Lisetta Carmi’s I Travestiti (Essedi Editions, 1972) is a disquieting book, and at times, looking at it feels like staring a little too long. Carmi’s images grant visual access to a marginalized group living on a rough fringe of 1970s Genoa society. The book succeeds in conveying the turbulent lives of these women as they pursue identity.

Carmi photographs in various modes, from constructed portraits to on-the-street-scenes. Overall, the images possess a tough naturalism that spares no spot, line, or wrinkle. This naturalism creates an unsettling contrast between the … Read more.

In our conversation with artist Keliy Anderson-Staley, we talk about working with the collodion process, editing images for her first monograph, and what she’s doing after publication of On a Wet Bough. Keliy has exhibited her work for over a decade in solo and group exhibitions at institutions including the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Russia; the California Museum of Photography; and the Southeast Museum of Photography. Her work is in the collections of Portland Museum of Art, Maine; the Library of Congress; and Cedar … Read more.

Up until November 2012, when MACK released a new edition in facsimile, Kodachrome by Luigi Ghirri (Contrejour, Paris, 1978) had been out of print for decades. The book was little seen and perhaps not as discussed as is its due, at least in America.

Parr and Badger cite Ghirri as a major influence on the rise of color photography in postwar European photography, likening the impact of Kodachrome in Europe to William Eggelston’s Guide in America (Volume I, p. 231). I agree with Parr and Badger’s description that Kodachrome is, “A … Read more.

File this under obvious, true, and worth repeating: Books are meant to be touched. Read all the reviews and watch all the preview videos you want, but the only way to truly know a book is to hold it in your hot little hands. This is especially the case for really good photobooks, ones in which the photographs and the book format support and inform each other.

A couple of years ago, I started thinking about this little truism in relation to classic photobooks. In 2011, the folks at … Read more.

Check out my review of Jonathan Hollingsworth’s new book, Left Behind: Life and Death on the U.S. Border (Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2012) that appears on the Fraction Magazine site. In Left Behind, it’s interesting to see connections in Jonathan’s two books; this newest work as well as his first book, What We Think Now (self-published, 2006), both have to do with what it means to be/become American. In What We Think Now, this becoming plays out in time, with Hollingsworth giving stage to young Americans’ thoughts about … Read more.