We Are Experienced
Photographs by: Danielle Levitt
Introduction by: Mark Jacobs
Publisher: powerHouse Books, 144 pages, $55

We Are Experienced, the first monograph from Danielle Levitt, could be called a return to her roots. Levitt got her start in 1998 shooting a street fashion column in the New York Post before she became known for her editorial and advertising work. The eye for style she developed while working New York’s downtown scene and, one presumes, during her Los Angeles upbringing, seems like a natural precursor to this personal project documenting American teenagers. “I’m paying attention to the [style] decisions these teenagers make because I’m curious about how they arrive at them,” explains Levitt in a Mark Jacobs interview from the book’s introduction. Levitt crisscrossed the country for the project, making portraits of young people that open up their personal stories by emphasizing their style decisions and details of their environs. The photographs, which are at times touching, funny and tragic, delve into individual and group identities and the way adolescents decide to present themselves to the world. Among Levitt’s subjects are cheerleaders, skaters, smokers, baton twirlers, jocks and teenage lovers. “Youth is a stage, and these kids put on spectacular shows,” writes Jacobs of the teenagers. Levitt has done a remarkable job capturing the performances.     —Conor Risch



Earth Under Fire: How Global Warming Is Changing the World
Photographs by: Gary Braasch
Publisher: University of California Press, 267 pages, $34.95 hardcover, $24.95 paperback

Conservation photographer Gary Braasch has been doing his part to raise the alarm about global warming for nearly a decade. In the opening pages of Earth Under Fire, he asserts that changes brought about by global warming are spreading faster than we realize, earth is becoming less hospitable to humans and everyone will feel the effects. Braasch isn’t plowing new ground here, but he argues that many other articles and books are easily dismissed because they’re speculative. His approach is to use photography to show the evidence. The book’s opening diptych illustrates the dramatic contraction of Canada’s Abathasca glacier over the past 90 years: In 2005 Braasch photographed this glacier from the same vantage point as photographer A.O. Wheeler used in 1917. Another striking image shows  the erosion of Bhola Island in Bangladesh, crowding the residents so tightly that they have no place left to go but their rooftops. Despite some striking images, Earth Under Fire is most valuable as an environmental studies textbook rather than as a photography book. It digests the latest scientific research on global  warming and devotes a lengthy chapter to alternative energy solutions. The illustrations—many of them Braasch’s photographs, in addition to images and graphics from other sources—play a supporting role but an important one. As Braasch points out, “Pictures are not science; they can, however, provide direct evidence that global warming is happening now, all over the world.”     —David Walker




Pitch Blackness
Photographs by: Hank Willis Thomas
Essays  by: René de Guzman and Robin D.G. Kelley
Publisher: Aperture, 128 pages, $35

In 2007, Hank Willis Thomas received the first-ever Aperture West Book Prize, a publishing award given yearly to an artist living and working west of the Mississippi. Published in November 2008, Willis Thomas’s monograph Pitch Blackness collects several projects undertaken over the course of his young career. The book’s themes bridge the personal and the sociopolitical, as family snapshots coexist with icons of capitalism and commerce. Visual tension is heightened by commingling images depicting the murder of Willis Thomas's cousin with investigations of how advertising and branding function in the construction of African American identity, especially where black males are concerned. Issues of racism and mass culture are explored through Willis Thomas’s co-option of historic images that were widely circulated by abolitionists. Essays by curator René de Guzman and professor Robin D.G. Kelly add context to the book and help readers to appreciate the intellectual rigor of the imagery and artistic choices. In her essay, Kelly points out that Willis Thomas’s work reflects the influence of his mother, Deborah Willis, a noted photographer and one of the foremost scholars of African American photographic history. An endorsement on the book’s back cover by conceptual artist Carrie Mae Weems describes Willis Thomas as no less than “the voice of his generation.” The apple has clearly not fallen far from the tree.       —CR

© Mikkel Aaland

 

Photoshop Lightroom 2 Adventure
By: Mikkel Aaland
Publisher: O’Reilly Media, Inc.,  384 pages, $44.99

It was a tough job, but somebody had to do it. Last spring, photographer and author Mikkel Aaland led an international team of photographers on a two-week photographic tour of Tasmania. This starkly beautiful island became the setting for a road test of Adobe’s latest   version of Lightroom image-processing software. 

Aaland’s resulting 384-page book mixes elegant images with concise, savvy writing and easy-to-follow screen graphics.

The trek to Tasmania followed on the heels of a 2006 Iceland Lightroom Adventure book. Adobe has significantly refined the software since then, so, for Aaland, a second “adventure”—and a second book—was clearly in order.

 As home of the world’s first green political movement, Tasmania offered a landscape alive with verdant flora and indigenous wildlife. In appreciation of their hosts, team members donated archival prints to a benefit auction held during the trip, which raised $7,000 toward protecting the endangered Tasmanian devil.

Each evening during their visit, the group returned to their hotel to beta-test the software with new images. Feedback, both good and bad, was shared with an on-site Adobe support team, and many suggested changes and additions were incorporated in the final version.
This book is an all-too-rare collaboration between outstanding photographers capturing a unique location and then sharing their images and expertise with the public. Even non-Lightroom users will appreciate the imagery, but if you use this software, you need this book.        —Thom O’Connor