photobook daily

“In An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, Taryn Simon documents spaces that are integral to America’s foundation, mythology and daily functioning, but remain inaccessible or unknown to a public audience. She has photographed rarely seen sites from domains including: science, government, medicine, entertainment, nature security and religion. This index examines subjects that, while provocative or controversial, are currently legal.”

An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar [Amazon])

“Long known for his radiant black-and-white naturist portraiture, Jock Sturges has also been quietly working in color for more than two decades. Life Time presents a broad range of this color work for the first time and carries forward Sturges’ extended portraits of families in Northern California counter-culture communities and on French naturist beaches.”

Jock Sturges: Life Time [Amazon]

“In 1956, a 28-year old William Klein arrived in Rome, fresh from the debut of his now classic monograph Life Is Good & Good for You in New York, to assist Federico Fellini on his film Nights of Cabiria. Filming was delayed, and so Klein instead strolled about the city in the company of Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Alberto Moravia and other avant-garde Italian writers and artists who served as his guides. It was on these walks that Rome, a pioneering and brilliant visual diary of the city, was born. First published in 1959, Klein’s Rome features the quirky extended captions that distinguished his New York book, interspersed with observations about the city by Stendhal, Michelet, Mark Twain, Henry James and others. Today it is one of the most celebrated photography books of the twentieth century.”

William Klein: Rome [Amazon]

“Robin Schwartz, born in Passaic, New Jersey in 1957, earned her MFA in photography from Pratt Institute in 1981. Her photographs have appeared in The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.”

Robin Schwartz: Amelia’s World (Tiny Vices) [Amazon]

Nearly a century’s worth of Scurlock photographs combine to form a searing portrait of a black Washington in all its guises—its challenges and its victories, its dignity and its determination. Beginning in the early twentieth century and continuing into the 1990s, Addison Scurlock, followed by his sons, Robert and George, used their cameras to document and celebrate a community unique in the world, and a stronghold in the history and culture of the nation’s capital.

The Scurlock Studio and Black Washington: Picturing the Promise [Amazon]

“Mitch Epstein’s latest project tackles one of the most loaded issues on the nation’s agenda: what and who powers America? Between 2003 and 2008, prompted by the evacuation of an environmentally contaminated Ohio town, Epstein traveled the United States to document the country’s energy “hot spots,” where fossil fuel, nuclear, hydroelectric, wind and solar power are produced, encountering further contaminations, Homeland Security obstacles, corporate invincibility and the occasional token of hope. In a post-Katrina and post-Patriot Act America, the angle of engagement permitted Epstein often varied, so that many of the power plants and refineries were shot from an enforced distance (“If you were Muslim, you’d be cuffed and taken in for questioning,” he quotes an F.B.I. agent in West Virginia telling him).”

Mitch Epstein: American Power [Amazon]

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“These images of public spaces - the streets, the park, the metro, the shopping malls - are strangely disturbing and unsettling. Caught by the camera as moments as fleeting as the flicker from a TV screen they draw out our sense of unease about contemporary city life. It is an image of the city - any city - as if seen by a sleep-walker drifting in and out of consciousness. The players in this urban dream are indistinct. At times appearing against theatrical backdrops of washed out colours or suddenly, as the focus shifts, sharp against the cold, dull steel of an escalator. But always they seem somehow to be on the edge of reality.”

Dolores Marat - Edges [Amazon]

“Working from Memory is a collection of stories by the renowned photographer, painter and sculptor William Christenberry. Based on conversations with author and critic Susanne Lange, these stories elaborate the artist’s memories of the Deep South, in whose rich literary tradition they are steeped. In a lyrical but lucid prose, they set personal experience against the backdrop of important political and cultural moments in the southern states, endowing that landscape with a vividness that will be familiar to fans of the artist’s photography. Christenberry’s own photographs accompany these tales.”

William Christenberry: Working from Memory [Amazon]

“In 1981, Jeff Mermelstein began taking trips to Asbury Park, New Jersey, where he gravitated toward the abundant supply of bizarre characters populating this town made famous by Bruce Springsteen. Drawn to the seedy atmosphere and entranced by the taffy-rich colors, Mermelstein was mesmerized by the sights: a pink lady at a baby parade, a startled bag lady dressed in red, a cat-show judge named Mr. Friend. Things kept getting stranger for Mermelstein, whose first magazine assignment was to photograph animal actors, including the legendary four-pawed performers Morris the Cat, Lassie, Benji, the Merrill Lynch bull, the Exxon tiger, and Zippy, a performing chimp. “I still feel the excitement of hugging Zippy,” Mermelstein has noted, “and watching and photographing him in his bus as he entertained at a Bar Mitzvah on Long Island.” Inspired by these encounters with the odd and unusual, Mermelstein began to vigorously prowl the streets of New York City during the mid-’80s with some Kodachrome and a flash, snapping up scenes of vivid color, glitz, and plastic artifice. Attracted to the surreal, Mermelstein continued to document outlandish scenes, whether on magazine assignments or on adventures of his own devising - to dog shows, promotional events, and grand openings of malls across this colorful, far-too-colorful-for-words land. No Title Here catalogues the results of the past twenty years Mermelstein has spent photographing the wacky, the quirky, the off, and the oddly lyrical he has encountered across America.”

Jeff Mermelstein -No Title Here [Amazon]

“This first in-depth publication of photographer Tim Davisís work dissects the disenchantment and dissociation that have come to dominate American civil life. It is Davisís treatise on the state of contemporary politics, politics as an aestheticized banality abstracted from real issues of power. He finds freedom of expression exhibited at its most casual and cursory, with political, commercial and populist signage jostling for space and attention in the social landscape: His documentation of that landscape, as Peter Eeley of Frieze magazine interprets it, asks, ìWhat if campaign signs, badges, bumper stickers and flags arenít simply the ephemera of Americansí political lives, but their substance as well?î My Life in Politics represents photographic seeing at its finest and most subtle. Davis continues Stephen Shoreís colorist tradition, meshing the careful management of a quotidian palette with an incisive eye for those points at which light bends and refracts, becoming something other than mere illumination.”

Tim Davis: My Life in Politics [Amazon]