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 …
Japanese Detail: Architecture by Sadao Hibi & The Art of Japanese Architecture by David and Machiko Young
Both of these architecture books are unique to the standard Japanese architecture books I’ve looked through in the past. Generally, the standards fall into the categories of brief overviews of large buildings, cities …
Adrienne Salinger
Despite one in seven Americans living alone, being single is still viewed with a combination of suspicion and pity. Yet many people love and choose to live along. Salinger’s subjects run the gamut from those forced into singlehood by the death of family or a spouse to those …
John Wehrheim
Taylor Camp’s hand-built tree houses gets some coverage in Tiny Homes, but it is the stories of the residents that are truly fascinating. Started by a group of people tired of the Vietnam War and exhausted from the anti-war movement, the original founders of Taylor Camp are …
Lloyd Kahn
“Joyful” is the best word I can use to describe Kahn’s new collection of tiny homes. Each under 500 square feet is a gem. Many are handbuilt and lived in by the builders. Others are from built by companies specializing in downsizing for the 21st century. The book …
