7 books
Sally Mann
Sally Mann has been making pictures on the same Virginia farm for fifty years, and this is the book about how the work actually gets made. Not theory. The nuts and bolts of a life spent at it. She’s funny…
Huw Lewis-Jones
Polar explorer, historian, professor, and writer Huw Lewis-Jones is so prolific you will be forgiven for thinking there are two of him. In 2010, he published this book, an admiring sweep of ocean pioneers, along with a similar, companion book…
Pablo Ortiz Monasterio
When Kahlo died in 1954, Rivera turned the Blue House into a museum but had the rest of her things — clothes, letters, documents, and more than 6,000 photographs — locked in the bathrooms and sealed. They stayed shut for…
Kiliii Yüyan
A book-length argument for entrusting Indigenous peoples with the land they have stewarded for millennia, and I’m convinced. The statistics do real work here, but it’s Yüyan’s photographs from nine Native communities that actually land the case.
Sally Mann
Mann found boxes in the attic — letters, photographs, court records — and built a memoir out of what was in them. Her father the country doctor and eccentric. Her mother. Gee-Gee, the Black woman who raised her, and Mann’s…
Geoff Dyer
Dyer looking hard at photographs, mostly one at a time, mostly for a few pages each. Eugène Atget’s empty Paris streets, Dorothea Lange, Roy DeCarava, Vivian Maier, Alex Webb, Gary Winogrand, plus a long stretch on his own preoccupations —…
Janet Malcolm
Malcolm spent a career taking other people apart in print and refused to write about herself, then in her eighties wrote this — twenty-odd short pieces, each triggered by a photograph from her own boxes. A Czech Jewish family that…
