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There’s a new blog with lots of photobook reviews in German on kasselerfotobuchblog.de.

Just in time for christmas: our friends from emerge-mag.com have their first book ready for subscription. It covers 276 pages with 26 reportages from German photographres Christian Pankratz, Gesche Jäger, Daniel Pilar, Anne Lass, Nicole Strasser, Lene Münch, Mareike Günsche, Jan Windszus, Frederic Lezmi, Anikka Bauer, Tine Casper, Daniel Etter, Mischa Christen, Kirill Golovchenko, Hannes Jung, Heinrich Völkel, Jan Brandes, Gordon Welters, Florian Manz, Judith Stenneken, Rebecca Sampson, Jonas Ludwig Walter, Andy Spyra, Dawin Meckel, Anna-Kristina Bauer and Felix Seuffert. The preview pages look promising.

Hamburg based photographer Petra Herbert did a lovely photo project in Pforzheim, the city she lived until she turned 18. This series was a special discovery for me as I grew up near Pforzheim in Southern Germany and lived in town for a few year at the beginning of my 20s . Check an interview (in German) and photographs from her artist book “What we’ve got is Gold” on the pages of SZ Magazin online.

After the release of Henrik Verning’s book Berlin – Die Stadt und die Beute in 2008 I asked him if he would like to exhibit some of his photographs at FENSTER61. He exhibited some new work there in 2009 and some of the pictures are now part of his new publication Sampler.01/Berlin:Crash. Verning shows a collection of photographs with hard contrasts in grainy black and white. A wild mixture of steet impressions, close-ups, portraits, animals and night visions that drag you through a dark, rough and blurry version of the city.

The magazine is planned to be published as a limited edition of 100 on a regular basis. Here’s a video on vimeo that gives an impression about the first issue.

Sol Neelman from Portland released a funny photobook called ‘Weird Sports’ which contains a collection of his photographs taken on freaky sports events in the US during the last eight years. His long term project ist documented with a lot more photos on his blog.
There are interviews with Neelman about how he ist working on The Image, Deconstructed and on the aperture blog.

I attended a lecture by Andreas Meichsner at Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, two or three years ago and pretty much liked his photo series he presented at the time. Those series, combined with some new ones, also dealing with his main subject tourism, are now published in his book „Alles in Ordnung“ („Everything is okay“). Jörg Colberg ist presenting it in a new video of his book presentation series on youtube.

Gundula Schulze Eldowy’s Berlin in einer Hundenacht / Berlin on a Dog’s Night will be finally released as a book this september. Her combination of text and photographs from East Berlin in the late seventies and eighties are outstanding and definitly one of the most intimate photographic works about East Berlin that I know. I never understood why those stories were only published as a pdf on her website and shown in some exhibitions. There are some previews on her redesigned website. Also interesting: an interview on youtube.

As a part of the Indie Photobook Library, my book ALEX is on exhibition at the New York Photo Festival this weekend like it was at the snap! Festival in Orlando, Florida last weekend. So if you should be around Dumbo…

Found this thread in a forum while googleing myself the other day. It’s interesting to read discussions like that about your own work and YES it should never be the intention to be everybody’s darling ;-)

Image from my book ALEX.

I discovered Rosalind Solomon’s book Chapalingas recently, which is a 460 page retrospective of the American photographer who started taking pictures not before the age of 38. The 200 images are in the most part portraits in a very intense and poetic documentary style. They were taken all over the word, different cultures, different decades and contexts but always middle format, 6×6 in black and white. The straight line in technique gives the book a clear thread while crossing all boundaries at the same time. A very impressing book by a very impressing artist.

There is a selection of her work on her official website and there are interesting interviews on americansuburbx.com and 2point8.

By accident I found „Bill Wood’s Business“ in a book store the other day. Bill Wood was a commercial studio photographer in Fort Worth, Texas, who died in 1973. During the 50s and 60s he photographed anything that his customers wanted him to photograph: portraits, events, products, advertisments, pets, architecture, diseases, even dead bodies. What was never ment to be any artistic or journalistic work now turns out to be a great documentation about living in the upper middle class in America at the time. A great book with over 250 black/white photographs. Check articles and pictures at foto8.com, icp.org and veryshortlist.com.

I haven’t seen this book yet but it seems to be promising: A Drug Free Land by Swiss photographer Thomas Kern. Book presentation tonight at Komenik, Berlin, at 6pm.
Photographs and reviews here and here.

Bought Bruce Gilden’s Fashion Magazine yesterday which in fact is a collection of 7 magazines, each 40cm high and 30cm wide. Entitled Power, Fame, Addictions, Body, Fantasmes, Exclusive and Illicit. The big format fits perfectly to those powerful pictures. There’s a multimedia presentation on Magnum In Motion with Bruce talking about the project. Awesome.

Seconds2Real published a nice review about ALEX last week – now they are running an ALEX competition. Click here to find out how you can win a copy of ALEX. If you shouldn’t be lucky to win one you still have the chance to order one ;-)