Best Books 2014
Best Books 2014
Marco Delogu
Best Books picks from Photographer, publisher and artistic director of the FOTOGRAFIA Marco Delogu.
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By Roger Ballen
Thames & Hudson
With his staged photography set in asylums, slums and so on, richly layered with graffiti, drawings, animals, and found objects, Ballen has defined his unique and instantly recognizable style. With the Asylum of the Birds we are pushed further into his vision, confronting an unspeakable world. The ninety photographs of the book follow each other in a unceasing rhythm without pause for the viewer.
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By Larry Fink
powerHouse
Larry can be described as a man with a camera and a harmonica. In 1958 at the age of seventeen, he left his childhood home on Long Island and moved to a one-bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village. If you weren’t square, that was the place you’d most probably want to be. There are no Kerouac or Bourroghs in the book, just his peers. Just the beats. The book’s beautifully conceived, mixing the beautiful and damned inhabitants flowing like in a cut-up.
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By Nicolo Degiorgis
Rorhof
Without considering the importance of the matter with its social and political relevance developed in the project, the book truly shows how a photobook can be the preferred platform to exhibit a work, more than the walls of a museum will never be able to, if carefully designed like Hidden Islam is. Forty-five folding pages, black and white exteriors of commonplaces, allows the viewer to step into those buildings, revealing a improvised mosque in a country that is notable for the lack of such structures.
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By Vladimir Radunsky & Chris Raschka
New York Review Children’s Collection
A book by Vladimir Radunsky and Chris Raschka of old photographs collected, found in flea markets or in the streets, from all over the world. Showing kids in gardens, photographer's studios with different backgrounds, and grandparents houses, the portraits tell us much, and are paired with words games by Chris Raschka.
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By Thomas Roma & Giancarlo T. Roma
powerHouse
A narrative book of memories in Brooklyn, told by an old woman. The two Romas follow her voice to give us a fresco of her hometown. Simple, deep, small — but big.
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By Robin Maddock
Trolley
"The Shot Heard 'Round the World" is the famous home-run that allowed the New York Giants to beat the Dodgers. No one knows what happened to the ball, but in Underworld the story serves as a pretext for DeLillo to describe American society through faith in the ball. Similarly, Maddock spent two years following a small ping-pong ball, a solitary sheet of white paper and puddles of spilled milk through the city of Los Angeles, exploring the relationship between light and shadows in the Californian metropolis.
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By John Gossage
Radius Books
I cultivate tomatoes, I mean pomodori a grappoli. I'm Sardinian, and I live next to a pond. three good reasons to be curios about this book by John Gossage.
The Girl at the Crossing, Nullo and Sideways Glance are the three books that make up Pomodori a grappolo. Individually they contain about fifty photographs each, taking the form of three visual stories, all set between Northern Italy and Sardinia. The written pieces — two stories and one epilogue — written by Marlene Klein converse and respond to Gossage’s images, reflecting the 30 years that Klein has spent living and working in Venice. Just like tomatoes, they are in a different trim size, but when it comes to their juice the images are all the same size, functioning as a study of the way that ink on paper can inform perception. The Gossage you will find is the one you know: rigorous and yet clever approach.
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By Tod Papageorge
STANLEY/BARKER
Tod once told me that he used to go to the Studio 54 because he dated a beautiful girl that used to frequent the club. This work has been in a drawer for years, but now that Tod retired from his teacher career he can fully dedicate himself to his activity as a photographer, dividing his time between his archive and his work on Rome. The golden years of New York’s legendary nightclub are captured by Tod Papageorge with full narrative quality, but adding also something more that allows the 66 photographs in the book to turn into a visual poem encapsulating the glamour and debauchery of those almost legendary nights.
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Marco Delogu, photographer, publisher and artistic director of the
FOTOGRAFIA — International Festival of Rome. He has been exhibited in all the world: Warburg Institute, Musee de l’Elysee, Centre Pompidou, Moscow Multimedia Museum, Villa Medici among others. His last work is “The Nature of The Night.” This September he will exhibit at the MACRO Museum in Rome his latest work “The Double Light,” a work on the waiting of the sun and the moon in the city of Rome
