In our November issue, we showcased 13 books that caught the attention of PDN’s editors this year (read it on PDNOnline here). Below is part two of our list, which includes several books we wrote about in the pages of PDN in 2009.




Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard
Text by Jeff L. Rosenheim
Steidl / The Metropolitan Museum of Art
350 pages, 430 illustrations
Hardcover, $65

If you think Martin Parr was the first photographer to take inspiration from picture postcards, think again. In 2009, The Metropolitan Museum mounted an exhibition of over 700 postcards from the collection of Walker Evans, and Steidl co-published an accompanying catalogue. Evans, who was born in 1903, began buying dime-store picture postcards when he was 12, around the time when the railroad, the Model T and the First World War took Americans further from home and created a demand for souvenirs of the small towns they visited. Most of these were shot in black and white, then hued through photolithography. By including examples of Evans’s photos of vernacular architecture in the show, curator Jeff Rosenheim, who has previously produced exhibitions and books on Evans’s subway photos and Polaroids, made a convincing case that the postcards’ straightforward look at main streets, homes, and public buildings influenced Evans’s documentary style.



Fall River Boys
Richard Renaldi
Introduction by Michael Cunningham
Charles Lane Press
184 pages, 89 images
Hardcover, $85

In March 2009, photographer Richard Renaldi and partner Seth Boyd officially opened their new publishing concern, Charles Lane Press, with the publication of Renaldi’s Fall River Boys. The collection of black-and-white portraits of young men in Fall River, Massachusetts, considers life in the post-industrial city where the per capita income is $16,000. “It is one of those places from which certain young people dream of escaping, almost from birth,” writes author Michael Cunningham in his introduction to the book. Renaldi’s subjects, says Cunningham, are at “the age at which we all begin, often without realizing it, to do whatever we can to create our own futures, or let the opportunity pass, and embark on futures made for us by others.”

Charles Lane Press’s guiding ideal is that “gorgeously printed books are the ultimate expression of a photographer’s vision.” With its beautiful production, Fall River Boys is a first step well taken.



I, Tokyo
Jacob Aue Sobol
Dewi Lewis
112 pages, 70 images
Hardcover, $45

Last year, Jacob Aue Sobol’s grainy, high-contrast, black-and-white snapshots of Tokyo won him the Leica European Publishers Award, given yearly since 1994. The winner is selected by seven European book publishers, an external judge, and a Leica representative and is then awarded a chance to publish a book. Sobol’s I, Tokyo was released this year by the seven publishers; the English version coming from British publisher Dewi Lewis.

The Copenhagen-born Sobol, a Magnum nominee since 2007, moved to Tokyo with his girlfriend Sara when she landed a job there in 2006. Over the next 18 months he got to know the city, pocket camera in-hand. “Rather than focusing on impressively tall buildings and the eternal swarm of people,” writes Sobol in his artist’s statement, “I began searching the narrow paths and the individual human presence in a city that felt both attractive and repulsive at the same time.” Sobol’s Tokyo photographs are a mixture of portraits, street scenes and observations that bear no signs of the sleek modernity and sea of people often associated with the Japanese capital. Instead his images are intimate, at times erotic, and often jarring in their perspective and proximity to his subjects. The result is a highly subjective catalogue of the photographer’s experiences searching for a place in a city foreign to him.



Not In Fashion
Mark Borthwick
Rizzoli
356 pages, 250 images
Hardcover, $50
For more on this book, see our story from the April 2009 issue of PDN.





Into The Sunset: Photography’s Image of the American West
Eva Respini
The Museum of Modern Art
168 Pages, 158 images
Hardcover, $45

Organized by MoMA’s Eva Respini, the associate curator of the department of photography, the 2009 exhibition “Into The Sunset: Photography’s Image of the American West” traced the evolution of photography of the American West. For those who could not make it to the show, the MoMA-published catalogue is a fine stand-in. Into The Sunset explores the link between the birth of photography and America’s Western expansion, which has since connected the medium with the creation and interpretation of the complex myths of Western life. Organized into two themes—the land and the people—the book includes 138 works by more than 70 photographers, from Carleton E. Watkins’s images of Yosemite Valley made in the late 1800s, to Katy Grannan’s recent photographs of “new pioneers,” people at society’s fringes who are struggling to find their identity. Within the framework of the larger themes, Into The Sunset considers various Western narratives: Manifest Destiny and ideas of utopia, industrialization, suburbanization, the promise of the land and its natural resources, the mythical cowboy and outlaw figures, and native American and immigrant experiences, to name a few. Works by Robert Adams, Dorothea Lange, Cindy Sherman, Joel Sternfeld and Edward Weston are also included.



Long Story Bit By Bit: Liberia Retold
By Tim Hetherington
Umbrage Editions
140 pages, 130 images
Hardcover, $45

In his foreword to Long Story Bit By Bit: Liberia Retold, Tim Hetherington describes Monrovia’s Centre Street with the familiarity of someone who has spent several years working in Liberia. As you travel toward the sea, Hetherington writes, as if speaking to future journalists who might try and discover the place for themselves, “At some stage you’ll run a gauntlet of aggressive ex-fighters and disenfranchised youth.” Hetherington first traveled to Liberia on assignment in 1999. During that trip he was detained by Charles Taylor’s Anti-Terrorist Unit, and an execution order was later given for Hetherington and writer James Brabazon, the only journalists who were working behind rebel lines during the 2003 civil war.

In this new book, Hetherington reveals Liberia in a way that peels back the complex layers of the country’s history and society. Page references—”See PP. 29, 164, 169”—at the ends of passages link together headlines, historical information, first-hand testimonies from a wide swath of sources, and Hetherington’s personal writings and photographs, encouraging a non-sequential reading of the book. The effect of this “bit by bit” approach is powerful: no two readers will proceed through the book in the same way, making the reading experience intensely personal. The fragmented narrative also artfully conveys the process journalists go through in order to develop and convey an understanding of a place to their audience.



Photography After Frank
Philip Gefter
Aperture
224 pages, 75 images
Hardcover, $20

In this collection of essays, former New York Times writer and picture editor Philip Gefter states that “overall, photography has given us a self-adjusting clarity about who we are, what we look like, and how we behave, reflecting our world—individually, culturally, scientifically, and, ultimately, existentially—in ways unimaginable merely two hundred years ago.” He then goes on to present a riveting look at contemporary photography, starting with a pivotal moment: Robert Frank’s 1950s work, The Americans. Throughout the book, Gefter interweaves Frank’s legacy with the work of dozens of important artists who have followed in his wake, from Lee Friedlander and Nan Goldin to Stephen Shore, Ryan MGinley and Sze Tsung Leong, among many others.

Other areas of the book sure to pique interest include essays on the current state of photojournalism, the recent diversity of portraiture styles, the influence of private and corporate collections on curatorial decisions and how the marketplace shapes art making.




The Photographer
Emmanuel Guibert
Photographs by Didiér Lefevré
288 pages
Soft cover, $29.95
For more on Emmanuel Guibert’s graphic novel about photojournalist Didiér Lefévre’s journey to Afghanistan during the war with the Soviet Union, see the story from the June 2009 issue of PDN.



Variety: Photographs by Nan Goldin
Edited by James Crump
Skira/Rizzoli
In Association with Picture this Publications
144 pages, 150 images
Hardcover, $50

This book of images by Nan Goldin is actually a collection of old work from a little known chapter in her career. Goldin had been taking photos of her own life and the lives of her friends on New York’s Lower East Side when, in 1983, filmmaker Bette Gordon asked the photographer to shoot stills for her independent movie, “Variety.” The film, which was written by Kathy Acker, was described in The New York Times review on its release as “a feminist film about a woman working as a ticket-taker in a porno movie theater.” Goldin shot the movie stills in her characteristic documentary style, but was often photographing fictional scenes.

Variety is published by Skira/Rizzoli and edited by James Crump, the noted photo curator, writer, book publisher and filmmaker. In his essay, Crump notes that several photos Goldin shot for Variety ended up in Goldin’s groundbreaking book The Ballad of Sexual Dependancy. Goldin appeared in the movie Variety, as did Cookie Mueller, a friend who was later the subject of one of Goldin’s books. Crump’s essay examines the start of Goldin’s distinctive style and how New Wave musicians, No Wave filmmakers, artists and photographers all influenced and learned from each other in the Lower East Side of the 1970s and 1980s.



Somerset Stories: Fivepenny Dreams
Venetia Dearden
Essay by Jon Levy
128 pages, 56 images
Hardcover, $68
For more on this book see our review on PDNOnline.



Homer Page: The Guggenheim Years: New York, 1949–50
Keith F. Davis
Yale University Press
144 pages, 98 images
Hardcover, $50
For more on this book, see our review on PDNOnline.





Proud Flesh
Sally Mann
Essay by C. D. Wright
Aperture/Gagosian
64 pages, 33 images
Hardcover, $80

Sally Mann has always liked taking pictures of the things she loves, things that, as she put it, “fascinate and compel” her. Best known for her intimate black-and-white photographs of her young children, as well as for landscapes suggesting death and decay, Mann recently delved into the bond between husband and wife.

In Proud Flesh, Mann exposes viewers to her marriage of almost 40 years to her husband Larry. Her 33 tritone nude studies are as artfully detailed as they are deeply personal and emotionally intense.

Writes Mann in accompanying text: “I have looked hard at my husband since the first long strides he took into the room where I was languishing on a ratty chenille couch in some student apartment. My eyes fastened on him with bright interest, squinting to better get the measure of this tall man. Within six months, we were married. That was forty years ago, and almost the first thing I did was photograph him.

“But that long history of picture-taking didn’t make it any easier to make the Proud Flesh photographs,” she continues. “Rhetorically circumnavigate it any way you will, but exploitation lies at the root of every interaction between photographer and subject, even forty years into it. Larry and I both understand how ethically complex and potent the act of making photographs is, how freighted with issues of honesty, responsibility, power, and complicity, and how so many good images come at the expense of the sitter, in one way or another.”



ON AIR: EIGHTHOURS
Atta Kim
Essay by Lesley A. Martin
Hatje Cantz
144 pages, 100 images
Hardcover, $105
For more on this book, see our story from the September 2009 issue of PDN.



Animal Logic
Richard Barnes
Essays by Jonathan Rosen and Susan Yelavich
Princeton Architectural Press
144 pages, 120 illustrations
Hardcover, $65
For more on this book, see our story from the September 2009 issue of PDN.



Periodical Photographs: Commissioned Works
Dan Winters
Foreword by Lynn Hirschberg
Aperture
156 pages, 90 images
Hardcover, $49.95

Art buyers and photo editors often tell photographers that they don't want to see more than one type of photography in a portfolio, unless the photographer can show them in a consistent style. Dan Winters' new book demonstrates one way to do it.  This monograph collects all the genres in which he works—close-up and environmental portraits, architectural photos, sculptural still lifes of specimens. While there are variations in lighting and point of view depending on the subject matter or location, each image has a studied, carefully crafted quality that makes them identifiable as a Winters' work. This book provides a tour of magazine photography of the past dozen years, as well as a compendium of Winters' interests, from science to space travel to natural history. The book is designed by Scott Dadich, former art director at Texas Monthly (now at Wired), a longtime collaborator of Winters





American Power
Mitch Epstein
Steidl Photography International
144 pages, 64 illustrations
Hardcover, $70
For more on this book, see our story from the October 2009 issue of PDN.



Ancient Light: A Portrait of the Universe
David Malin
Phaidon Press
Hardcover, 128 pages
60 black-and-white images, $49.95

On the occasion of this year’s International Year of Astronomy, which celebrates the 400th anniversary of the first astronomical observations ever recorded, Phaidon has published a new monograph by photographic astronomer David Malin.

Malin was formerly a photographic scientist and astronomer at the Anglo-Australian Observatory. He currently teaches scientific photography at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. Malin creates images using telescopes and lengthy exposures to capture light undetectable to the human eye, some of it billions of years old. His photographic techniques led to the discovery of two new types of galaxies, and his images have been on the covers of LIFE and National Geographic, in addition to appearing in gallery and museum exhibitions. Ancient Light: A Portrait of the Universe collects 60 of the groundbreaking black-and-white images that gained Malin international recognition.

Scanned from lush platinum prints, the photographs in the book are coupled with explanations of the scientific and mythological importance of the phenomena they depict. The collection also includes an essay from Malin that reflects on the history of photographic astronomy and its contribution to our knowledge of the universe. He also shares his own techniques for photographing the universe.

—Jennifer Kaye



To Walk In Beauty: A Navajo Family’s Journey Home
Stacia Spragg-Braude
Afterword by M. Scott Momaday
Museum of New Mexico Press
198 pages
Hardcover, $45
For more on this book see our story from the November 2009 issue of PDN.



Photo Wisdom: Master Photographers on their Art
Lewis Blackwell
Chronicle Books / PQ Blackwell
220 pages, 200 images
Hardcover,  $50
For more on this book see our story from the November 2009 issue of PDN.




OIL
Edward Burtynsky
Edited by Marcus Schubert
Essays by Michael Mitchell, William E. Rees and Paul Roth
Steidl Photography International
140 pages, 100 illustrations
Hardcover, $125
For more on this book see our recent interview with Burtynsky on PDNOnline.

Part 1 of our Notable Books of 2009 appeared in the November issue of PDN. Read it on PDNOnline here.