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Photographs by Hiroshi Watanabe
Selected as one of the Best Books of 2014 by:
Out West
By Kyler Zeleny
Sarah Bradley
Anne Kelly
"Oh well. If the dam bursting on our heads is inevitable, we might as well make some photographs while waiting for it. Watanabe's been busy as usual doing just that, and The Day The Dam Collapses collects some of his recent work. Watanabe has switched in recent years from black and white to color, and he's given up film for digital, at least for this book. But the photographic style he developed in the mid 1990s has remained consistently his own. That's the contemplative streak I mentioned earlier. It's always been in his photos, and it's in this project too."—From the review by Blake Andrews
Anne Kelly
"Oh well. If the dam bursting on our heads is inevitable, we might as well make some photographs while waiting for it. Watanabe's been busy as usual doing just that, and The Day The Dam Collapses collects some of his recent work. Watanabe has switched in recent years from black and white to color, and he's given up film for digital, at least for this book. But the photographic style he developed in the mid 1990s has remained consistently his own. That's the contemplative streak I mentioned earlier. It's always been in his photos, and it's in this project too."—From the review by Blake Andrews
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By Kyler Zeleny
"Out West takes us with Zeleny as he tours the Canadian West visiting communities with populations of 1,000 or less (frequently far, far less). His superb essay, which ends the book, outlines not only his journey, but his deeply felt ideas about the rural as a vanishing habitat. For those engaging with Out West for the first time I suggest starting at the end with The Rural Unstuck. Zeleny deserves credit not only for an illuminating collection of photographs, but for eloquently written exposition as well."—From the review by Christopher J. Johnson
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i
By Eamonn Doyle
By Eamonn Doyle
i was also selected as Book of the Week by Martin Parr. Read his statement.
A Perpetual Season
By Grégoire Pujade-Lauraine
Selected as one of the Best Books of 2014 by:
Alex F. Webb & Lewis Chalpin
"Tightly edited and smartly designed, Grégoire Pujade-Lauraine’s A Perpetual Season is a psychological short story that leads us through this bleak city. Intimate, yet claustrophobic, order seems to be all around, but the faces of the city’s inhabitants are marked by confusion and bewilderment. Trapped in a labyrinth of their own making, they are left circling and searching." —From the review by Adam Bell
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A Perpetual Season
By Grégoire Pujade-Lauraine
Selected as one of the Best Books of 2014 by:
Alex F. Webb & Lewis Chalpin
"Tightly edited and smartly designed, Grégoire Pujade-Lauraine’s A Perpetual Season is a psychological short story that leads us through this bleak city. Intimate, yet claustrophobic, order seems to be all around, but the faces of the city’s inhabitants are marked by confusion and bewilderment. Trapped in a labyrinth of their own making, they are left circling and searching." —From the review by Adam Bell
Selected as one of the Best Books of 2014 by:
Manik Katyal
Eric Miles
"The attire of the climbers is initially startling. Men cling to drain pipes in Plimsolls and trousers, clamber up ornate decorative work barefoot, wedge themselves between pillars in suits and dress shoes, looking all the more strange in their 1930s street clothes. Occasionally, a policeman shouts feebly from the ground like a scene out of Keystone Cops. Sometimes funny, other times outright goofy, the photographs never shake an unsettling eeriness that accompanies the deep blacks and extreme variants of grays in the edifices. At times, the climber can be hard to spot within the photograph; periodically they appear like apparitions on spires, hanging precariously off gutters and window ledges."—From the review by Sarah Bradley
Manik Katyal
Eric Miles
"The attire of the climbers is initially startling. Men cling to drain pipes in Plimsolls and trousers, clamber up ornate decorative work barefoot, wedge themselves between pillars in suits and dress shoes, looking all the more strange in their 1930s street clothes. Occasionally, a policeman shouts feebly from the ground like a scene out of Keystone Cops. Sometimes funny, other times outright goofy, the photographs never shake an unsettling eeriness that accompanies the deep blacks and extreme variants of grays in the edifices. At times, the climber can be hard to spot within the photograph; periodically they appear like apparitions on spires, hanging precariously off gutters and window ledges."—From the review by Sarah Bradley
"Ah yes, the photos. They're quite entertaining. Chesser counters between formal portraiture and set pieces in an entertaining mix. He mixes straight landscape and human activity, and along the way manages to convey the story of Coyote Camp, or at least some of it. His use of light is exquisite. If it's sometimes overly sentimental, that can be excused by the subject matter. This is the new Utopia remember, the great un-Spinning. It must be presented as Heroic. Most importantly the photos convey an intimacy dependent on exclusive access, as Chesser had to track down the tribe and then live among them for many months to capture these scenes. The investment pays off with the photographs."—From the review by Blake Andrews
Selected as one of the Best Books of 2014 by:
Sara Skorgan Teigen
"Geert Goiris has struck again, following last year’s Lying Awake with a new book of only 30 or so haunting photographs — landscapes, trees, rock formations, man-made objects and images of people who look like they are waiting for something to happen, or maybe it just happened? The quiet tension about the pictures reminds me of the French TV series The Returned. Both get under my skin and I don’t want to look away."—From the Book of the Week pick by Tricia Gabriel
Carpoolers
By Alejandro Cartagena
Sara Skorgan Teigen
"Geert Goiris has struck again, following last year’s Lying Awake with a new book of only 30 or so haunting photographs — landscapes, trees, rock formations, man-made objects and images of people who look like they are waiting for something to happen, or maybe it just happened? The quiet tension about the pictures reminds me of the French TV series The Returned. Both get under my skin and I don’t want to look away."—From the Book of the Week pick by Tricia Gabriel
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By Alejandro Cartagena
Selected as one of the Best Books of 2014 by:
Sarah Bradley
Cristina de Middel
Jeffrey Ladd
Colin Pantall
Martin Parr
"Cartagena photographed the cars from a pedestrian bridge above a six-lane highway that led to the wealthy suburbs of Monterey, a continuation of his fascination with the relationship between the urban and suburban, between the rich and the poor, the dynamics of a place where the workers are trucked in by the day to build the houses, tend the gardens and clean the swimming pools of Monterrey’s suburban rich."—From the review by Colin Pantall
Sarah Bradley
Cristina de Middel
Jeffrey Ladd
Colin Pantall
Martin Parr
"Cartagena photographed the cars from a pedestrian bridge above a six-lane highway that led to the wealthy suburbs of Monterey, a continuation of his fascination with the relationship between the urban and suburban, between the rich and the poor, the dynamics of a place where the workers are trucked in by the day to build the houses, tend the gardens and clean the swimming pools of Monterrey’s suburban rich."—From the review by Colin Pantall
