Sawdust Mountain
By Eirik Johnson
Foreword by Elizabeth A. Brown
Essay by Tess Gallagher
Poem by David Guterson
Aperture/Henry Art Gallery
144 pages, 70 images
Hardcover, $50

In her foreword to Eirik Johnson's Sawdust Mountain, which examines the post-boom era of the Pacific Northwest's logging and fishing industry, Henry Art Gallery curator Elizabeth A. Brown notes Johnson's contention that the colors of the region are the "mirror opposite" of those in Eggleston's South, with its "dry and dusty earth, faded greens and intense blue skies." A native of the Pacific Northwest myself, when I look through Johnson's book I see the familiar soft light of damp, gray days, and recognize the lush green and brown of the forest land, which toes the line between rot and explosive growth. As Johnson shows in his photographs, areas of Washington, Oregon and Northern California currently exist in a similar transitional state, where what has died feeds what survives in its place. Once-thriving mill towns are old and all but abandoned. Late-model vehicles have been scrapped and residents of depressed communities struggle to make ends meet. Salmon runs have dried up, and old growth forests have been clearcut.

In one photograph an adolescent bald eagle sits on the limb of a pathetic-looking dead tree, which stands amid a field of thick stumps and barely perceptible new growth. In the distance the sun lights a hilltop laid bare by loggers.

What will grow from all this rot is less clear from Johnson's photographs. Images of seedling farms, salmon hatcheries and an old dam slated for removal hint at conservation efforts. A small stand of dying, topped trees in a clearcut section of forest are meant to provide food and shelter for nesting wildlife—a meager attempt at reparations. While the struggles of hatchery workers or the lone Department of Fish and Wildlife employee seem heroic in Johnson's portraits, it's hard to believe the force of their effort can counteract the power and efficiency of the industry that moved through the area, leaving only impoverished communities and wounded landscapes to show for the profits.


Witness Number 7
By Todd Hido
Nazraeli Press/JGS, Inc.
87 pages, 46 images
Hardcover, $40

An appealing quality of Todd Hido's work is that much is suggested between the lines and left to the imagination, rather than stated explicitly. That makes his work conducive to contemplation and repeat visits. Hido is drawn to that quality in the work of other photographers, too. At his house and studio are large tables of photo books open to images that Hido studies and rearranges in a sort of ongoing visual conversation. Eventually he re-expresses some of the ideas through his own work. Witness Number 7 is something of a tour of the process. The book is divided into three sections, the last of which shows pages shot from many of his favorite photo books "that have been stewing in my mind for years," he writes. The first section, meanwhile, features a selection of Hido's decade-old images of the interiors of foreclosed homes. Shot in dreary available light, they show the flotsam of abandoned lives: drab carpets, marred walls, and spent fixtures. Such details evoke those who were forced to leave. "I was interested in making pictures of places that were ultimately about people," Hido says. "Walls do talk. I think that these images reflect our current state in their own quiet way." Sandwiched in the middle of Witness Number 7 is a collection of fascinating family portraits by Leon Borensztein, who pulls back from his subjects just enough "to capture that little bit of what our possessions and environments can say about us," Hido explains. Hido is a master, but he's ever the student, too. In Witness Number 7 you can get a glimpse of what, how and from whom he's learned.


Nollywood
By Pieter Hugo
Text by Chris Abani, Stacy Hardy, Zina Saro-Wiwa
Prestel
112 pages, 50 images
Hardcover, $49.95

Pieter Hugo's latest book of photographs explores the phenomenon of the Nigerian film industry—colloquially known as "Nollywood"—which claims to be the third largest in the world after the United States and India. Hugo's penchant for finding unique subcultures on his home continent continues from his previous book The Hyena & Other Men (Prestel, 2008).

The evocative portraits in Nollywood take an unusual approach. Instead of shots from actual sets, Hugo photographed local actors who restaged and recreated themes, and colorful characters from popular Nigerian films. Often surreal and gory, they depict saints and demons, a sword-wielding midget, military-clad zombies, and a man in a suit holding the freshly plucked lungs of an ox. Within the desolate Nigerian cityscape and stark interiors, the images portray a range of characters from stories many modern Africans understand and confront daily, involving the occult, AIDS, romance, corruption, violence, and the realities of economic hardship.

Hollywood, Bollywood and kung-fu movies have long dominated the African cinematic scene. Nollywood is remarkable in that it's the first indigenous African cinematic form that has taken root there—and is challenging the hegemony of foreign films in Africa.

The images have an undeniable B-movie charm, and Nollywood gives a mesmerizing look into an immensely popular cinematic form little known outside of Africa.


Eye of the Leopard
By Beverly Joubert
Text by Dereck Joubert
Foreword by Lt. General Ian Khama
Rizzoli International
208 pages, approx. 200 images
Hardcover, $75

There are lots of animal books out there, but National Geographic filmmakers/photographers Beverly and Dereck Joubert managed to find a great narrative thread for their newest book. Having made previous studies of lions, the Jouberts were following a female leopard, when they noticed her newborn cub. They followed the offspring, whom they named Legadema (which means "Lightning") for the next three years, from infancy through adolescence to adulthood when she gave birth to two cubs of her own. The result provides insights into animal behavior, the rhythm of life in Botswana's wilds, and the methods of dedicated wildlife photographers. Poking curiously at her mother's tail or scaling a tree, Legadema occasionally bears uncanny resemblance to your average house cat, except for the rippling muscles that allow her to haul a buffalo into a fig tree.

The book is a companion piece to a film, so many dramatic moments described in the text—an encounter with lions, the moment her mother abandons Legadema because she let an impala carcass fall from a tree and into the clutches of scavenging hyenas—are not shown in the still photos. The text design has a cornball feel, with chapter headings and big drop caps set in gold, and poems by the author set off in italics. But the life of this powerful huntress, who chows down on a baboon and suffocates an impala to subdue it, is depicted without sentimentality and just a touch of well-deserved awe.


Paul Graham
By Paul Graham
Essays by David Chandler, Michael Almereyda and Russell Ferguson
steidlMACK
376 Pages, 250 images
Hardcover, $60

This year, in addition to winning the Deutsche-Börse prize for his 2008 book project, a shimmer of possibility, and exhibiting his work at New York's Museum of Modern Art, Paul Graham also created an exhibition with curator Ute Eskildsen for the Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany. This self-titled book, which surveys Graham's work from 1981–2006, was published to accompany the exhibition, which will travel to Hamburg and London in 2010 and 2011 respectively.

The book divides Graham's career thus far into three chronological periods. David Chandler's detailed, biographical essay, which opens the book, examines and contextualizes Graham's work within both British and international photographic histories. Russell Ferguson discusses Graham's continued interest in working in the space "between journalism and pure esthetics." And Michael Almereyda devotes his essay to Graham's 12-volume shimmer series of books.

All of Graham's major projects are presented in a new, pared-down edit, but they are also seen as Graham initially intended in the illustrated bibliography, which shows thumbnails of every page of all of his previous books.

Wrapped in a sky blue satiny cover with Graham's name stamped on it in metallic fuschia, the book design seems to refer with a smile to the traditionalists who maligned color documentary work in Britain in the early Eighties. Nearly 30 years after he began, Graham is recognized as one of the important photographic artists working today.


In Whose Name? The Islamic World after 9/11
By Abbas
Thames & Hudson
290 pages, 173 images
Hardcover, $60

"With my black-and-white films, which I'll get developed when I'm back in Paris, I look like a complete dinosaur," writes Abbas, the Iranian-born photographer who has shot for Magnum since 1981. Abbas discloses this as he sets up a chapter on Afghanistan in his latest photo book, a sprawling survey of contemporary Islamic culture. Why should the reader who cares about current events and photography seek insight from a dinosaur? Here's one good reason: After eight years, we're just beginning to understand what 9/11 means. Abbas, as a longtime observer of both war and religion, can add perspective and wisdom to the endless analysis on post-9/11 Islam already published.

A book like this is a chance to forge something thoughtful and lasting out of events that flashed by as confusing headlines. The photos here are presented with care and avoid the clichés of news coverage—there are few, if any, pictures of masked militiamen, uniformed soldiers, or Osama bin Laden stickers. Instead, Abbas gives us images of Hajj pilgrims resting on rocks, a heavily armed grocery shopper in Israel, and a dancing bride surrounded by friends and family at a wedding in Turkey. There are many images of crowds; Abbas invites us to consider public assemblies as a window to understanding the 16 countries he visits.

Less compelling is the text, a series of present-tense journal entries that reads like a blog. This travelogue is the only place where Abbas reveals his disgust with some of his subjects. His images, more appropriately, just look straight ahead and show us what's there.


Legacy: The Preservation of Wilderness in New York City Parks
By Joel Meyerowitz
Introduction by Michael Bloomberg
Preface by Phillip Lopate
Aperture
300 pages, 250 images
Hardcover, $65

A pioneer of color photography in the 1970s, Joel Meyerowitz found a new audience of fans with his 2006 book Aftermath, a monumental study of the excavation of the World Trade Center after the 9/11 attacks. New York City is also the subject of his new book, but here he returns to the landscape photography fans will recall from his popular 1978 work, Cape Light. Invited by the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation to photograph the city's wild spaces, Meyerowitz traveled throughout the five boroughs documenting dense forests, marshy wetlands, creeks, shorelines and pastures from 2006 to 2009. His goal was not to make postcard-pretty images; he was too meticulous for that. Here and there he captures the intrusion of the manmade: a rotting pier, a Mobil station abutting the entrance to Udalls Park Preserve in Queens, warehouses on the Bronx River, batting cages and handball courts, high rises looming in the distance.

The treat of the book is in discovering little known places like North Brother Island in the East River. The site of a power station and a sanitarium, now overgrown, the island is a breeding ground for herons, egrets and cormorants. When photographing a more familiar spot, like the Literary Walk in Central Park, Meyerowitz would return in all seasons to reveal its transformation throughout the year. The book includes maps for those who are inspired by Meyerowitz's work to hike into La Tourette Park on Staten Island or grab a dinghy and explore Pelham Bay's Twin Island.


2nd Tour Hope I Don't Die
By Peter van Agtmael
Photolucida
112 pages, 74 images
Softcover, $24

The title of Peter van Agtmael's first book comes from a scrawl of bathroom graffiti at an Air Force base in Kuwait, a transfer point for American soldiers entering and leaving Iraq. The book's four or five most stirring images telegraph those words—"Hope I don't die"—through the wide-eyed faces of American soldiers, lost in distant thought or fear.

Between 2006 and 2008, van Agtmael made two trips to Iraq and two to Afghanistan as an embedded photojournalist. His unflinching war photography won a Photolucida contest, which led to the publication of this paperback monograph.

Just 24 when he made his first trip to Iraq, van Agtmael bonded with the military personnel he covered. They were in danger, and so was he. In a particularly painful series of photos, he follows medics in Afghanistan and Iraq as they treat the wounded. These photos show scenes that have seldom been published before, including a shot of a badly burned soldier on his deathbed.

Back in the States, van Agtmael visits some of the soldiers and their loved ones, showing the wounded reconnecting with their families and the dead being mourned.

Despite this theme of looming death, the small tragedies sometimes pack more punch than the big ones. One haunting image is a full-page portrait of an Army specialist, wearing that same distant gaze as many of the other soldiers. The caption tells us he spent 16 months in Afghanistan, and when he finally returned home to Colorado, he and his girlfriend broke up. Maybe van Agtmael just caught the guy on a bad day, but the photo shows a man who knows the road ahead is one of hardship.


Irving Penn: Small Trades
By Virginia A. Heckert and Anne Lacoste
J. Paul Getty Museum
Foreword by Michael Brand
272 pages, 250 images
Hardcover, $49.95

Irving Penn: Small Trades is a lovely, big book that reproduces a series of portraits the late photographer first made while photographing people from different parts of the world using his Rolleiflex camera, a portable studio, a simple backdrop and natural light, a technique he used most famously in Worlds in a Small Room, 1974. Whereas that book combined the various ethnographic studies Penn had made in Cuzco, Crete, Extremadura, Dahomey, Cameroon, San Francisco, Nepal, New Guinea and Morocco, Small Trades highlights skilled tradespeople primarily from Paris, London and New York, all dressed in their work clothes and carrying the tools of their occupation: a slaughterhouse worker complete with bloodied apron and various knives pocketed at his hip; a nude sculptor's model with arms raised; two pastry chefs with white hats and rolling pins; even a hunter, his rifle in tow as he stands stoic in head-to-toe fur.

There are 210 photographs in all, each part of an exploration of workers from these three different cities and cultures. As he first wrote in Worlds in a Small Room, Penn found that Parisians were suspicious: "They felt there was something fishy going on, but they came to the studio more or less as directed—for the fee involved." On the other hand, he felt Londoners were more trusting: "It seemed to them the most logical thing in the world to be recorded in their work clothes. They arrived at the studio, always on time, and presented themselves to the camera with a seriousness and pride that was quite endearing." The New York photographs were based on trades associated with a technologically advancing society and growing industrial working class: the gas company mechanic, pneumatic driller, riveter, sandblaster, steel mill firefighter, etc.

Penn revisited the Small Trades series many times over several decades, experimenting with platinum/palladium printing techniques for the final prints. The images are truly fascinating and fortunately for us, they are currently part of an exhibit running at the J. Paul Getty Museum through January 2010.


A Shadow Falls
By Nick Brandt
Essays by Peter Singer and Vicki Goldberg
Abrams
132 pages, 58 images
Hardcover, $50

On first glance A Shadow Falls seems to contain lots of images of elephants and giraffes, then more elephants and giraffes, and oh, look, an abandoned ostrich egg. Okay, so I've never really been an animal person…but in mere seconds I was drawn in by the cover—a dramatic and quite engaging portrait of an elephant taking a drink of water—and was subsequently engaged throughout the book's 132 pages of regal African wildlife…. And to be fair, there are also cheetahs, zebras, lions and buffalo.

The book is part of Brandt's ongoing photographic project memorializing the vanishing natural grandeur of East Africa and includes 58 oversize tritone plates. It is a beautiful compilation of massive, proud creatures set against a sweeping African landscape: a lioness jumping out of a tree in the Masai Mara park reserve in southwestern Kenya; a herd of elephants lumbering through the grass in Amboseli National Park in Kenya; a wildebeest arc on the plains of the Masai Mara, and so on.

As primatologist and conservationist Jane Goodall wrote when reviewing the book, "It's almost impossible to look through his work without sensing the personalities of the beings whom he has photographed." Brandt seems to forge an intimate connection with many of the animals in the several close-up portraits throughout the book, which he achieves by taking long, difficult trips into the field and getting physically close to the animals instead of using a telephoto lens. That approach definitely works here, resulting in a more human-like rendering of each animal that introduces us to, writes Brandt, "some of our companions on this planet."


Three
By Ed Kashi
Essay by Allison Nordstrom
Edited by Kristin Reimer
powerHouse Books
162 pages, 87 images
Hardcover, $45

"It came to me in a dream…as I lay in bed one morning and three images from a story in Brazil flowed through my mind's eye. This idea of three images…seeing in threes…became a focal point for combing through my more than 25 years of images, looking for the visual connections, visual language, visual poetry of three."

If you haven't guessed by now, Three is a book of triptychs, all culled from the extensive archives of photojournalist, filmmaker and educator Ed Kashi, known for examining issues of social and political significance over the years. Flipping through the book becomes a fun, and riveting, journey of revelation—most pages fold out to unveil second and third images—with each set featuring photographs that, while standing strongly on their own, form a compelling little photo essay when combined.

My favorite grouping is a series of black-and-white images of an old man (which is also the cover grid): on the left, he stares out at a body of water while his very wrinkled, leathery-looking back dries in the sun; in the middle image he is seen swimming vigorously through the waves; and on the right he takes flight as he dives into the water. Together, it's a lovely piece about man confronting sky, sea and earth; individually (easily discovered if you "cheat" and look up the captions towards the end of the book) they are images of Brazil's most famous boat pilot Ze Peixe, 74, who guides ships in and out of the port if Aracaju by swimming up to ten miles a trip.

The book is dense at 162 pages and 87 images, but is well worth the effort it takes to unfold each set of triptychs. As Kashi eloquently writes in the book: "These are not passive images. They have tension, conflict, action and reaction. They are photographic language in full discourse."


The Spirit & The Flesh
By Debbie Fleming Caffery
Foreword by Luis Alberto Urrea
Essay by Carrie Springer
Radius Books
96 Pages, 64 images
Hardcover, $60

Debbie Fleming Caffery's The Spirit & The Flesh is a beautiful and haunting consideration of prostitution in Mexico. Black-and-white environmental portraits of sex workers form the core of the book, while photographs of Catholic iconography and architecture, as well as other scenes and small details of everyday life, create a sense of a religious society in which prostitution is tacitly accepted as a means of survival for impoverished women.

As Carrie Springer notes in her essay, Caffery, who was raised Catholic in Louisiana, was particularly "fascinated by how [the prostitutes] survived and continued to navigate in a world of Catholicism." In many of the portraits, women wear crucifixes. Caffery's careful use of light and shadow often creates a sense of spiritual turmoil surrounding the women. In other images her subjects appear fleeting or out of focus, drawing attention to their quietly acknowledged existence. Male figures in the photographs look neither innocent nor predatory. In one picture a man's hand rests on the head of a naked prostitute—who is on her knees on a bed with her back to the camera—in what could be a caress or an act of subjugation (or both). Night photographs of church exteriors further the sense of conflict between human desire and religious notions of propriety, while photographs of children, among the most disturbing, hint at the perpetuation of the struggle for survival and love.

The work Caffery presents in this book spans the years from 1995–2005, and the care and understanding of both her female subjects and their physical and spiritual environment reflect the time and dedication the photographer committed to them.


Neco
By Yuichi Hibi
Nazraeli Press
140 pages, 76 images
Hardcover, $125

Yuichi Hibi's Neco (cat) stands out not only for the photographs, but also because it is a stunning example of the art of bookmaking. In his second monograph from Nazraeli Press, Hibi's black-and-white images of felines combine with his handwritten texts, illustrations and calligraphy, giving the oversize book a personal, diaristic feel. The book documents the photographer's longstanding effort to understand the creatures he calls "very hidden, mysterious, and proud."

Hibi encountered most of the cats in his photographs outdoors, many at night, and only a couple wear collars—they are predominantly street cats, or at least are out in the street away from their owners. Some are resting. One or two are at play. Several seem to be up to something, probably hunting.

In his short text at the end of the book, Hibi writes that he likes dogs better, but that somehow he ends up taking more photographs of cats. "I often feel they know how to make me take pictures of them, and they reveal what's inside," he writes. In many of the photographs the cats look at the photographer, and their eyes, which are so expressive, show a surprising range of emotion and experience.