Jon Rafman is a Canadian artist and filmmaker based in Montreal. He recently gave a talk about his work entitled “In Search of the Virtual Sublime” at the Gaité Lyrique, a new space devoted to digital culture in Paris. I met up with Jon in a café near the Jardin du Luxembourg to discuss Google Street View, street photography, the cyberflâneur and what the future looks like.

How did you start working in the digital space?

After I graduated I discovered a community of artists on the social bookmarking site del.icio.us. It really felt that an incredible artistic dialogue was taking place informally: a new vernacular was being formed online. There was so much energy to it. The dialogue was so exciting, mixing humour and irony, critique and celebration. Del.icio.us was the platform on which I really started working with the Internet. At this point Facebook and Tumblr have pretty much replaced it.

I had known about early net art but I was never attracted to its glitchy aesthetic. So when I discovered this community I felt like I had found what I had been searching for all through art school. Del.icio.us led me to various different collectives like Paintfx. That is the period when I started my Google Street View project.

The project started out as PDF books. And then I started to print out the images just like photographs. I experimented with the printing for a while and eventually decided to print the images as large format C-prints. In 2009 the art blog Art Fag City asked me to write an essay, and that was when the project really took off, but I already had a huge archive of material by that stage. The 9-eyes tumblr blog came directly out of that. I had already been working with Google Street View (GSV) for one or two years when I created 9-eyes.

What was your process to find the locations and images that you used?

At first it was just long, arduous surf sessions. I went to places I wanted to visit, mainly in America (GSV had not been launched in many countries at the time), but not in a systematic way. As the project grew, I learned certain tricks. For example the best place to go for images is to check where the Google cars are and to follow those. Otherwise, Google may have removed any ‘anomalies’, which often make the most interesting images.

Once the project went viral I started getting tons of submissions from people. Some of these I used directly and some would act as a departure point to search for images.

What were you looking for specifically?

I was working a bit like a street photographer: keeping an open mind and responding to my intuition. The process was really about editing down. The entire project is a process of subtraction: since everything has already been captured on GSV, it is about editing down until you find the core, essential moments. I think it could be considered as a major editing project.

Are there any online GSV communities or forums that you use to find images?

There is a forum for pretty much anything you can think of. There is a forum where people only collect images of prostitutes, some of which I used in 9-eyes. I don’t like fetishizing labour. I don’t want to play up the amount of time I spend finding these images. This can become a kind of artistic crutch. The greatest works of art for me can be a single gesture that took very little time at all.

Even though this project is inherently time consuming, I don’t want that to be its central focus. It could easily have become an endurance piece, a kind of artistic marathon. If I had an algorithm to find all these amazing images, I think I would be equally as happy.

Take Duchamp’s ready-mades: they changed art. If everything can be art, then what is art? I see that as the healthiest state for art to be in: questioning its very nature.

How conscious were you of specific street photographers’ styles when taking these images?

I was very aware of photographic history when working on this project. I really believe that photography was the medium of the twentieth century, because of the ambiguity surrounding the question of whether it was or was not art, due to photography’s mechanical nature. I saw GSV in some way as the ultimate conclusion of the medium of photography: the world being constantly photographed from every perspective all the time. As if photography had become an indifferent, neutral god observing the world.

The perception of reality associated with photography is very modern. In the past, representations in the form of images were always imbued with a certain magical quality. The photograph shows a world that is empty of that. It is just a reflection of the surface of things. In that way the photograph is the perfect embodiment of our perception of the modern world. More than specific photographic history, I was thinking of photography from a philosophical point of view.

Most of your work deals with digital media of some kind. Do you consider yourself to be a digital artist?

For a while the term “Internet-aware” was used in relation to artists working with the Internet. Nobody was happy with the term, or with “net artists” which felt too ghettoising. In the same way, many people do not feel comfortable with the term “new media artist”, because it implies a kind of fetishisation of new technology.

I would prefer to be recognised simply as an artist. Unless you are very specific to a medium, which I’m not, I don’t think it is necessary to add these labels. I’m fine with championing net art, but I don’t want to be wedded to it forever.

Take Elad Lassry for example. He is one of the most successful young photographers that I know, and in some way I think that is because he doesn’t position his work as photography but as art. I have a lot of respect for those ‘purists’ that are attached to the formal qualities of their medium, but I don’t want to be associated too closely with a particular medium as I’m interested in exploring many different approaches.

There are other artists, including Michael Wolf and Doug Rickard, who have worked with Google Street View. Do you see GSV as a territory where there is only room for one or do you see it as a vast territory that more and more artists are likely to explore?

GSV is in the zeitgeist and it is a vast territory to explore. In a way I’m surprised that there haven’t been more artists working with it. We all have different methods of working. For example, Michael Wolf photographs the screen to make his images, whereas I think that Doug Rickard removes all traces of Google from the images: the symbols, the Google copyright. My process is more akin to the ready-made.

You have also referred to the flâneur in relation to your work. How does this term that is generally associated with nineteenth century art in Paris relate to your practice?

I’m very interested in the notion of the flâneur. The lack of history in this new post-internet age is making it harder to have a sense of self. The Internet has already become so ubiquitous, that it is now a banal part of our reality.

In Internet years things are forgotten so quickly. The importance of history in building a sense of self is one of the main themes running through my work. Many of my projects focus on very marginal sub-cultures such as gaming (ed. Codes of Honor, for example). They feel the lack of a sense of self acutely because their culture can die out any day. The game is everything to them but from one the day to the next the culture of that game becomes obsolete.

The reason I tie in the flâneur is because I want to find the connection between the cyberflâneur and the flâneur of the Parisian arcades of the late nineteenth century. On one level the comparison is absurd, but on another level it is very apt. In the same way that Internet cultures die off, so did the arcades of Paris.

People talk about how the Internet age is so new, and the idea that technology has changed everything. I think it is very important to see that many of these things existed in different forms in the past. For instance, the information overload that is thought of as defining the Internet era dates back to early modern times and the emergence of the modern city.

The NYTimes recently published an article by Evgeny Morosov about the death of the cyberflâneur. Morosov makes the point that in the age of social media, web surfing is essentially over, that the information we get from the Internet is essentially pre-digested. Do you agree with that view?

People often ask me what the future is going to look like… I’m not really sure why… maybe simply because I work with new technologies.

In the past we relied on dystopian and utopian views of the future. The future was thought of as fundamentally different from the present. Today, there is a sense that the future is going to be a lot more banal, that we are already living in the future (like with the phone that you are recording this conversation with), that the future is going to be more of the same… more apps and technologies that are designed to mediate and ‘improve’ our experience of reality. It is essentially a more Facebook-like future. This is very different from the early Internet, which was more like an exploration of a vast unknown territory.

Note: Jon Rafman’s latest exhibition, MMXII BNPJ, opens at American Medium in New York on May 5.

Related posts:

1. Rewriting history
2. Notes on 2010

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 quintessentially American exercise. The term also has an epic quality: it conjures up the idea of a seemingly never-ending journey. With his book SP 67, the Italian photographer Roberto Schena has played with the mythology of the road trip to explore a short (13km) stretch of road running through the mountains in northern Italy.

The books cover sets the mood: the landscape is wintry and barren and the air seems to be heavy with moisture. This is a book that is all about atmosphere. Although its title and endpapers (a reproduction of a map of this mountain road) seem to place importance on the particular location that Schena has chosen for this project, its subtitle, La strada della tramontana scura (The road of the dark north wind), is more revelatory of its nature. The book is structured like a drive from East to West along the SP 67, one almost entirely shrouded in a thick fog which only allows for glimpses of the surrounding landscape.

Most of the images in SP 67 are technically landscape photographs, but they reveal very little… the odd curve in the road… the foliage that surrounds it… always obscured by the incessant fog. This unsettling visual backdrop is punctuated by the odd animal apparition. This is what gives the book its rhythm: a pig running along a ridge on the horizon, a closeup of a horse’s head, a goat or some dogs picked out of the darkness by the car’s headlights. This creates the sense that this world belongs to animals rather than to men. This road seems to run through a parallel universe, a place that we recognise but where space and time are distorted and unfamiliar (another reviewer compared Schena’s world to that of a Murakami novel).

While Schena has undeniably created a heavily atmospheric world with this work, I found it to be a little too impenetrable. SP 67 is a slippery book that left me with a lingering sense of frustration. Like a dream that you awake from feeling unsettled, but, no matter how hard you try, you just cannot remember.

Roberto Schena, SP 67 (Rome: Punctum, 112 pages, 51 colour plates, 2012).

Rating: Worth a look

Related posts:

1. Review: Lewis Koch, Touchless Automatic Wonder
2. Review: Adriaan van der Ploeg, Mont Purgatoire
3. Review: Valerio Spada, Gomorrah Girl

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 course, this state of affairs is not as new as we might think—it has been in place since Walter Benjamin and his age of mechanical reproduction—but digital technology has led this proliferation to take off exponentially.

The impact of this is clear, even in traditional, ‘purist’ photography circles. In 2007 the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne created a crowd-sourced exhibition entitled We Are All Photographers Now, allowing anyone to upload their photographs to be included in the show. More recently Europe’s biggest photo-festival, the Rencontres d’Arles, centred on an exhibition entitled From Here On, a kind of manifesto for the age of the online image (“Now we’re a species of editors. We all recycle, clip and cut, remix and upload. We can make images do anything.”) where much of the work was made by artists appropriating or collecting other people’s images. Even Elliot Erwitt has been saying that more pictures are better than one.  So what a relief to open a photobook (am I allowed to call it that?) and discover that it does not contain a single picture: the cover’s ‘empty’ frame is the closest thing to an actual photograph.

Photographs Not Taken is a collection of essays about photographs that, for one reason or another, did not end up being taken. The writer and photographer Will Steacy, who edited the volume, asked an eclectic group of photographers (Emmet Gowin, Tim Hetherington, Laurel Nakadate and Jamel Shabazz all feature to give you an idea of the mix) to “abandon the conventional tools needed to make a photograph–camera, lens, film—and instead make a photograph using words.” The book is both a collection of opportunities missed, of attempts to conjure up in words those images that got away, but also a look into the psychology of the photographer and their ethics, reflexes, and methods.

Naturally many of these non-photographs were not taken because of an ethical or moral decision by the photographer, a decision that photojournalists must face on a day-to-day basis. Interestingly, many of the writers contrasted the act of taking a photograph with the state of being present as a human being. In these cases the camera is described as a defense to hide behind, with which to shield the photographer from the impact of the moment happening in front of or to them. The book also has its more surreal moments: Matt Salacuse describes the scientologist jedi mind trickery of Tom Cruise forcing him to lower his camera and to pass up the opportunity of photographing Cruise and Kidman’s newborn adopted baby.

It must be said that the essays are uneven… after all this is a collection of texts by photographers and not by writers. I found that some of the texts failed to bring the images to life, or perhaps that too many of these images ended up ‘sounding’ the same. For me Roger Ballen‘s essay stood out: he avoids any explanation of why he didn’t photograph the scene he describes (did he even have a camera with him on that day?), but there is no question whose world this lost moment belonged to. Rather than in attempting to resurrect lost images through words, an exercise that surely would be better accomplished by a group of writers, I found Photographs Not Taken to be most successful when it makes the reader think about the decisions that go into making, or not making a photograph. And if it encourages us to put down our cameras from time to time, that can only be a good thing.

Note: The International Center of Photography in New York will be hosting a book signing with several of the contributors on Friday, March 23rd from 6:00-7:30 p.m.

Will Steacy (ed.), Photographs Not Taken, (Daylight, 2012).

Rating: Worth a look

No related posts.

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 questioned in different interrogation rooms, each as sparse as the next. By choosing not to include any captions and very little information about the context of these interrogations, Weber has put together a book which is an unflinching and discomfiting encounter with a particularly brutal and raw manifestation of power.

Although the interrogations themselves are book-ended by a prologue and an epilogue, these provide limited context. The prologue consists of images which set a mood for the book. They depict a bleak, difficult world punctuated by a few moments of natural beauty and provide an abstract sense of life in these parts. They also serve as a reminder that Weber did not parachute in to shoot his portraits but spent close to six years shooting in the region. Rather than showing us the specific worlds or lives of the subjects of the interrogations, the prologue creates a sense of foreboding for what is to come.

The epilogue—a longer essay by Larry Frolick and two shorter pieces by Frolick and Weber and by Weber on his own—refuses to provide much context either. Like the book’s photographic introduction Frolick’s essay is also a mood piece documenting a difficult trip that Frolick took with his Ukrainian fixer, an echo of the bleakness, strength and the violence of the world photographed by Weber.

As an object, the book is very well made. Its size, unusual ‘vertical’ format and the full-bleed one-per-spread treatment of the portraits all contribute to its intensity. The cover is initially a little confusing, until the portraits reveal that it replicates the cheap, textured wall of one of the interrogation rooms, a clever design feature.

Naturally the meat of the book is the portraits themselves. Taken in a handful of dingy, sparse interrogation rooms, they show different people undergoing a psychologically and sometimes physically violent interrogation process. We are not told who these people are are, what they are accused of, or why they are being interrogated. Indeed the book only indirectly reveals that these photographs were not staged and were taken during real interrogations. As one portrait follows the next, the emotions intensify. Concern and defensiveness give way to terror, panic and perhaps most alarmingly to expressionless faces, the faces of people whose spirit has been broken. The claustrophobia and tension of these portraits is heightened as the interrogators are never revealed. The few glimpses that Weber affords us are manifestations of pure violence and intimidation: a hand outstretched to grab a man or to strike another on the back of the head. In two of the most shocking portraits an interrogator presses a gun to the head of their subject.

Weber prides himself on his unflinching gaze and this comes through clearly in these portraits. Just as for those being interrogated, there is no respite or redemption in the book: we are ‘forced’ to stare head on at raw terror, at the loss of dignity, at brutal physical intimidation. The overall effect is visceral and deeply uncomfortable. In Weber’s words, “the unseen subject of these photographs is Power”. For me this is the success of the book: by removing any context about these people, thereby turning them into the “Invisible Man”, and by reducing the interrogators to faceless threats, to an abstraction of brute force, Interrogations is able to grapple with the ‘capitalised’ ideas of Power, Violence and Fear.

The book also raises some fundamental questions about the photographic process at play here. By sitting through these interrogations and photographing them without intervening, was Weber not complicit in their violence and their brutality? Indeed, by looking at these pictures are we not also complicit in their violence? What did Weber have to do to get access to these situations, who did he have to associate with and what, if anything, did he do for those that were being subjected to this violence? Why did he show them stripped of all dignity and reduce them to total anonymity? These questions are not new: they are at the heart of any documentary photographic practice, but this book poses them in the starkest manner possible.

Although he does not answer them directly in the book, Weber has been quite open in interviews (with Colin Pantall and with Pete Brook) about his process and the questions his images raise about his motivation and responsibility as a photographer. However, for me the book’s one failure is in Frolick and Weber’s short essay outlining the intentions for this project. The text manages to be grandiloquent (“the photos in this book were … the inevitable product of a Western artistic sensibility confronting the mystery of the Other”), confused (“the artist’s goal is to shock us with our own wordlessness: to show us proofs of life in its willful alternative histories”) and sometimes a little silly (“exposing yourself to the cold winds of the void”, “speaking in silence”), in a way that feels very much at odds with the directness and simplicity of these photographs. The book would have been even more brutally powerful without this poor articulation in words of what it succeeds in doing with images alone.

Donald Weber, Interrogations. (Amsterdam: Schilt Publishing, 160 pages, colour plates, 2011).

Rating: Recommended

No related posts.

It will soon be the first anniversary of the huge earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan’s Tohoku region. Hundreds of thousands of images have been taken since the disaster and most of these naturally focus on documenting the scale of the devastation. In my view, little interesting work that goes beyond straightforward visual description has emerged as yet. One of the strongest projects started up immediately in the aftermath of the disaster when the photographer Aichi Hirano decided to distribute disposable cameras to the people in the shelters in the devastated region. He retrieved the cameras, developed the film and published the results at www.rolls7.com. I have written about the Rolls Tohoku project before on the blog and Hirano has continued to add new images to the Rolls website since then.

This week, I discovered another project which is a fascinating companion to Rolls Tohoku. The Memory Salvage Project was started two months after the earthquake by a team of young researchers from The Japan Society for Socio-Information Studies who felt the need to return the photographs which were swept by the tsunami to their owners. A group was set up to gather photographs that were retrieved after the tsunami, to clean them, digitize them, and to attempt to return them to their owners. This could seem like a herculean and perhaps misplaced undertaking given the scale of the problems that people face in the affected areas, but I think it is a wonderful reminder of what photographs can mean to people and how closely they are linked to our memories.

An exhibition of some of the retrieved images took place at Akaaka’s gallery in Tokyo earlier this year and, for any readers in Los Angeles, a second exhibition at Hiroshi Watanabe’s studio is taking place from 8-25 March. Details are on the Lost & Found website.

No related posts.

© YANA PAYUSOVA - Holy Trinity - Holy Ghost, 2004

The Cruel and Unusual exhibition that opens at the Noorderlicht Gallery in Groningen tomorrow is a rare breed. This is a project that started out (and still lives) on the internet, became a road trip across America, and is now both a newspaper and an exhibition. With work by eleven different artists, Araminta de Clermont, Amy Elkins, Alyse Emdur, Christiane Feser, Jane Lindsay, Deborah Luster, Nathalie Mohadjer, Yana Payusova, Lizzie Sadin and Lori Waselchuk, the exhibition focuses on prison photography, a subject that receives very little exposure. The show is co-curated by fellow photo-bloggers Hester Keijser (Mrs Deane) and Pete Brook (Prison Photography) who write two of the most dynamic and esoteric blogs that you will find on the web (aside from the dozens of other writing, curating and photographic projects). To state the obvious, prisons are not exactly a sexy subject and the fact that they have managed to put this show together is very impressive. Instead of a ‘traditional’ exhibition catalogue, the curators have put together a newspaper (print run of 4,000 / 1.50 € per copy) in an attempt to reach more readers than an expensive photobook could (they lay out their reasons for this choice in detail here). The world of photography online can be an exasperating, sprawling mess, but the fact that it can lead to projects such as this one makes it genuinely worthwhile. I’m providing a few visuals of the work on show with this post, but if you can make it to Noorderlicht before the exhibition closes on 1 April, don’t miss this.

© AMY ELKINS - 6/44 (Not the Man I Once Was)

© CHRISTIANE FESER

© NATHALIE MOHADJER - Detention cell in Muyinga, Burundi 2009

© ALYSE EMDUR - Anonymous Backdrop Painted in Shawangunk Correctional Facility, New York 2005- 2011

No related posts.

Le Bal’s latest exhibition, Foto/Gráfica: Une nouvelle histoire des livres de photographie latino-américains (A New History of Latin-American Photobooks) opened last week. The show is based on a selection of 40 books taken from Horacio Fernandez’s recently published book on books, The Latin-American Photobook (Aperture, 2011). This is not Le Bal’s first photobook exhibition—they presented Japanese Photobooks Now in the summer of 2011—but it is the first time that they have devoted their entire space to an exhibition of books. Following this show they will be hosting the 5th International Fotobook Festival, which is traditionally held in Kassel, so it seems that photobooks are becoming one of the major areas of focus of their programme.

According to Martin Parr, Latin-American photobooks “are the best kept secret in the history of photography”… one of the many secrets that are being steadily revealed by Parr and/or Aperture through The Photobook: A History series, Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and ’70s and a forthcoming book on Chinese photobooks that Parr is doing with WassinkLundgren chez Aperture. The ‘books on books’ phenomenon is gaining so much traction that Andreas Schmidt, a pleasingly disruptive photobook maker, is already looking forward to the book on books on books which surely can’t be too far away. As for Parr’s quote, I am willing to take his word for it, knowing absolutely nothing about Latin-Amercian photobooks (with a few Mexican exceptions) and having had very few opportunities to see any.

© Pascal Martinez

I was particularly interested to see how Le Bal would take on this subject. Although there appears to be a growing trend for exhibiting books, the ones I have seen so far have generally been disappointing. Books are not an easy thing to exhibit, in fact they are exhibition-resistant in my view. Most people’s preferred position for reading or looking at books is sitting down and they are generally consumed by one person at a time, things that are difficult to replicate in an exhibition context. Exhibitions do not encourage visitors to touch the works on display, making it difficult to display more than one spread, something which is painfully reductive unless multiple copies of each book displayed can be tracked down. I think the key in exhibiting books is in overcoming these obstacles by recreating the immersive experience of a book in a way that goes beyond the experience of going into a very good bookstore.

In addition to the basic difficulties of exhibiting books, Le Bal’s space is far from huge whereas Latin America is on the large side and presumably has produced a decent number of interesting photobooks over the years. This poses the additional challenge of avoiding the exhibition equivalent of a ‘best of’ compilation album. To borrow the strapline from a random ‘Best of Latin America’ compilation, this could have been “a lively exhibition filled with hot and spicy Latin American photoboks!” which would probably have given me a severe case of indigestion.

Thankfully the exhibition successfully avoids most of these pitfalls. Rather than structuring the exhibition around individual countries, it is broken up into a series of sections: history and propaganda, urban photography, photographic essays, artist books, literature and photography, and contemporary books. These categories go beyond the traditional bounds of the photobook, expanding its definition to something like ‘books that contain photography,’ which makes the terrain far more diverse and interesting, bringing in books such as the revolutionary propaganda tome, Sartre Visite a Cuba (1960) or Auto-photos (1978) an artist book documenting a performance. There is enough material in each of the sections to whet the appetite, but without requiring you to spend several hours in the exhibition space just to cover all the material on display.

The scénographie of Foto/Gráfica is particularly good, the best I have seen for a photobook exhibition. Firstly, in order to tackle the issue of displaying more than one spread from each book, the organizers have decided to go down the road of sacrifice and cut the books up so that a series of spreads can be displayed (there are clearly enough copies of these books to spare, as book-surgery is not the kind of thing that could be done with an exhibition of rare Japanese photobooks for example). The books are displayed in a variety of different ways, from ‘classic’ glass display cases, to superimposed custom shelving units hanging on the walls. The exhibition also makes good use of prints, which are exhibited alongside the books and are a useful reminder of how different these media are. In the downstairs space, the central wall has been covered with scans of the spreads from a single book with a handful of prints displayed in mounts floating on the surface, a very impressive display. I’m posting a few of the official installation views with this post, as my crappy iPhone shots would not do the exhibition justice. By deconstructing the books in these different ways, it makes the viewer think about the form of the book and its specific qualities.

© Pascal Martinez

© Pascal Martinez

© Pascal Martinez

The success of Foto/Gráfica is that it opens itself out beyond Latin American photography to engage with Latin American artistic culture more broadly. By giving politics, literature and other art forms center stage, the exhibition not only provides some much-needed context, but opens up a number of interesting paths of inquiry. Photobook lovers won’t need my encouragement to go and see this, but this is one for those that are not book geeks as well. After Paris, the exhibition is travelling to Ivory Press in Madrid, Aperture in New York and to the Museo del Libro y de la Lengua in Buenos-Aires.

Foto/Gráfica, Une nouvelle histoire des livres de photographie latino-américains, Le Bal, 20 January – 8 April 2012.

Rating: Recommended

No related posts.

Colin Pantall has written an interesting post on his blog regarding the many year-end ‘best photobooks of 2011′ lists that have been published of late. In the post he raises questions about this process, the role of “tastemakers” in today’s photobook market and discusses the need for the expansion of the photobook market. I started to respond to his post initially as a comment on his blog, but it got so out of hand that I decided to turn my response into a post of its own.

After having compiled a non-exhaustive meta-list of 52 of the Best Photobooks of 2011 lists, I am interested by the reactions that these lists have generated. It seems to me that many of us have a love/hate relationship with them. We hate the idea that everything seems to get boiled down to a top 10, or even a top 50. But we can’t help but read them, particularly when they are written by people whose opinions we respect or have been on the telly, or just because everyone else is reading them and liking them on Facebook. As I recently posted in a Facebook group, there are myriad and sometimes very good reasons why we make and read lists. Umberto Eco has said it a little better than I can here (and Ken Schles has written a marvellous response to Umberto Eco’s ideas on lists which you can read here).

In his post Colin focused on Christian Patterson’s Redheaded Peckerwood, the “winner” of my meta-list, as an example of a book that is getting all the plaudits. Colin bought it after it received so many recommendations but it left him cold. I got the feeling from his post that it was a book that he admired but did not enjoy. What I found amazing in the mind-bendingly tedious exercise of compiling all these lists is that Redheaded Peckerwood only got 14 mentions in the 52 lists that I compiled. In total 313 books got mentions. Colin mentioned Martin Parr, Alec Soth and Markus Schaden as three of the ‘tastemakers’ on photobooks, but Redheaded Peckerwood is not actually on Parr or Soth’s lists on Photo-eye (Soth did an expanded Top 20 list on which it does appear) and as far as I know Markus Schaden hasn’t done a 2011 list. What I found particularly interesting about the 2011 lists is that the tastemakers seldom agreed. To use Colin’s example Soth and Parr only agreed on 3 books of the 10 that they each selected. Expand the list of ‘tastemakers’ to 5 (I took Gerry Badger, Martin Parr, John Gossage, Alec Soth and Todd Hido) and there isn’t a single ‘best’ book that they all agreed on. John Gossage, who makes photographs and photobooks, designs and publishes them, and looks at more photobooks than most, said it best in his comment in response to Soth’s Top 20 Photobooks list, “None of us see more than a small part of what is being done in photobooks these days. So many things that touch people. A good time to be alive”… at least, if you like photobooks… it’s probably less good if you invested in sub-prime mortgages. That is the positive side of today’s photobook market. I think the tastemakers are generally a positive force: the more there are of them and the more that their opinions differ, the better. You can take or leave their recommendations, but they are often helpful in drawing your attention to new work.

That is the good side of the current photo-market. But as Colin points out, there are many bad sides too: books that are being bought and kept in shrinkwrap so that they are worth more on some “mythical future date of sale”, books that are bought and never looked at, photographers being stalked at their hotel by overzealous book dealers to sign hundreds of books so that they can be sold at an inflated price (true story)… I was amazed to see this article on the Guardian Money website a little while ago, which seemed to suggest that photobooks have become a good investment vehicle and a reliable way of doubling your investment within a couple of years. That might be true for a handful of books, but what percentage of the books being made are sold for less than their retail price 6 months after they have been published? Go and spend $100,000 on photobooks today and then try to sell them in 2 or 3 years time. Let me know how that goes for you.

I think that the most important and difficult question that Colin raises is the need for the expansion of the photobook market. As an artist it must be incredibly frustrating to spend years making a book only for it to be bought by a maximum of 1,000 people and seen only by a few hundred. The issues with the fragmentation of the photobooks market, the problematic distribution model, the proliferation of tiny independent publishers and self-published books, all made me think of some of the issues that there are with the music industry (although the almost-total digitisation of music has yet to happen to photobooks and is unlikely to). Big record labels are struggling, and people are distributing their music themselves or via small labels through the internet. Like with the photobook, I think this is a time where there is a huge amount of musical experimentation, of trying everything and anything. As a consumer of music, I see this as a golden age: I have never been able to access so much music so easily. Name an obscure musical genre (e.g. post-gangsta neofolkcore) and I will be able to listen to it within minutes and own (or steal) several albums of it within hours. But for those people making the music (let’s not worry about the ones selling the stuff) it is more complicated. I am no expert on the music industry but my understanding is that musicians now have to rely on concerts to make their money since virtually no-one makes anything from selling albums any more. What is the photographer’s equivalent of the tour? Exhibitions? Surely there is even less money in that than in books. Workshops maybe?

While I would love to see the photobook market expand, I can’t help but wonder exactly how big its potential is? The “population at large” never really bought photobooks before all these pictures were available online for free, so I’m just not sure why and how that would happen now. But then stranger things have happened. Allow me to leave you with this beautiful chart of vinyl sales over the last two decades which, if my tenuous musical analogy holds water, suggests there may be hope for photobooks yet.

No related posts.

Dan Abbe, (blogger and publisher)

Kazuyoshi Usui, “Showa88” (Zen Foto Gallery)

“Maybe my favorite book of the year. Bright colors, geisha and yakuza draw you in, but Usui is very conscious about playing with Japanese culture and history. I will definitely introduce this work in more detail in 2012.”

Kazuo Kitai, “Spanish Night” (Tosei-Sha)

“Color photos of Spain in the 1970s that Kitai dug up from his basement. Simple and excellent. I posted a few photos here and they were later picked up by a blogger in Spain who wrote some very nice things about them.”

Haruna Sato, “First of the Month” (Self-published)

“A criminally cheap self-publication which creates an artificial structure for ‘daily snap photography’ – it’s a book of photos only taken on the first of each month.”

Hiroshi Takizawa, “A Rock of the Moon” (Self-published)

“Color photographs from a psychology graduate turned photographer. You could actually buy this zine using the link above.”

Taishi Hirokawa, “Still Crazy” (Korinsha, 1994)

“I’m cheating. This book was actually published in 1994, but it’s the most I spent on a book this year, and with good reason.”

*****

Nao Amino (Editor. Worked at Little More and FOIL, freelance editor and exhibition planner from 2011)

Rinko Kawauchi, “Illuminance” (FOIL)

Katsumi Omori, “Everything happens for the first time” (Match and Company)

Shigekazu Onuma, “SHIGEKAZU ONUMA” (limArt)

Anders Edstrom, “Two Houses” (part of a special book published by X-Knowledge)

Emiko Nagahiro, “Reverb” (Self-published)

*****

Atsushi Fujiwara, (photographer and founder of ASPHALT Magazine)

Eiji Sakurai, “Hokkaido 1971-1976” (Sokyu-sha)

Mao Ishikawa, “Here’s What the Japanese Flag Means to Me” (Miraisha)

Takao Niikura, “Scorching Port Town” (Seikyusha)

Hara Yoshiichi, “Walk while ye have the light” (Sokyu-sha)

Hiroh Kikai, “Tokyo Portrait” (Crevis)

*****

Ken Iseki, (website editor and blogger)

Masayuki Yoshinaga, “Sento“* (Tokyo Kirara-sha)

“Masayuki Yoshinaga, who has been shooting groups of minority and outsiders in Japan, made this series of work in 1993 when he was still a photographer’s assistant. Building good relationships with the subjects made it possible to photograph these relaxed naked men from such a close distance.”

*Sento is an old style public bath (not a natural hot spring) that can be found almost anywhere in Japan.

Masafumi Sanai, “Pylon” (Taisyo)

“After publishing tons of photobooks with various publishers since his debut in the late 1990s, he launched his own publishing label ‘Taisyo’ in 2008. Sanai is a very typical Japanese photographer in a way: strolling around neighborhoods and shooting photos without any concept, but no other photographer’s work has as much strength as his photography. This is the tenth book of his own from the label.”

Takashi Homma, “mushrooms from the forest 2011” (Blind gallery)

“As many other photographers did, Takashi Homma also left for the Tohoku area to document the aftermath. But he didn’t photograph any debris or people like others did, instead he chose to shoot the forest and mushrooms in Fukushima which also suffered from radioactive contamination.”

Kotori Kawashima, Mirai-Chan (Nanaroku-sha)

“Because this photobook reached people who don’t buy photobooks or who are not even interested in photography at all. Simply amazing.”

Masterpieces of Japanese Pictorial Photography (Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography)

“The exhibition “Masterpieces of Japanese Pictorial Photography” at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography reminded us that there was also an significant movement, which is hardly recognized, before the era of Araki and Moriyama. This is the catalog from the exhibition.”

*****

Ryosuke Iwamoto (photographer)

Naoya Hatakeyama, “Natural Stories” (Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography)

“For me, the best thing wasn’t a book but an exhibit—Naoya Hatakeyama’s show ‘Natural Stories’ at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. It’s not really ‘today’s Japanese style,’ but I thought it was great on the whole, so I’ll pick the catalog that he made for the show.”

*****

Microcord (blogger)

Nobuyoshi Araki, “Rakuen” (Rat Hole Gallery)

Shinya Arimoto, “Ariphoto Selection vol. 2” (Totem Pole Photo Gallery)

Hiroh Kikai, “Anatolia” (Crevis)

*****

Tomoe Murakami (photographer and lecturer)

Naoya Hatakeyama, “Terrils” (Taka Ishii Gallery)

*****

John Sypal (photographer and blogger)

“2011 saw the publication of several more photobooks by Nobuyoshi Araki. In addition to being featured in at least one magazine each month, the man puts out more solo photobooks in a year than most established Western photographers put out in a career. Here are three of my favorites and one non-Araki publication.”

Araki, “Theater of Love“, (Taka Ishii/Zen Foto)

“A small visual treat published by Taka Ishii & Zen Foto galleries which is a collection of recently rediscovered pictures taken by Araki in the mid 1960s, several years before his Sentimental Journey debut in 1970. The book, published in an edition of 1000 copies, matches the 5×7 size of the actual rough little prints while the content allows one to see the the very foundations of Araki’s future major themes coming to light. A must-have for those interested in learning more about the early stages of this artist.”

Araki, “Shakyo-rojin Nikki” (WIDES)

“With a title that roughly translates into “The Diary of an Old Man Photo Maniac”, Araki again employs his date-imprint function to great effect chronicling the three months to the day after the Tohoku Earthquake on March 11th. Where his inclusion of color paints to black and white photographs resulted in brilliant and moving imagery, his alteration of the images in this book was subtractive in his scratching of the negatives with the edge of a coin. Each image bears a scar or fault line through it with results that fluctuate between sadness, horror, and at other times comedy. His tenacious treatment of the actual physical essence of film-based photography comes across as a rebellious challenge to the dry dull digital era he has been lamenting in recent interviews.”

Araki, “Shamanatsu 2011” (Rathole)

“The third and most beautiful of three Araki books published by Rathole Gallery in 2011, Shamanatsu continues on with the artist’s personal destructive alteration of physical photographs. The book is divided into two parts, the first being pictures taken with his Leica over the past 5 years from various commercial assignments and personal experiences. Each print has been unsettlingly and completely torn in half only to be mended back together with cellophane tape across the front the prints. The publisher did a marvelous job recreating the shimmer of the tape on each page. The second half of the book is a series of images Araki took over the unusually hot 2011 summer with a new Fuji 6×7 camera purchased earlier in the year. In a recent interview in the mens’ fashion and culture magazine, HUGE, Araki states clearly that Shamanatsu is not any sort of Art with deep meaning, but simply the photographic manifestation of his own physiology. He also added that after his new camera broke this series came to its sudden end.”

Meisa Fujishiro, “Mou, Uchi ni Kaerou 2″ (Let’s go home 2), (Rockin’ On)

“Photographer Meisa Fujishiro’s sequel to his wildly popular book “Let’s go home”. While his first book, now in it’s 9th printing, simply dealt with married life with his wife (a professional model) and dogs, the sequel introduces his son from birth and five years after that. For a skilled photographer who mainly shoots celebrities and bikini models, Fujishiro’s pictures of his home life are never bogged down by excessive slick camerawork or sentimentality. Their delightful frankness is a simple kind of beauty.”

*****

Ivan Vartanian (author, editor, publisher and book producer)

“With the risk of sounding contrarian, compiling a list of books as a year in review is tricky business because most often such lists are mistaken for “best of” and do a great disservice to publications whose stand-alone value is problematic. If there is one thing I’ve learned from working with Japanese photography and Japanese photobooks it is the need for trepidation in looking at things in isolation, which is the inherent project of such review lists. So much of Japanese photography has to do with the relationship and context of images within a given sequence, as well as the circumstance of publication and why a book was made. In a similar regard, the books I’ve selected aren’t necessarily “best of” books. Rather, they were selected for what they say in relationship to the photobook oeuvre of each individual photographer.”

Yurie Nagashima, “SWISS+” (Akaaka Art Publishing)

“From her earliest and strongest photography projects, Nagashima has used Family, her family in particular, as the source material for her photography. As a book production, SWISS+ interleaves pages of photography with prose printed on tracing paper. The photographer has recently turned her attention to writing both non-fiction and fiction. This book most poetically gives us a framework for how she finds a sort of concordance between the two mediums, sometimes independent, sometimes dependent on one another.”

Takuma Nakahira, “Documentary” (Akio Nagasawa Publishing)

“This book was largely overlooked and under-appreciated after its publication. Documentary compiles this master photographer’s recent color work. The photography’s awkward vertical format and how it reveals the position of the photographer relative to his subject matter seem to be at odds with the book’s lofty title. But when we consider this publication in light of Nakahira’s early and other experimental work, the project of his color work is slightly more understandable—resisting the dogma and trappings of contemporary photography. The publication of Documentary was almost simultaneous with the publication of a facsimile edition of his legendary For a Language to Come (Osiris, 2010).”

Daido Moriyama, “Sunflower” (MMM Label [Match and Company])

“The lush black and tonal range of this publication are an example of how beautiful basic offset printing can be. The same is true of the craftsmanship exhibited in the book’s layout and edit. In its simplicity, it shines.”

Takashi Homma, M2 (Gallery 360)

“M is an ongoing series of about fast food restaurants around the world. M refers to the identifying logo mark of the McDonald’s chain of restaurants. Such establishments have been a continual object in Homma Takashi’s photography since his Tokyo Suburbia series, which addressed the Americanization of Japanese culture. The screen printing of the photobook’s cover has a plain visual kinship with the discernible dot pattern on the cups and packaging produced by the fast-food chain. Does eating too much fast food also effect vision? Among the 500 copies of the edition, there are multiple cover variations.”

Koji Onaka, “Long Time No See” (Média Immédiat [France])

“This is a bit of a cheat. This book was not published by a Japanese publisher but, as a body of work, it may be one of Onaka’s best photobooks so far, especially when considered relative to his previous publications. This is an example of the photographer stepping outside of his familiar territory and producing a body of work that is free of his usual rigor. The full weight of his previous work still lingers in the air of this tiny book. It is a treat to see the cone-shaped birthday hat worn by his otherwise hapless mother, dutifully giving her son (Koji) a birthday party. The photographer scanned monochromatic photographs from his family albums and added color to each image in Photoshop. Onaka’s father was a photographer so there was a wealth of snapshots to choose from.”

Related posts:

1. Review: Japanese photobooks of the 1960s and ’70s
2. Photobooks 2011: And the winner is…
3. Another best books of 2011 list…

The constant stream of best books of 2011 lists that have appeared in the past couple of weeks got me wondering whether there are any books that are getting all the plaudits. I have pulled together 52 lists in total (the final update to this post was made on 29 December), including my own, (the sources are listed at the bottom of the post). Some contrarians like Blake Andrews included books that weren’t published this year, but for this statistical exercise I have only included books that were published in 2011. After compiling the results (I gave 1 ‘vote’ to any book that was on any of these lists) one book has risen to the top of the pile with 19 votes. And the winner is…

1st Place (19 votes)
- Redheaded Peckerwood, Christian Patterson (Mack)

2nd Place (14 votes)
- A Criminal Investigation, Yukichi Watabe (Xavier Barral/Le Bal)
- Illuminance, Rinko Kawauchi (Aperture)

3rd Place (10 votes)
- Paloma al aire, Ricardo Cases (Photovision)

4th Place (9 votes)
- Gomorrah Girl, Valerio Spada (Self-published)

5th Place (8 votes)
- A, Gregory Halpern (J&L Books)

6th Place (7 votes)
- Series, Enrique Metinides (Kominek Books)

7th Place (6 votes)
- Photographic Memory: The Album in the Age of Photography, Verna Posever Curtis (Aperture)
- A New Map of Italy, Guido Guidi (Loosestrife Editions)
- The Suffering of Light, Alex Webb (Aperture)

8th Place (5 votes)
- The Place we Live, Robert Adams (Yale University Press)
- Salt & Truth, Shelby Lee Adams (Candela Books)
- In the Shadow of Things, Léonie Hampton (Contrasto)
- The Brothers, Elin Høyland (Dewi Lewis)
- Permanent Error, Pieter Hugo (Prestel)
- Rwanda 2004: Vestiges of a Genocide, Pieter Hugo (Oodee)
- Magnum Contact Sheets, Kristen Lubben (Thames & Hudson)
- Animals that Saw Me, Ed Panar (The Ice Plant)
- Redwood Saw, Richard Rothman (Nazraeli Press)
- The New York Times Magazine Photographs, Kathy Ryan (ed.) (Aperture)
- First Pictures, Joel Sternfeld (Steidl)
- Is this Place Great or What, Brian Ulrich (Aperture)
- Visitor, Ofer Wolberger (Self-published)

9th Place (4 votes)
- C.E.N.S.U.R.A, Julián Barón (Editorial RM)
- Dirk Braeckman (Roma Publications)
- People in Trouble, Laughing, Pushing Each Other to the Ground, Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin (Mack)
- Fragile, Raphaël Dallaporta (Editions GwinZegal)
- The Unseen Eye, W. M. Hunt (Aperture)
- Pontiac, Gerry Johansson (Mack)
- Seacoal, Chris Killip (Steidl)
- Koudelka: Gypsies, Josef Koudelka (Aperture)
- Lang Zal Ze Levan, Anouk Kruithof (Self-published)
- Iraq / Perspectives, Ben Lowy (Duke University Press)
- History’s Shadow, David Maisel (Nazraeli Press)
- pretty girls wander, Raymond Meeks
- Believing is Seeing, Errol Morris (Penguin Press)
- Mom & Dad, Terry Richardson (Mörel Books)
- The Heath, Andy Sewell (Self-published)

10th place (3 votes)
- La Creciente, Alejandro Chaskielberg (Nazraeli Press)
- Abendsonne, Misha de Ridder (Schaden.com)
- Chromes, William Eggleston (Steidl)
- Films, Paul Graham (Mack)
- Mexico Roma, Graciela Iturbide (RM Editorial)
- Sunday, Paul Kooiker (van Zoetendaal)
- On Thin Ice, In a Blizzard, Paula McCartney (Self-published)
- You and I, Ryan McGinley (Twin Palms)
- One to Nothing, Irina Rozovsky (Kehrer)
- 83 Days of Darkness, Niels Stomps (Kominek Books)
- A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, Taryn Simon (Steidl)
- The Bridge at Hoover Dam, James Stillings (Nazraeli Press)
- Les Amies de Place Blanche, Christer Strömholm (Dewi Lewis)
- Abstract Pictures, Wolfgang Tillmans (Hatje Cantz)
- Photographs, Penelope Umbrico (Aperture)
- Interrogations, Donald Weber (Schilt)
- Conductors of the Moving World, Brad Zellar (Little Brown Mushroom)

11th place (2 votes)
- Half Life, Michael Ackerman (Dewi Lewis)
- Unmarked Sites, Jessica Auer (Les Territoires)
- Candlestick Point, Lewis Baltz (Steidl)
- A Guide to Trees for Governors and Gardeners, Yto Barrada (Deutsche Guggenheim)
- One Day: Ten Photographers, Harvey Benge (Kehrer)
- Tibet: Culture on the Edge, Phil Borges (Rizzoli)
- War Primer 2, Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin (Mack)
- Eden is a Magic World, Miguel Calderón (Little Big Man)
- The King of Photography, Tiane Doan Na Champassak (Self-published)
- Double Life, Kelli Connell (Decode Books)
- A Falling Horizon, Heidi de Gier (Fw:)
- Subway, Bruce Davidson (Aperture)
- The Latin American Photobook, Horacio Fernández (Aperture)
- The Vanities, Larry Fink (Schirmer/Mosel)
- In the Picture: Self-Portraits 1958-2011, Lee Friedlander (Yale University Press)
- Color Correction, Ernst Haas (Steidl)
- Astronomical, Mishka Henner (Self-published)
- No Man’s Land, Mishka Henner (Self-published)
- Afterwards, Nathalie Herschdorfer (ed.) (Thames & Hudson)
- Celebrity, Kenji Hirasawa (Bemojake)
- Playground, Jeroen Hofman (Self-published)
- Safety First, Rob Hornstra (The Sochi Project)
- Sochi Singers, Rob Hornstra (The Sochi Project)
- In Almost Every Picture 9, Erik Kessels (Kesselskramer)
- A Head with Wings, Anouk Kruithof (Little Brown Mushroom)
- The Sea, Mark Laita (Abrams)
- Pilgrimage, Annie Liebovitz (Random House)
- Tooth for an Eye, Deborah Luster (Twin Palms)
- God Forgotten Face, Robin Maddock (Trolley)
- Street Photographer, Vivian Maier (Powerhouse)
- Carnal Knowledge, Malerie Marder (Violette Editions)
- 7 Rooms, Rafal Milach (Kehrer)
- Mark Morrisroe, Mark Morrisroe (JRP Ringier)
- Burke + Norfolk: Photographs from the War in Afghanistan by John Burke and Simon Norfolk, Simon Norfolk (Dewi Lewis)
- Hard Ground, Michael O’Brien (University of Texas Press)
- As Long as it Photographs, It Must be a Camera, Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs (Self-published)
- Core Curriculum: Writings on Photography, Tod Papageorge (Aperture)
- Swiss Photobooks from 1927 to the Present, Peter Pfrunder (ed.) (Prestel)
- Photographs 2001-2009, Ken Rosenthal (Self-published)
- Oculus, Ken Schles (Noorderlicht/Aurora Borealis)
- Hurricane Story, Jennifer Shaw (Broken Levee Books)
- Subscription Series 3, Mark Steinmetz (TBW Books)
- Summertime, Mark Steinmetz (Nazraeli Press)
- Dessau, Bill Sullivan (Kaugummi Books)
- Nomad, Jeroen Toirkens (Lannoo)
- Self Publish Be Naughty, Various (Self Publish Be Happy)
- Chinese Sentiment, Shen Wei (Charles Lane Press)
- Waikiki, Henry Wessel (Steidl)
- The Lost Photographs of Captain Scott, David M. Wilson (Little, Brown & Co.)

So there it is. The meta ‘best of’ list. A few points worth noting. I have only included books that got more than 1 vote. There were 313 books nominated in the 52 lists that I used to compile this meta-list. It’s fascinating to see that there is so little consensus on the ‘best’ books of the year and that there is such a broad playing field. There are books on here that were printed in editions of several thousand copies and books that were printed in editions of less than 100. Some artists even managed to get nominated for several books produced in the same year. I’d like to leave you with a final recommendation: remember, these rankings are totally subjective, meaningless and even nonsensical. It’s hard to resist looking at these lists (although if I see another list at this stage, I will probably have to take my own life), but remember that there are hundreds of other books that are just as good if not better than these.

Sources: Brainpickings, The 11 best photography books of 2011; Sean O’Hagan (The Guardian), Photography books of the year 2011; American Photo, The best photobooks of 2011; Alec Soth, Top 20 photobooks of 2011; Rémi Coignet & Maria-Karina Bojikian, Livres de photographie: notre sélection 2011; Le Monde, Ouvrages de fête à savourer (Photographie); Jörg Colberg, My favourite photobooks this year; Tom Claxton, 2011 photobook highlights; Corey Presha, Favorite Books of 2011; Bridget Coaker, Photography Books of the Year; Yannick Bouillis, Favorite photobooks; Bart Peters, 10 favourite photobooks of 2011; Claire de Rouen, Xmas Top Ten; BJP, The best photobooks of 2011; Blake Andrews, Photography Books; Conor Donlon, Favourite Books of 2011; Sebastian Hau, “books that engaged me the most”; Larissa Leclair, The Best Books of 2011 (self and indie published); Willem Van Zoetendaal, Favorite Books of 2011; Rob Hornstra, Top Photo Books 2011; Marcel Du, Best of 2011 photobooks; Photobookstore, Our favourite photobooks of 2011; Elizabeth Avedon and friends, 2011 best photography books; NY Times Photo Department, Our Top 10 Photo Books of 2011; Time, Best of 2011: The Photobooks We Loved; Photo-eye (26 contributors), The Best Books of 2011; Laurence Vecten, 7 livres photographiques du moment, à feuilleter au coin du feu; Me, Another best books of 2011 list.

Before I sign off this post, it is worth remembering that there is also another way to cut this ‘best photobook’ cake and that is sales. This is how the list ends up looking based on sales (according to this article by PDN):

1. Simply Beautiful Photographs (National Geographic)
2. The Great LIFE Photographers (Little, Brown & Co.)
3. The Royal Wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton (LIFE)
4. One Nation: America Remembers September 11, 2001, 10 Years Later (Little, Brown & Co.)
5. Portraits of Camelot: A Thousand Days in the Kennedy White House (Abrams)
6. In Focus: National Geographic Greatest Portraits (National Geographic)
7. The President’s Photographer: Fifty Years Inside the Oval Office (National Geographic)
8. Decade (Phaidon)
9. Edward S. Curtis: Visions of the First Americans (Chartwell)
10. Wonders of LIFE: A Fantastic Voyage Through Nature (LIFE)

Related posts:

1. Photobooks 2011: a view from Japan
2. Review: Japanese photobooks of the 1960s and ’70s
3. Another best books of 2011 list…