It’s Beautiful Here, Isn’t It
By Luigi Ghirri
Preface by Willliam Eggleston, Essay by Germano Celant,
Notes by Paola Ghirri
Aperture
Hardcover, 152 pages
155 images, $55

Looking through this book, the first one on influential Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri to be published in the US, is like stepping into a fairy tale or a story by Lewis Carroll. Often washed in the pastel palette of his native country, Ghirri’s images—of maps, murals, billboards, reflections in mirrors, snapshots in a photo album, Che Guevera’s face on a t-shirt photographed through a store window—play with scale and befuddle foreground and background. In one of his many essays collected in this volume, Ghirri talks of photography as “a great magical toy” and “a formidable visual language for fostering this desire for the infinite that inhabits each of us.” Geramano Celant, writing in the book’s densely academic introduction, argues that Ghirri, an early pioneer of color photography, was also influenced by Surrealism and Conceptual art. What all these intellectual ponderings omit is that Ghirri’s work is often witty and usually gorgeous. The preface by William Eggleston makes the point. Describing one of his favorite Ghirri photos, Eggleston sums it up in a one-word sentence: “Beautiful.”

—Holly Stuart Hughes


Sent A Letter
By Dayanita Singh
Steidl
Seven softcover booklets in a cloth box, 126 pages,
Images throughout, $60

In Sent A Letter, Dayanita Singh, who has several book projects to her name—Myself Mona Ahmed, Privacy, Chairs and Go Away Closer—created with Gerhard Steidl a remarkable and personal collection of six accordion-folded booklets that document her travels in India. The publisher tells us that Singh originally made these books by hand with a person in mind, some of them people who had accompanied her on her trips. The books are small at 3.5 x 6.1 inches, and the photographs are presented roughly 3 x 3 on the pages, which deemphasizes the pictures in favor of what they are meant to evoke: shared memory and non-verbal communication between people who are close to one another. There are photographs of statues and a library in Bombay, books for sale in the street and a man sleeping in a cart in Calcutta, citizens of Varanasi at play and in prayer, and building interiors and the ocean in Padmanabhapuram. In this way the books are like photo albums that might be assembled by an amateur after a trip, and the production, right down to the hand-assembled cloth box, suggests a handed-down practice. The seventh book, created from photographs taken by Singh’s mother, Noni, establishes that Singh has indeed carried on a family tradition. The text adorning the exterior of the box—Sent a letter to my friend on the way he dropped it. Someone came and picked it up and put it in his pocket—also seems to hint at a collective effort to create and pass along these records of shared experience. Beyond its value as a unique art object, what makes Sent A Letter great is the impulse one feels to create books to send to friends and to keep in a handmade box of one’s own.

—Conor Risch




Richard Avedon: Portraits of Power
Introduction by Renata Adler
Essays by Paul Roth and Frank Goodyear
Steidl / Corcoran Gallery of Art
Hardcover, 300 pages
180 images, $60.00

The title Portraits of Power may bring to mind Avedon's 1969 group portrait of the Chicago Seven or “The Family,” his series on the country's power elite, commissioned in 1976 by Rolling Stone. But this new book, based on a Corcoran exhibition, emphasizes "portraits" as much as it does "power." Artists and writers from Marian Anderson to Ezra Pound to Sean Penn are included, as well as individuals far from seats of authority: Tiger-cage performers in Saigon photographed in 1971, and a couple and their baby photographed at a 2004 Nevada gun show. Spanning Avedon's career from the 1950s to his final project shot during the 2004 Democratic convention, Portraits of Power includes many images previously published in Richard Avedon Photographs: 1946-2004 (released in 2007), Richard Avedon Portraits (2002) and Evidence (1999). Still, this volume's essays provide valuable historical context and include quotes from some of Avedon's subjects (Karl Rove: "The portrait is foolish, stupid, insulting. I look like a complete idiot."). From the Nixon cabinet to an Illinois state senator named Barack Obama, these portraits offer a reflection on history. Just see how segregationist George Wallace evolved from a leering young pol to a contemplative man in a wheelchair to a fragile senior citizen looking stricken as the face of his African-American attendant hovered near his cheek.

—Holly Stuart Hughes



Kilgore Rangerettes
By O. Rufus Lovett
Foreword by Elliot Erwitt, Introduction by Katy Vine
University of Texas Press
Hardcover, 192 pages
133 images, $50

In 2006, O. Rufus Lovett’s photographs were brought to a wider audience with the publication Weeping Mary. Now, University of Texas Press presents the second of Lovett's long-term photographic projects. The Kilgore Rangerettes are a team of small-town college high-kicking dancers who have performed across the nation, and have performed at the Cotton Bowl Classic every year since 1951. Of the 133 duotone plates, about a third were taken in 1989 (when Lovett first discovered the troupe), a smattering represent the 1990s and early 2000s, and the remaining third were taken between 2005–2007. It’s hard to tell if this reflects the book’s photo edit or has another reason behind it. Whatever the case, the images are an unsentimental study of Americana, in which time seems to have stood still. Images taken f15 years apart follow one another without much distinction—not so much because the images are black and white, or the image-making repetitious; the subjects themselves seem to look exactly as their predecessors did 30 years ago—the same costumes, high kicks, curled hair and lip-sticked, smiling faces. The book contains a foreword by Elliot Erwitt (he made a film about the Rangerettes in 1972) and an introduction by Katy Vine, in which she imparts some much needed insight into the actual institution of the “Rettes” themselves. This is a charming book that will grow on readers.
 
—Debra Klomp Ching




The Blue Room
By Eugene Richards
Phaidon
Hardcover, 168 pages
78 images, $100

Social documentary photographer Eugene Richards’ stature comes from his devotion to giving a voice to people, particularly in the inner city, who have to cope with our society’s scourges, from poverty (Below The Line) to drugs (Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue) to violence (The Knife and Gun Club). His new book The Blue Room, a study of abandoned houses and farms across the south, the southwest and Great Plains, would seem to be a complete departure for Richards. The setting is rural, it’s shot entirely in color, and the skewed perspectives and jam-packed frames for which he has been known are replaced by quiet compositions that are lyrical and often pretty. More startlingly, the pictures show no people, only their remains: shards of dusty crockery, abandoned cars covered in snow, old family photos that have curled and yellowed, a string of Christmas lights still dangling from the roof of a screened-in porch. In his working notes, published at the end of the book, he describes asking a rancher what happened to the family that used to occupy an abandoned house. “ ‘They’re not moving away,’ he answered without emotion, ‘They're going to the cemetery.’” The subtext of The Blue Room involves the economic pressures on farm families and the flight to the cities, but Richards focuses on the particularities and minute details. Even without ever showing a single human being The Blue Room manages to be as humanistic and as poignant as any of Richards’ work.

—Holly Stuart Hughes



Oxbow Archive
By Joel Sternfeld
Steidl
Hardcover, 160 pages
77 images, $70.00

Among the few words in Joel Sternfeld’s Oxbow Archive is a quote from Emerson: “To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.” In this case the field is the East Meadows in Northhampton, Massachusetts, near the Oxbow of the Connecticut River, the attentive eye is Sternfeld’s, and the pictures are large format. Published in concert with Sternfeld’s September show at Luhrig Augustine Gallery in New York City, the volume collects landscapes that Sternfeld shot between 2005 and 2007, although the first plate is dated “Late October, 1978,” so Sternfeld’s relationship with the field is presumably an old one. Arranged chronologically by season but not by year, the book begins with the bare trees and dry, dead grasses and underbrush of late winter, and closes with the snows of late March, 2007. Many of the photographs in this series include traces of humanity. Dirt roads and tire tracks are at times prevalent in the compositions, and at other times more subtle, reaching across the very bottom of a frame or out of view beneath a puddle that has formed in a large rut. There are cornfields in various states of production and an occasional barn or glimpse of the Mount Holyoke Summit House. The natural surroundings are mostly muted, and only a few of the photographs show evidence of bright sunlight. One tragic photograph of a dead raccoon, and one of several geese sitting in a corn field after the harvest, their black and white and gray bodies creating a beautiful contrast with the dead yellow of the spent corn stalks, are the only photographs of animals. Given the highly concerned tenor of current conversations about the environment, one might read Sternfeld’s series as a reflection on, or a preservation of, a natural world that is changing for the worse, season by season. Others may see a landscape that was never majestic in the traditional sense and, despite human intervention, has maintained a seasonal equilibrium of death and re-growth, on which the humans present in the fields depend; a landscape with “its own beauty,” in other words.

—Conor Risch




Iranian Photography Now
Edited by Rose Issa
Hatje Cantz,
Hardcover, 236 pages
189 images, $60
 
Iranian Photography Now is a surprising and wide-ranging compendium of work by 36 artists including citizens and ex-pats, established and emerging photographers, photojournalists, industrial and advertising photographers, and conceptual and fine artists. Editor Rose Issa, an independent curator and the director of Beyond Art Productions, explains in her introduction: “This book hopes to reveal the visual pulse of the country—one that reflects the joy, the grief, the traumas of its recent history, and the intermingling of life and art.”  Her selections were driven by her interest in what she calls “‘real fictions’—a subtle mix of documentary and fiction that blurs the line between reality and creativity.” For most of the last 30 years, photographers in Iran have lacked theoretical and practical training, access to art publications, and patronage, never mind government support for the arts. But given the country’s recent history under a repressive regime, it is hardly a surprise that Iranian photography is so inventive—and loaded. The work here shows photographers grappling with the cultural and political aftermath of the ’79 revolution and the bloody eight-year war with Iraq during the 1980s. But their work also explores the tension between traditional and Western values, nostalgia, self-perception, and other themes. As Issa explains, the work comes from the photographers’ “emotions about the here and now—the resilience needed to transcend the harassments of daily life.” The book is by no means comprehensive. Reza and several other notables are excluded. But Issa explains that it is meant as an introduction, and that it would have been impossible to do everyone’s work justice. (Yeah, yeah). Iranian Photography Now is arranged alphabetically by photographer, but might have been stronger if photographers had been grouped thematically instead. And Issa includes a small handful of so-so images. For the most part, though, this book introduced me to some striking work that I didn’t know was out there, and left me wanting to see more.

—David Walker



Invasion 68: Prague
By Josef Koudelka
Aperture
Softcover, 296 pages
250 images, $60

First viewed 40 years ago in the pages of London’s Sunday Times Magazine as an anonymous first-hand account, Josef Koudelka’s photographic chronicle of the August 1968 invasion of Prague by Warsaw Pact tanks is presented in this large softcover book, which includes many photographs never seen before. Interspersed with texts including government radio transcripts, pamphlets, and eyewitness accounts, all of which provide context to the photographs and make the book into a riveting historical document, the black-and-white images convey a daring point of view of Prague’s resistance during the Soviet occupation. Taken mostly around the city center, the images follow the people of Prague as they oppose steel tanks and rifles with little more than flesh, bone and ideals. Interestingly, Koudelka had returned the day before the invasion from Romania, where he had been documenting the Roma gypsy population. Acting on impulse, the aeronautical engineer-turned-photographer used unexposed 35mm cinema film recycled from movie reels to record the invasion, occupation and resistance. When he smuggled the negatives out of the country to Britain (Magnum would later distribute the photos worldwide), he not only introduced himself (albeit anonymously) to the world, but he also shed light on Soviet rule for the West to see.

—Daniel Ryan



Role Models: Feminine Identity in Contemporary American Photography
by Lucy Soutter, Shelley Rice, Susan Fisher Sterling, and Kathryn A. Wat
National Museum of Women in the Arts
Hardcover, 138 pages
71 images, $30

This publication accompanied an exhibition surveying photography by women artists, specifically the importance in their work of role-playing and role models. Beginning in the 1980s, it charts the intergenerational shift from the early modes of representation that employed notions of the objective to new narratives that collapse the bridge between documentary and conceptual work. Tableaux and masquerade are common themes, as are the notions of public/private and constructed identity. The essays are excellent in providing a solid overview of the work, and, in particular, Shelley Rice provides an insightful study of American women’s photography within the international context—commenting on the work of Rineke Dijkstra, Niki S. Lee, Orlan and Tracey Rose in particular. Photographs by the likes of Mary Ellen Mark, Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin and Sharon Lockhart make their deserved appearances, but there are also images by Collier Schorr, Katy Grannan and Angela Strassheim. The reproduction quality of the plates is somewhat flat, which is disappointing. Despite this, Role Models is a timely publication given the current penchant for staged photography.

—Debra Klomp Ching

Part 1 of our "Photography Books of 2008," which included reviews of new books by Stephen Shore, Ed Kashi and Walter Iooss, appeared in the November issue of PDN and can be found online here.