Photography Books

January 2014

Our Beautiful, Fragile World | Peter Essick

Our Beautiful Fragile World

Peter Essick shares his personal stories from twenty-five years of traveling to some of the most remote regions in the world to capture the perfect image to visually enhance articles for National Geographic magazine. His images highlight some of today’s most pressing environmental issues: fresh water wars, deforestation, climate change, coral bleaching,nuclear waste, and plastic and chemical pollution. The articulation of his personal experiences with these complex issues, each story illustrated with a single image, will help shed light and give us insights on how we can begin to repair the damage we have wrought on the natural systems that support all life. Essick gives examples of how to protect the vital species and ecosystems that still remain intact. We are at the threshold of a new era of understanding.

How successful we are in securing an environmentally sound future for generations to come will depend in large part on how we move forward to protect the natural world and the myriad of resources it provides for all humanity. We are, after all, borrowing the richness of our planet’s assets and investing them to ensure that future generations are able enjoy the same privileges we have been fortunate to enjoy. But we have to doit with an ecological mindset, not with a quick boom-and-bust manner fueled by greed.

Peter Essick

The beautiful images in this book will transport you on an adventure of discovery while looking at nature at its best, with images from some of Peter Essick’s favorite places, such as Torres del Paine National Park in Chile, near the tip of South America in the southern part of Patagonia. The images will also transport you to the cold reality of human society at its worst through the documentation of the depletion of biodiversity in the name of progress and development, such as what Peter witnessed and photographed in the Canadian Oil Sands and in the shameful aftermath of our irresponsible use of Agent Orange in Vietnam decades ago.

Hardcover
124 pages
Rocky Nook Publisher
9.8 x 5.9 x 0.6 inches
$34.95
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Cedar Key, the Net Ban, and its Water Women | Christian Harkness

Cedar Key, the Net Ban, and its Water WomenChristian Harkness is concentrating on making small editions [5 books] of 8×10 inch photo books, printing them on Strathmore, heavy weight, acid free Drawing paper, and then binding them using the traditional Japanese Stab Binding method

As he says ….
From printing to sewing the binding, I do all the work myself.

These photographs span almost thirty years, picking up around the time of the enactment, in 1995, of the Florida Net-Ban, outlawing the use of gill and trammel nets.

Cedar Key, the Net Ban, and its Water WomenWhen the net-ban became effective I had been living in Cedar Key, Florida, a small island town of about 800 inhabitants in the northern Gulf of Mexico, on Florida’s west coast, for several years. For generations its residents had made their living largely from fishing, crabbing and oystering, and those tourist attractions that revolve around restaurants, fishing, and the attraction of an offbeat vacation in an out-of-the-way place. Cedar Key was a place that had endured. It had survived storms and hard times, and its inhabitants were not getting rich, but were getting by. The coming of the net-ban and the end of a way of life produced severe anxiety, concern, and anger in the community. It was then that I decided to start photographing a few of the fishermen I had gotten to know. Silent and reticent towards outsiders, they were difficult for me to approach.

Almost coincidentally to the coming of the net-ban was the developing of aquaculture, in this case clam farming, in Cedar Key waters. Generally, the fishermen wanted nothing to do with it and were in denial about the demise of their future and ability of making a living by working independently on the water. I had a friend who was doing some small boat, commercial fishing and also became involved in clam farming. Through her, I realized that while the fishermen might be staying away from showing any interest in clam farming, several of the women from fishing families started taking an interest in the business. Although I had spent a lot of time sailing the waters of Cedar Key, I hardly ever encountered them on the Gulf. These “waterwomen” certainly did not think of themselves as being unique, or special. Growing up in Cedar Key, they were connected to the water, and making a living this way was “no big deal” to them.

Cedar Key, the Net Ban, and its Water Women8×10
$65
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Inventing Reality: New Orleans Visionary Photography | curated by D. Eric Bookhardt

Inventing Reality: New Orleans Visionary PhotographyThe collection, curated by D. Eric Bookhardt, presents a vision that is both subjective and representative of a broad spectrum of techniques, providing an overview into the creative renaissance that is taking place in the city today. “In photography, this city and the surrounding region have long been a spawning grounds for visionary or magic realist imagery dating to Clarence John Laughlin’s surrealist works of the 1930s,” writes Bookhardt. “Today a coterie of younger emerging artists, often reflecting alternative sociocultural milieu, have in concert with their more established peers expanded this visionary vocabulary.”

Inventing Reality: New Orleans Visionary PhotographyBookhardt’s insightful essay details the rich history of photographic arts in New Orleans, and his individual introductions to each photographer’s series provide context for the works of 2013 Guggenheim Fellow Deborah Luster, David Halliday, Josephine Sacabo, and Louviere+Vanessa, among other established and emerging artists. The array of photographic practices used by the artists ranges from wet-plate collodions, orotones, photogravures, x-rays, and silver gelatins, to modern digital processes. The resulting anthology is a lyrical insight into personal visions, dazzling in their variety of approaches. As Russell Lord notes in the book’s foreward: “It is a story about identity, tension, perception and the psychic mystery of photography in New Orleans.”

Inventing Reality: New Orleans Visionary Photography
Various photographers
Author & Curator: D. Eric Bookhardt
Foreword by Russell Lord
$45

136 pages, 95 photographs
Softcover – Otobind, 8.5″ x 11″ portrait,
Paper: 170 Gm Upm Finesse Plus Varnish
Cover: 4/4 Ink Foil Stamping
Published by Luna Press LLC
ISBN 978-0-9896095-0-0
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Natural Virginia | Ben Greenberg

Natural VirginiaA century ago, legendary photographer Edward Curtis set about to capture the traditional world of Native Americans before that world vanished. Now, Ben Greenberg has done the same for the natural areas of Virginia. Devoted to preserving and celebrating Virginia’s diverse but sometimes threatened natural richness, Greenberg has spent years creating a collection of more than one hundred stunning, panoramic images that range from the Commonwealth’s most well-known to its rarely explored landscapes.

Cloth
240 pp.
17 x 10
ISBN 9780989881203
$59.95
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