If you are looking for some photo books to purchase, here is a list of a few.
In Plain Air
This work began 10 years ago when Irina Rosovsky took a small motorboat around the southern lake of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. It is then that she saw “what first felt like a mirage–families, lovers, friends, a multitude of cultures and ethnicities, all sharing the same land and moment.” The interaction between nature and city and the park’s depiction as a democratic and public space is captured through her colour photographs.
Portraits and Dreams
Wendy Ewald’s photo book ‘Portraits and Dreams’ contains photographs made by Kentucky schoolchildren in the 1970s. It is about personal memory and the passage of time. Wendy Ewald wanted to give these children an opportunity to express the intimate dreams and fears they had. She gave them each a camera and also interviewed them about childhood. A wide range of themes is explored in this book, such as death, love, loss, and hope. It is an authentic rendering of these children’s lives, and each perspective is original and unique. Portraits and Dreams depict the simultaneous pleasures and horrors of childhood through the photographic medium. (A revised and expanded version of it was published in 2020).
Justine Kurland: Girl Pictures
Justine Kurland reclaims the space of the North American frontier, a symbol of rebellion, freedom and romance, and a masculine myth of cowboys and outlaws. Her series of teenage girls from 1997 to 2002 consists of staged photos that resist patriarchal ideals. “Their world is at once lawless and utopian, a frontier Eden in the wild spaces just outside of suburban infrastructure and ideas.” 20 years later, this book still feels relevant and includes new, unpublished images.
Day Sleeper
Sam Contis presents a new perspective of the work of the iconic photographer Dorothea Lange in this book. “Drawing from Lange’s extensive archive, Contis constructs a fragmented, unfamiliar world centred around the figure of the day sleeper – at once a symbol of respite and oblivion. The book shows us, one artist, through the eyes of another, with Contis responding to resonances between her and Lange’s ways of seeing.”