Photo-Eye Announces Top 10 Books of 2008

Try requesting some of these titles via Interlibrary loan - they are sure to please!

Library of Dust.
Photographs by David Maisel. Essays by Geoff Manaugh, Terry Toedtemeier, and Michael Roth
Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 2008. 108 pp., 80 color illustrations., 13¼x17"
Publisher's Description

Esteemed photographer David Maisel has created a somber and beautiful series of images depicting canisters containing the cremated remains of the unclaimed dead from an Oregon psychiatric hospital. Dating back as far as the nineteenth century, these canisters have undergone chemical reactions, causing extravagant blooms of brilliant white, green, and blue corrosion, revealing unexpected beauty in the most unlikely of places. This stately volume is both a quietly astonishing body of fine art from a preeminent contemporary photographer, and an exceptionally poignant monument to the unknown deceased.

Sent a Letter.
Photographs by Dayanita Singh. Text by Sunil Khilnani.
Steidl, Gottingen, 2007. 160 pp., 85 tritone illustrations, 6x4"


Publisher's Description

Dayanita Singh has been making small photo journals of her travels in India for some years now. Each book is made with a certain person in mind, either one she has made the journey with or one that was on her mind during her travels. She makes two copies of each book by hand, one of which remains with her, and the other of which goes to the friend it was made for. A diary with coded images of a time shared. Steidl is pleased to publish seven of these small journals for the first time, along with an eighth journal of her mother, Nony Singh's, photographs of her daughter growing up. The journals are produced in accordion folds so that they can open into mini private exhibitions in her friends' homes, and come housed in a handmade wooden box.

Deformer.
Photography by Ed Templeton.
Damiani, 2008. 175 pp., 150 color illustrations., 9½x11½"

Publisher's Description

Eleven years in the making and compiling more than 30 years of material, Ed Templeton’s scrapbook of his upbringing in suburban Orange County California is a much-anticipated book. Its photographs give a sun-drenched glimpse of what it might be like to be young and alive in the “suburban domestic incubator” of Orange County, conveyed in the idiom of Nan Goldin or Larry Clark (and with a sharp eye for the streets that recalls Garry Winogrand or Eugene Richards). For like his groundbreaking predecessors, Templeton is always a participant in the scenes he shoots. From the Alleged Press series curated by Aaron Rose, Deformer interweaves disciplinary letters from Templeton’s grandfather and religious notes from his mother with sketches, snapshots, telling images and the occasional brutal tale, laying out an unresolved narrative that plunges readers headlong into Templeton’s chaotic youth and his reliance on art and skateboarding to accommodate its stresses and joys.“ Skateboarding allowed me to travel the world, and that showed me that where I live is totally messed up,” he observes. “That perspective has fueled me and been a source for my art.” Through photographs, stories and ephemera of all sorts from his youth and teenage years, Templeton offers readers an intensely close and personal look at an artist’s coming of age. Deformer is also available in a boxed limited edition which comes with a signed and numbered photograph by Ed Templeton.

The Disciples.
Photographs by James Mollison. Foreword by Desmond Morris.
Chris Boot, 2008. 128 pp., 58 color illustrations., 10x14"


Publisher's Description

Between 2004 and 2007, James Mollison attended pop concerts across Europe and the USA with a mobile photography studio, inviting fans of each music star or band to pose for their portrait outside the gig. He subsequently combined portraits of 8-10 fans for each performer into a single line up, making a single panoramic image in each case. With a total over 500 individual portraits, in 58 panoramic images, The Disciples, an original, sharp and highly entertaining take on contemporary music culture and the tribalism invoked by popular music stars.

Included are the disciples of the Arctic Monkeys, Jimmy Buffett, George Clinton, the Cure, the Damned, P Diddy, Snoop Dogg, the Dresden Dolls, Yossou N’Dour, Bob Dylan, Missy Elliot, 50 Cent, Iron Maiden, Elton John, Tom Jones, Kiss, Led Zeppelin, Jennifer Lopez, Madonna, Madness, Marilyn Manson, George Michael, Morrissey, Motorhead, Willie Nelson, the New York Dolls, Oasis, Dolly Parton, Iggy Pop, Prince, Radiohead, Shabba Ranks, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Cliff Richard, the Rolling Stones, the Sex Pistols, Shakira, the Spice Girls, Rod Stewart, Angie Stone, Take That, ZZ Top, U2 and the Wailers.

With a foreword by Desmond Morris, ethologist, writer and broadcaster (whose previous books include The Naked Ape, 1967), The Disciples also features a commentary by Mollison on his encounter with the fans of each star. The book is exquisitely designed and produced on a large portfolio scale (each image featured appears at 70cm/28in wide), and is published in a limited edition of 3000 copies.

Invasion 68.
Prague
Photographs by Josef Koudelka.
Aperture, New York, 2008. 296 pp., 250 duotone illustrations., 9½x12½"

Publisher's Description

In 1968, Josef Koudelka was a thirty-year-old acclaimed theater photographer who never photographed a news event. That all changed on the night of August 21, when Warsaw Pact tanks invaded the city of Prague, ending the short-lived political liberalization in Czechoslovakia that came to be known as the Prague Spring.
Koudelka had returned home the day before from photographing gypsies in Romania. In the midst of the turmoil of the Soviet-led invasion, he took a series of photographs, which were miraculously smuggled out of the country. A year after they reached York, Magnum Photos distributed the images, credited to an unknown Czech photographer to avoid reprisals. The intensity and significance of the images earned still-anonymous photographer the Robert Capa Award. Sixteen years would pass before Koudelka could safely acknowledge authorship.
Forty years after the invasion, this impressive monograph features nearly 250 these searing images-most of them published here for the first time-personally selected by Koudelka from his extensive archive. Though they document a specific historical event, their transformative quality still resonates. A compelling introduction and chronology by three Czech writers provides a nuanced examination of invasion.

Domestic Vacations.
Photographs by Julie Blackmon. Essay by Regina Hackett. Interview by Alison Nordstrom.
Radius Books, Santa Fe, 2008. 96 pp., 40 color illustrations, 11x11"

Publisher's Description

The Dutch saying, “a Jan Steen household,” originated in the seventeenth century and has come to refer to a home in disarray, full of rowdy children and boisterous family gatherings. The paintings of Steen, along with those of other Dutch and Flemish genre painters, are the direct inspiration behind the layered domestic scenes of Julie Blackmon’s photographic work. Raised as the oldest of nine children, and the mother of three herself, Blackmon takes an approach to her work that is at once autobiographical and fictional. According to Anne Wilkes Tucker of The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Blackmon has “taken a subject that is ripe for cliché—mother photographing children— and through the subtle, digital manipulations, the use of color and highly graphic images, she’s given it humor and edge and taken the subject somewhere fresh.


The Hyena & Other Men.
Photographs by Pieter Hugo.
Prestel, Lakewood, 2008. Unpaged, Thirty-five full-color plates

Publisher's Description

Many myths surround the 'Hyena Men' who haunt the peripheries of Nigeria's cities. Accompanied by hyenas, rock pythons and baboons, these men earn a living by performing before crowds and selling traditional medicines. Pieter Hugo's extraordinary portraits of their liminal existence reveal an uncanny world of complex, codependent relationships, where familiar distinctions between dominance and submission, wildness and domesticity, tradition and modernity are constantly subverted. Nigerian journalist Adetokunbo Abiola introduces readers to the 'Hyena Men,' explaining the traditions and mystique behind their practices. Presented in thirty-five full-color plates, these intense portraits reveal why Hugo is one of the most exciting young photographers at work today.

A Clearing.
Photographs by Raymond Meeks.
Nazraeli Press, Tucson, 2008. 48 pp., 34 duotone plates., 12x17"

Publisher's Description

Hardcover edition now out-of-print.

Following up his richly emotive debut collection, Ray Meeks expands the range of his vision with equally stunning technique, suggesting visual rhymes between the sentient and the inanimate, between stratigraphic lines and telephone wires, between a bulldozer’s tread marks and a boy’s ribcage. Whereas his earlier book, Sound of Summer Running, invited us inward, into the expressive interiors of family and place, a Clearing presents us with a world that averts its face, a world we haven’t yet learned to read, where meaning still seems to be gathering itself, where verticality is a sign of defiance. Figures in the landscape appear so isolated, they take on mythic force. The sky is resistant as eyes turned back in a head. Meeks’s camera records the naked geological and human assertion of presence against the flattening insistence of time, erosion, and poverty. In a Clearing, the world speaks itself in a language of origins: stone and child and woman and man cry out from elemental silence, Look, I am here. The first printing of this gorgeously-produced artist’s book is limited to 500 numbered and signed copies, each with an original print on the back cover.

Decotora.
1998 – 2007 Japanese Art Truck Scene.
Photographs by Tatsuki Masaru.
Little More, Tokyo, 2007. 116 pp., 100 color illustrations, 9½x11½"

Publisher's Description

Chromed up, with individual artworks on their panels and lit up like Christmas trees, these Japanese trucks and their proud owners (with sharp eyes for detail), form part of a distinct sub-culture in Japanese society. The full colour photographs, captured by Tatsuki Masaru in a project started in 1998, allow insights both into a personal and intimate world, and a unique aesthetic phenomenon.

America.
Photographs by Zoe Strauss. Edited by Steve Crist and Zoe Strauss.
Ammo Books, 2008. 192 pp., Numerous illustrations., 11x8"

Publisher's Description

Brief Description Poised to be the most important photography book of 2008, Zoe Strauss' AMERICA shines a light on the often unseen people and places in the United States today. Following in the famed footsteps of Robert Frank: The Americans, but 50 years later, Zoe Strauss traveled across the country as a Gund fellow documenting what she calls 'the beauty and struggle of everyday life.' In highly formal compositions, she uses photography to create epic narratives that pursue 'a hopeful quality in adverse conditions and how people manage to live their lives.' Strauss' photographs depict the bittersweet beauty of everyday life and lay bare the human comedy.


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