Paris Photo and Aperture Foundation have announced the winners of the 2012 PhotoBook Awards. Winning the PhotoBook of the Year is
City Diary (Volumes 1-3) by Anders Petersen published by Steidl.
"
City Diary comes in a grey cardboard envelope, the distinctive Anders Petersen scrawl giving us title and publisher. Inside are three large paperback volumes, each 9-1/4x12-1/4, the same basic design and format as the now sold out
Dear Diary, published as a small limited run exhibition catalogue for the
City Diary show. The
City Diary book from Steidl and Gun Gallery pulls in more of the images from this 100 image exhibit which presented over 5 years of photographs from Petersen's travels. Many of the images in this book are familiar, having been included in some of Petersen's earlier publications, but the sequencing is notable. Various locations are gathered into each book, and without a firm sense of place the images are connected intuitively with Petersen as the unifying element. The photographs lead us on what feels like an exploration of Petersen's own photographic past, scattered and reassembled in these three books. These are the first in an on-going series." -- from Sarah Bradley's post on
City Diary. Read the complete post
here
Purchase a copy
here
The First PhotoBook award was given to a self-published book by Dutch photographer David Galjaard titled
Concresco.
In Concresco, Galjaard documents some of the 750,000 above ground bunkers that exist as remnants of Stalinist leadership in Albania. Galjaard's
website says: "In this documentary, the bunkers are used as a visual metaphor in the telling of a larger social story. They help to paint a picture of developments in a country that was the last in Europe to renounce communism and has set out on a demanding quest to become part of the capitalist West." Joerg Colberg reviewed the book earlier this year, which can be read
here.
Images from the book can be viewed on Galjaard's
website.
We are currently inquiring about carrying this book.
Email us if you'd like to be notified when it is available.
For more information on the event, we recommend this great video on the book exhibition at Paris Photo, where Chris Boot and Lesley Martin discuss the awards and winning books.
Paris Photo Photobook Awards 2012 from Paris Photo on Vimeo.
