The Year in [Photo] Books

For this year’s photography book roundup, we look at the topic of perspective. The question at hand is whether what we see is worth seeing, and if there is another way to see it. The photographers and editors of the following publications have all addressed this issue in their work, and we hope that the readers of Rangefinder will find these books inspirational.

Miles Aldridge: I Only Want You to Love Me
Photographed by Miles Aldridge
Rizzoli
Hardcover, 288 pages, $75

Miles Aldridge is not afraid of embracing, objectifying and spotlighting the Western world’s consumer-oriented culture. He is also not afraid of using bright and vibrant primary colors. Fortunately, these two elements combine perfectly in his latest monograph.

A well-known fashion photographer, Aldridge creates beautifully composed images in settings that include supermarkets, restaurants, bars, beaches, boudoirs and bedrooms. The colors are hyperbolic, bold and mesmerizing. This is true even if the actual set location is beneath a kitchen sink and the subject in question is wearing a dress and holding a plunger and cleaning fluid. The details of each and every element in the photo intrigue and tantalize the viewer. There is a bit of Helmut Newton in Aldridge’s approach—nudes are occasionally used to contrast the clothes or other items in question. Also Newton-like is the unmistakable glamour in many of these images, whether the image is of a dinner party, a grocery shopping excursion or a trip to the local ATM with a baby in tow.

The book also includes a marvelously insightful foreword by lifestyle writer and GQ magazine contributor Glenn O’Brien. The essay, titled “Not with a Bang but with a Pop,” explains that Aldridge conjures “a totally coherent post-modern dream world that meets the highest standards of fashion reportage…a hyper-chromatic world—intense color pushed to the unnatural max.” Aldridge has delivered a book of reverberant images.

Photorealism in the Digital Age
By Louis K. Meisel and Elizabeth Katherine May Harris
Abrams
Hardcover, 320 pages, $9

There was a time when photographers had grudgingly “used a computer” to adjust their images. If it wasn’t done in the darkroom, then it wasn’t real photography. Those days are long past; not only is digital retouching accepted, it is the norm. Filters abound for any image taken with a smartphone or digital camera, and if one reviews the works on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, it is clear that they are in heavy rotation.

This new approach to photo manipulation has, in fact, evolved to the point where one can create, recreate or re-imagine an entire “photograph” using digital art and software, not unlike the school known as Photorealism that came into fruition in paintings during the 1960s. Though the approach only uses the photographic medium as a primer for the finished product, the 850 full-color works in Photorealism in the Digital Area make it clear to any observer that a talented artist armed with a computer can approach and even surpass the preconceived boundaries between these formats.

Author Louis K. Meisel has compiled a fantastic survey of 21st century Photorealism and its range of techniques, topics and results.

Across the Ravaged Land
By Nick Brandt
Abrams
Hardcover, 120 pages, $65

The best way to enjoy Nick Brandt’s Across the Ravaged Land is to know nothing about it. That way, the sheer “OMG!” factor works to its fullest effect. You will be able to look at the photos of lions and elephants and admire the photographer’s composition and skill, as well as the beauty of nature’s citizens. You will say, “I wish I had a year to just do a project like this.” And then upon seeing images of shorn tusks and animal head trophies, “Poachers and hunters are going to wipe out these creatures.”

You will also, however, find yourself thinking, “Wait a minute…how is that mummified bird still sitting on a tree limb? How did that happen? I can see this is a real animal with no special effects—did it just die on the tree and not fall over?” The answer to the last question is calcification. Apparently this region’s water from a Rift Valley soda lake is unbalanced to the point that animals die and decay in a very bizarre fashion, and Brandt simply had to pick up their carcasses and place them in upright positions.

Across the Ravaged Land, however, is not just about lions, elephants, mummies, hunter’s trophies and strange water. It is also about how the beauty of this world is quickly disappearing due to the influence of man. Each image is worthy of appearing in a museum, a collection or a vacated space in a wildlife preserve.

Game Changers. 
The Evolution of Advertising
Edited by Peter Russell and Senta Slingerland
Taschen
Hardcover, 312 pages, $69.99

Through its hit series Mad Men, cable channel AMC has brought us a newfound appreciation for the world of advertising—it’s not just about coming up with a catchy slogan or a pretty picture. Now, when people say that they are in advertising, the listener gives them more than a blank and bored stare. Yet the question of whether advertising is an art or science has not been answered. Game Changers. The Evolution of Advertising helps you arrive at your own conclusion. The book covers the history behind 150 classic works of advertising, and makes it quite clear that without well-conceived, targeted, mundane or often brilliant photography, the ad industry would never have achieved its current level of cultural and economic influence.

Published in celebration of the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, Game Changers includes a foreword by celebrated author, biographer and founder of the Huffington Post, Arianna Huffington, as well as accounts and comments from various industry icons, including photographer David Bailey and TBWAWorldwide chairman and global director Lee Clow.

Why It Does Not Have to Be in Focus: Modern Photography Explained
By Jackie Higgins
Prestel
Paperback, 224 pages, $17.95

The publishers and editors of Why It Does Not Have to Be in Focus: Modern Photography Explained, employed sheer brilliance when they selected a series of photographs by Pop artist Andy Warhol for the cover. If you are at all familiar with the impact on the art world of Warhol’s seemingly casual style of making pictures, paintings, film and even writing, then you know that the point of the book’s title has already been made. However, author Jackie Higgins does not stop there: she provides 100 works that support the idea that a lack of perfection in an image may not only be on purpose, it may also be purposeful. Underexposure, overexposure, blurring and poor composition may have once been a reason to dismiss a picture, but as she demonstrates here, many of our most groundbreaking and venerated images include these very “flaws.”

A Year in Photography: Magnum Archive
By Magnum Photos
Prestel
Hardcover, 752 pages, $24.95

A Year in Photography does not take place in one calendar year. Rather, it is a selection of 365 iconic images from Magnum’s vast archive. The “365” correlates to the number of days in a regular calendar year. The images within this volume, modest in dimension but hefty in girth, have been chosen with an expert eye. It’s apparent that this eye has one true objective: To inspire you to continue to reflect and think about the images therein for 365 more days.

Glory of Water
By Karl Lagerfeld
Steidl
Hardcover, 112 pages, $125

Legendary haute couture fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld, currently artistic director at Fendi, launched his new photography book Glory of Water with a series of parties, videos and exhibitions in Paris. Attendees included celebrities, editors and tastemakers, including actresses Sharon Stone and Naomie Harris. But while a product of fashion inspiration, the book is not at all about fashion. This slipcased, black-and-white and sepia-tinted publication focuses on the essence of one of Rome’s most enigmatic features: its fountains. They don’t just spout streams of water, they are also standalone works of art and sculpture. As Lagerfeld explains, “…the fountains are an important part of Rome’s beauty. Our reaction can be essentially aesthetic. It does not have to be based on reflection and knowledge. Water also represents physical pleasure. Here, it is linked with history, art and beauty.”

As many travelers and residents have found throughout history, the sound and image of water can inspire one to tranquility or to glory. In focusing on these definitive elements that are both background and foreground in his artistic life, Lagerfeld’s photography collection has performed a great service for those of us soothed by water’s presence. The LVMH Corporation, which owns luxury brand Fendi, believes so as well, and has pledged over a million dollars to a Roman fountain restoration initiative.

Household Inventory Record
By Robert Frank
Steidl
Paperback, 24 pages, $35

If you are a devotee of Robert Frank, you will find this new publication to be an intriguing behind-the-scenes look of snapshots from his life. The book is a compilation of Polaroids taken of friends, family, travel, work and random objects that basically just caught his eye. Formatted like a slim notebook or notepad portfolio, Household Inventory Record is a unique opportunity to see not just Frank’s lauded public work, but view the work he did every day in taking a picture for no reason other than capturing, without guile, something or someone that intrigued him.

New York Arbor
By Mitch Epstein
Steidl
Hardcover, 96 pages, $68

In New York Arbor, photographer Mitch Epstein depicts New York as something that most people would not consider: a city of trees. Rather than presenting the proto-typical urban pictures of skylines, buildings, stores and people, Epstein presents magnificent individual trees as if they in and of themselves are precious landmarks. Some are towering, some are stilted, but they are portrayed in form-defining black-and-white monochrome and are all clearly visible as architectural and natural wonders. Straight and tall, or twisted and contorted, these trees are as much a part of the modern Big Apple landscape and lifestyle as are the subways, buses, bodegas and taxis. Though some were originally planted for a long-past purpose or function, it is hopeful that many may also survive well past the environments and neighborhoods in which they find themselves today.

Epstein was inspired to produce this work by two other artists: Eugène Atget and Robert Adams. Atget photographed trees daily after having suffered a heart attack, and Adams has documented the effects of clear-cutting forests in the Northwest. It is obvious that Epstein has now cultivated his own perspective, and is sharing his view that New York truly is a city of trees.

Two books to enjoy back-to-back are Almost Fiction by Jamie Baldridge and Revue by Eugenio Recuenco. They both deliver beautiful fine-art photography with a detailed modern surrealist perspective.

Almost Fiction
By Jamie Baldridge
Modernbook Editions
Hardcover, 105 pages, $75

If you can tell a book by its cover, then Almost Fiction’s cover design resembles the type of book you would find if you combined Alice in Wonderland with Catalan surrealist artist Joan Miró. A hardbound monograph by photographer Jamie Baldridge, Almost Fiction elevates Baldridge’s photography, set design and fantasy-visions to the tenth degree. Published by San Francisco-based boutique photography gallery ModernBook Editions, it includes images from three of his series: “Belle Epoque,” “Dystopia” and “The Everywhere Chronicles.” Each photo meticulously combines the smallest details to tell a story that is hinted at by its title, but widely open to interpretation by the viewer.

There is a certain feeling of the “Steampunk” movement’s influence in Baldridge’s work, in particular in his regular use of wood, mechanical gadgets and slightly dilapidated walls. This influence gives his pieces both historical and modern atmosphere, and more often than not the results are quite beautiful to behold. Writers everywhere will ache to conceive a bestselling backstory for the scenes depicted on these pages.

Revue
By Eugenio Recuenco
teNeues
Hardcover, 304 pages, $125

Revue by Spaniard Eugenio Recuenco is quite a large book at 304 pages and more than 240 of Recuenco’s most compelling photographs. These cinematic images are inspired by Grimm’s fairy tales, ancient mythology, Hitchcock films, and even Renaissance and Modern art history. Clearly well-educated in these topics, the references Recuenco makes in each painting-like picture take the viewer into a spellbinding loop of otherworldly introspection and reflection. You can easily imagine yourself in the moment being depicted, waiting for the next second of action to occur, the next key decision to be made. Yet, as many of these glamorous images have been created with commercial intent for publications such as Vogue, Vanity Fair, Stern, GQ and Madame Figaro, you also know that their main purpose is to completely capture and focus your attention. In that regard, Recuenco, without a doubt, succeeds.

Publisher teNeues has released two versions of Revue: a regular edition for $125 and a $2,500 Collector’s Edition that includes a clamshell box and portfolio with one signed and numbered photographic print.