Ninjalicious
Ninjalicious, founder of Infiltration.org and master urban explorer, came out with the wicked useful guide to visiting hidden and off-limit places. Sadly, he died weeks after the book was published. However, his immensely useful collection of tips on getting in and out of spaces is available to one and …
Harry Skrdla
Harry Skrdla is a prat. His writing is pompous, overblown and redundant. I can almost guarantee he has a closet full of notebooks where he wrote wretched Goth poetry in while in high school.
The pictures, on the other hand, are beautiful. Encompassing a wide array of ruins …
Peter Seidel and Manfred Sack
Seidel’s photos are a creepy, otherworldly collection of underground sits in Germany. The most benign include art vaults and wine cellars. More common, however, are shelters, prisons and command centers built to withstand war after war – including Hitler’s own bunker. Fantastically beautiful pictures, regardless …
Morna Gregory and Sian James
A thoroughly enjoyable photo essay collection of toilets of the world. From a hole in the sand in the middle of a vast desert, a tree marked “p” on a hiking trail, to an ultra-modernist egg shaped pods at a London club, the world takes …
Gary Gladstone
By the same photographer who shot and wrote Passing Gas is another fantastic collection of photography. Choosing towns with silly and often obscene sounding names, Gladstone and his spent months driving the country, hoping these towns still existed and then photographing them and their residents. Some residents are …
Joel Sternfeld
American Prospects is a nifty collection of photos from the 70s and 80s by a master photographer. Sternfeld focuses on contrasts of human objects placed existing in nature – a huge rock obstructing the view of a business office, towns dotting empty prairies, a rotting refinery in the …
Portraits by Kip Fulbeck Forward by Sean Lennon
I saw this little gem in the pop culture rack a few weeks ago and couldn’t resist snagging it, despite my already precariously towering heap. Fulbeck’s collection is a photo essay of hapa – people of part Asian, part “other” descent. The …
The Beard and Moustache Championships – The First Official Book (with entry form!)
A short but amusing tome with a collection of photos of past international beard and moustache championship winners. Everything form little clarkie moustaches and van dyke beards, to multi-tentacled freestyle beards and foot wide mutton chop whiskers. …
Eduardo Rodriguez, Andrew Moore, Andy Grundberg
Once, years ago, our friend Rebecca asked us to come out and look at her recently deceased grandmother’s house. It had been built during the civil war and had received its only wallpapering at that time – which was still hanging in black shreds …
Robert Bennett, Jules Shell and Nick Kroll with a foreword by The Village People
You don’t need to be a Jew to appreciate this glorious collection. Bennett et al. collected thousands of Bar and Bat Mitzvah photos from the 60’s through the 80’s. And lord are they hideous. Acres of …
Andy Goldsworthy
The artwork of Goldsworthy is about nature and impermanence. Like artist Robert Smithson (Spiral Jetty), Goldsworthy’s works are meant to erode and disappear over time. The only records are photos. Working with whatever is at hand, Goldsworthy sculpts and creates with leaves, rocks, ice and twigs. Short commentary …
Dennis Kitchen, intro by Garrison Keillor
I’m a sucker for photo essays. This is one of my favorites. Kitchen traveled the US, photographing the smallest towns in each state. What a variety of responses he received! Some towns turned out in full force – all 2,4 or 6 of them. …
Lloyd Kahn
I love this book. I love it so much I actually bought it. With real money and everything. Kahn’s book is a massive collection of hand built shelters of every sort of building material possible. And they are truly inspiring. There are fantastic homes built of light concrete …
Loretta Lux
Whoooo, creepy! Remember that little kid that was supposed to be Scully’s daughter in X-Files but everyone hated her because she was so creepy? Well, that little weirdo has nothing on Lux’s models. Lux’s children are how I imagine seraphim would appear – beautiful forms, but also terrible, …
Peter Menzel
These photo essays are short pictorals of an average family in various countries around the world. Menzel found families willing to bring the entire contents of their houses out so he could photograph them. The images are fascinating and startling. Vignettes, like TVs around the world, keep the …
Martin Parr
Time and time again, I check this book out of the library. There is something incomprehensibly mind-boggling about this book. Perhaps it’s the graphic designer in me, but the scope of work involved in this book just makes me marvel at the stupid things humanity will do. The …
