Category Archives: Book reviews

Review: Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, Nostalgia

By eyecurious | Published: 17 December 2012
I’ve always found it fascinating to see early examples of colour photography, because they inevitably reveal a world that isn’t so monochrome as all those black-and-white photographs might make you think. I’ve written about an archive of colour photographs of Depression-era America here before and now I’ve come across another even earlier archive (which also [...]
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Review: Andres Gonzalez, Somewhere

By eyecurious | Published: 26 November 2012
Andres Gonzalez’s book Somewhere is a deliberately slippery beast. As its title implies it is not about a specific place, but more about the idea of place itself. It begins and ends in an airplane, as if to make the point that it will be taking us on a series of journeys. These photographs were [...]
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10×10: Japanese Photobooks

By eyecurious | Published: 18 September 2012
2012 is turning into the year of the Japanese photobook exhibition. After Contemporary Japanese Photobooks at The Photographers’ Gallery in London, New Yorkers now have the 10×10 Japanese Photobooks Reading Room to look forward to from 28-30 September. 10×10 is a 3-day pop-up reading room sponsored by the International Center of Photography Library with 100 [...]
Also posted in Events, Japanese photography, Photo-books | 5 Comments

Review: Nina Poppe, Ama

By eyecurious | Published: 25 May 2012
If I had to choose a single word to describe Nina Poppe’s book Ama it would be ‘modest.’ It is not a ‘clever’ book, nor a powerful one. It is quiet and does little to promote itself (the book’s open spine design which does not allow for text guarantees that it will be all but [...]
Also posted in European photography, Japanese photography, Photo-books | 4 Comments

Review: Roberto Schena, SP 67

By eyecurious | Published: 19 April 2012
The road trip is one of the primal photographic gestures. It has given rise to some of the most celebrated series of photographs as well as to countless clichéd and forgettable pictures. Thanks to—or maybe even because of—Robert Frank’s ten thousand mile drive across America which led to The Americans, it also feels like a [...]
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Review: Will Steacy (ed.), Photographs Not Taken

By eyecurious | Published: 19 March 2012
We live in the age of photo proliferation. Digital technology in all its forms (cameras, phones, computers, the Internet) has made photography the most democratic of media, both in terms of making and disseminating images. And they are everywhere, all the time: on our TVs, our computer screens, our smartphones and in our streets. Of [...]
Also posted in Events, Photo-books, Photo-journalism | 1 Comment

Review: Donald Weber, Interrogations

By eyecurious | Published: 16 March 2012
  The title of Donald Weber’s latest book, Interrogations, is very appropriate: both because they are the book’s subject, but also because this book raises a number of difficult questions which it deliberately refuses to answer. Set in Russia and the Ukraine, the book is made up of a series of portraits of people being [...]
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Photobooks 2011: a view from Japan

By eyecurious | Published: 9 January 2012
As 2011 came to an end, I (somewhat foolishly) decided to compile the many ‘best photobooks of 2011′ lists that were popping up all over the internet to see whether there were any books that were consistently getting all the plaudits. The result is the previous post, a meta-list drawn compiling a total of 52 [...]
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Naoya Hatakeyama: a book and an exhibition

By eyecurious | Published: 16 December 2011
My most recent trip to Japan in October happily coincided with Naoya Hatakeyama’s first retrospective at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. Regular readers will know that I am a big fan of his work – and there is quite a lot of it – so I was curious to see how this exhibition, entitled [...]
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Another best books of 2011 list…

By eyecurious | Published: 13 December 2011
I have given up, caved in, admitted defeat. Although the world does not need it, the temptation was just too great, so I have gone ahead and compiled a selection of my favourite books of the year. Instead of giving you a top 10 I decided to humbly borrow the format of the Oscars and [...]
Also posted in Collecting, Photo-books | 6 Comments