Here are three new arrivals under $30 – great little photobooks to add to your collection. Mountain Shadow Place is an inspired road trip journal, Motherland Issue 7 is a collection of stories and photographic essays about all things paranormal and Antikira is an inviting look at the small coastal town in Greece. This is the third post in the series of Great Little Photobooks Under $30 – some books are still available from the first and second installments.
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| Mountain Shadow Place by Nicholas Muellner |
Mountain Shadow Place is a documentation of a road trip from Devil's Tower National Monument in Wyoming to the Badlands National Park in South Dakota from photographer Nicholas Muellner. We experience the rich beauty of these places through Muellner's sophisticated, visually-descriptive narration, while the photographs depict them as banal tourist destinations, marred by human intervention. The tension between the natural landscape and our innate urge to exploit it is captured perfectly by Muellner, making this unsuspecting little book quite powerful. This softbound, signed monograph, limited to 100 copies, contains six digital offset and screen-printed photographs, two of which also come as poster inserts.
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| Motherland Issue 7 – Motherland |
The Motherland publication carries a strong, focused curation of articles and photography about a single topic in each of its issues. In Motherland Issue 7, the editors focus on all things paranormal — ghosts, spirits and other supernatural phenomena, as well as related topics of faith and belief. The issue contains photographs of talismans used in ceremonial exorcisms, stories and photographs of haunted houses, a fashion spread inspired by horror films and a poignant political piece about a scam in northern India cheating people out of their land rights by claiming they have passed away.
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| Antikira – Kristof Guez |
Antikyra is a small coastal town in central Greece seated on the Mediterranean Sea. Photographer Kristof Guez spent summer holidays there as a child, and in this lovely monograph, he returns to photograph Antikyra. The past is often idealized in a young child's mind, and that tension seems to be the driving force behind his photographic investigation. Are the places of our past as we remember them today? Guez's photographs are palatable and inviting — most of them including the ocean or coastline. In Antikira, Guez has memorialized the place where his sense of beauty may have first developed in soft, stunning compositions. Small half and quarter pages are bound within the book that appear to be old family snapshots of his vacations to Antikyra as a small child. –Erin Azouz