Don’t miss some of our favorite photobooks published by women, transgender, and non-binary photographers in 2019!
CHARLOTTE SCHMITZ — LA PUENTE
The stunning photographs in La Puente were made in a large brothel in Ecuador where over 150 women work. The photos were created in collaboration with the women, who chose their own poses and later painted with nail polish on the Polaroids. The nail polish was initially used to provide anonymity but quickly developed into a creative instrument, a way for the women to beautify the world within the brothel. Not only their selected poses, but also the use of nail polish tell about the women’s inner and outer perceptions. The images also raise questions about the sexualized picture of women in our societies. The process of working with Polaroids and nail polish gave the women control to personalize their own photos, breaking down the power structures in the artistic production itself by including the women in the creative sphere.
PURCHASE: FotoEvidence
LISETTE POOLE — LA PALOMA Y LA LEY
Other Stories is Ecuadorian-American photographer Karen Miranda Rivadeneira’s first monograph. It focuses on her relationships with the women in her extended family, especially her mother and grandmother. The resulting images exude tenderness and dignity, and incorporate symbols and visual elements subtly that hint at Rivadeneira’s Ecuadorian heritage. Other Stories threads personal and collective narratives that are centered in identity, intimacy, memory, and indigenous knowledge. The book contains an essay in English and Spanish by Alanna Lockward, a Dominican-German author and independent curator. She is the founding director of Art Labour Archives, an exceptional platform centered on theory, political activism and art.
PURCHASE: Lisette’s Site
ELIZABETH D. HERMAN & CELESTE SLOMAN — THE WOMEN OF THE 116TH CONGRESS
Just over a century ago, Jeannette Rankin of Montana won a seat in the House of Representatives, becoming the first woman ever elected to federal office. In 1917, 128 years after the first United States Congress convened, she was sworn into its 65th session.
One hundred and two years later, one has become 131—the number of women serving in both chambers of the 116th Congress as of 2019.
For most of recorded American history, political power has looked a certain way. But the 2018 midterm elections brought a seismic change. This book, a collaboration between New York Times photo editors Beth Flynn and and Marisa Schwartz Taylor and photographers Elizabeth D. Herman and Celeste Sloman, documents the women of the 116th Congress, photographed in the style of historical portrait paintings commonly seen in the halls of power to highlight the stark difference between how we’ve historically viewed governance and how it has evolved.
PURCHASE: Abrams Books
JOANA TORO — HELLO, I AM KITTY
“Hello I am Kitty” is the result of the photographer’s personal journal to find a new identity through an eye hole in the head of a Hello Kitty costume while asking for donations after posing for pictures in Times Square between 2012-2013.
PURCHASE: Joana’s Site
LILI KOBIELSKI — I REFUSE FOR THE DEVIL TO TAKE MY SOUL
This series of photographic portraits and interviews with Cook County Jail inmates as well as jail social workers and psychologists provides a glimpse of life with mental illness behind bars.
The Cook County Department of Corrections in Chicago is one of the largest single-site pre-detention facilities in the world, with an average daily population hovering around 9,000 inmates. It is estimated that 35 percent of this population is mentally ill. Now more patients than ever are being treated in jail rather than at a mental health facility. Cook County Jail has become one of the largest, if not the largest, mental health care providers in the United States.
PURCHASE: PowerHouse Books
SORAYA ZAMAN — AMERICAN BOYS
American Boys is a book of portraits capturing the trans-masculine community across the United States. The young Americans featured in these pages are united through their proud embrace of gender identity. Both tender and exciting these portraits are evidence of the rapidly expanding conceptions of gender sweeping the country.
PURCHASE: Daylight
JEONGMEE YOON — THE PINK & BLUE PROJECT
Why do girls love pink toys, and boys love blue ones? The fine arts photographer Jeongmee Yoon (*1969, Seoul) poses this question in her work, The Pink and Blue Project, for which she began photographing Korean and American girls and boys in their bedrooms in 2005. The gender-specific color schemes quickly established themselves as an overarching phenomenon, independent of cultural or ethnic background. Yoon’s impressive portraits, for which she spent hours carefully arranging pink or blue objects, question these color codes and the consumer habits of both parents and children. They reveal the connections linking gender identity and social norms, consumer culture, and media.
PURCHASE: Hatje Cantz
ELINOR CARUCCI — MIDLIFE
It is a period in life that is universal, at some point, to everyone, yet in our day-to-day and cultural dialogue, nearly invisible. Midlife is a moving and empathetic portrait of an artist at the point in her life when inexorable change is more apparent than ever. Elinor Carucci, whose work has been collected in the previous acclaimed volumes Closer (2002) and Mother (2013), continues her immersive and close-up examination of her own life in this volume, portraying this moment in vibrant detail.
As one of the most autobiographically rigorous photographers of her generation, Carucci recruits and revisits the same members of her family that we have seen since her work gained prominence two decades ago. Even as we observe telling details—graying hair, the pressures and joys of marriage, episodes of pronounced illness, the evolution of her aging parents’ roles as grandparents, her children’s increasing independence—we are invited to reflect on the experiences that we all share contending with the challenges of life, love, and change.
PURCHASE: Monacelli Press
JUSTYNA MIELNIKIEWICZ — UKRAINE RUNS THROUGH IT
An exploration of the issues facing Ukraine today using the Dnieper River as a symbolic dividing line for understanding what unites and separates Ukrainians.
PURCHASE: Justyna’s Site
ANNA MARIA ANTOINETTE D’ADDARIO — DEEP IN THEIR ROOTS, ALL FLOWERS KEEP THE LIGHT
In Deep in their roots, all flowers keep the light visual metaphors are beautifully woven together, addressing challenging concepts such as the silence and despair surrounding the tragic death of a beloved sibling, especially when compounded by the horror of murder and violation. Anna D’Addario works through the intensity of extreme personal loss and family trauma, to create a unique elegy to her sister Daniela. This kind of practice requires a healthy amount of courage and psychological stamina on behalf of the artist, as she opens herself up, not only to her own raw, painful feelings, but to the potential of viewers’ morbid curiosity, fear, sympathy and a myriad of unexpected responses.
D’Addario addresses the problems associated with remembering and how memory and photography are inextricably linked to place, time, nostalgia and forgetting. In doing so, she creates a work that is a carefully considered exploration of photography’s value and application as a tool for symbolic, emotional and poetic communication.
PURCHASE: Ceiba Editions
MORGANNA MAGEE — TEENAGE WILDLIFE
Morganna Magee’s Teenage Wildlife, an ongoing documentation of the lives of three young women, is presented as the artist's first mongraph.
Daisy, Shania and Teeya are three young women from the same family. Over the years in which Magee has photographed them, the relationship between sitter and photographer has allowed for a collaborative practice in which the girls are allowed autonomy over their representation.
Experiencing their first heartbreak and other universal rights of adolescent passage in combination with poverty, crime, lack of education and systemic neglect of their mental health, the girl’s teenage years end abruptly with the birth of a child.
PURCHASE: Morganna’s Site
MICHELLE YEE — AFTER THAT AUGUST
Through Michelle’s photography, personal written reflections, and ephemera, an intimate portrait of a moment in time is revealed. This private journey to love following a divorce comes presented in a thoughtfully-designed and hand-finished, limited edition artist's book.
PURCHASE: Michelle’s Site
CHLOE AFTEL — OUTSIDE & IN BETWEEN
In the fall of 2013, Sasha Fleischman was set on fire on a public bus because they (Sasha doesn’t use s/he as identifiers) wore a skirt with a men’s shirt. Sasha identifies as “agender,” while others in this series think of themselves as “non-binary.”
This series aims to document the evolving culture of people living outside or in-between the gender binary, refusing to define themselves as strictly male or female. It was shot in a meaningful place for each subject, most often at home. It is an exploration of what this movement looks like and what it means for each person involved.
PURCHASE: Chloe’s Website
CHARLOTTE JANSEN — GIRL ON GIRL
Girl on Girl looks at how women are using photography, the internet and the female gaze to explore self-image and female identity in contemporary art.
A new generation of women is taking the art world – online and offline – by storm. In an image-obsessed culture saturated with social media, these 40 artists are using photography and the female gaze to redefine the fields of fashion, art, advertising and photojournalism, making a profound impact on our visual world.
Forty artists are featured, all of whose principal subject matter is either themselves or other women. Each is accompanied by a short profile based on personal interviews with the author, giving a fascinating insight into this exciting shift in female creativity.
PURCHASE: Laurence King
DJAMILA GROSSMAN — BE HERS BE MINE
After eight years and numerous failed attempts to get pregnant, a Swiss couple decide to have their baby born by surrogacy. Although it is banned in Switzerland, they ask a woman in the USA to carry their child in her womb. Photographers Tom Licht and Djamila Grossman describe the journey of the couple and the reasons behind their decision. They join the parents for the child’s birth in Wisconsin, USA, because they are intrigued by the questions their story offers. Surrogacy mirrors a global reality where lines blur between technology, human biology, ethics, and law. The complexity of the topic is reflected in documentary-style sequences, still life motifs, portraits, documents, and interviews.
PURCHASE: Djamila’s Site