My Top 10 Photography Books of 2022
In last-name alphabetical order, because I can't deal with hierarchies.
Happy Holidays everyone!
I’ve gotten a little sick with the end of the year sniffles, and I’ve been getting spammed with a whole bunch of end-of-year lists from photography books to music albums to inexpensive NYC restaurants, so I thought it was time to contribute my own list. This is by no means all-encompassing and I beg anyone with their own picks to send them my way. I’ve been seeing too many lists with the same sorts of books, and I hope this one sticks out and presents you with something new.
Jimmy DeSana: Submission (DelMonico Books / Brooklyn Museum)
As much as I try to look across the five boroughs for shows, I often end up stuck in my Manhattan bubble. A couple of weeks ago, critic and friend Taylor Ndiaye reminded me of the fantastic Jimmy DeSana retrospective happening at the Brooklyn Museum; Ndiaye had been working as a curatorial intern for the exhibition organizer Drew Sawyer. We were standing in the used isle of Strand’s photography department and I could see the book still sitting on the new releases table. I would come back again and again to flip through the book which acts both as an exhibition catalogue and the “first comprehensive book” on the New York legendary artist. Going through the book, I became hypnotized by DeSana’s use of color and how he applied photography artistically, editorially, but ultimately as a social and political tool of gender and sexual liberation.
William Eggleston: The Outlands, Selected Works (David Zwirner Books)
I recently was talking with a friend who actually disagreed with me about this, but I really enjoyed these selections more than the complete 3-volumed set of The Outlands. After looking through Eggleston’s exhibit at Zwirner, I had the opportunity to flip through the new book there. It seemed natural to me to want to see Eggleston’s photographs big, having seen these big prints throughout the show. I wasn’t interested in seeing matted and small 4x6 sized prints in a big book, as the complete set of books did; I wanted to look up close. For me, the new Selected Works book did exactly that, and more in its nice lay-flat binding and lush, luster printing. I understand the traditional and conventional printing etiquette of making prints small so you don’t risk getting your fingers on the image. The inconsistent sizes in the books, and prints spewing across the gutter may disrupt one’s assumption that they’ll open the book to find a catalog of neatly packed prints, but what they leave with is better— a capacity to peer deeper in the image, to land up close, and not watch from a distance.
Judith Joy Ross: Photographs 1978–2015 (Aperture)
Attending Bard College’s photography program, Ross’s portraits were a constant reference for myself and others. In my meetings with my thesis advisor and artist An-My Le, I was introduced to curator Susan Kismaric’s introduction in a 1995 MoMA book on Ross’s work. Kismaric details the profound delicacy and trust involved in Ross’s portraits, different than the projection of self in portraitists like Richard Avedon or intellectualized-works like Thomas Struth’s. In Ross’s work, there was a mutual respect between sitter and photographer; Kismaric puts it simply after observing Ross make a portrait of two teenage boys, “I could see that
they were flattered by Ross's attention and her continuous exclamations of genuine appreciation.”
Throughout her photographic projects, there’s an echo of simple looking, and contrary to many people’s beliefs, that’s the art. Kismaric reminds us that “her approach is to simply center her subject in the frame. She relies on the fidelity of photography and, when possible, natural light to describe what is before the camera.” Every portrait is a precise, but also welcoming invitation to engage with the sitter’s eyes. With the exception of some politicians, most sitters— Kismaric wrote— seem eager to have their portrait made and prints delivered, from the local children in Ross’s childhood town Hazelton, PA to National Guardsmen leaving from a nearby armory where “according to Ross, everyone wanted to be photographed, to somehow make concrete who they were before going off to an abstract, unknown future.”
I wish to be able to meet Ross sometime soon and be able to discuss her work with her further, and see what she has learned about photographing people from all walks of life and what it has meant for her in terms of reflecting on how she looks at the people closest to her. Kismaric makes the point that much of Ross’s motivation in photographing came from grappling with her father’s death. As someone interested in understanding my relationship to my parents both emotionally but also visually, I wonder how Ross thinks about the photos she has of her family and her father now, after her life-long commitment to making direct portraits of her sitters. The last time I had the opportunity to ask her a question was a Zoom lecture, but all people wanted to ask was “What camera do you use?” and “How did you get people’s permission?” And maybe that’s the cherry on the top, the people attending these lectures aren’t the student photographers, they’re the everyday people walking through public and common spaces— like the Easton YWCA where Ross held an exhibit in 1988— simply asking as Ross is simply photographing.
Shala Miller: Tender Noted (Wendy's Subway)
I bought Tender Noted at 8-Ball Community x Printed Matter’s East Village Zine Fair this past Summer from Wendy’s Subway’s booth. It’s a comprehensive survey of Miller’s work in showcasing field notes, plays, scripts, stories, early photographic works like of their ill father in and out of the ICU, a series of self-portraits, collections of prints with text, to stills from films. Even before Miller lectured my senior seminar at Bard this last year, I’ve been intent on following their work and explorations across disciplines through performance, text, photography, and beyond.
REVS: Life's A Mission… Then You're Dead (Self-published)
I don’t usually line up for purchases, but the anticipated September release of a 500+ page book mixed with stories from 100 graffiti writers and distorted photography from Matt Weber seemed sufficient enough of a reason. I intended on going with my friend and bookstore man Craig Mathis, but when I heard he had to go before his work at 9am, I was hesitant. Yet, thank G-d I went when I did because we were already around the corner when we arrived a little over an hour before the store’s doors opened. Word was that each cover was 1-of-1, hand-drawn by REVS himself. You had to pay cash, $20. I didn’t think much of wearing my Gem Spa x Fun City Tattoo shop collaboration t-shirt, but it served me good being that I got handed a cover inspired by East Village legend Peter Missing’s symbol, an upside down martini glass. A masked man standing in front of the store called me over and asked if I knew what it meant, I shrugged. He said, “It means the party’s over. It’s when he sobered up.”
Roger Richardson: Let Me Sow Love (Deadbeat Club)
After her December, 2020 online talk with Bard’s Student Run Darkroom, artist Sasha Phyars-Burgess suggested myself and the rest of the club head reach out to Middletown, NY based artist Richardson to give a lecture. It turned out Richardson had been a Hudson Valley college student like ourselves, graduating from SUNY Purchase nearby. The lecture was a rich look at Richardson’s work from undergrad onwards to his then-current work— which is exciting to see it take on new forms in this published body of work. I had invited my college friend, who was born and raised in Middletown, to the lecture and she remembered seeing faces in the photographs she hadn’t seen in so long. It was a revelation to me in that moment that Richardson was making a kind of historical record of his peers, loved ones, and even strangers. They were memories to become.
LaToya Ruby Frazier: Flint is Family in Three Acts (Artbook / Steidl)
I’ve been following Frazier’s work for some time now, but my attention started to pick up speed when I came across a pristine first-edition copy of The Notion of Family (2014) at East Village Books for 25 bucks, for my friend Andy Garcia. I became more interested in understanding her interest in uncovering and acknowledging the physical and emotional consequences of industrialization, particularly in Braddock, PA and in Flint, MI. Browsing through the Strand, Dashwood Books, and Artbook at MoMA PS1, I came to face again and again with this large survey of Frazier’s work. In the same book, we are led through Frazier’s inaugural series— The Notion of Family— to her union photographs, to photographing Breonna Taylor’s family for Vanity Fair, to documenting the water crisis in Flint. The book is a necessary guide to Frazier’s work.
Rose Salene: SLUGS (American Art Catalogues)
I first saw Salene’s work at the Hessel Museum on Bard’s campus in 2021. My CCS grad student-teacher Camila Palomino had curated Salene’s solo-exhibit, C21OWO (2021)— an exhibit examining and analyzing the remains of Century 21’s flagship store following its 2020 bankruptcy. Later in 2021, my senior seminar professor Farah al Qasimi led us on a gallery tour in NYC, including a stop at the New Museum Triennial. Salene’s 60 Detected Rings (1991-2021) was on view— a physical, intuitive, and monetary evaluation of rings found from a woman’s metal detector on an Atlantic City beach. The work echoes her Panorama 94 (2019) project analyzing 94 lost rings from public transit she won from an MTA’s asset auction. Salene had gone through multiple processes of analysis to further understand the rings’ lost owners: DNA electrophoresis analysis, physic and pawn broker evaluations. There’s a wonderful Art21 video, “Rose Salene’s Lost & Found” on Panorama 94 and Salene’s most recent work, SLUGS (2022), following her as she goes to pawn shops and psychics to understand these found objects. Salene appears as an archeologist, looking to trace the steps of these rings and coins, and end up with an image of who lost them. The monetary value seems of little importance to Salene; she’s invested in their value as remains of memory, one’s life experiences. After looking through her work, I now imagine ghosts of people surrounding coins left on a clean subway seat. Salene is invested in understanding these ghosts and making their stories known.
I had been waiting to get this intensely sized book of high-resolution scans of individual “slugs” used to confused MTA buses coin-readers, won by Salene in another asset auction, and the publisher’s Black Friday sale was a great opportunity. SLUGS was originally exhibited in this past year’s Whitney Biennale, seemingly just dumped on a table. I would recommend reading Salene’s recent digital fellowship with the Pompeii Committment, “The Feedback Loop of Belongings,” which ties together her lost ring projects together with her recent research on found jewelry in Pompeii.
Mark Steinmetz: Rivers and Roads (Stanley Barker)
On my last birthday, my mom gave me a gift certificate to Dashwood Books. I knew I wanted Steinmetz’s Rivers and Roads from seeing it promoted across his social media with little teasers, and in Stanley Barker’s Instagram livestream of a flip-through— that was unfortunately streamed backwards. Regardless, I was excited to grab a copy since I had only really started following his work in the last year after his 2021 released books: Berlin Pictures & the re-released South Triology.
It’s been wonderful to look through Steinmetz’s pictures as the beginnings of ideas, forms, and concepts in his graduate years at the renown Yale MFA Photography program. The pictures aren’t entirely there, and that’s what interests me. The book marks Steinmetz’s humble beginnings; it is his efforts and tries at maybe following others, and eventually finding his own path along the way.
Francesca Woodman: Alternate Stories (Marian Goodman Gallery)
One of my favorite bookstores to browse endlessly is the Strand Bookstore, and specifically its constantly updated photography section and new releases table. A couple of weeks ago it struck me that there was a new book of Woodman’s work. I hadn’t engaged with her work since my freshman year of college when after a critique, a friend told me she was wearing Woodman’s coat; she was related to Francesca or maybe were family friends.
The book features a lot of work I wasn’t immediately familiar with. It goes beyond the common themes and forms I usually associate with her work; it shows an unseen side of Woodman’s creativity, and thus perhaps, where the alternate stories lie.
Honorable Mention: Adam Zhu: Nice Daze (CCProjects)
I’ll be frank and say I haven’t seen the book even in person but such a project that documents the last decade of downtown Manhattan creativity, music, arts, and culture deserves recognition. The book can be considered a catalogue to Zhu’s current exhibit of photographs and memories on display through January 8th at CCProject’s gallery at 17 Allen Street, 2nd Floor. Teasers of the book show rapper WIKI sporting a Ratking jersey and IRAK crew member— I’m careful to not say writer, because in a recent interview Martins detests that his identity is simply a graff writer, he works across disciplines— Kunle Martins throwing up an Earsnot filler. The book is a record of Zhu’s memories with friends, mentors, and peers in the Lower East Side.
That’s my list. I’ve been enjoying the end of year lists for photography books specifically because it has introduced me to a lot new publisher I never knew or were familiar with, like Swiss publisher Scheidegger & Spiess who publishes many photographers I’m only becoming presently familiar with.
I’ve slowed down on my curated events, openings, and shows because I’ve gotten busy in a slew of new gigs I’ve started like substitute teaching, working at my old high school, and working at farmer’s markets.
Till the new year!
Rainer