Recent Photobook Haul

It's my favorite time of year.

Christmas time is great for several reasons. My favorite is when Ariel and I ask our families and each other to get us just books or photobooks. We usually don’t buy many books throughout the year and typically wait until Christmas. So, in today’s newsletter, I wanted to share a few photobooks I picked up and all of the ones that were given to me recently. Let’s jump into it.

Every time I share photobooks in this space, I encourage you to seek these books out for purchase either directly from the artist, their publisher, or an independent bookstore. We can not keep lining billionaires’ pockets by purchasing from Amazon or other similar stores. This is the year to support artists and independent booksellers.

“Advice for Young Artists” by Alec Soth

Between 2022 and 2024, Alec Soth visited twenty-five undergraduate art programmes across the United States. Advice for Young Artists comprises work he made there. Its title – perhaps like the visits themselves – is misleading: rather than wisdom or guidance, Soth offers an angular and unresolved reflection on artmaking at different stages of life and the relations of photography, time, and ageing. The photographs here range from formal studies evocative of the classroom to more unruly works of self-expression. Ambiguous stagings, found forms, and lyrical portraits are interspersed with gnomic quotes and unfinished credos scrawled on Post-its. Among the students, Soth himself appears at intervals, an uncertain sage in their midst.

Inspired by Walker Evans’s late Polaroids, this latest body of work reveals a new expansion of Soth’s practice and a new vantage, twenty years on from the publication of his first book. Recalling the conceit of Broken Manual, it uses an instructional format as a spurious cover for introspection and provocation. As much as a study of the experience of the young artist, this is a reckoning with the prospect of becoming an old one.

I have most of Alec’s books, except for the extremely rare and hard-to-find ones, and I was going to pick this one up eventually. That changed the moment I saw his YouTube video about the work, which I highly recommend watching. Alec is such a refreshing voice in photography, and I go to his YouTube channel often to get a timeline to cleanse my brain and revisit all the wonderful videos he has made.

“Black Country” by Bruce Gilden

During his three week stay back in 2013, Gilden documented overlooked people, factories and homes in the Midlands in order to unveil and study the changing landscape of post-industrialised Britain.

Gilden focused on the neglected and marginalised communities; his goal was to shine a light not only on people who are often ignored in day to day society, but also on the trades and ideals that are slowly fading into history in the UK.

About the design

The design of his new monograph directly draws upon the themes which Gilden investigated whilst producing the work. Bound using stainless steel screws to appear like a factory manual, the book is presented in a beautiful cover printed with silver on black paper, just like those worn doors found in real-life warehouses and factories; inside, instead of machinery, a series of large scale saturated images grab your attention, forcing you to pay full attention to the subjects.

As with Alec, I have most of the Bruce Gilden books you can commonly find. He recently published a new one that I had not picked up yet. The design is unique, with its metal rivets, beautiful silver paper cover, and full-bleed images on different paper types that break up the flow of the book. Foldouts for certain horizontal images can also somewhat fool you into thinking they are two vertical images, side by side. The work, as always, is one of my favorites. There’s nothing like a Bruce Gilden book to flip through.

“Modern Color” by Fred Herzog

Fred Herzog is known for his unusual use of color in the 1950s and 1960s, a time when art photography was almost exclusively associated with black and white imagery. The Canadian photographer worked almost exclusively with Kodachrome slide film for over 50 years, and only in the past decade has technology allowed him to make archival pigment prints that match the exceptional color and intensity of the Kodachrome slide. In this respect, his photographs can be seen as a pre-figuration of the New Color photographers of the seventies. This book will bring together over 230 images, many never before reproduced, and will feature essays by acclaimed authors David Campany and Hans-Michael Koetzle. Fred Herzog will be the most comprehensive publication on this important photographer to date.

There are a few photographers who set the tone for color photography to be an acceptable form of art in the 1950s, 1960s, and beyond, but Fred was a pioneer in color photography. This book is unbelievable, and the way he uses light and color is stunning. Very few photographers have made color work as good as this. Highly recommend.

“A Long Arc — Photography and the American South”

Collects over 175 years of key moments in the visual history of the Southern United States, with over two hundred and fifty photographs taken from 1845 to present. The South is perhaps the most mythologized region in the United States and also one of the most depicted. Since the dawn of photography in the nineteenth century, photographers have articulated the distinct and evolving character of the South’s people, landscape, and culture and reckoned with its fraught history. Indeed, many of the urgent questions we face today about what defines the American experience—from racism, poverty, and the legacy of slavery to environmental disaster, immigration, and the changes wrought by a modern, global economy—appear as key themes in the photography of the South. The visual history of the South is inextricably intertwined with the history of photography and also the history of America, and is therefore an apt lens through which to examine American identity. A Long Arc: Photography and the American South accompanies a major exhibition at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, with more than one hundred photographers represented, including Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Gordon Parks, William Eggleston, Sally Mann, Carrie Mae Weems, Dawoud Bey, Alec Soth, and An-My Lê. Insightful texts by Imani Perry, Sarah Kennel, Makeda Best, and Rahim Fortune, among others, illuminate this broad survey of photographs of the Southern United States as an essential American story. Copublished by Aperture and High Museum of Art, Atlanta.

My friend Steven, the only person I trust to print my work that I sell and exhibit, recently gifted me this phenomenal book. He viewed this insane exhibition in Richmond and brought the book back to me. I am so glad I get to experience this work in a tangible way at home. This work is so moving, and it sticks with you over time. It lingered in your brain for days after my first flip through of the book.

“Hafiz” by Sabiha Cimen

Sabiha Cimen spent three years photographing Girl Quran Schools in five cities in Turkey, a subject that she knows very well since she attended the same schools when she was a teenager with her twin sister. After becoming a photographer, she returned to those schools to work on her project that has now become the subject for her first book.

The title Hafiz refers to one who has memorized all 604 pages of the Holy Quran. Historically the task of memorization began during the time of Muhammad. The individual process can take up to four years and is usually done by girls ranging in age from eight to nineteen. Turkey has thousands of Quran schools.

This world has never been captured with so much intimacy before, as only Sabiha can do, because she is part of this culture. Every photo reveals a different aspect and gives us a deeper understanding of the daily life and the dreams of these girls.

I flipped through this book nearly every time I was in New York since it came out and never pulled the trigger on it. It has been on my list since. Ariel picked this up for me, and I am so excited about it! The 99 medium-format color photographs are like a pastel dream. The book is beautifully designed and printed, and when you’re flipping through it, it’s like watching a coming-of-age film. So glad to have this in my collection.

“From Dust” by Boris Apple

I met Boris one gorgeous day while photographing on Fifth Avenue in NYC when I took a week-long workshop with Bruce Gilden in 2022. Within minutes of talking with him, I felt like I met a lifelong friend. His work has constantly inspired me since we bumped into each other that day. He is nearly exclusively a black-and-white street photographer and this is a small book of that work. The design and layout are really great and unique, with these partial foldouts that reveal some fun details within each of the photographs that have one of these folds. I highly recommend scooping one up if you can; I’m sure only a handful of copies are available (if that).

“American Photographs” by Walker Evans

“Walker Evans: American Photographs was first published by The Museum of Modern Art in 1938 in a carefully prepared, deluxe letterpress edition to accompany an exhibition of photographs by Evans that captured scenes of the United States in the early 1930s.

It has been out of print for long periods since 1938, and subsequent editions—two of which altered the design and typography of the book in small but significant ways—are often unavailable outside libraries and rare-book stores. This seventy-fifth-anniversary edition re-creates the original as closely as possible with the aid of new digital printing technology, making the landmark publication available for a new generation.

More than any other artist, Walker Evans invented the images of an essential America that we have long accepted as fact, and his work has influenced not only modern photography but also literature, film, and visual art in other mediums.” — Essay by Lincoln Kirstein

There’s not much more I can say bout this highly influential work of Evans made in the 1930s. But I’m just very glad to finally have this iconic book that shaped the medium of photography to this day.

“William Eggleston’s Guide”

In 1976, William Eggleston's Guide was the first one-man show of color photographs ever presented at The Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum's first publication of color photography. The reception was divided and passionate. The book and show unabashedly forced the art world to deal with color photography, a medium scarcely taken seriously at the time, and with the vernacular content of a body of photographs that could have been but definitely weren't some average American's Instamatic pictures from the family album. These photographs heralded a new mastery of the use of color as an integral element of photographic composition.

For this second edition of William Eggleston's Guide, The Museum of Modern Art has made new color separations from the original 35mm slides, producing a facsimile edition in which the color will be freshly responsive to the photographer's intentions. Bound in a textured cover inset with a photograph of a tricycle and stamped with yearbook-style gold lettering, the Guide contained 48 images edited down from 375 shot between 1969 and 1971 and displayed a deceptively casual, actually super-refined look at the surrounding world.

Despite William Eggelston being one of my biggest influences, this is my first Eggleston book (I need to work on that, I know). But this is a tightly edited book of stunning color photographs. This year’s haul really leaned into collecting work from the godfathers of color photography, and I’m here for it. Just get this book; it’s nearly essential for every photographer to have a look at this important work.