Saturday, February 6
reviewed by Charles Dee Mitchell Photographer Thomas Dworzak first went to Georgia to cover the civil war in 1993. Several years later after becoming a member of Magnum, he returned to make Tbilisi his home...

Friday, February 5
reviewed by Antone Dolezal Taken between 2003 and 2008, Mitch Epstein?s images in American Power are inherently political. Not only is this a book of photographs, it is a story of a photographer operating in a state of Patriot Act paranoia, where setting up one?s view camera can create an eminent sense of confrontation in a landscape already violently reconstructed by an entity much larger than any individual...

Thursday, February 4
reviewed by Alex Sweetman Violet Isle, color photographs by Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb, was published in 2009 by Radius books, a distinctive new not-for-profit publisher of books of ?artistic and cultural value.? Texts are in Spanish and English...

Tuesday, February 2
reviewed by John Mathews The Contact Sheet provides a brief insight into the editing processes of forty international photographers by compiling their working contact sheets from shoots that have resulted in a single definitive or iconic image. The book?s layout is straightforward and the text on each of the photographers is concise, insightful and accessibly presented in four languages...

Monday, January 25
reviewed by George Slade Look closely at this book, as you would at one of those 'name ten things that are wrong with this picture' illustrations in a kid's activity book (or the recent Photoshopped image pairs LIFE publishes as 'picture puzzles'). There are a number of things 'wrong' with it...

Monday, January 25
reviewed by Charles Dee Mitchell Artlessness is an oxymoronic virtue. No artist wants to produce work truly lacking in artistic value, nor can a true artist pretend to be the naïve producer of ingenuous work free from any historical, aesthetic awareness...

Tuesday, January 19
reviewed by Charles Dee Mitchell Thoughts on the genre of the still life follow a sad trajectory: abundance - overabundance - excess - vanity - decay - death. The Dutch established themselves as masters of the genre centuries ago, and Dutch photographer Holger Niehaus is the latest to put the 'morte' into nature morte...

Monday, January 18
reviewed by Susan Burnstine Ordinary Lives, is a remarkable collection of images from three of Rania Matar's interconnected bodies of work: The Aftermath Of War, The Veil and The Forgotten People. The first focuses on the aftermath of the Lebanese Civil war that lasted from 1975-1990, the war between Hezbollah and Israel in the Summer of 2006 and the conflict between the Lebanese army and suspected terrorists who infiltrated Nahr al-Bared refugee camp in Tripoli in 2007...

Monday, January 18
reviewed by George Slade By Fredrik Marsh's accounting, there's a lot of ruin in Dresden. Or should I say 'ruins,' as in time's effect on architecture, culture's physical artifacts, over centuries? Is Dresden a ruined city, or a city of ruins? Neither, probably, but both in this version of its story...

Monday, January 18
reviewed by Sarah Bradley Simon Roberts produced the images for We English during a year visiting popular recreational sites across England. It's an intriguing way to investigate a country, one which served my family well when living in England while I was 13 (we actually visited some of Robert's locations)...

Friday, December 18
reviewed by Shane Lavalette Viviane Sassen's Flamboya brings together photographs from her recent visits to Africa. Though predominantly raised in the Netherlands, from the ages of two to five Sassen lived in a Kenyan village with her father, a doctor who worked at a neighboring polio clinic...

Thursday, December 17
reviewed by Douglas Stockdale On the surface, the subjects of Hisashi Shimizu's book Portraits of Silence are soldiers who perished during the Iraq conflict, indirect portraits developed from the perspective of the soldier's parents. But Portraits of Silence is also about the desire to maintain the memory of a beloved, and the fight to keep a tangible presence of who they were while dealing with the grief of their loss...

Wednesday, December 16
reviewed by George Slade Whether Barnes's work is about logic, instinct, nature, or artifice is a question that should be arbitrated in higher courts than this. Zoologists, museum professionals, biologists, semioticians, linguists, and philosophers should address the implications of these images...

Wednesday, December 16
reviewed by Nicholas Chiarella Terri Weifenbach's Another Summer is a delicate and unassuming book, even before one opens it. Her ninth volume of photographs and her first with The Thunderstorm Press, the 5'x7...

Wednesday, December 16
reviewed by John Mathews Trinity consists largely of musings and historical snippets about the shifting social- political climate of the Arizona and New Mexico deserts over the last four hundred years. The text by Charles Bowden explores a diverse range of subjects including the treatment of native peoples, mining booms and wars to its use as a nuclear testing site...

Monday, December 7
reviewed by Douglas Stockdale Bette Gordon's famous, perhaps infamous, 1983 independent film Variety evolved from an earlier series of cinematic narrative photographs created by Nan Goldin. While a few of the photographs from Goldin's Variety were incorporated in her earlier opus, The Ballard of Sexual Dependency, this is the first cohesive publication of the entire Variety project...

Monday, December 7
reviewed by Sara Terry Bruce Connew's limited edition of On the Way to an Ambush is a clever bit of packaging. Originally published by Victoria University Press in 1999, Connew is offering what his website calls the 'last 100-copy limited edition, multi-media' version of the book...

Tuesday, December 1
reviewed by Richard Gordon In the past few years some of Robert Adams's seminal and hard to find (or very expensive) early books have been reprinted. The latest effort is an expanded version of Summer Nights, now re-titled, Summer Nights, Walking...

Monday, November 30
reviewed by Shane Lavalette Iris Editions Ltd., the collaborative effort of NYC-based Kristopher Graves and London-based Sergio Fernández, has released the first of what is likely to be a remarkable series of luxury edition large-format books...

Saturday, November 28
reviewed by Douglas Stockdale Spending time with Duane Michals recent book, 50, was essentially re-experiencing much of my own photographic life, having come of photographic age with his Somnambulistic period. His fascination with dreams, dreamlike states and dream-walking precedes our current interest with making connections to memories...

Saturday, November 28
reviewed by George Slade This little book has got me all riled up. It purports to be about nothing-things that do not happen, entry zero in an imagined sequence, no captions or dates, and a text that, translated into English from Italian, has only the barest hints of meaning...

Tuesday, November 24
reviewed by George Slade My dear, departed friend and mentor Ted Hartwell (1933-2007), the founding curator of the photography department at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, assembled a collection that includes several thousand prints that reflected Ted's passion for 'pictures that tell a story.' He was drawn to great photojournalists and documentary photographers who chose to inform the world about truths going untold...

Tuesday, November 24
reviewed by Charles Dee Mitchell Thanks to the ever-increasing amounts of artificial light that floods our cities, photographers such as Brassai, Weegee, and Saul Leiter, along with many others, have chosen the night as their subject matter. But on November 5, 1965, Swiss photographer Rene Burri had nighttime thrust upon him...

Thursday, November 19
reviewed by Sara Terry The first image in Shelley Calton's Hard Knocks, is a wonderful set-up for the brief, wild ride into the kinetic world of women's roller derby that is to come. Titled 'Agent Belligerent,' the opening portrait is of a woman who looks set for combat - and she is...

Wednesday, November 18
reviewed by Charles Dee Mitchell Rome. Winter, early 21st century...

Tuesday, November 17
reviewed by Douglas Stockdale There is something amiss with Deanna Templeton's self published book, 17 Days, the photo documentary she created while accompanying a product promotional tour through Europe in 2008. I am bedeviled by all that bothers me, and I think that it is best described as an overall unevenness in the body of work, almost like a Flickr download of vacation snapshots...

Tuesday, November 17
reviewed by George Slade Accompanying this wry volume's many accomplishments, Reiner Riedler deserves credit for reminding us that the United States does not monopolize the global marketplace for vicarious experiences available at cost. Yes, Orlando and Las Vegas hold places of honor in this collection...

Monday, November 16
reviewed by Richard Gordon Edward Hopper & Company is a beautiful book: elegant and restrained, intelligent as the exhibition it records. The exhibit, now closed, was a treat for the eye and the mind...

Tuesday, November 10
reviewed by Aline Smithson I recently sat in a darkened screening room, tears streaming down my face, as I watched the documentary, Changing the Truth, about photographer Gloria Baker Feinstein and how, inspired by a photo workshop in Africa, she returned to adopt an entire Ugandan orphanage. Full disclosure here, Feinstein is a friend of mine, and I have watched with amazement and pride as she created Change the Truth, a non-profit organization that has transformed the lives of countless Ugandan orphans...

Monday, November 9
reviewed by Shane Lavalette Published on the occasion of her Spring 2008 exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Colnaghi, Roni Horn's catalog Bird highlights a selection of close-up studio portraits of taxidermied Icelandic birds, a typology that Horn worked on for more than ten years. The usually wild animals are each seen here set in front of white backdrops, lit evenly and shown from behind, a revealing point of view that somehow transforms the birds into strangely beautiful, non-figurative surfaces...

Thursday, November 5
reviewed by Antone Dolezal A young man with straight posture and a broad smile stands wearing a sheath with several knives and holding an animal corpse in his arms. He is a slaughterhouse worker, and judging from his body language, he takes immense pride in his work...

Tuesday, November 3
reviewed by George Slade The astounding thing about Maggie Taylor is that she pushes forward by reaching backward. It was a treat while looking at the early images in this book to recall that at one point my Yale classmate (an undergraduate philosophy major and freshman admirer of Chaucer's smale foweles) was making fairly straightforward images of collected objects...

Tuesday, November 3
reviewed by Richard Gordon Circus is a beautifully crafted book, as is always the case with any offering by The Eakins Press. The question remains as to whether all the effort and expense of beautiful reproduction and classically understated, intelligent book design (by Catherine Waters) was worth it...

Wednesday, October 28
reviewed by Charles Dee Mitchell "Eddie Adams," writes his widow Alyssa Adams in her Author's Note to Vietnam, "would never had let this book be published if he were alive." It is a strange way to open a monograph on one of the most honored photojournalists of the Vietnam era.

Tuesday, October 27
reviewed by Shane Lavalette With an open-ended book commission from Charlotte Cotton of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, artist Shannon Ebner decided to approach the work with the innovative design team Dexter Sinister (a.k.a. David Reinfurt and Stuart Bailey) and produced what is perhaps one of the most intriguing photographic books to surface this year.

Monday, October 26
reviewed by Susan Burnstine In this latest monograph, Josef Hoflehner takes us on a far more buoyant, and perhaps complex, journey than any of his former works. The images in Jet Airliner express the childlike wonder many of us experienced as we gazed toward the sky and caught an exhilarating glimpse of something that amazed us for the very first time.

Thursday, October 22
reviewed by Eddie Marsman A little gem containing exactly 29 images, all of them in B&W, all of them showing female backs and occiputs. Which is basically all there is to say with certainty about the content of Bombay Beauties...

Wednesday, October 21
reviewed by George Slade Capitolio—a district in central Caracas. Caracas—the capital and, with over three million residents, the largest city of República Bolivariana de Venezuela (Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, the country's official name since 1999)...

Tuesday, October 20
reviewed by Alex Sweetman American Surveillance is an important, nervous book. In it, photographer Richard Gordon takes a hard look at America, and America, literally and ironically, looks back—in the form of the fixed, vacant, glass-eye stare of video surveillance cameras...

Thursday, October 15
reviewed by Charles Dee Mitchell British photographer Martin Parr's previously recorded trip to the beach was to the Liverpool suburb of New Brighton, a holiday spot well past its sell-by date when he made his mid-1980's visits. In The Last Resort, his monograph of those visits, he captured the English working class having a desperate go at enjoying themselves, their white skin for the most part impervious to what sun there was...

Wednesday, October 14
reviewed by Susan Burnstine Shoot, Photography Of The Moment is a compelling look at a wave of photographers who deliberately present seemingly offhand images in a fine art or editorial context, and thus strive to create 'perfectly imperfect' images. The photographers presented in this book are from all over the world and do not have a unified approach, but all are influenced by a movement that began twenty-five years ago with the personal documentary work of Stephen Shore and Nan Goldin...

Tuesday, October 13
reviewed by Aline Smithson My first reaction to Dutch photographer Otto Snoek's new book, Why Not, was that Rotterdam was off my travel list. Even so, it's immediately evident that Mr...

Monday, October 12
reviewed by George Slade As a rule, I'm a fan of the built environment. The choices and structures we make as a species are bewildering, arrogant, inorganic, and full of illusions about what is necessary to allow our continued evolution...

Wednesday, October 7
reviewed by Alex Sweetman Douglas Holleley has written a book that every photo-educator should read: Your Assignment: Photography, described as an interactive resource for students and teachers of photography. To my knowledge, it is the only book that speaks intelligently about the role and meaning of photo-assignments, some of which are routine across the field, and it does so in lucid, plain English...

Tuesday, October 6
reviewed by Charles Dee Mitchell Sushma Prasad is an assistant clerk to the Cabinet Secretary of the State of Bihar, India. Her desk is relatively neat, but behind her is a chaotic pile of irretrievable facts buried in hundreds of tattered paper files. Prasad is one of fifty civil servants Jan Banning photographed in Bolivia, France, Yemen, Russia, Liberia, India, China, and Texas...

Friday, October 2
reviewed by Richard Gordon 2nd Tour Hope I Don't Die is at once a hauntingly beautiful, passionately engaged, angry, and a necessary book. Few are. This is The Disasters of War for first decade of a relentlessly creepingly, creepy century...

From Rixon Reed The phenomenon of books-on-demand has come on strong in the past few years as an inexpensive way to self-publish photobooks. Without the financial pressures of commercial publishing...

From Rixon Reed Photography Book Now is Blurb's brilliant annual book competition for print-on-demand books. The following is an interview with PBN's lead judge, Darius Himes, co-founder of Radius Books, by photo-eye Director, Rixon Reed...