Dayanita Singh, 'Sent a Letter'
DAYANITA SINGH: Sent a Letter (Steidl, £45, $90, 65 euros)
This beautiful box of 7 small concertina books by Dayanita Singh stems from her desire to make individual notebooks of photographs, each with a particular friend in mind. Singh has said that creating books is the most important part of her work and it's refreshing to see that each book she makes is different - and invariably small! Singh's work is currently in the Serpentine Gallery's survey of Indian contemporary art and her most recent solo show was at the Frith Street Gallery in London in December 2008.
Sarah Moon, 'Monette pour Comme des garçons', 2007
SARAH MOON: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 (Thames & Hudson, £95)
Another boxed set, this time five books by Sarah Moon which together form a kind of personal memoir in pictures, evoking her life, friends and fantasies. The publication also includes an interview with Moon by Ilona Suschitsky about colour, one of the most striking aspects of Moon's work. 'Colour allows humour, distance and abstraction,' she says. 'It can be about a presence, a stridency as well as about the ephemeral, about a movement that is so unpredictable that I can hardly pin it down... it's the gesture before it is complete, a movement in slow motion... like for example all those women seen from behind, walking away.'
Mikhael Subotzky, Samuel (standing), Vaalkoppies (Beaufort West rubbish dump), 2006
MIKHAIL SUBOTZKY: Beaufort West (2006-2008) (Chris Boot, £40, $75)
Mikhael Subotzky is one of the most important young photographers currently making work. He was born in Cape Town in 1982, has already one a number of awards and at just 25 he was the youngest photographer ever to be accepted into Magnum Photos. 'Beaufort West (2006-2008)' (a selection from this series is on view at MoMa in New York until 5 January 2009) portrays a small desert town in South Africa's Western Cape blighted by unemployment, rampant crime, domestic violence, poverty, and segregation. 'Despite being originally established to bring law and order to the central Karoo, Beaufort West is now a transit town,' says Subotzsky. 'I was drawn to Beaufort West when I came across its prison. It is bizarrely situated in a traffic circle in the centre of the town in the middle of the N1 highway. Most South African prisons are hidden from view on the outskirts of our towns and cities. I was interested in this image of the prison at the centre of the town and the irony that it is still hidden as most of those who drive around the traffic circle don't realize that they are passing the prison. This image thus became a locus by which to explore the town and its margins.'
MIROSLAV TICHY (Walter Koenig, £36)
Now in his eighties and a recluse, Miroslav Tichy was the big 'find' at Rencontres d'Arles in 2005 where he won the 'New Discovery Award', normally given to a young photographer. For thirty years, using an extraordinary camera which he made himself out of old tins of food, Tichy took hundreds of photographs each week showing an obsession with the female form, whether glimpsed in the park, on the television or walking along the streets of his home town of Brno in the Czech Republic. Two books on Tichy came out in 2008 - one was published to coincide with the retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the other, published by Walter Koenig, which has more photographs and includes an essay by the late Harald Szeeman who organised Tichy's first solo exhibition.
ANDERS PETERSEN: French Kiss (Dewi Lewis, £19.99)
Anders Petersen, who was nominated for last year's Deutsche Borse Photography Prize, has become well known for his high contrast black-and-white photographs which document the margins of society in a particularly raw and intimate way. A cross between Nan Goldin and Daido Moriyama (the cat image bookending this series is reminiscent of Moriyama's iconic dog), the photographs in his new book, all taken in the South of France, are unflinching, intense and make you wonder how Petersen managed to get so close to his subjects.
Robert Adams
VANISHING LANDSCAPES essays by John Berger and Friedrich Tietjen (Frances Lincoln,£35)
This book brings together the work of 20 photographers, including Hiroshi Sugimoto, Jitka Hanzlova, Robert Adams and Edward Burtynsky, who draw our attention to the catastrophic changes taking place in the natural world. Looking at the photographs in this book is to recognise that, from rural England to the Antarctic, the world as we know it is not only rapidly changing but, with the devastation caused by man's compulsion for progress, will in some places never be the same again.
STEPHEN SHORE: A Road Trip Journal (Phaidon, £125)
The steep price is sure to put some people off, but the book is in a limited edition of 3,300 copies - there are also 100 artists proofs signed and numbered by the photographer. Stephen Shore is best known for his photographs of vernacular America taken in the early 1970s and this book offers a comprehensive documentation of his month-long road trip across America in 1973. The book reproduces every page of the journal he kept on this trip along with every photograph taken, including small town high streets, plates of food, toilets, beds, hotel rooms and portraits of locals and friends.
WHY PHOTOGRAPHY MATTERS AS NEVER BEFORE: Michael Fried (Yale, £30)
Michael Fried picks up the discussion he began in his landmark book 'Art and Objecthood' (1967), arguing that photography is indisputably at the forefront of contemporary art and that questions concerning the relationship between the viewer and the work of art are as applicable to photography as they are to painting. The turning point, Fried argues, was in the 1970s when photographers started making large-scale prints to be hung on walls in galleries, which dramatically shifted the relationship between the viewer and the photograph. Among the artists Fried discusses in depth are Jeff Wall, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, Douglas Gordon and the Bechers.
Joel Sternfeld
OXBOW ARCHIVE: Joel Sternfeld (Steidl, £40, $75, 50 euros)
Inspired by Thomas Cole's 1836 painting 'View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm (The Oxbow)', Joel Sternfeld spent a year and a half from 2006 visiting the field depicted in Cole's painting. Sternfeld's book is a record of an unremarkable field within this new England landscape which, as Cole feared, has changed from being an example of the American sublime to being encroached upon by an interstate highway
Robin Schwartz from Tiny Vices
TINY VICES (Aperture, $125)
If you're interested in seeing the work of some of the most exciting emerging photographers, where better to start than tinyvices.com? Since it was launched in 2005 by Tim Barber, tinyvices has become an influential platform for emerging and underexposed talent. It features the work of hundreds of photographers and artists, including some who have gone on to become extremely successful such as Ryan McGinley and Dash Snow. This Aperture publication brings together five separate volumes on five young photographers from tinyvices.com in special boxed set of just 25 copies which will include a signed and numbered print by each featured artist. The artists are Kenneth Cappello, Allan Macintyre, Jason Nocito, Robin Schwartz and Jaimie Warren. The individual books are also available for $29.95.
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