![“The Asakusa quarter of Tokyo has a shady past—it was the home of some of Japan’s most notorious pleasure palaces. Today it embraces this history by remaining a steadfast holdout of independent culture, which encompasses traditional comedy theater and some of the most innovative burlesque in the world. Asakusa has long attracted bohemians who opt out of Japan’s contemporary consumer society, yet it is also home to the famous Senso-ji temple, which attracts floods of tourists. Over the past two decades, Hiroh Kikai has created an extensive and unforgettable series of street portraits from the diverse mass of people that pass through the district. Posed against the stark walls of the temple, his portraits of Asakusa’s iconoclasts radiate a sense of hard-won individuality. The photographs are accompanied by Kikai’s own pithy commentary.”
Asakusa Portraits, Hiroh Kikai [Amazon]](http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kxw7e1akmN1qzy7o7o1_500.jpg)
“The Asakusa quarter of Tokyo has a shady past—it was the home of some of Japan’s most notorious pleasure palaces. Today it embraces this history by remaining a steadfast holdout of independent culture, which encompasses traditional comedy theater and some of the most innovative burlesque in the world. Asakusa has long attracted bohemians who opt out of Japan’s contemporary consumer society, yet it is also home to the famous Senso-ji temple, which attracts floods of tourists. Over the past two decades, Hiroh Kikai has created an extensive and unforgettable series of street portraits from the diverse mass of people that pass through the district. Posed against the stark walls of the temple, his portraits of Asakusa’s iconoclasts radiate a sense of hard-won individuality. The photographs are accompanied by Kikai’s own pithy commentary.”
![“Although Edward Steichen exhibited some of Saul Leiter’s color photographs at The Museum of Modern Art in 1953, for 40 years afterward they remained virtually unknown to the art world. Saul Leiter: Early Color provides the first opportunity to see a comprehensive presentation of images by one of photography’s great originals. Leiter moved to New York in 1946 intending to be a painter, but through his friendship with the Abstract Expressionist Richard Pousette-Dart, he quickly recognized the creative potential of photography. Though he continued to paint, exhibiting alongside Philip Guston and Willem de Kooning, Leiter’s camera became—like an extension of his arm and mind—an ever-present interpreter of life in the metropolis. He sought out moments of quiet humanity in the Manhattan maelstrom, forging a unique urban pastoral from the most unlikely of circumstances. The lyricism and intensity of his vision come into fullest play in his eloquent handling of color unequaled by his contemporaries. Leiter’s visual language of fragmentation, ambiguity, and contingency is evoked by these 100 subtle, painterly images that stretched the boundaries of photography in the second half of the 20th century.
Saul Leiter: Early Color [Amazon]](http://30.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kwrcibhtyq1qzy7o7o1_500.jpg)
“Although Edward Steichen exhibited some of Saul Leiter’s color photographs at The Museum of Modern Art in 1953, for 40 years afterward they remained virtually unknown to the art world. Saul Leiter: Early Color provides the first opportunity to see a comprehensive presentation of images by one of photography’s great originals. Leiter moved to New York in 1946 intending to be a painter, but through his friendship with the Abstract Expressionist Richard Pousette-Dart, he quickly recognized the creative potential of photography. Though he continued to paint, exhibiting alongside Philip Guston and Willem de Kooning, Leiter’s camera became—like an extension of his arm and mind—an ever-present interpreter of life in the metropolis. He sought out moments of quiet humanity in the Manhattan maelstrom, forging a unique urban pastoral from the most unlikely of circumstances. The lyricism and intensity of his vision come into fullest play in his eloquent handling of color unequaled by his contemporaries. Leiter’s visual language of fragmentation, ambiguity, and contingency is evoked by these 100 subtle, painterly images that stretched the boundaries of photography in the second half of the 20th century.
![“An undisputed masterwork among Japanese photobooks, Eikoh Hosoe and Tatsumi Hijikata’s Kamaitachi was originally released in 1969 as a limited edition of 1,000 copies. Hosoe, the renowned photographer, and Hijikata, the founder of ankoku butoh dance, had visited a farming village in northern Japan, where Hijikata improvised a performance inspired by the legend of a weasel-like demon named Kamaitachi. As Hosoe photographed Hijikata’s spontaneous interactions with the landscape and with the people they encountered, the two artists together enacted an intense investigation of tradition and an exploration, both personal and symbolic, of contemporary convulsions in Japanese society. In 2005, Aperture published a limited-edition facsimile in homage to the original, in close consultation with the artist; now, they have made this enchanting body of work available in its first ever affordable trade edition, which was painstakingly reworked by renowned graphic artist Ikko Tanaka—the designer of the original volume—shortly before his death. His reinterpretation of this classic book object, which is truly a paragon of Japanese bookmaking, includes as a special bonus four never-before-published images from the classic Kamaitachi series.”
Eikoh Hosoe: Kamaitachi [Amazon]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kwmemefQoX1qzy7o7o1_400.jpg)
“An undisputed masterwork among Japanese photobooks, Eikoh Hosoe and Tatsumi Hijikata’s Kamaitachi was originally released in 1969 as a limited edition of 1,000 copies. Hosoe, the renowned photographer, and Hijikata, the founder of ankoku butoh dance, had visited a farming village in northern Japan, where Hijikata improvised a performance inspired by the legend of a weasel-like demon named Kamaitachi. As Hosoe photographed Hijikata’s spontaneous interactions with the landscape and with the people they encountered, the two artists together enacted an intense investigation of tradition and an exploration, both personal and symbolic, of contemporary convulsions in Japanese society. In 2005, Aperture published a limited-edition facsimile in homage to the original, in close consultation with the artist; now, they have made this enchanting body of work available in its first ever affordable trade edition, which was painstakingly reworked by renowned graphic artist Ikko Tanaka—the designer of the original volume—shortly before his death. His reinterpretation of this classic book object, which is truly a paragon of Japanese bookmaking, includes as a special bonus four never-before-published images from the classic Kamaitachi series.”
![“Mark Steinmetz completes his powerful and moving trilogy, ‘South’, with ‘Greater Atlanta’. Photographing in Atlanta and its outlying regions, Steinmetz provides his testimony on contemporary American civilization. Combining portraits and landscapes, he weaves a symbolic and lyrical investigation that subtly questions notions of progress. He further develops motifs - on the automobile, on the telephone - that were first introduced in ‘South Central’, and catalogues car culture, fast food, convenience stores, and suburban sprawl. Beautifully printed in duotone on matt art paper, ‘Greater Atlanta’ is printed in a first edition of 1,000 casebound copies.”
Greater Atlanta [Amazon]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kwgajbT1Wu1qzy7o7o1_500.jpg)
“Mark Steinmetz completes his powerful and moving trilogy, ‘South’, with ‘Greater Atlanta’. Photographing in Atlanta and its outlying regions, Steinmetz provides his testimony on contemporary American civilization. Combining portraits and landscapes, he weaves a symbolic and lyrical investigation that subtly questions notions of progress. He further develops motifs - on the automobile, on the telephone - that were first introduced in ‘South Central’, and catalogues car culture, fast food, convenience stores, and suburban sprawl. Beautifully printed in duotone on matt art paper, ‘Greater Atlanta’ is printed in a first edition of 1,000 casebound copies.”
![“For photographers, the city of Paris must constitute a genre of its own (alongside “nudes” or “botanical”), so perennially photogenic are its streets, skylines, storefronts and people. Here, William Eggleston—“The Father of Color Photography”—offers a brilliant, unusual take on Paris today, with depictions that completely revitalize our sense of this most picturesque of cities. Eggleston spent three years working throughout different seasons, to craft images that reveal surprising and rarely-seen facets of the city, as one might expect from the lens of a photographer most associated with the American South.”
William Eggleston: Paris [Amazon]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kw7mh4LguE1qzy7o7o1_400.jpg)
“For photographers, the city of Paris must constitute a genre of its own (alongside “nudes” or “botanical”), so perennially photogenic are its streets, skylines, storefronts and people. Here, William Eggleston—“The Father of Color Photography”—offers a brilliant, unusual take on Paris today, with depictions that completely revitalize our sense of this most picturesque of cities. Eggleston spent three years working throughout different seasons, to craft images that reveal surprising and rarely-seen facets of the city, as one might expect from the lens of a photographer most associated with the American South.”
![“In this exquisitely produced book, the influential American photographer Robert Adams revisits the classic collection of nocturnal landscapes that he began making in the mid-1970s near his former home in Longmont, Colorado. Originally published by Aperture in 1985 as Summer Nights, this new edition has been carefully reedited and resequenced by the photographer, who has added 39 previously unpublished images. Illuminated by moonlight and streetlamp, the houses, roads, sidewalks and fields in Summer Nights, Walking retain the wonder and stillness of the original edition, while adopting the artist’s intention of a dreamy fluidity, befitting his nighttime perambulations. The extraordinary care taken with the new reproductions also registers Adams’ attention to the subtleties of the night, and conveys his appeal to look again at places we might have dismissed as uninteresting. Adams observes, “What attracted me to the subjects at a new hour was the discovery then of a neglected peace.”
Robert Adams: Summer Nights, Walking [Amazon]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kw7mj8kMJC1qzy7o7o1_500.jpg)
“In this exquisitely produced book, the influential American photographer Robert Adams revisits the classic collection of nocturnal landscapes that he began making in the mid-1970s near his former home in Longmont, Colorado. Originally published by Aperture in 1985 as Summer Nights, this new edition has been carefully reedited and resequenced by the photographer, who has added 39 previously unpublished images. Illuminated by moonlight and streetlamp, the houses, roads, sidewalks and fields in Summer Nights, Walking retain the wonder and stillness of the original edition, while adopting the artist’s intention of a dreamy fluidity, befitting his nighttime perambulations. The extraordinary care taken with the new reproductions also registers Adams’ attention to the subtleties of the night, and conveys his appeal to look again at places we might have dismissed as uninteresting. Adams observes, “What attracted me to the subjects at a new hour was the discovery then of a neglected peace.”
![“Edward Burtynsky’s Oil collects a decades’ worth of photographing the world’s largest oil fields, refineries, freeway interchanges and automobile plants, in an attempt to comprehend the scale of production attending this most politicized of resources. The ideal photographer for this job, Burtynsky locates and documents the sites that urban dwellers never see, and questions human accountability. His imagery is vast in both scale and ambition, revealing the apparatus behind the energy we mine from dwindling resources, and the ongoing effects of the industrial revolution. “In 1997 I had what I refer to as my oil epiphany,” Burtynsky explains: “it occurred to me that all the vast, man-altered landscapes I had been in pursuit of for over 20 years were all possible because of the discovery of oil and the mechanical advantage of the internal combustion engine.”
Edward Burtynsky: Oil [Amazon]](http://30.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kvssr76nks1qzy7o7o1_400.jpg)
“Edward Burtynsky’s Oil collects a decades’ worth of photographing the world’s largest oil fields, refineries, freeway interchanges and automobile plants, in an attempt to comprehend the scale of production attending this most politicized of resources. The ideal photographer for this job, Burtynsky locates and documents the sites that urban dwellers never see, and questions human accountability. His imagery is vast in both scale and ambition, revealing the apparatus behind the energy we mine from dwindling resources, and the ongoing effects of the industrial revolution. “In 1997 I had what I refer to as my oil epiphany,” Burtynsky explains: “it occurred to me that all the vast, man-altered landscapes I had been in pursuit of for over 20 years were all possible because of the discovery of oil and the mechanical advantage of the internal combustion engine.”
![“Mike Disfarmer was a true American eccentric. Born Mike Meyer, he changed his name to distance himself from both the surrounding farming community of his native Arkansas and from his own kinfolk—claiming that a tornado had accidentally blown him onto the Meyer family farm as a baby. The son of a German-born Union soldier in the heart of the South, Disfarmer was an agnostic from Lutheran stock among the church-going Baptists and Methodists, and remained a confirmed bachelor in a community of large families.”
Disfarmer: The Vintage Prints [Amazon]](http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kvg7pad8uc1qzy7o7o1_400.jpg)
“Mike Disfarmer was a true American eccentric. Born Mike Meyer, he changed his name to distance himself from both the surrounding farming community of his native Arkansas and from his own kinfolk—claiming that a tornado had accidentally blown him onto the Meyer family farm as a baby. The son of a German-born Union soldier in the heart of the South, Disfarmer was an agnostic from Lutheran stock among the church-going Baptists and Methodists, and remained a confirmed bachelor in a community of large families.”
![“Men wearing suits jousting with sailfish. Head-on bridge collision. Men with linoleum. Kitchen murder-suicide. Firemen playing donkey baseball. Ideal woman in apron. Through more than 10,000 images, Irwin Denison Norling, the unofficial town photographer for Bloomington, Minnesota, captured the strange juxtapositions, incongruities, and dark corners of the developing suburban America of the 1950s and ’60s. A competitive amateur glued to his police radio, Norling spent years examining the light and darkness, tragedies and desolation, rituals of community and celebration through the lens of the camera, deftly capturing the uneasy dichotomy between the familiar and subversive–the familiarly subversive. “That was the way it was. And the way it was, that’s what I was after.”
Suburban World: The Norling Photographs [Amazon]](http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kvg7inwGcz1qzy7o7o1_500.jpg)
“Men wearing suits jousting with sailfish. Head-on bridge collision. Men with linoleum. Kitchen murder-suicide. Firemen playing donkey baseball. Ideal woman in apron. Through more than 10,000 images, Irwin Denison Norling, the unofficial town photographer for Bloomington, Minnesota, captured the strange juxtapositions, incongruities, and dark corners of the developing suburban America of the 1950s and ’60s. A competitive amateur glued to his police radio, Norling spent years examining the light and darkness, tragedies and desolation, rituals of community and celebration through the lens of the camera, deftly capturing the uneasy dichotomy between the familiar and subversive–the familiarly subversive. “That was the way it was. And the way it was, that’s what I was after.”
![“Recent world events have dramatically altered the cultural identity of airports. Where once they connoted excitement—the prospect of flight, remote destinations, encounters— today airports are loaded with very different associations and anticipations. Armed police officers, safety regulations and restrictions only heighten our feelings of insecurity. Roissy Charles de Gaulle Airport has always been a special place for the Swedish photographer J.H. Engstrom. At the age of 10, he moved to Paris with his parents, and Charles de Gaulle was his first contact with a world beyond his native Sweden. The relocation created an intense relationship to the city of Paris, as well as to the Charles de Gaulle and airports in general. For the project CDG/JHE, Engstrom spent three weeks isolated in an airport hotel, photographing in and between the terminals. The airport became a place to observe public behavioral habits at a crucial juncture in its brief history.”
J.H. Engstrom: CDG/JHE [Amazon]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kvg6sw7BMB1qzy7o7o1_500.jpg)
“Recent world events have dramatically altered the cultural identity of airports. Where once they connoted excitement—the prospect of flight, remote destinations, encounters— today airports are loaded with very different associations and anticipations. Armed police officers, safety regulations and restrictions only heighten our feelings of insecurity. Roissy Charles de Gaulle Airport has always been a special place for the Swedish photographer J.H. Engstrom. At the age of 10, he moved to Paris with his parents, and Charles de Gaulle was his first contact with a world beyond his native Sweden. The relocation created an intense relationship to the city of Paris, as well as to the Charles de Gaulle and airports in general. For the project CDG/JHE, Engstrom spent three weeks isolated in an airport hotel, photographing in and between the terminals. The airport became a place to observe public behavioral habits at a crucial juncture in its brief history.”
