Reading List #6
My latest batch of recommended photo books, zines and other publications on photography
Looking for something to read? Check out my latest Reading List for recommended photo books, zines and other publications on photography.
Happy reading! 🔮
Bryan Schutmaat : County Road (Trespasser)
Created during the first months of the COVID-19 outbreak, County Road captures scenes along the rural routes between Austin and Leon County. County Road is a quiet and intimate look at the backroads of Schutmaat’s memory.
Reed Klass: The Acres (Underlife Editions)
The Acres is a short book depicting the relationship between a man named Al and his fabled hermitage in rural Ohio shortly before his approaching death.
Dana Lixenberg: Polaroid 54/59/79 (Roma Publications)
The title of this book with 768 Polaroids refers to the types of peel-apart instant film that Dana Lixenberg used between 1993 and 2010, which could be loaded into a cassette that fit into her 4×5″ field camera. These instant Polaroid prints, serving as test and reference material for lighting and composition, provide an intimate glimpse into Lixenberg’s work process during photo shoots for numerous clients such as Vibe, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Vrij Nederland, and personal projects. After the Polaroid Corporation went out of business in 2008, Lixenberg finished her last box of Polaroid 54 two years later. Apart from being an ode to this specific material, the large collection of portraits also reflects the American culture and society Lixenberg encountered in the 1990s and 2000s.
Jason Lee: TX | CA 17 (Stanley/Barker)
The pictures in Jason Lee’s forthcoming monograph were made in the summer of 2017 on a drive from his then adopted home state of Texas to Los Angeles, where he’d lived prior and from where he set out to start photographing from the road in 2006.
TX | CA 17 is the first time Lee has published images from a single outing. They are presented in geographical and (rough) chronological order—North Texas, NM, AZ, the California desert, and finally DTLA, where we see the gentleman awaiting his bus. The exposures were made primarily along and surrounding Highways 287, 40/66, 62, and 10.
“Many of these places I’ve come to know quite well, with some documented frequently before and since this particular drive. It’s always a pleasure revisiting the familiar—these somehow comforting landmarks; these reminders—and equally exciting to discover new sights, make new pictures, and collect new memories. So you keep going. After sixteen years of photographing outside, I remain fascinated by the American landscape and all its parts both beautiful and curious.” — Jason Lee
Lee Friedlander: Framed by Joel Cohen (Fraenkel Gallery)
In his selection of 70 photographs by Lee Friedlander, acclaimed filmmaker Joel Coen focuses on Friedlander’s beautifully strange sense of composition. In Friedlander’s unmistakable style, images are off kilter and visually dense, bisected and carved by stop signs and utility poles, store windows and reflections, car doors and windshields or shadows and trees. “As a filmmaker, I liked the idea of creating a sequence that would highlight Lee’s unusual approach to framing—his splitting, splintering, repeating, fracturing, and reassembling elements into new and impossible compositions,” Coen writes.
Featuring work spanning more than 60 years, the book includes selections from some of Friedlander’s most celebrated series, including The American Monument, America by Car, The Little Screens and others, arranged to draw connections between form and composition rather than subject. In an afterword, renowned actor Frances McDormand describes the bond between the two artists. Coen and Friedlander “hold mysteries that feel a bit connected,” she writes. “They both capture and fill frames with sometimes simple and other times chaotically elaborate images that cause us all to wonder.”
Aleix Plademunt: Matter (Spector Books)
Matter is a constant. It was there from the beginning and it will remain long into the future. The word matter is derived from mater, the Latin word for mother: matter refers to the substance from which all things are made. In English, the word can also indicate urgency or importance—something to be concerned about. Since 2013, Aleix Plademunt has been working on Matter, his most extensive photographic project. It tackles the age-old question of existence. It delves into our origins. Matter itself is inert, motionless, unable to reproduce. But it leads to life. The Big Bang’s radical expansion created everything. During its life cycle an organism undergoes many changes—it grows, learns, evolves, and dies—but matter always remains.
That’s it for this newsletter!
If you have any suggestions for interviews, features, topics, interesting work or photo books that I should check out, don’t hesitate to leave a comment or reach out!
Stay safe and keep shooting.
Kim
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