Who doesn’t love a good photo book? To flick through the pages, be enlightened, educated, distracted and absorbed into another world through another’s eyes? Totally fantastic!
We’re here to share our Photobook Favourites – a selection of our favourite photography books recommended by the Shutter Hub community, an archive of titles we’ve enjoyed, and a reference point for you to explore.
The Colour of Money and Trees, Tony Dočekal, VOID
The photographs in ‘The Color of Money and Trees’ were made by Dutch photographer Tony Dočekal during several visits to Arizona and California. While volunteering for an organisation working with the unhoused, she encountered many who live on the margins of society—either by necessity or choice—and began to question the pursuits of success and the value of American Dream. The Color of Money and Trees takes the form of a diaristic fable and the photographs are interspersed with Dočekal’s diary entries alongside quotes from those she met along the way.
17.3 x 21.6cm, 96 pages, 500 copies /Silkscreened Cloth Hardcover
Find out more and buy The Colour of Money and Trees here.
The Lost World will take you on a journey through the magically desolate places of Japan. In the Land of the Rising Sun almost 8.5 million houses stand abandoned (according to the Japanese Housing and Land Survey of 2018). Even in the municipality of the busy metropolis of Tokyo, one in ten houses is empty. This was an unimaginable amount for the Dutch photographer Maan Limburg. She was so fascinated she spent months in these locations capturing these deserted places in intimate photographs. Her keen eye allows her to go way beyond the urban exploring genre and treats you to the rich stories and human details of these locations.
24 × 34cm, 176 pages / Hardcover
Find out more and buy The Lost World here.
Collar City: A Photographic Portrait of Troy, New York, Susan B. Anthony, MW Editions
On a winter day in 2013, photographer Susan B. Anthony drove an hour north from her home in Columbia County to Troy, New York, and unexpectedly fell in love with the city. For ten years, she visited and took photographs with her Hasselblad regularly.
Troy was a powerhouse of steel manufacturing and brickmaking in the 19th century. It is also known as “Collar City” for the removable shirt collars that were once a commonplace feature of men’s shirts and which were invented and produced here. Like many cities in the American Northeast and Midwest, its industrial power and wealth waned during the latter half of the 20th century.
Among Troy’s graffiti-covered factories stand grand houses built of Troy brick that feature stately marble fireplaces and colorful Tiffany windows. The past couple of decades have seen an influx of newcomers to Troy who are restoring homes and becoming part of the community. Anthony photographed the urban environment in various stages of dilapidation and renewal, along with taking portraits of residents—small children to elders who have lived in the city for decades. The photographs in Collar City create a portrait of a vibrant, diverse, and multigenerational community in this historic American town.
28.5 x 28.5cm, 144 pages, 85 colour photographs / Hardbound
Find out more and buy Collar City: A Photographic Portrait of Troy, New York here.
Contemporary Concrete Buildings, Taschen
Once synonymous with eyesore highway bridges and crumbling, unloved walls, concrete has been reborn as adventurous and sexy. This Bibliotheca Universalis edition considers the elaborate feats and prodigious engineering of contemporary concrete architecture, from stars such as Tadao Ando and Herzog & de Meuron, to fresh new studios like the Russian SPEECH.
14 x 19.5cm, 624 pages / Hardcover
Find out more and buy Contemporary Concrete Buildings here.
Flowers for Bea, Brendan Barry, GOST
Flowers for Bea is a book of still life photographs of wildflowers collected close to artist Brendan Barry’s home in Devon. The images were created in a camera obscura—a room sized camera, operated from the inside—using two distinct analogue processes. The creation of each photograph involved a painstaking process of alchemy and patience with a successful exposure sometimes taking up to 8 hours.
29.2 x 35cm, 88 pages, 48 images, Signed / Hardcover
Find out more and buy Flowers for Bea here.
Lowlands, Ester Vonplon, IIKKI Books
“Lowlands” began when Ester Vonplon traveled to Spitsbergen in the Arctic Ocean in summer 2016. She sailed the ice-clogged seas of the Arctic Ocean on a three-masted sailing vessel, to capture the impressions of the calving glaciers and melting ice. This journey in the Arctic Ocean was the perfect beginning for Taylor Deupree & Marcus Fischer to compose and record Lowlands.
Ester Vonplon (1980) lives and works in Castrisch, Switzerland. She studied photography in Berlin and has finished in 2013 her Master in Arts at the ZHdK in Zurich. Her work has been awarded several times amongst others Manor Kunstpreis, 2017. Her work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions, among others including Bündner Kunstmuseum, Chur, Kunstmuseum Thun, Museum Allerheiligen, Schaffhausen, FOAM Amsterdam, FOMU Antwerpen, Dafen Artmuseum Shenzhen and at Artfairs and Festivals.
30 x 22cm, 112 pages, 88 photographs / Hardcover
Find out more and buy Lowlands here.
When I Was Six, Phillip Toledano, Dewi Lewis Publishing
40 years ago, Phillip Toledano’s sister died in an accident. He was six years old at the time. Although she was almost never spoken of again, Claudia was a constant but unknown presence in his life. After his parents died, he found boxes of her things, things he’d never seen before, neatly packed away, a museum of sorts, created by his mother.
‘This work was a way of getting to know my sister. But it was also a way of getting to know my parents and their relationship with her. It gave me a glimpse into the pain and courage it took to stay together as husband and wife, as mother and father, to give me the beautiful life they gave me. I have no memories of my life after my sister’s death for a few years, other than an obsession with space, planets, and distant universes. Perhaps it was a way of being somewhere else, distant. Half of the images in the book are of the imagined landscapes that saved me, when I was a child that needed saving. The other half, of things that belonged to my sister. Things that explain who she was, how she loved my parents, and what happened after her death.’
22 x 30cm, 78 pages, 42 colour photographs/ Clothbound Hardback
Find out more and buy When I Was Six here.
Home can be found in a person or a memory, in a place or a feeling.
The holding of hands, the warmth of a smile, a sentiment, or sense of belonging. The comfort of home doesn’t always come with four walls. Home can be anything, anywhere.
Home revisits one of Shutter Hub’s favourite themes of the last decade, and the inspiration for this publication is 2019’s HOME exhibition in Wales, where we invited photographers to submit their work and answer the wide-reaching question – what does home mean to you?
14.8 x 21cm, 116 pages, 100 colour photographs / Softcover.
Find out more and buy Home here.
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