Best Books 2015: Gerry Badger

Best Books 2015 Best Books 2015 Gerry Badger 2015 Best Books picks from Gerry Badger.

Fire in Cairo By Matthew Connors SPBH Editions Fire in Cairo weaves Connors’ trademark street portraits with urban landscapes that catch the chaos, excitement, despair and hope of the recent Egyptian Revolution in a particularly oblique and poetic way.	Columbia Road By Joanna Neurath Hoxton Mini Press London’s famous flower market has been photographed by Joanna Neurath for years, and Columbia Road fulfills the first criterion of a successful photobook for me. It contains some extremely good and intriguing photographs.	You Haven't Seen Their Faces By Daniel Mayrit Riot Books This clever protest book, employing surveillance camera techniques to photograph not anti-capitalist rioters but some of the most powerful figures in the City of London, asks some relevant and uncomfortable questions about today’s world.
Himmelstrasse By Brian Griffith Browns Editions Brian Griffin’s sober, haunting book documents the railway tracks in Poland, some now abandoned, that once transported people to the Nazi death camps, adding a layer of poetic history to a Bechers-type scenario.	Roots & Bonds By Regina Anzenberger AnzenbergerEdition You don’t often see a new approach to photography of the natural landscape, but Regina Anzenberger, using a combination of straight and painted photography, shows an imaginative, somewhat disturbing view of the woods around Vienna.	Bottom of the Lake By Christian Patterson Koenig Books Christian Patterson’s Bottom of the Lake revisits his hometown of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, using a 1973 telephone directory as an interactive base for his usual mixture of different photographic genres, both appropriated and shot by the artist.
Lago By Ron Jude MACK Ron Jude’s view of the California desert of his childhood, centered round a desert lake, may be cryptic and inconclusive, but it is also poetic and intriguing, and like Regina Anzenberger’s woods, somewhat disturbing.	Chizu (The Map) By Kikuju Kawada Akio Nagasawa Publishing I wouldn’t normally select a new edition of an old book on a top ten listing, but it is good to get Kawada’s masterpiece, one of the greatest of all photobooks, in its original form.	Ma Vie Va Changer By Patricia Almeida and David-Alexandre Guéniot Ghost This collection of press clippings and vernacular imagery, compiled during the recent financial crisis and made into a “family album” for the authors’ children, also functions as a quirky, existential protest book.

Gerry Badger was born in Northampton, England, and is a photographer, architect, and photographic critic. Among his books are Collecting Photography (2002), The Genius of Photography (2007), The Pleasures of Good Photographs (2010), winner of the ICP Infinity Writer’s Award, 2011, and (with Martin Parr), The Photobook: A History (3 vols., 2004, 2006 and 2014), winner of Deutsche Fotobuch Preis and the Kraszna Krausz Prize in 2007. His first photobook, It Was a Grey Day: Photographs of Berlin, has just been published.







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