Click here for Part 2 of our Photography Books of 2008, including reviews of new books from Richard Avedon, Eugene Richards and Joel Sternfeld.

Travelers
Photographs by Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz
Story by Jonathan Lethem
96 pages/40 images/$35 (hardcover)
Aperture

What is it about tableaux portrayed with miniatures that make them so entrancing? The photographer duo of Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz works in a territory trod by David Levinthal, Paolo Ventura and others but with a twist: all their tiny figurines occupy wintry landscapes inside snow globes. The tiny figures are mysterious; their facial expressions are too miniscule or blank to read. The scenes Martin and Muñoz create here alternate between whimsy and menace. A couple embraces on the pinnacle of a glacier. A man holds a gun to the head of another man forced to kneel in the snow. Two men greet each other on a snow-covered hill: One man doffs his hat; the other man pulls off his clay head. Are those people toting luggage through a glen on a quest, or are they lost? The short story at the end of the book, written by novelist Jonathan Lethem, is inspired by these scenes, but it's more fun to pore over the images and try to write a story of your own.




Beaufort West
Photographs by Mikhael Subotzky
Essay by Jonny Steinberg
80 pages/45 images/$75 (hardcover)
Chris Boot

My late father grew up in the small rural South African town of Beaufort West in the 1920s and 1930s. When he was 16 years old, he went to university in Johannesburg and never returned. It was a smart move back then and, judging from Mikhael Subotzky's photographs of the same place taken some 70 years later, it appears that escaping Beaufort West would be considered an even smarter move in 2008. Sadly, many of the subjects of Subotzky's remarkable book will probably never leave prison, let alone Beaufort West. An award-winning South African documentary photographer (he is the youngest-ever member of Magnum) Subotzky is both sympathetic and yet somewhat detached from his subjects, who include black Africans on the margins of existence—poor, imprisoned, addicted, destitute—as well as whites who are photographed at the gym, riding horses and going to church. The inequalities are there for all to see, but Subotzky doesn't preach; instead he elegantly documents what he sees in front of him, allowing the viewer to be the judge. The work is bleak and unforgiving, but never voyeuristic, and that is the ultimate testament to Subotzky's talent. As well as the images, the photographer supplies gripping anecdotes about the lives of his subjects and the stories behind the photographs. It is easy to see why Subotzky is being heralded as the new Alec Soth.


Stephen Shore: A Road Trip Journal
Photographs by Stephen Shore
256 pages/300 images/$250 (hardcover with slipcase)
Phaidon

The medium- and large-format color images of the American urban and small town landscapes that Stephen Shore made on various road trips across the United States and Canada during the 1970s earned him a place in the pantheon of great twentieth century photographers. His seminal book, Uncommon Places (1982), captures the culture and esthetic of 1970s America in the mundane details of its streets, signs and structures. His second book, American Surfaces (2005), is a similar study with a snapshot-diary feel: alongside the streetscapes, Shore's images include motel beds he slept in, diner platters he ordered and TV sets he watched while on the road. A Road Trip Journal is his latest release, a page-by-page reproduction of the journal Shore kept during one of his trips, in 1973. In the original journal, he pasted gas and hotel receipts, parking tickets and banal postcards he bought along the way. He also made brief notes of miles traveled, meals eaten, TV shows watched and images shot. The everyday details add up to a compelling there-at-the-creation document (Do you remember America when Dragnet was on TV? When HoJo's was famous for fried clams? When gas was 42 cents per gallon?). The book includes images of postcards that Shore had printed from his own photographs, and that he had surreptitiously loaded into postcard racks along the way. A section of plates showing every photograph he made on the trip is presented in a chronological and somewhat evidentiary way. Ninety percent of the images are published here for the first time, though none would have been out of place in American Surfaces. The edition is "limited" to 3,300 copies, each one signed and numbered by Shore, and Phaidon has set an aggressive, daring price.




Interior Exposure
Photographs by Jessica Todd Harper
Foreword by Larry Fink
112 pages/59 images/$45 (hardcover)
Damiani

Imagine images combining the social class of Tina Barney, the intimacy of Elinor Carucci and the sensibility of the Dutch painter Vermeer. A beguiling mix for sure, and so it's no wonder that the young photographer Jessica Todd Harper (a former PDN's 30) is making such a splash in the fine-art world. Harper, in carefully constructed tableaux, photographs herself, her husband, her family and friends in artfully lit and tasteful interiors. The title of the book refers both to these domestic settings and to the psychological impulses of her subjects. The camera is a quiet observer of these domestic narratives that are at turns tranquil, fraught with tension, erotic, affectionate, mysterious and mundane. Her subjects seem to revel in the presence of the camera and at times treat it with casual disdain. Nothing is ever explained, just presented. It is up to us to deduce or speculate about what these people are thinking and feeling. Some people may find the work too self-conscious for their liking and perhaps too self-involved. Others may marvel at her undeniable skill in creating wonderful images and then instilling them with such power—the power of suggestion.


Frenchkiss
Photographs by Anders Petersen
116 pages/90 images/$39 (hardcover)
Dewi Lewis Publishing

Swedish photographer Anders Petersen's Frenchkiss is a visual romp through the streets, backrooms and underbelly of the South of France. It is a fast-paced and intensely personal social document, disturbing at times, but filled with raw beauty. His gritty black-and-white images confront us with a "too close for comfort" vantage point. Shadowy portraits and random still-lifes are juxtaposed with pulled-back, melancholic landscapes. This snapshot effect of moving in and out of captured moments creates an occasionally frantic pace. His focused images seduce viewers with textures of hair, dirt, light and moisture. But what really pulls us in is the weirdness of the content: the menacing gaze from a strangely muzzled dog, a one-armed man with a devil tattoo, a woman sticking out her wine-stained tongue, the hairy back of an unknown animal, and a couple about to kiss in a barely lit walkway. Throughout, Petersen contrasts stark, inky blackness against white. The pacing, subject matter and claustrophobic vantage points make Frenchkiss enticingly uncomfortable. In Petersen's world, ordinary does not exist.




Paul Fusco: RFK
Photographs by Paul Fusco
Tribute by Senator Edward M. Kennedy
Essays by Vicki Goldberg, Norman Mailer, Evan Thomas
224 pages/120 images/$50 (hardcover)
Aperture

Paul Fusco: RFK, a revised release of RFK Funeral Train, needs little introduction. Marking the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, the book is a much-anticipated update of the original publication from 2000. The original book contained just 53 plates, edited from the approximately 2,000 images that Fusco shot. This new edition contains 120 four-color plates, drawn from the archive at the Library of Congress and Fusco's own collection. These previously unseen photographs are a testimony to the power of the historic event and the artistic vision of Magnum photographer Paul Fusco himself. Fusco was on the train that carried Kennedy's body from New York to Washington, D.C.; along the tracks mourners lined the route to pay respect. These extraordinary scenes show people from all walks of life, united in paying homage to a lost dream. In the vibrant Kodachrome color images, we bear witness to waving crowds, flag bearers, a lone woman in a bikini, families standing on car rooftops and in playing fields, and groups straddling fences and bridges. Collectively, the images capture the American spirit and a historical moment. A truly engaging photo publication edited with great care and attention.


Meadowlands
Photographs by Joshua Lutz
108 pages/48 images/$50 (hardcover)
powerHouse Books

The New Jersey Meadowlands, a vast, beautiful and once badly abused marshland that occupies the space between New York City and Newark Airport, is a place most people "pass through and forget on their way to someplace else," Joshua Lutz writes in the end note of this gorgeous book. For eight years, he explored and photographed the Meadowlands, which he likens to a neglected, unguided child. "It is this loneliness and solitude that continues to bring me back year after year." What he captures with astuteness, empathy and a tinge of darkness is the entropic character of a marginal place. No single image in the book defines the Meadowlands. It is too disparate and discontinuous: a gas station here, an AM-transmitting station that time forgot over there, industrial operations elsewhere, all of them more or less isolated from one another—and the rest of the world—by the surrounding marsh grass and swamp. (The fill on which the developed areas sit includes decades worth of New York City trash and demolition detritus.) There's creepy mystery, too: a body face down in the mud, the broken fuselage of a passenger jet in some woods (and no titles or captions to explain any of the images). Lutz photographed the people and places around the fringes: the slightly down-and-out motels, the modest homes, the residents who look a bit hardened by their working class milieu. Meadowlands is rooted in the urban landscape tradition of photographers such as Walker Evans and Stephen Shore, but Lutz captures the sense of an unusual place and its uncertain future in a voice of his own.




Living Africa
Photographs by Steve Bloom
336 pages/236 images/$75 (hardcover)
Thames & Hudson

A documentary photographer known for his wildlife photographs, Steve Bloom left his home in South Africa for London in 1977. It was not until he made a trip to his birthplace in the early Nineties that he dedicated himself to wildlife photography as a career. As is evident from his substantial new book, he has devoted a great amount of time and effort photographing the continent of Africa. Creating a book that seeks in any way to encapsulate Africa would be an exercise in futility. Fortunately, Bloom knew not to attempt anything of the sort. "This book is a fleeting glimpse of the Africa I love," writes Bloom in the introduction to Living Africa. "It is not intended to be an encyclopedic or comprehensive study of its inhabitants." What is here, however, is a vast collection of compelling images that crisscross the continent. Although the book contains a few photographs of city shops and skyscrapers and crowded urban centers, Bloom seems most comfortable among the Karo and Mursi of Ethiopia, the Wodaabe of Niger, the Samburu of Kenya and the Ndebele of his native South Africa. And, of course, his wildlife photographs are striking. Arguably as important to this volume are Bloom's short texts, which reveal a deep understanding of and appreciation for the survival struggles of its animals and the customs of its people. The book's greatest achievement is its intimacy, something one would expect from a smallish, 96-page book focused on a single subject, not a 336-page "glimpse" of a massive continent.


Mark Klett: Saguaros
Photographs by Mark Klett
Essay by Gregory McNamee
96 pages/74 b&w images/$75 (hardcover)
Radius Books

The cover image of Saguaros looks, upon first glance, so dry and austere that you can almost hear the crunching of desert sand in the distance. Upon a second viewing, the stark vista looks quite sweeping and grand, and the cactus that stands front and center with "arms" outstretched is, in fact, quite personable—almost human. The entire book is like that, all 74 images of cactus plants, photographed by Klett over the course of several years from 1987 to 2006, in the deserts of central and southern Arizona. The only text appears at the end, in the form of an essay that pays tribute to the "heat-loving saguaro," by Gregory McNamee, as well as a very brief description of the book's contents by Klett himself: "The originals are 20 x 16-inch gelatin silver photographs printed from 4 x 5-inch Polaroid Type 55 instant film negatives," Klett writes. "The series was originally conceived as saguaro portraits and given the title 'Desert Citizens.' For centuries desert people have considered saguaros to be the souls of lost ancestors." I don't know about that, but Saguaros does make for a lovely coffee-table book. . .and it won't even prick your fingers.




Library of Dust
Photographs by David Maisel
Essays by Geoff Manaugh, Terry Toedtemeier and Michael S. Roth
108 pages/80 images/$80 (hardcover)
Chronicle Books

Known primarily for his large-scale aerial landscape photographs, it may seem suprising that David Maisel's third book explores the largely forgotten contents of a room in a deteriorating Oregon psychiatric hospital. But the subjects—copper canisters that contain the cremated remains of patients who died at the hospital between 1883 and 1970—are not unlike the bodies of water in Maisel's The Lake Project (2004), or the buildings and roadways of Los Angeles in Oblivion (2006). The aging copper vessels in Library of Dust are covered in the vibrant colors and patterns that characterize Maisel's aerial work. In his statement, Maisel writes that the canisters "evoke the celestial—the northern lights, the moons of some alien planet, or constellations in the night sky." Geoff Manaugh, Terry Toedtemeier and Michael S. Roth contribute essays on the nature of dust, the elemental origins of copper mineralization, and the way we think about the insane and the dead, respectively. Despite trading his usual aerial perspective for close-ups of objects shot against a black background and presented on 11 x 14 pages, Maisel has created a similar effect for the viewer to that of his other work: we are drawn in by the color and complex patterns in the images, but as we examine them we turn to thoughts of what is not pictured—in this case, the remains within the canisters, the lives of the psychiatric patients represented by them and the hospital that was their home.


Araki Gold
Photographs by Nobuyoshi Araki
Edited by Filippo Maggia
220 pages/200 images/$55 (hardcover)
Skira

Araki Gold is a unique collection of previously unpublished photographs by Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki. Arranged in six distinct chapters that present a condensed survey of work made over the course of five decades, the book not only demonstrates Araki's prolific output but also his remarkable range as a photographer. In this sense, his reputation for shooting bondage and sexually explicit content is a limiting one. "Ginza," his black-and-white documentary work from the 1960s, shows bustling street scenes and spontaneous photographs of people in Tokyo. His formal use of color and structure in "Flowers" seduces us with lush, crimson-specked orchids and occasionally unorthodox arrangements. The playful, random selection of images in the "Polaroid" chapter, which are often outtakes, offers a rare insight into his creative process. Araki is at his most controversial in the "Bondage" chapter, where kimono-clad women are elegantly tied up and suspended. Though the photographs are provocative, erotic and often viewed as pornographic, the esthetic practice of sexual bondage known as shibari is rooted in Japanese culture, and was derived from a non-sexual practice called hojojitsu, which Samurai warriors used to restrain their captives without harming them, as a show of respect. As this book shows, throughout Araki's work there exists a covert study of, or counteraction to, the West's view of Japanese propriety.




Athlete
Photographs by Walter Iooss
Introduction by Michael Jordan
256 pages/150 images/$34.95 (hardcover)
Sports Illustrated Books

Athlete, by Walter Iooss, is a big book filled with big-name, iconic figures the Sports Illustrated photographer captured throughout the past half-century. Thumb through this large tome and revisit striking, pulse-pounding moments in sports history. And it's impossible not to be drawn to the larger-than-life portraits of the athletes themselves: Joe DiMaggio, Sandy Koufax, Muhammad Ali, Michael Jordan, Shaquille O'Neal, Tiger Woods, Wilt Chamberlain, Arnold Palmer, Gail Devers and Steffi Graf, to name just a few. At 256 pages, it's quite an impressive presentation—Iooss and the sports superstars he has included here have all had illustrious careers. This book pays homage to the athletes them-selves as well as to Iooss, who has had his images grace the cover of Sports Illustrated at least 300 times since the Sixties. A sepia-toned print near the end of the book especially strikes a chord: the pairing of a much older and less fit Muhammad Ali with Joe Frazier, both appearing, ironically, quiet and introspective. Iooss writes: "It was easier to get Ali to pose for this picture than it was to get Frazier. Joe still resented all the torment Ali had caused him over the years. . . . I knew it would be a difficult shoot because Ali had Parkinson's, and I learned that day that Frazier had diabetes." In the end, though, Iooss says he got the picture he was looking for, and I think, a perfect ending for the book: "Two battered warriors who'd left their lives in the ring."


Curse of the Black Gold: 50 Years of Oil in the Niger Delta
Photographs by Ed Kashi
Edited by Michael Watts
220 pages/102 color photographs/$45 (hardcover)
powerHouse Books

Someone might buy Curse of the Black Gold for its essays. The photo book contains a dozen contributions by journalists, scholars and activists reflecting on Nigeria's oil wealth—and how little of it trickles down to the country's impoverished population. More likely, though, readers will learn just as much or more from Ed Kashi's photographs of this troubled region. In the book's first pages we see a striking image of a man on a small boat in a choppy sea, as hot orange gas flares burn against the gray sky. A caption informs us this man is a disgruntled worker trying to board an oil rig as a form of protest. Here and throughout the book, color is Kashi's friend—the magenta blood of slaughtered livestock, the soft blue felt of a pool table in a bustling public street, the rainbow sheen of oil scum that pollutes the waters of a fishing village. Kashi's travels on this project were dangerous. In 2006, while on assignment for National Geographic, Kashi and his fixer were imprisoned for four days by the Nigerian military. Reprinted in the book are a series of e-mails Kashi exchanged with a leader of an armed rebel group as he tried to negotiate access and ensure his own safety. The book ends with several photos Kashi took while traveling with fighters, including a scene of them burying one of their own who was just killed in a military attack. Just as disturbing, somehow, are images of workers inspecting oil drills and cleaning up spills, their uniforms emblazoned with the familiar logos of your neighborhood gas stations.




Till The Cows Come Home: County Fair Portraits
Photographs by Dan Nelken
Essay by Roy Flukinger
120 pages/68 images/$50 (hardcover)
Kehrer

Dan Nelken's charming and insightful book shows that documentary photography doesn't always have to uncover the darker side of human nature. It also demonstrates that compelling subjects for documentation can appear right in one's backyard. Nelken, a committed urbanite, left his New York City studio one summer day in 1998 and headed upstate to the town of Walton. There he came across a county fair and from that moment he was hooked, repeatedly returning to fairs over a nine-year period, shooting both portraits and still lifes. The county fair is a very (white) American tradition where farmers and their families "share and celebrate the results of their industry and labor," writes University of Texas curator Roy Flukinger in the introduction to the book. Nelken's photographs are indeed a celebration of the county fair in all its very local and low-key glory. Nelken neither over-sentimentalizes his subjects—many of them children with their beloved animals—nor does he take the more obvious irony route. W. Eugene Smith was a friend and mentor to Nelken and occasionally, like Smith, he poses his subjects; but that aside, Nelken deservedly comes home with the prize.



Click here for Part 2 of our Photography Books of 2008, including reviews of new books from Richard Avedon, Eugene Richards and Joel Sternfeld.