The view from The New Yorker’s photo department.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/photobooth/2011/10/lise-sarfati-she.html#ixzz1cTszmRF6

“Gina #12 Oakland, CA” (2009)

“Sloane #06 Oakland, CA” (2005)

“Christine #21 San Francisco, CA” (2005)

“Sasha #07 Phoenix, AZ” (2007)

“Christine #11 San Francisco, CA” (2005)

“Christine #13 Oakland, CA” (2009)

“Christine #10 Hollywood, CA” (2006)

“Sloane #66 Oakland, CA” (2009)

“Gina #24 Oakland, CA” (2007)

“Sloane #16 Oakland, CA” (2007)

“Sasha #20 Emeryville, CA” (2007)

“Sloane #62 Oakland, CA” (2007)

Rinko Kawauchi’s Illuminance (Aperture) could be the year’s most beautiful photo book. Her 12th since 2001, when she published three books simultaneously, it’s culled from 15 years of work and loosely tied to the theme of light. Typically, her subjects are both ordinary and extraordinary: a burning cigarette, a suckling baby, a dead bird, a drop of water on a lily pad, a lunar eclipse. In a sequence of radiant color images that feels at once deliberate and random, she strikes an ideal balance between weight and weightlessness, the concrete and the ephemeral. David Chandler, the book’s elegant essayist, identifies Kawauchi’s “highly personal, insatiably hungry form of photography, both euphoric and startled,” as part of “a new kind of visual communication, a new language…that is diaristic, uninhibited, interpersonal, and emotionally charged.” But he also places her squarely within the Japanese photo-book tradition that gives publications priority over exhibitions. With Illuminance, Kawauchi clarifies what Chandler calls her “spirit of accelerated wonder,” summing up her considerable achievement while leaving it marvelously expansive and open-ended.

William Eggleston: Before Color

by Alison Zavos on July 14, 2011

A few years ago in the archives of the William Eggleston Artistic Trust in Memphis, a box was found containing Eggleston’s earliest photography – remarkably in black and white. The photos were subsequently exhibited at Cheim & Read gallery in New York and sold. This book, Before Color, published by Steidl reunites these photos in their entirety, and shows the artistic beginnings of a pioneer of contemporary photography.

In the late 1950s Eggleston began photographing suburban Memphis using high-speed 35 mm black and white film, developing the style and motifs that would come to shape his pivotal color work including diners, supermarkets, domestic interiors and people engaged in seemingly trivial and banal situations.

Now, fifty years later, all the plates in Before Color have been scanned from vintage prints developed by Eggleston in his own darkroom. In the mid 1960s Eggleston discovered color film and was quickly satisfied with the results: “And by God, it worked. Just overnight.” Eggleston then abandoned black and white photography, but its fundamental influence on his practice is undeniable.

All photos are from Before Color: William Eggleston, published by Steidl.

PhotoIreland Exhibtion

15 July – 31 July

In July 2011, PhotoIreland will present ‘Martin Parr’s Best Books of the Decade’, an exhibition of 30 publications from all over the globe, hand-picked by the world-famous photographer and photographic bibliophile. These photobooks have not only fantastic images, but also have exceptional production value, and became classics of their own time. Often quite radical, and sometimes taking time to fully appreciate their merits, all of these books are bound to go down as important contributors to the ongoing photographic book culture.

Photographs by Graciela Iturbide.

Text by Oscar Pujol.

La Fabrica, 2011.

Graciela Iturbide (born 1942) is Latin America’s most internationally admired photographer, as her receipt of the 2008 Hasselblad Foundation award confirmed. Although she is best known for her serial portrayals of her native Mexico, one of Iturbide’s most popular individual photographs is “Perros Perdidos” (or “Lost Dogs” ), an image of several dogs in silhouette on a rocky outcrop taken in India in 1998. Graciela Iturbide: No Hay Nadie/There Is No-Onereveals the Mexican photographer’s extended explorations in (mostly) cities in the north of India–Varanasi, Delhi and Calcutta, as well as Bombay–over the past 13 years. Iturbide’s black-and-white images are strikingly at ease with their subject matter, able to locate arrangements of objects, architectural outline and urban signage without ever lapsing into visual tourism.

Text courtesy of Artbook.

This book is scheduled to arrive in October 2011.

Introduction by Ian Frazier

Published by powerHouse Books in association with CDS Books of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University

Now available at ROSEGALLERY

French photographer Lise Sarfati has lived and worked in the United States since 2003, and has produced six series of photographs with resulting exhibitions and publications during her time in the US. With her photographs Sarfati says she conveys “a vision in which the individual is environment, a map outlining a perilous cultural geography.” She goes on to emphasize that the simplicity of her photographs and richness of perception are constructed without effects to capture “a determinism of the heroic, inevitably tragic figure.”

Her publications include “Austin, Texas” published by Magnum Photos (2008), “The New Life—La Vie Nouvelle” published by Twin Palms (2005) and “Acta Est” published by Phaidon (2000).

Sarfati is represented by ROSEGALLERY, Los Angeles and Yossi Milo, New York.

Rinko Kawauchi: Illuminance will open at the Gallery at Hermès on 20 May, 2011 and run through 16 July, 2011. This will be the first time this work has been exhibited in a solo show in the United States. Along with the Hermès exhibition, Aperture will release a full illustrated catalogue, which will be the first time Kawauchi’s work will be published outside of Japan.

To celebrate this release, Aperture will be hosting an artist talk and book signing on Wednesday 18 May, 2011 in New York City, where Kawauchi will discuss her previously unpublished images with Aperture’s Book Publisher Lesley Martin.

Image © Rinko Kawauchi.