spring book spring

© Doug DuBois, All Rights Reserved

Being an unrepentant bibliophile, I can't resist being excited about the latest crop of Aperture books. They've just released their Spring Catalog, and they've got a number of cool books coming out. Among the books are Thomas Ruff's book JPGS, The Edge of Vision (Lyle Rexer's exploration of contemporary photographic abstraction), Vol. 2 of the MP3 Project (Curtis Mann, John Opera and Stacia Yeapanis), a Magnum compilation on the effect of AIDS wordlwide, and a book called Photography After Frank, an essay compilation which explores Robert Frank's neverending influence.

However, there are a couple of books I'm most excited to see. The first is entitled Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and 1970s, and is edited by Ryuichi Kaneko, the curator of the Tokyo's Metropolitan Museum of Photography. Riding on the success of Parr and Badger's books, as well as Roth's book, 101 Photography Books, this is another in a growing list of photobooks on photobooks. Hopefully, along with more recent re-publications of important Provoke and other seminal Japanese photobooks, this book will help fill the gap in the West's knowledge about Japanese photography and books, and their profound significance for the medium. Although I'm admittedly often perplexed by the faint trickle of tomes that make their way to the US, the wealth, volume and variety of work in Japanese photobooks is exciting. Given the often narrow range of creative influence for young photographers in the US, the variety and radically different nature of the work is welcome.

I'm also excited to see books by both Eirik Johnson and Doug Dubois. Eirik Johnson won the Santa Fe Prize a couple of years ago for his project Borderlands, which was subsequently published as a book by Twin Palms. His new body of work, entitled Sawdust Mountain, explores the fragile relationship between man, industry and nature in the Pacific Northwest. Although travelling well-worn paths, Johnson manages to offer fresh and interesting images that further probe our conflicted relationship with nature. Likewise, Doug Dubois' book All The Nights And Days, is another exciting publication by a well-deserving and excellent photographer on a familiar subject. The culmination of over twenty-years, DuBois' tender and smart pictures of his family manage to avoid the ready clichés of photographing the family while remaining evocative and touching. Began after his father suffered an on a commuter train, the work explores the subtle frailties and daily emotion struggles of a family. Sadly, we have to wait all winter to see these treasures.

© Eirik Johnson, All Rights Reserved