There are so many great photo books once again this year! Check out some of them in my
BEST PHOTOGRAPHY BOOKS 2021 ROUND-UP
-Elizabeth Avedon
Blue Violet. Photographs and text by Cig Harvey. Monacelli Press
Blue Violet is Cig Harvey’s celebration of the natural world and the senses. A book of deeply personal and lush photographs, drawings, and writing. Part art book, botanical guide, historical encyclopedia, and poetry collection, includes the magic in everyday life. Plants, flowers, and our experience of the natural world are the threads that tie this unique book together.
The Day May Break. Photographs by Nick Brandt. Hatje Cantz
Photographed in Zimbabwe and Kenya in late 2020, The Day May Break is the first part of a global series by acclaimed photographer Nick Brandt, portraying people and animals that have been impacted by environmental degradation and destruction
Mona Kuhn: Works: Photographs by Mona Kuhn. Thames & Hudson Text by Rebecca Morse, Simon Baker, Chris Littlewood, Darius Himes, Elizabeth Avedon.
A stunning career retrospective of Mona Kuhn, one of the most respected contemporary photographers of her time, best known for her large-scale photographs of the human form. Kuhn created a notable approach to the nude by developing friendships with her subjects, and employing a range of visual strategies that use natural light and bucolic settings to evoke a sense of comfort between the human figure and its environment.
The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship by Deborah Willis. NYU Press
The Black Civil War Soldier is both a major contribution to Civil War studies and an album of our ancestors’ journey at the critical hour of American history that belongs to all of us as the descendants of their sacrifice. ― Henry Louis Gates,Jr., Professor, Harvard University
A Photo Spirit. Photographs by Ruth Orkin. Edited by Mary Engel and Nadine Barth. Hatje Cantz
Published on the occasion of what would have been the photographer’s 100th birthday, this illustrated volume celebrates Orkin’s life and career with an equally extensive and fascinating overview of this exceptional artist’s oeuvre.
Fauxliage. Photographs by Annette LeMay Burke. Foreword by Ann M. Jastrab. Daylight Books
Fauxliage documents the proliferation of disguised cell phone towers in the American West. …I was initially drawn to the towers’ whimsical appearances. The more I photographed, the more disconcerted I felt that technology was clandestinely modifying our environment. – Annette LeMay Burke
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What Lies Within, Photographs by Dale Niles
Foreword by Aline Smithson. Afterword by Alexa Dilworth
A book of photographs about a unique collector’s eclectic collections. Seven years ago, I entered the collector’s world of Andrea M. Noel after a friend suggested that I might be interested in photographing her expansivecollections…I was unprepared for the surprises that lay within. – Dale Niles, photographer
Anne Berry: Behind Glass. Text by Dr. Jane Goodall, Primatologist JoSetchell and Art Critic Jerry Cullum. Self-published.
Behind Glass is a collection of photographs made in monkey houses of small zoos throughout Europe. Berry’s powerful and moving photographs gently confront the viewer to facilitate a reexamination of the human, and oftenpersonal, relationship with the animal kingdom.
Standing Together: Inez Milholland’s Final Campaign for Women’s Suffrage
By Jeanine Michna-Bales. MW Editions
Through her own photographs, combining dramatic landscapes and historical reenactments of important vignettes of Milholland on her journey with archival materials, Michna-Bales captures a glimpse of the monumental effort required to pass the 19th Amendment.
She. Photographs by Rania Matar. Texts by Mark Alice Durant and Orin Zahra. Radius Books
Rania Matar, a Lebanese-born American artist and mother, focuses on young women in their late teens and early twenties, who are leaving the cocoon of home, entering adulthood and facing a new reality. Depicting women in the United States and the Middle East, this project highlights how female subjectivity develops in parallel forms across cultural lines.
Nine Peanut Portfolios 2021: Brian Day, David Gonzalez, Jean-Pierre Laffont, Lori Nix & Kathleen Gerber, Barbara Peacock, Michelle Rick, Aline Smithson, and Preston Utley. Peanut Press Books
Purchase separately or the full set of the 2021 Peanut Portfolio Books, includes eight signed original photographs and eight signed and numbered hardcover books, each book has 40 pages, 18 color plates
kissing a stranger. Photographs by Joni Sternbach. Dürer Editions
kissing a stranger is a study of Sternbach’s early work made during the 1970s and 1980s. In essence it is a portrait of the artist as a young woman forming her visual language through freedom of experimentation and expression. She says “finding my way towards independence and autonomy as a young art student was both intensely lonely and toughening. A camera around my neck afforded me a feeling of protection. It allowed me to project myself onto the world around me; with my needs, my desires and my loneliness exposed – I felt less vulnerable.”
The African Lookbook: A Visual History of 100 Years of African Women. By Catherine E. McKinley. Introduction by Edwidge Danticat, Foreword by Jacqueline Woodson. Bloomsbury Publishing
Curator Catherine E. McKinley draws on her extensive collection of historical and contemporary photos to present a visual history spanning a hundred-year arc (1870–1970) of what is among the earliest photography on the continent. The African Lookbook captures the dignity, playfulness, austerity, grandeur, and fantasy-making of African women across centuries.
Balancing Cultures. Photographs by Jerry Takigawa. Self-Published
Balancing Cultures presents the work of a multi award-winning photography series about the artist’s family’s experience with the WWII American concentration camps. This project presented an opportunity to confront the racism perpetrated on the Japanese that resulted in their confinement in theAmerican concentration camps sanctioned by President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 issued on February 19, 1942.
American Geography: Photographs of Land Use from 1840 to the Present. Edited by Sandra S. Phillips and Sally Martin Katz. Texts by Beverly Dahlen, Hilary Green, Layli Long Soldier, Barry Lopez, Jenny Reardon, Richard White, and Richard B. Woodward. Radius Books
Drawing from the vast permanent collection of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, American Geography charts a visual history of land use in the United States providing a complex, thought-provoking survey featuring work from Robert Adams, Dawoud Bey, Barbara Bosworth, Debbie Fleming Caffery, William Eggleston, Mitch Epstein, Terry Evans, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Emmet Gowin, Lee Friedlander, Dorothea Lange, An-My Lê, Trevor Paglen, Wendy Red Star, Mark Ruwedel, Victoria Sambunaris, Stephen Shore, Alec Soth, and Carleton E. Watkins, among others.
Personal Ties: Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. Street portraits by Amy Touchette. Foreword by Larry Fink, Afterword by C. Joi Sanchez. Schilt Publishing
“…Arming herself with a camera and a compassionate heart, Amy Touchette photographed ordinary people in her Bedford-Stuyvesant community, creating intimate portraits of personal ties, kinship, and individuality that are now frozen moments in time.” —Jamel Shabazz, photographer
Rebels: From Punk to Dior. Photographs by Janette Beckman. Drago Publishing
Rebel, from Punk to Dior, is one of the most complete anthologies of its kind, containing the best works of British-born photographer, Janette Beckman. Known as one of the most famous street photographers, with her feminine and underground touch, Janette has portrayed the all-time greatest exponents of the Hip Hop, Punk and Underground scenes.
Sleeping Beauty. Photographs by Lydia Panas. Text by Marina Chao,Maggie Jones, Monae Mallory. MW Editions
This volume presents award-winning Pennsylvania-based photographer Lydia Panas’ much-praised series of mesmerizing color portraits of reclining women and girls. In an interesting reversal of roles, the artist’s and models’ gazes are intertwined, incorporating the viewer as participant in an often uncomfortable connection.
Past Present: Photographs by Justine Tjallinks. NHP Publishing
Justine Tjallinks, an Amsterdam-based Dutch artist, takes inspiration from Dutch master painters for their use of light and color, juxtaposed with remarkable, contemporary faces and figures seen in modern clothing designs, to create images that have a sense of nostalgia whilst the content and subjects are often firmly fixed in present day sensibilities.
Where the World is Melting. Photographs by Ragnar Axelsson. Kehrer Verlag
RAX highlights the extraordinary relationships between people, animals, and places in the Arctic and their extreme environment – relationships that change in profound and complex ways due to unprecedented climate change. In simple black and white photos, he captures the elementary human experience in nature on the edge of the habitable world.
This is a spectacular list of books, and so helpful to reference as I plan out which ones and in what order I’ll be buying as I continue to expand my library!! Thank you!!!!