-table book on Craftsman style architecture. Springing from William Morris’s Arts and Crafts movement, this architectural movement aimed to be the antithesis of industrialized, modern building. In the views of the Arts and Crafts movement, things started going …
Clothes We Can’t Believe We Bought
Tom Coleman
Photography by Jerome Jakubiec
Everyone can relate to this book because everyone has had at least one fashion disaster in their life. Maybe it’s the “fashion forward” item you bought because you thought it would be cutting edge, only to discover that …
Cathy Teesdale
Like her counter-part, Brandon Stanton’s book Humans of New York, Teesdale travels the streets of London taking photos of interesting individuals and taking short interviews. Many are mundane – mums in the sun with babies, people on the way to work. More often though, they are extremely …
John Szabo
Malverne High School photography teacher John Szabo is clearly a very talented photographer in his own right. And luckily, he found eye-catching subjects all around him. His collection, Teenage, shows a cohort of his students in the late 1970s. Szabo catches all the facets of the teen …
Iago Corazza and Greta Ropa
The “last men” of Papua New Guinea is a phenomenal collection of photos. Corazza and his wife Ropa travel deep into some of the most remote places in the world to meet tribes living in stone age conditions. The photo are breathtaking. At first, the …
John Hill
Despite being an architecture fan, I was delighted to find in this book a number of buildings and architects that I wasn’t familiar with. There were certainly some of the biggest and most familiar names – Frank Lloyd Wright, Atoni Gaudi and Oscar Niemeyer and their well known …
Richard Renaldi
Despite being packed cheek-to-jowel in many cities, most Westerns have a strong aversion to being touched by strangers. Renaldi’s book captures numerous “couples” touching one another. All are strangers, having met just a moment before. The facial expressions and body language vary differently in every one. Some images …
Candacy A. Taylor
Taylor became fascinated with waitresses and diner culture when waiting tables to pay for her graduate school education. Her thesis, this book, focused on the “lifer” waitress – women who have waited tables for decades. With a combination of research and interviews, Taylor soon dispels the notion …
Brandon Stanton
Photographer Brandon Stanton’s blog and photo collection are a joy to view. They show humanity in all its oddness, ugliness and beauty. While Stanton often turns his eye to the wildly fashionable, are simply wild, his short cameo-interviews turns his subjects into the real people they are. Like …
Tim Walker
Tim Walker is a fashion photographer in the loose sense that there are people wearing expensive clothing in many of his photos. However, the clothing themselves are probably the last thing your eye will fix on. Walker uses enormous props, decaying mansions and the bizarre, disproportionate bodies of …
Carl Warner
Food Landscapes is as it sounds – lovely, Disney-esque scenes created entirely out of food. There are rivers of meat, skies if salmon, cheesy rocks and broccoli trees. Every minute detail is fantastic and brilliantly positioned. After the first eye-popping scan of the book, do go back and …
Bernhard Edmaier
Edmaier’s aerial photos of volcanoes, both active and dormant, around the world are works of art. Some are so alien, so intensely colored and strangely shaped, that they can’t be of this planet. Some are brooding dead hunks of rock, other fiery pits and still others glowing pools …
David Stephenson
Heavenly Vaults: From Romanesque to Gothic in European Architecture catalogs dozens of vaulted ceilings. Each one, shot from a prone position below, is a masterpiece. The ability of humans with nothing but crude tools and sweat-labor to make some magnificent structures is mind-boggling. We have wildly advanced tools, …
Masayuki Yoshinaga and Katsuhiko Ishikawa
Ari Seth Cohen
Like Fruits and Fresh Fruits, Gothic and Lolita and Advanced Style are photo collections of street fashion – people wearing their own style as they go about their day. The gothic and lolita styles, photographed in Japan, follow relatively rigid lines. …
Phaidon
This beautiful overview of historical and influential home styles is perfect for the architectural dilettante. Each pages features a large photo with a short paragraph on the chosen house, architect and influences. Most are highly liveable styles – though are a few houses, like one by Buckminster Fuller – …
Photos by Alan Weintraub | Text by Alan Hess
At least for me, Niemeyer’s houses vacillate between stunningly beautiful and almost repugnantly spare, even Stalinish, in design. Many of his houses, built primarily in Brazil now have the feel of “has-been modernism.” They were the stuff of the future sixty …
