Secret Gardens

This is an odd and rambling shaggy dog story. I’ve taken up gardening recently and spend quite a bit of time poring over manuals on how to raise tomatoes, amend soil, make compost, set up planting schedules, etc All of this gardening on the brain made me remember a book I’d picked up a few [...]

Read Full Post »

American Negatives

Abner Nolan takes old found negatives and reprints them. There’s not a lot of his work online, but he did do a limited edition book with Trillium called American Negatives which looks like it might be out of print. He will have another limited edition coming out in the next year with These Birds Walk, [...]

Read Full Post »

Kith and Kin

These Birds Walk is a small art book publisher in Oakland whose goal is to “provide affordable art books that quietly exist somewhere between a discarded pamphlet on the street and a high end coffee table book.” They publish an annual limited edition subscription series that includes four books, each from an individual photographer. The [...]

Read Full Post »

Anatomy Lessons

It’s the question every photojournalist might ask him or herself. When dramatic events unroll before you, do you stay behind the camera and document or do you step out and engage? Max Aguilera-Hellweg decided to engage. It started back in 1990 when he was asked to capture a neurosurgeon at work for Savvy magazine. He [...]

Read Full Post »

Story of the Eye

I picked up “Diane Arbus: The Libraries” at Fraenkel Gallery. It’s a visual catalog of the books and photos that belonged to Arbus’s personal library, the actual contents of which were displayed as part of the Arbus retrospective, Revelations at SFMOMA back in 2003. The book is beautifully put together—accordion-pleated pages inside a cocoa brown [...]

Read Full Post »

Pinhole Wizard

I was rummaging through some papers and came across a flyer for an exhibit I saw a while back at Varnish Gallery. The show was called “A Collection of Souls from the Borderland” and it showcased Wayne Belger‘s pinhole cameras and the photos he takes with them. Belger, an LA-based artist trained originally as a [...]

Read Full Post »

Buried Treasure

I just received a copy of the first printing of the second edition of E.J. Bellocq’s Storyville for my birthday. I love the history behind this set of photographs—Bellocq the commercial photographer and social misfit producing images of the ladies of New Orleans’ red light district in a project that was private and personal, never [...]

Read Full Post »

Photo Follies

On the plane back from Paris, I needed something to help me make it through the 11 hour flight so I picked up a Paul Auster book, Brooklyn Follies, and sped through it, reasonably entertained. Only when I finished did I look more closely at the paperback cover and realize it was an Evelyn Hofer [...]

Read Full Post »

URL Pic(k)

Discovered this website a while back and added it to my list of interesting collections: Covering Photography. The site’s creator, Karl Baden, teaches photography at Boston College and along the way started cataloging book jacket designs that use fine art photography. He decided to document all this on the Web so he scanned covers, uploaded [...]

Read Full Post »

Visionary State

I spent the past weekend in LA, taking in lots of art galleries…and making a stop at the Bradbury Building. I hadn’t heard of the Bradbury until I stumbled into a show at Scott Nichols gallery in San Francisco a while back. Photos were grouped on the walls in blocs of four or nine—image modules [...]

Read Full Post »