2018 Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards
On Friday, September 21, Paris Photo and Aperture Foundation announced the Shortlist for the 2018 Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards, celebrating the photobook’s contribution to the evolving narrative of photography, with three major categories: First PhotoBook, PhotoBook of the Year, and Photography Catalogue of the Year.
The following selected nominees are available for purchase through photo-eye.
The following selected nominees are available for purchase through photo-eye.
First PhotoBook
Photographs by M L Casteel
American Interiors depicts the psychological repercussions of war and military service through images of the interiors of cars owned by USA veterans.
Through working with veterans over a five year period, Casteel became aware of the subtle indicators of past traumatic experience. He also recognized that the condition in which we live can often be a signifier of our well-being, and that even the state of car interiors can be seen as a manifestation of human interiors.
Jasper
Photographs by Matthew Genitempo
A View of a Room
Photographs by Susan Meiselas
PhotoBook of the Year
On Abortion
And the Repercussions of Lack of Access
Photographs by Laia Abril
An Autobiography of Miss Wish
Photographs and text by Nina Berman
Seeing Deeply
Photographs by Dawoud Bey
Masahisa Fukase
Photographs by Masahisa Fukase
Halfstory Halflife
Photographs by Raymond Meeks
Behind the Glass
Photographs by Alexandra Catiere
Inversion
(Paris Edition)
Photographs by Daisuke Yokota
My Birth
Photographs, artist's book, and text by Carmen Winant
Photographs by Matthew Genitempo
Inspired by the life and work of the poet and land surveyor Frank Stanford, these photographs were taken in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas and Missouri. By capturing the region’s foggy landscapes, hermetic homes, and rugged men living in solitude in the dark woods, Jasper explores Matthew Genitempo’s fascination with running away from the everyday. The work bounces between fact and fiction, exhibiting both the reality and the myth of what it means to be truly apart from society.
A Thousand Crossings
False Positives
Photographs by Esther Hovers
False Positives is about intelligent surveillance systems. These are cameras that are said to be able to detect deviant behaviour within public space. False Positives is set around the question of normative behaviour. It aims to raise this question by basing the project on eight different anomalies. These so-called anomalies are signs in body language and movement that could indicate criminal intent. It is through these anomalies the algorithms are built and cameras are able to detect deviant behavior. The eight different anomalies were pointed out by several intelligent surveillance experts with whom the artist collaborated for this project.
Experimental Relationship Vol. 1
Photographs by Pixy Liao
"My photos explore the alternative possibilities of heterosexual relationships. They question what is the norm of heterosexual relationships. What will happen if man & woman exchange their roles of sex & roles of power. Because my boyfriend is Japanese, and I am Chinese, this project also describes a love and hate relationship. This project is an ongoing project which grows with our real relationship but is never meant to be a documentation.”
— Pixy Liao
One Wall A Web
Photographs by Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa
One Wall a Web gathers together work from two photographic series, Our Present Invention and All My Gone Life, as well as two text collages all made in, and focused on the United States. Through a mixture of writing, portraiture, landscape, and appropriated archival images, the book describes quotidian encounters with fraught desire, uneven freedom, irrational fear, and deep structural division, asking whether the historical and contemporary realities of anti-Black and gendered violence when treated as aberrations do not in fact serve to veil violence's essential function in the maintenance of “civil” society.
Guts
Photographs by Masaki Yamamoto
Masaki Yamamoto’s highly anticipated first photobook presents one of the most daring family portraits in Japanese photography.
Shot entirely in his family’s tiny apartment, with walls yellowed from cigarette smoke, broken doors and trash covering the ground, Yamamoto’s unashamed, uncompromising black-and-white photos nonetheless depict a strong and rare sense of familial intimacy and affection. Not quite dysfunctional, but decidedly atypical.
Higher
Photographs by John Edmonds
Higher by John Edmonds is a monograph spanning the first decade of his photographic practice and includes texts by Dr. Aaron Rosen, Durga Chew-Bose, and A conversation with Mickalene Thomas.
Read more about Edmonds' work online at Cultured magazine.
Read more about Edmonds' work online at Cultured magazine.
Khichdi (Kitchari)
Photographs by Nick Sethi
Taken over a 10 year period, Khichdi (Kitchari) explores India's rapidly changing identity, focusing on gender, technology, and the balance of traditional Indian and western culture. Printed in New Delhi, the book's production draws upon the seemingly haphazard yet highly resourceful nature of a place where space and proximity lead to unexpected interactions. Materials are repurposed and recycled many times over.
Photography Catalogue of the Year
The Land in Between
Photographs by Ursula Schulz-Dornburg
Ursula Schulz-Dornburg’s The Land in Between presents the complex bond between landscape and human civilization, exploring the construction of power though the built environment and its inevitable impermanence. By looking back at areas of past historical or political importance her images highlight how conflict, destruction, time and decay transforms the landscape.
A Thousand Crossings
Photographs by Sally Mann
For more than 40 years, Sally Mann has made experimental, elegiac, and hauntingly beautiful photographs that explore the overarching themes of existence: memory, desire, death, the bonds of family, and nature’s magisterial indifference to human endeavor. What unites this broad body of work—portraits, still lifes, landscapes, and other studies—is that it is all “bred of a place,” the American South.
Photographs by Susan Meiselas
A few months before the launch of her book, A Room of Their Own, The Photographers’ Gallery asked Meiselas to exhibit a print for their Touchstone programme, where visitors are invited to respond to a photograph through writing and drawing. The response card asks a simple question: “What do you see?”
This publication, A View of a Room, reproduces a selection of the responses that were submitted alongside a signed 6 x 4-inch archival print of the photograph Meiselas chose to contribute — Ritu’s Room.
PhotoBook of the Year
And the Repercussions of Lack of Access
Photographs by Laia Abril
On Abortion is the first part of Laia Abril’s new long-term project, A History of Misogyny. Abril documents and conceptualizes the dangers and damage caused by women’s lack of legal, safe and free access to abortion. She draws on the past to highlight the long, continuing erosion of women’s reproductive rights through to the present-day, weaving together questions of ethics and morality, to reveal a staggering series of social triggers, stigmas, and taboos around abortion that have been largely invisible until now.
Photographs and text by Nina Berman
An Autobiography of Miss Wish is a tale about two lives intertwined, subject and photographer, working collaboratively to create a uniquely enigmatic book, which pushes the boundaries of documentary storytelling. It is a haunting, dark story of a survivor of sex trafficking and child pornography and her struggle to survive and find physical and emotional safety, to assert herself as an artist and narrator, and to craft a life while living in a state of flashbacks, trauma and addiction.
Photographs by Dawoud Bey
Seeing Deeply offers a forty-year retrospective of the celebrated photographer’s work, from his early street photography in Harlem to his current images of Harlem gentrification. Photographs from all of Bey’s major projects are presented in chronological sequence, allowing viewers to see how the collective body of portraits and recent landscapes create an unparalleled historical representation of various communities in the United States.
Photographs by Masahisa Fukase
Among the most radical and original photographers of his generation, Masahisa Fukase was famous for The Solitude of Ravens, in which these birds of doom, in flocks or alone, blacken the pages of the book in inky, somber, calligraphic clusters. Fukase also has a lesser-known corpus of collages, self-portraits, photographs reworked as sketches, black-and-white prints, Polaroids and more. This book brings together all of his work for the very first time.
Photographs by Raymond Meeks
Over the course of multiple summers, Raymond Meeks has ventured the few miles from his rural home in the Catskill Mountain region of New York, to a single-lane bridge. Beneath the bridge, a waterfall drops sixty feet over moss-covered limestone toward a forbidding pond. The local youth have come here from time immemorial, congregating near outcroppings and around a concrete altar – a remnant of an earlier stone bridge. Most allow themselves a brief running start before launching themselves into the void, where tentative suggestions of flight mark the response to gravity.
Photographs by Alexandra Catiere
Behind the Glass takes its title from Alexandra Catiere’s series shot in Minsk and Moscow in 2005-2006. Curated and designed by Chose Commune, this book brings together photographs from this early unpublished series with additional selected images. Included is a new set of photograms; the artist’s latest camera-less experiments composed of light, sensitized paper, pebbles and grass.
(Paris Edition)
Photographs by Daisuke Yokota
Daisuke Yokota's Third Volume of INVERSION. This is the most experimental collection in Yokota's work among many that have been published, such as attempting silk screen printing on OHP film. All pages by silk screen printing.
Photographs, artist's book, and text by Carmen Winant
Combining text and image, My Birth, by Columbus, Ohio–based artist Carmen Winant (born 1983), interweaves photographs of the artist's mother giving birth to her three children with found images of other, anonymous, women undergoing the same experience. As the pictorial narrative progresses, from labor through delivery, the women's postures increasingly blend into one another, creating a collective body that strains and releases in unison.
Jurors’ Special Mention
The Sweet Flypaper of LifeText by Langston Hughes
The Sweet Flypaper of Life is a "poem" about ordinary people, about teenagers around a jukebox, about children at an open fire hydrant, about riding the subway alone at night, about picket lines and artist work spaces. This renowned, life-affirming collaboration between artist Roy DeCarava and writer Langston Hughes honors in words and pictures what the authors saw, knew and felt deeply about life in their city.