When editing and entering the contributor's comments for our Best Books feature, I was struck by the number of books by Dutch photographers. It seems like the general consensus is that Dutch photographers and book designers are producing some of the most amazingly innovative photobooks out there. Jörg M. Colberg, Martin Parr and Ramón Reverté all mentioned this fact, Parr noting that "the Dutch continue to be the best bookmakers in Europe." Bint Photobooks on Internet noticed this trend in our contributor's lists too, and complied the information from our feature into an open publication web book, which you can find here. You can read Bint Photobooks' post "Dutch Photobooks selected in photo-eye's Best Books of 2010" here.
Looking over our contributors picks, I actually found a few more that didn't make it into Bint Photobooks' list! Here are the rest:
Asper. Photographs by Karianne Bueno. Schaden.
"Asper" is a dreamy portrait of a tiny village in Flemish Belgium. Ms. Bueno's camera floats, for example, above a tangle of green forest , a sunny backyard plot with a child and his toys, a midday river picnic, and an empty street at night. As fanciful as it is non-fictional, "Asper" is also equal parts tender and regretful: through the nostalgia, "the oppressive feeling of living in a small rural community is never far away. The quiet idyll might turn to melancholy, or loneliness, or fear."
Remnants of the Recent Past. The Soviet Energy Legacy.
Self Published.
Selected by: Fabrice Wagner, Rinko Kawauchi
Book with recent photographic work by Uta Eisenreich focussing on the shortcomings of our cognitive tool-kit. A NOT B walks us along the fine line between common sense and uncommon nonsense in a realm reminiscent of pre-school books, assessment tests and optical illusions.
Selected by: Hester Keijser
A selection of recent photographs that mimic the appearance of the Kodak 126 format prints. Photographical clichés, registration-like images of specific themes such as minerals and architecture and romantic views together shape a virtual amateur archive of imagery from the past.
Selected by: Hester Keijser