Posts

The story that led to A Period of Juvenile Prosperity is far more interesting than the simplified idea of “a photographer who decided to travel across the United States by train.” Mike Brodie did not begin the journey as a photographic project. First came the need to move, to disappear from conventional life; photography arrived later, almost by accident. That distinction explains much of the book’s power. There is some confusion regarding the exact date of his first journey,

The Steidl story begins in Göttingen, Germany, in the late 1960s, when Gerhard Steidl was still very young. In 1968, he opened a small silkscreen workshop dedicated to posters, graphic works, and artists' publications. The business was born within the artistic and political context of a rapidly changing Germany. At that time, Steidl had no intention of becoming one of the world's leading publishers of photography books. His starting point was much more artisanal: ink, paper,

Ed Templeton is one of those figures whose career is difficult to contain within a single discipline. Photographer, draughtsman, painter, professional skateboarder and founder of Toy Machine, Templeton has developed since the late 1980s a body of work deeply connected to urban culture, adolescence and everyday life. Although his name is inevitably associated with skateboarding, reducing his work to that world would overlook a much broader, autobiographical and complex artisti

Descubre a Hiromix, una de las fotógrafas japonesas más influyentes de los años noventa. Con su fotografía espontánea, íntima y cercana a la cultura juvenil de Tokio, transformó la vida cotidiana, los autorretratos, la amistad y la música en una nueva forma de expresión fotográfica. En este post exploramos su trayectoria, sus principales photobooks como Girls Blue y Hiromix, su relación con la fotografía japonesa contemporánea y el fenómeno de la llamada “girly photography”.

Cristóbal Hara occupies a unique place in contemporary Spanish photography. Born in Madrid in 1946, his career has developed outside the usual categories of documentary photography. His work draws its inspiration from reality, without simply transcribing it. His images contain humor, strangeness, popular traditions, violence, theatricality, and a very particular relationship to painting and Spanish culture. After spending his childhood in the Philippines, the United States, G

Masahisa Fukase was born on February 25, 1934, in Bifuka, a small town in Hokkaido, in the far north of Japan. He grew up in a family where photography was not just a hobby, but a profession. His father, Sukezō Fukase, ran the family photography studio, founded by previous generations, and it was there that young Masahisa learned the basics of photography, portraiture, and darkroom development at a very early age. In 1952, he moved to Tokyo to study photography at Nihon Unive

Dash Snow was one of those artists whose work is impossible to separate from his own life. Born in New York in 1981 and passing away in the same city in 2009, at just 27 years old, he left behind a relatively brief but highly influential body of work, particularly through his Polaroids, which today occupy an important place in the recent history of photography and Photobooks. Coming from a family closely connected to the art world and collecting, Snow nevertheless distanced h

The Steve McCurry scandal erupted in 2016 and became one of the most controversial episodes in contemporary documentary photography. It all began when Italian photographer Paolo Viglione visited a McCurry exhibition at Venaria Reale, near Turin, and noticed a strange flaw in a photograph taken in Havana in 2014. Upon closer inspection, he saw that a signpost and a person didn't physically align, and that part of the signpost appeared to have been digitally removed or displace

Bruce Davidson’s Subway project was born in the early 1980s, at a time when the photographer needed to find his way back to a personal project after several years devoted to commercial work and the frustration of a film project that ultimately never came to fruition. Davidson began travelling again through some of the New York neighbourhoods he had photographed before, and he constantly used the subway to get there. Little by little, he began to understand that the journey it

Francesc Català-Roca occupies a fundamental place in the history of 20th-century Spanish photography. His work is deeply linked to the transformation of Spanish society in the decades following the Civil War, but to reduce him to the mere figure of a documentary photographer would be an oversimplification. Català-Roca possessed an immense visual culture, capable of moving with ease from reportage to portraiture, architecture, landscape, travel, and book photography, all while

In the fascinating world of photobook collecting, there is a specific terminology that allows for the precise description of a book's characteristics. These terms help determine aspects such as its provenance, uniqueness, and bibliographical importance, and in many cases, can have a considerable impact on its value. In this post we're going to review some of these terms and details, because certain aspects can radically change the price of a photobook, both upwards and downwa

The obi is one of the most interesting and unique features of Japanese photobooks, and to understand many Japanese editions it is almost essential to understand what function it had. The obi is the narrow paper band that typically encircles a book, like a sash or belt. In Japan, it's used for books, records, and other published products, and it usually contains information not found on the front cover: title, author, publisher, price, publication date, awards, reviews, or pro

Many of you may wonder how it is possible that the same copy of New York, by Keizo Kitajima, can be found with two completely different obi and yet both correspond to the first edition. At first glance, it might seem that one of the two copies belongs to a second edition or a later reprint. But that's not the case. The explanation lies in the book's publishing history and, specifically, in an event that took place after its initial publication. In 1982, the Japanese publisher

On countless occasions I have seen a look of bewilderment appear on the face of someone who is beginning to take their first steps in the exciting world of photography and, by extension, photobooks. How is it possible that these 83 photographs, many of them blurry, out of focus, underexposed, and with framing that seems to defy all the rules of photography, have ended up becoming one of the most influential photobooks in history? Okay, let's take it one step at a time. 1947 R