Don’t miss some of our favorite photobooks published by women, transgender, and non-binary photographers in 2020!
ENDIA BEAL — PERFORMANCE REVIEW
Performance Review, the first monograph by North Carolina-based artist, educator and activist Endia Beal, brings together work from first-hand experiences that highlight the realities and challenges for women of color in the corporate workplace.
Beal’s widely-published videos and photographic series, including “Am I What You’re Looking For?” “Office Scene,” “Can I Touch It?” and “9 to 5” are presented in a book sequence that highlights the ambitions, challenges and negotiations that women of color navigate within the workplace.
Beal’s signature directness and visual intelligence engages viewers of varying generations and backgrounds in dialogues that accept there is much to questions we push forward during the social evolutions of our time.
The book includes a foreword by Beal’s contemporary and colleague Whitney Richardson, Global Events Manager for The New York Times in London, and contributions by journalists David Walker, Priscilla Frank, and Becky Harlan, who have all written about Beal's work for national publications.
PURCHASE: Minor Matters
DEBI CORNWALL — NECESSARY FICTIONS
What are the stories we tell ourselves, the games we play, to manage unsettling realities? Necessary Fictions explores the performance of American power and identity in the post-9/11 era. During trips to ten military bases across the United States since 2016, Debi Cornwall documented mock-village landscapes in the fictional country of “Atropia” and its denizens, role players who enact versions of their past or future selves in realistic training scenarios. Costumed Afghan and Iraqi civilians, many of whom have fled war, now recreate it in the service of the U.S. military. Real soldiers pose in front of camouflage backdrops, dressed by Hollywood makeup artists in “moulage”—fake wounds—as they prepare to deploy.
Cornwall presents a meta-reality—the artifice of war—and the book combines her photographs with a variety of texts to provoke critical inquiry about America’s fantasy industrial complex. With texts by Sarah Sentilles, PEN Award-winning critical theorist; Makeda Best, PhD, Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography, Harvard Art Museums, Harvard University; Nomi Stone, PhD, Pushcart Prize-winning poet; and an original work of fiction from Lannan Literary Fellow Roy Scranton, PhD.
PURCHASE: Radius Books
DIANA MARKOSIAN — SANTA BARBARA
Santa Barbara is the debut monograph by Diana Markosian, a talented artist who works at the intersection of photography and film. The series recreates the story of Markosian’s family’s journey from post-Soviet Russia to the U.S. in the 1990s.
The project pulls together staged scenes, film stills, and family pictures in an innovative and compelling hybrid of personal and documentary storytelling. In it, the artist grapples with the reality that her mother, seeking a better life for herself and her two young children, escaped Russia and came to America. Markosian’s family settled in Santa Barbara, a city made famous in Russia when the 1980s soap opera of that name became the first American television show broadcast there. Weaving together reenactments by actors, archival images, stills from the original Santa Barbara TV show, Markosian reconsiders her family’s story from her mother’s perspective, relating to her for the first time as a woman, and coming to terms with the profound sacrifices she made to become an American.
Picturing the hopes of Markosian’s mother to provide a different future for her children, the project emphasizes the hypercharged symbolism of the opportunities of America and the West, while serving as a personal reflection of the artist’s family history. Images are woven together with a script written by Markosian in collaboration with one of the original Santa Barbara writers, Lynda Myles, and is the basis for a new short film directed by the artist. Encapsulating different styles and storytelling techniques, Markosian proves to be at the forefront of a new generation of photographers pushing the boundaries of documentary.
PURCHASE: Aperture
AKASHA RABUT — DEATH MAGICK ABUNDANCE
More than any party, parade, team, or disaster, New Orleans is the people. The ones who persevere, survive, strengthen, and transform the city in all its unceasing vibrancy. For nearly a decade, photographer Akasha Rabut has documented this thriving culture. In Death Magick Abundance, her first book, she reveals the city’s spirit through the pink smoke of the Caramel Curves, the first all-female black motorcycle club; alongside the Southern Riderz, urban cowboys on horseback in the streets; and many others who represent the next generation of New Orleans. Seeking to interpret and preserve a sacred cultural heritage while redefining itself against a constantly shifting landscape, Death Magick Abundance is a conduit for the love and unending beauty of New Orleans and its people to flow to the rest of the world.
PURCHASE: Akasha’s Site
MELISSA RENWICK — BY THE TIDES, THE SUN, & THE MOON
It's often compared to Neverland, some refer to it as the Wild West – I call it home. Tofino sits at the end of the road, where the temperate rainforest plunges into the sea on the western edge of the Canadian coast. People who end up here are often running from something. Others are pulled by the tides. Those who are born here stay. I landed in this remote, coastal town three years ago to escape the city - taking flight like a bonafide Wendy Darling. What was meant to be a brief stopover became my forever. Neverland sucked me in.
“By the tides, the sun and the moon,” is an exploration of the innocence of youth and how our environment shapes so much of who we become. The images capture Tofino’s surf youth as they transition into adulthood. Their futures remain unknown. Will they stay, or will they go, darling?
PURCHASE: Melissa’s Site
THANA FAROQ — I DON’T RECOGNIZE ME IN THE SHADOWS
Thana decided to make this book to figure out how everything happened – to figure out the war, the escape, the transition, and the unfamiliar. It’s not easy to talk about trauma while you’re living in it because you can’t recognize it. Creating this work enabled her to tackle the trauma and to confront it her own terms. The images and the words serve as a record, a healing method to register and validate her emotions and experiences during the transition into the unknown.
“I wanted to offer my own version of the story, one that is infused with my resilient spirit — unbroken, unfailing and devoid of self-pity. I wanted to climb the fences, and I did”
Throughout this journey, Thana took on many roles – She is the storyteller, the photographer, and the person who has gone through these experiences of displacement and asylum. It is empowering to tell your own story to the world. It is liberating. She was not alone and so she hoped to visually articulate people’s struggles to leave countries where conditions of violence, war, and aggression are prevalent. She focused on reflections of personal moments including handwritten testimonies that capture the hopes, fears, dreams, and struggles.
PURCHASE: Lecturis
FARRAH SKEIKY — PRESENT TENSE: DC PUNK AND DIY, RIGHT NOW
Present Tense: DC Punk and DIY, Right Now is a photo book of images from DC punk, hardcore, and DIY bands that are active and recently active in the scene. Captured from 2015 - 2019, these photos were made in traditional venues, dive bars, basements, warehouses, churches, galleries, living rooms, restaurants, and even a neighborhood grocery store in the DMV area.
This book exists as a response to those who might think that DC punk died out in the 90s, or speak to the creativity of this community in the past tense. It is a celebration of bands who define the present, and bands who played three shows and called it. This is an argument against nostalgia, against complacency. It is a celebration of one of the most revered traditions of modern music, in the context of today.
PURCHASE: Farrah’s Site
ISADORA KOSOFSKY — SENIOR LOVE TRIANGLE
Photographed in Los Angeles, Senior Love Triangle documents three senior citizens in a romantic conflict. Jeanie, age 81, and Adina, age 90, share William, age 84, as a partner and companion, often all spending time together. In his late 70s, Will formed a relationship with Adina. Then, Will moved into another retirement home where he fell in love with Jeanie. Since Will did not want to choose between Jeanie and Adina, they formed a trio. While pushing against sociocultural norms about senior citizens, the connection between Jeanie, Will and Adina also reveals ageless needs, anxieties and contradictions. Renowned documentary photographer Isadora Kosofsky met Jeanie, Will and Adina when she was 17, chronicling their moments of adventure, desire and loneliness with an empathetic gaze for years.
Senior Love Triangle, published widely, multi-award recipient, center of a TED Talk and basis for a feature film, is seen as a revolutionary visual work on intimacy and aging, questioning the universal nature of love and monogamy. “There are many different kinds of love,” says Adina to Kosofsky. Through photography and writing taken from Kosofsky’s notebooks, including conversations and reflections, Senior Love Triangle book is documentary storytelling that viscerally immerses us in the lives of these three people where it is impossible not to reflect on the complex nature of our own relationships.
PURCHASE: Kehrer Verlag
RAJA LÄUBLI — HEXENWELTEN
Hexenwelten (Witches' Worlds) is a social documentary work that explores the lives and practices of seven women in Switzerland. Every protagonist has her own approach to witchcraft and her own way of living with nature and magic. While some offer rituals and tell the fortune for a living, others see witchery as just one of their facets or even prefer to keep it entirely to themselves.
'A witch is somebody who feels for oneself, who thinks for oneself, who questions and doesn't condone.' - Mui
For the project they all allowed me to accompany them with the camera and provided an insight into their extraordinary everyday lives, ceremonies and subculture.
PURCHASE: Raja’s Site
JENNY RIFFLE & MOLLY LANDRETH — IT’S RAINING… I LOVE YOU
This co-authored book of early self-portraits by two professional photographers celebrates love—first love, an enduring friendship that resulted, and a lifelong devotion to photography as a form of creative expression.
The black and white photographs in the book are drawn from the summer of 1999—when Prince told us to party, computer scientists feared global shutdown, and the seismic changes in communication that arrived with widespread use of the internet had not yet occurred. Jenny Riffle and Molly Landreth, home from their first year at separate colleges, documented the precious and banal moments of early adulthood as they explored their surroundings, and each other, through photography.
Presented along with selected correspondence from the remainder of their college years, the photographs are a testament to the power of enduring friendship, and the creative spirits of two unique yet complementary artists.
PURCHASE: Minor Matters
JACKIE DIVES — BECOMING NOT A MOTHER
“There is a kind of sadness in not wanting the things that give so many other people their life’s meaning. ” ― Sheila Heti, Motherhood
What follows the choice not to become a mother? When you decide not to become a mother there is no word for what you are becoming. But not becoming a parent does not simply mean a continuation of the status quo. Becoming Not A Mother is an exploration of self care rituals and healing through feelings of loss, alienation, and unworthiness in the wake of my decision to not have children.
PURCHASE: Jackie’s Site
HANNAH KOZAK — HE THREW THE LAST PUNCH TOO HARD
The book “He Threw The Last Punch Too Hard” by Los Angeles based photographer Hannah Kozak tells the story of her mother Rachel Zarco, a beautiful, passionate, vivacious, and fiery Guatemalan Sophia Loren- type brunette who left Hannah and the family after she fell in love with another man. The man turned out to be violent. He beat her so badly that she suffered permanent brain damage and had to be moved into an assisted living facility at the age of forty one, where she still lives today. Since 2009, Hannah has followed her difficult journey and this book is their story. A story that could inspire other women to leave an abusive relationship, before it’s too late.
“He Threw The Last Punch Too Hard” is printed in a limited edition of 700 copies. It measures 21 x 26 cm (8' x 10.5") and contains 51 black and white images and 30 archival photographs drawn from Zarco/Kozak family albums. The text includes a personal essay from Hannah Kozak and Hope Edelman and commentary by Aline Smithson.
PURCHASE: Hannah’s Site
SARA SALLAM — IF I CAN BE HEARD IN THE PLACE WHERE YOU ARE
In this book, I criticise how ancient Egyptian necropolises are no longer considered, perceived, or experienced as places of mourning. I juxtapose landscapes of ancient burial grounds with views from contemporary cemeteries, archival stills, and dialogue extracts from Egyptian films and television series. The depicted mourning practices in this film material accentuate the emotional bleakness of ancient tombs where such emotionally-charged experiences no longer occur. The words spoken in these scenes of loss can thus be read as though addressed to the ancient Egyptians. To strengthen this invitation further, I interweave throughout the book excerpts from an ancient letter written by the scribe Butehamun to his departed wife. I liken thus his grieved words for his beloved to those uttered nowadays in funerals. In doing so, the book becomes a reminder that mournful tears of sorrow were once shed inside pyramids, temples, excavation pits, and touristic sites.
PURCHASE: Sara’s Site
ESTHER HORVATH — INTO THE ARCTIC ICE
In September 2019, a team of 600 researchers from 19 countries united in a common mission known as MOSAiC–the Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate–whose mission is to chart conditions in the Arctic for one continuous year. This illustrated account of that incredible voyage features amazing images from acclaimed photographer Esther Horvath, who documents every step of the expedition. Learn how researchers prepare for the journey with survival training. Watch as they plow through the ice and set up a network of research stations that drift along on a floe across the North Pole. See them take ice samples, measure wind and temperature, and study every element of the atmosphere, terrain, and ocean to obtain data that will help shape the course of climate science for generations to come. Horvath’s camera captures life on board the vessel, visits by curious polar bears, the wonders of the Arctic sky, the endless waves of wind-blown snow and ice, and the beauty and ferocity of some of the most brutal conditions on earth. Accompanying these pictures are texts and commentary by researchers taking part in the expedition. This stunning book offers a front-row seat to the most important climate research project in recent history and helps readers grasp why studying the Arctic is essential to our survival on this planet.
PURCHASE: Penguin Random House
TESSA BUNNEY — FARMERFLORIST
We are a nation of farmers, of gardeners, of flower lovers and our cut flower industry is worth 2.2 billion pounds a year. Flower farms were once a familiar feature of the British countryside and market gardeners grew flowers among their vegetables. In the 1800s, larger farms sprang up as transport links improved and daily trains carried violets from Dawlish, snowdrops from Lincolnshire and narcissi from Cornwall. Flower production has always necessarily been linked to transport, and with planes came distance. Now we can have any flower at any time of year, flown in from the equator, or hothoused in vast Dutch greenhouses.
Recently a number of smaller British flower farms have sprung up, fuelled in part by the wider, resurgent interest in locally produced, seasonal, sustainably grown produce. They are contributing to a vibrant ‘artisan’ cut-flower industry in the UK. My project explores this new movement for ‘fair trade in flowers’, a celebration of the domestic growers past and present.
PURCHASE: Another Place