On Friday, March 3, 2023, curators, scholars and librarians will present short talks on photobooks at What They Saw Reading Room at the Boston Athenaeum. I will be speaking with Donna Ferrato, author of Living with the Enemy from 4 pm-5 pm.
See the list of all Spotlight talks here.

March 2nd, 2023, Boston:
An exciting conversation on the history of photobooks by women at Boston Athenaeum:
Panelists include Anne Havinga (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Estrellita and Yousuf Karsh Chair, Department of Photography), Professor Kim Sichel (Boston University, Professor of History of Art & Architecture), Harvey Silverglate (Author, Activist and Attorney) and Dr. Stephanie Tung (Peabody Essex Museum Byrne Family Curator of Photography).

Learn more here

Join me on December 15th from 1 pm-2 pm ET, in an online Zoom meeting, Paris Photo in the Rearview Mirror, my third iteration of sharing the myriad resources from the largest international photo fair.

The images I share will demonstrate:

• current trends in finishing

• installation options

• unique exhibition treatments

Audio and video recordings will be available after the event.

Registration Required

Fee: $20
*Free to pre-registered Paris Photo in Your Pocket Members (note: use the redeem code sent to you and/or find on home page of member area)

Join J. Sybylla Smith in conversation with Odette England, Jennifer Garza-Cuen and Susan Bright about Past Paper//Present Marks: Responding to Rauschenberg.

In 2018, Odette England and Jennifer Garza-Cuen spent a week at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Residency in Captiva, Florida, making a series of nearly 200 cameraless photographs. These photograms were made by submerging expired photo-paper once owned by Rauschenberg in his swimming pool, exposing it to sunlight and moonlight.

Jennifer Garza-Cuen and Odette England
Essays: Susan Bright, David Campany, Nicholas Muellner
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 160 pages with approx. 70 images
Release Date: Fall 2021
Language: English
ISBN: 9781942185826
Dimensions: 11 x 12.75 inches
Publisher: Radius Books

*By registering for the online photobook group you are opting into my mailing list—quarterly newsletters, and updates about special offers. You can unsubscribe at any time.

Join J. Sybylla Smith in Conversation with Rita Leistner about her book, Forest for the Trees.

Rita Leistner planted over half a million trees from 1984-93. She spent the next twenty years working as a documentary photographer and photojournalist, primarily in war zones, claiming the backbreaking work of tree planting and the logistical skills she acquired as a crew boss prepared her for thriving in challenging environments.

Returning to the cut-block (the vast swathes of land cleared by logging) in 2016, Leistner “embedded” with a community of 100 tree planters, spending four years living in their bush camps in remote parts of western Canada. She creates heroic and uncanny portraits of work and of the land in homage to the people, profession and environment that were so formative to her.

High production tree planting is only in its second generation (it became necessary with the rise of mechanical logging in the late 1960s). Tree planting is a hybrid industrial labour and high intensity sport, where Canadian tree planters set the bar and are without peers worldwide. Today, tree planting is at a crossroads: the crucial moment at which it is transitioning from being something securely within the forestry industry to a kind of Anthropocene climate change symptom and solution. In addition to the book, the five-year project resulted in large scale works that are in major collections in Canada, and a feature documentary film Forest for the Trees (2021).

*By registering for the online photobook group you are opting into my mailing list—quarterly newsletters, and updates about special offers. You can unsubscribe at any time.

Concept Aware® Beginner's Guide

Perfect for anyone interested in the Concept Aware® toolkit, the Beginner’s Guide class helps students learn more about the CA framework and how it contributes to concept development. Eight essential elements are presented to students and shown through contemporary photography examples.

Wednesday, November 2, 2022
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

1 Hour Workshop Online | $50
Zoom Information Provided at Sign Up

Concept Aware® Beginner’s Guide

Perfect for anyone interested in the Concept Aware® toolkit, the Beginner’s Guide class helps students learn more about the CA framework and how it contributes to concept development. Eight essential elements are presented to students and shown through contemporary photography examples.

Tuesday, November 1, 2022
7:00 PM - 8:00 PM

1 Hour Workshop Online | $50
Zoom Information Provided at Sign Up

Join J. Sybylla Smith in conversation with Rania Matar about her new book, SHE. Raina Matar is a 2022 finalist of the Arnold Newman Prize for New Directions in Photographic Portraitures.

*Note: In honor of the 50th episode of Got Punctum?, Radius Books invites our audience to purchase Rania’s book, SHE, for 20% off. Use the following coupon code at checkout: TG56A1V
Offer valid through October 31, 2022.
Thank you, Radius Books!

As a Lebanese-born American artist and mother, Rania Matar’s (born 1964) cross-cultural experiences inform her art. She has dedicated her work to exploring issues of personal and collective identity through photographs of female adolescence and womanhood―both in the United States where she lives, and in the Middle East where she is from.

Rania Matar: She focuses on young women in their late teens and early twenties, who are leaving the cocoon of home, entering adulthood and facing a new reality. Depicting women in the United States and the Middle East, this project highlights how female subjectivity develops in parallel forms across cultural lines. Each young woman becomes an active participant in the image-making process, presiding over the environment and making it her own. Matar portrays the raw beauty of her subjects―their age, individuality, physicality and mystery―and photographs them the way she, a woman and a mother, sees them: beautiful, alive.

Photography by Rania Matar
Texts by Mark Alice Durant and Orin Zahra

Published by Radius Books
*Purchase Rania’s book, SHE, for 20% off. Use the following coupon code at checkout: TG56A1V
Offer valid through October 31, 2022.
Hardcover / 11.5 x 13.5 inches
83 images / 184 pages
ISBN: 9781942185833

*By registering for the online photobook group you are opting into my mailing list—quarterly newsletters, and updates about special offers. You can unsubscribe at any time.

Join J. Sybylla Smith in conversation with Holly Lynton about her new book, Bare Handed.

"The first book by this award-winning American photographer, presenting a nuanced portrait of rural life in 21st-century America - Her photographs are in the collections of the Yale University Art Gallery, the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, and the Lowe Art Museum in Miami - An exquisite object, beautifully printed and bound in Italy using 5 kinds of paper, with a 4-color printed slipcase and Swiss binding In Bare Handed, photographer Holly Lynton presents a nuanced portrait of rural life in 21st-century America. Returning to specific communities year after year, Lynton moves beyond mythology to reveal a complex social landscape suffused with tradition but unburdened by nostalgia. The 85 gestural portraits and visceral landscapes in her debut monograph depict people working barehanded in tandem with their environments, using tools mostly replaced by mechanization. This decade-long series goes far beyond the yields of a harvest to celebrate an almost spiritual state of being that emerges from time-honored practice and underscores a commitment to unmediated experiences with the natural world. Her keen attention to cultural visual memory is further contextualized in original poetry and essays by art historians Terence Washington and Carl Fuldner. Lynton's spellbinding color photographs convey an elemental connection to animals, the earth, and ritualized agricultural practices. The imposing, often tense physicality of the men, women, and animals and the dramatic lighting turn barns and compost heaps into stages for conflict, surrender, and transfiguration" - The Boston Globe.

Photographs by Holly Lynton.
Published by L’Artiere Edizioni, Bologna, Italy.
Designed by Margaret Bauer.
Essay contributions by Terence Washington & Carl Fuldner.
10.5 x 11.6 inches, 136 pages, 78 images.
Softcover with hardcover slipcase.

*By registering for the online photobook group you are opting into my mailing list—quarterly newsletters, and updates about special offers. You can unsubscribe at any time.

Join J. Sybylla Smith in conversation with Yelena Yemchuk about her new book, Odesa.

*In addition to reading the description below of the book from the publisher’s website. we invite you to read a wonderful and timely PhotoVogue article Odesa, the city where time loses its contours – Ukraine through the eyes of Yelena Yemchuk by Rica Cerbarano.

"Time is different in Odesa. It’s a city outside of time’.

As a child growing up in Kyiv, Yelena Yemchuk was fascinated by the reputation of Odesa as a free place during Soviet times. The city seemed full of contradictions — “acceptance but also danger. A place of jokes and characters, populated by outlaws and intellectuals.” She first visited Odesa in 2003 and returned in 2015 to begin to photograph the city and its inhabitants over a period of four years. This book is Yemchuk’s visual ode to the city.

In 1981, when Yemchuk was eleven years old, her family immigrated to the United States from their home in Kyiv, Ukraine. They could tell no-one out of their family of their plans to leave and going beyond the ‘Iron Curtain’ at the time meant they could never return to their home country. Ten years later, when Ukraine announced its independence, the artist was able to return to her home country to visit.

–from publisher’s website

Published by Gost Books. late May 2022
(August 2022 US)
Poems by Ilya Kaminsky
215 x 285 mm, 176 pages
111 full colour images
Hardback
978-1-910401-71-2

*By registering for the online photobook group you are opting into my mailing list—quarterly newsletters, and updates about special offers. You can unsubscribe at any time.

Works by Becky Wilkes
June 3, 2022 — July 30, 2022
Arts Fort Worth

Very excited to share news about Becky Wilkes exhibit. Read about my consultation and curation collaboration with her.

Arts Fort Worth
1300 Gendy Street
Fort Worth, TX 76107
Hours of operation: Monday through Saturday 9 AM - 5 PM.
June 3, 2022 through July 30, 2022

Three contemporary photographers share their unique journey of shepherding an idea into an object. How did each nurture a concept and develop a project? What creative choices did they encounter? When did they know a book was the platform for their work? How did they find collaborators?

Join me, in a panel discussion with photographers Lydia Panas, Amy Touchette  and  Karen Marshall as they share their recent publishing experience for a Griffin Museum panel on bookmaking.

We will learn of each project in a brief presentation and jump in to these and other questions - come with yours! 

One event of many in the Griffin Museum of Photography offerings on photobooks - see options on their website under Events!

Lydia Panas Sleeping Beauty published with MW Editions

Amy Touchette Personal Ties: Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn published with Schilt Publishing, 2021

Karen Marshall Between Girls published with Kehrer Verlag, 2021

Info for registration

Join J. Sybylla Smith in conversation with S. Billie Handle about her new book, Reconciliation. For ten years S. Billie Mandle photographed confessionals throughout the United States. She visited churches in small towns and large cities, creating images that depict the visible – and invisible – traces of people, communities, histories and dogmas.
The images speak to the beliefs that define these dark rooms and shape this intimate yet institutional ritual. Photographing from the perspective of the penitent, she used a large format camera and available light, creating images that are more metaphorical than typological. As a queer woman raised Catholic, Mandle has long had a complex relationship to the Church; these photographs are part confession, part reconciliation.

»When you go to confession on a Saturday night, you go into a warm, dimly lit vastness, with the smell of wax and incense in the air, the smell of burning candles, and if it is a hot summer night there is the sound of a great electric fan, and the noise of the streets coming in to emphasize the stillness.«
– Excerpt from Confession from The Long Loneliness by Dorothy Day

Hardcover22,4 x 28 cm
104 pages
40 color illustration
ISBN 978-3-86828-951-02020
Published by Kehrer Verlag
Purchase book

*By registering for the online photobook group you are opting into my mailing list—quarterly newsletters, and updates about special offers. You can unsubscribe at any time.

Join J. Sybylla Smith, in conversation with Jim Dow and April Watson, Senior Curator of Photography, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art about Jim’s new book Signs: Photographs by Jim Dow and exhibit.

Vivid, clear-sighted images of American vernacular signage and architecture encountered along old US highways showcase the early black-and-white work of the acclaimed photographer Jim Dow.

The American photographer Jim Dow (b. 1942) is renowned for photographs that depict the built environment—he first gained attention for his panoramic triptychs of baseball stadiums—and for his skill at conveying the “human ingenuity and spirit” that suffuse the spaces. This book is the first to focus on Dow’s early black-and-white pictures, featuring more than 60 photographs made between 1967 and 1977, a majority of which have never before been published. Indebted to the work of Walker Evans, a key mentor of Dow’s, these photographs depict time-worn signage taken from billboards, diners, gas stations, drive-ins, and other small businesses. While still recognizable as icons of commercial Americana, without their context Dow’s signs impart ambiguous messages, often situated between documentation and abstraction. Including a new essay by Dow that reveals his own perspective on the development of the work, Signs suggests how these formative years honed the artist’s sensibility and conceptual approach.

Published by Yale University Press

*By registering for the online photobook group you are opting into my mailing list—quarterly newsletters, and updates about special offers. You can unsubscribe at any time.

Sunshine state. Swampland paradise. Tourist aspiration. Real estate racket. Refuge of excess. Political swing-state. Sub-tropical fever dream. With forms of nature and culture found nowhere else, Florida is unique. It is also among the most elusive and misunderstood of places. Anastasia Samoylova photographs Florida on intensive road trips. Walker Evans (1903–75) photographed it over four decades. Twisting the visual clichés, these two remarkably discerning observers convey Florida’s dizzying combination of fantasy and reality.

Evans witnessed modern Florida emerging in the 1930s, with its blend of cultures, waves of tourism, stark beauty and blatant vulgarity. He photographed there until the 1970s, making Polaroids that still feel contemporary. Samoylova inherits what Evans saw coming. With intelligence and humor, she picks her way through the seductions and disappointments of a place that symbolizes the contradictions of the United States today. In Floridas, photographs by Samoylova and Evans are presented in parallel, weaving past and present, switching between black-and-white and color imagery, all complemented by an essay by editor David Campany and a visionary short story by celebrated novelist and Florida resident Lauren Groff.

192 pages, 144 images
Hardback / Clothbound 
30.5 x 26.2 cm

ISBN 978-3-96999-007-0 
Published by Steidl

*By registering for the online photobook group you are opting into my mailing list—quarterly newsletters, and updates about special offers. You can unsubscribe at any time.

Join J. Sybylla Smith in conversation with Mona Kuhn about her new book, Kings Road. “In Kings Road Mona Kuhn lyrically reconsiders the realms of time and space within the architectural elements of the Schindler House in Los Angeles. Built by Austrian architect Rudolph M. Schindler in 1922, the house was both a social and design experiment and an avant-garde hub for intellectuals and artists in the 1920s and ’30s.”

160 pages, 72 images

Hardback
2 3.7 x 31 cm

ISBN 978-3-95829-755-5

Published by Steidl

*By registering for the online photobook group you are opting into my mailing list—quarterly newsletters, and updates about special offers. You can unsubscribe at any time.

Join J. Sybylla Smith, in conversation with Jess Dugan about their new book, Look at me like you love me. In Look at me like you love me, Jess T. Dugan reflects on desire, intimacy, companionship, and the ways our identities are shaped by these experiences. In this highly personal collection of work, Dugan brings together self-portraits, portraits of individuals and couples, and still lifes, interwoven with diaristic writings reflecting on relationships, solitude, family, loss, healing, and the transformations that define a life. Dugan has long used photography to understand their own identity and to connect with others on a deeper level. Their process of working slowly and collaboratively discloses moments of heightened psychological intensity in images that transcend the specifics of a particular person or place, engaging with what it means to know oneself alongside and through others. Using medium-format cameras and natural lighting, Dugan employs traditional photographic practices to depict these contemporary subjects, resulting in images that both evoke and reimagine the conventional dynamics of art-historical portraiture. Brought together here, these photographs function as an extended, oblique self-portrait as much as a catalogue of friends and loved ones. Through a diffuse but studied sequence of image and text, Look at me like you love me brings our attention to one of the most powerful and complex forms of intimacy – that of seeing and being seen.

Embossed printed linen hardcover
23.5 x 29.5 cm, 108 pages

ISBN 978-1-913620-54-7
February 2022
Published by MACK Books

*By registering for the online photobook group you are opting into my mailing list—quarterly newsletters, and updates about special offers. You can unsubscribe at any time.

This text-based memoir of Michelle Dunn Marsh’s life and work as a book designer, cultural producer, and publisher is punctuated by photographs—gifted to her from projects, obtained through trade, or purchased in support of non-profit arts organisations—by some of American photography’s master practitioners over the last twenty-five years.

Portraits of her by Stephen Shore, Larry Fink, Sylvia Plachy, Will Wilson, and others punctuate a loosely chronological narrative exploring the author’s evolution of seeing, the influences of family, education, geographies, mentors, and photography itself on that process, and her commitment to the printed book as a vessel of future histories.

Seeing Being Seen evolved out of and expands upon an exhibition of the same name at the Highline Heritage Museum in 2019, and includes an afterword by the museum's director, Nancy Salguero McKay.

Michelle Dunn Marsh (b. 1973, Seattle) is the co-founder and publisher of Minor Matters Books. Since 1994 she has professionally engaged with the artform of photography through the creation of over one hundred publications, curation and placement of exhibitions, and development of numerous public programs. She has held staff positions with Aperture Foundation (New York), Chronicle Books (San Francisco), and Photographic Center Northwest (Seattle), and consulted with the estate of legendary music photographer Jim Marshall, among others. She was a tenured professor in graphic design, and has lectured internationally on photography and visual book publishing. She holds a master’s degree in publishing from Pace University, and a bachelor’s degree from Bard College.

Nancy Salguero McKay (b. 1979, Mexico City) is the executive director of Highline Heritage Museum in Burien, Washington. She was selected as one of the most fabulous people in Washington state in 2020. McKay has taught in the Museum Studies program at the University of Washington, and has been recognized for her leadership in museum and heritage fields.

*By registering for the online photobook group you are opting into my mailing list—quarterly newsletters, and updates about special offers. You can unsubscribe at any time.

2020 was a period of groundbreaking social and political upheaval, in combination with a colossal epidemiological crisis—and it urgently redefined the working conditions of photojournalists. The historic 2020 Black Lives Matter protests and the devastating Covid-19 pandemic presented unique challenges for photojournalism, forcing photographers into a terrain defined by new ethical, technological, and safety (emotional and physical) concerns, as well as innovative attacks on press freedom. 

Through a series of interviews—with top photographers who covered 2020’s biggest crises, as well as key photo editors who grappled with these unprecedented obstacles inside the newsroom—Through the Lens: The Pandemic and Black Lives Matter unpacks the industry’s most critical debates as it sheds light on the experiences and thought processes of the visual journalists themselves. Importantly, this book encourages readers to consider the efforts behind the camera lens: the challenges and risks visual journalists face to bring us the news in pictures. 

Richly illustrated with evocative photos, Through the Lens is a timely and vital look at the role photojournalism serves in a world of crisis. It is a powerful follow-up to Lauren Walsh’s previous title, Conversations on Conflict Photography, which offers a crucial exploration of the visual documentation of war and humanitarian crisis.

Lauren Walsh teaches at The New School and New York University, where she is the Director of the Gallatin School’s Photojournalism Lab. She is also the Director of Lost Rolls America, a national public archive of photography and memory.

Published by Routledge 2022
47 Color and B&W photographs
150 pages
Extensive index
Paperback / ISBN: 978-0-367-33209-9
$24.95/£18.50
Hardcover / ISBN: 978-0-367-33207-5
$120.00/£88.16

*By registering for the online photobook group you are opting into my mailing list—quarterly newsletters, and updates about special offers. You can unsubscribe at any time.

“If the decisive moment reflects reality in tune with the photographer’s intuition, flawlessly combining composition and timing, then the abandoned moment is the consequence of a fractional instant of surrender. This collection, made over a 40-year period by renowned photographer Ed Kashi, reveals imprecise glimpses of transitory events filled with frenetic energy - the chaos of everyday life. Embodying photography’s intrinsic power, they preserve moments that can never occur again in exactly the same time and space.

When geometry, mood, and possibility unite to unintentionally create something new, the magical and fictional qualities of still photography capture the unplanned essence of existence. In contrast to his journalistic approach of deep personal connection and keen observation, this work is about capturing the untamed energy of a moment with abandon.”

—from the essay by Alison Nordström

Edited by Brenda Bingham, Jennifer Larsen, Marjorie Steffe, Mallika Vora
Texts by Ed Kashi, Alison Nordström
Designed by Michael Curry, Mallika Vora

Published by Kehrer Verlag, 2021
Hardcover
ca. 30x24cm
ca. 136 pages
ca. 42 color + 26 b/w ills.

*By registering for the online photobook group you are opting into my mailing list—quarterly newsletters, and updates about special offers. You can unsubscribe at any time.

“In the period leading up to the November 3, 2020 elections in the United States, Teju Cole began to photograph his kitchen counter in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Working in the still life tradition of Chardin, Cezanne, and the Dutch masters, as well as such contemporary photographers as Laura Letinsky and Jan Groover, he photographed every day over the course of five weeks. Unlike those illustrious forbears, Cole left his arrangements entirely to chance, ‘the bowls and plates moving in their unpredictable constellations.’

What emerges is a surprising portrait, across time, of one kitchen counter in one home at a time of social, cultural, and political upheaval. Alongside the photographs is a long written essay, as wide-ranging in its concerns—hunger, fasting, mourning, slavery, intimacy, painting, poetry and the history of photography—as the photographs are delimited in theirs.

The text and photographic sequences are interspersed with an anonymous handwritten eighteenth century cookbook from Cambridge. Golden Apple of the Sun is a luminous and humane work, presented with the formal boldness and oblique intelligence we have come to expect from Teju Cole.”

 From publisher, MACK’s web page for Golden Apple of the Sun by Teju Cole

*By registering for the online photobook group you are opting into my mailing list—quarterly newsletters, and updates about special offers. You can unsubscribe at any time.

Tabitha Soren’s project Surface Tension is made by shooting the grime and debris that accumulates on her iPad. The background images are appropriated from her various devices through social media, images texted to her and from her web history. Soren creates the images about digital culture with an analogue large format view camera. The vigorous and expressive gestures on the surface of the image reflect the conflict between reality and fiction and between our embodied lives and our online, mediated lives. The photographs put in sharp focus what we normally try to look past and ignore on our screens. The images show the dystopian outside world swirling with the fingerprints and greasy smears of our embodied selves. The human markings are seemingly at odds with the chilly detachment and objectivity of the information that flows towards us, unrelentingly. In this project, the viewer is forced to see an everyday object in a way they usually don’t. 

The book is accompanied by an essay by Jia Tolentino. She is a staff writer for The New Yorker. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine and Pitchfork. In 2019, she published an essay collection called Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion.

Published by RVB Books 2021

22,4 x 34 cm / 8,82 x 13,49 inches
Hard cover, 64 pages, 41 colour photographs
ISBN 978-2-492175-08-4c
$34.42

*By registering for the online photobook group you are opting into my mailing list—quarterly newsletters, and updates about special offers. You can unsubscribe at any time

Black Diamonds is a personal endeavor to connect with the Appalachian region that photographer, Rich-Joseph Facun now calls home. As a person of color, he defines his community based on personal experience, which diverges from the stereotypes of race, religion, gender, and politics that are often attached to the region by outsiders. His images hint at life as it once was, sharing the hyperrealism of what it is today and the uncertainty of what it is to become in the coal mining boomtowns of bygone days. Life in Appalachia is fraught with mystery and mischaracterization. Yet, in all his interactions, the simple needs of day-to-day survival loom larger than the abstract issues of politics. The images strive for an understanding of people and place in these rural, isolated foothills pocked with poverty; where a heritage of hospitality, not hate, is an unspoken psalm.

Rich-Joseph Facun is a photographer of Indigenous Mexican and Filipino descent. His work aims to offer an authentic look into endangered, bygone, and fringe cultures—those transitions in time where places fade but people persist. The exploration of place, community, and cultural identity present themselves as a common denominator in both his life and photographic endeavors. Facun attended Ohio University where he earned his Bachelor of Science degree in Visual Communication. Before finding home in the Appalachian Foothills of Southeast Ohio, Facun roamed the globe for 15 years working as a photojournalist. His photography has been commissioned by various publications including NPR, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and more. Additionally, his work has been recognized by Photolucida’s Critical Mass, The Washington Post, Feature Shoot, The Image Deconstructed, The Photo Brigade, and Pictures of the Year International.

Published by Fall Line Press, 2021
60 color photographs, 3 historical photographs
128 pages
Hardcover
10” x 11”
First Edition of 1,100
Essay by Alison Stine
ISBN 978-1-7348312-1-4

*By registering for the online photobook group you are opting into my mailing list—quarterly newsletters, and updates about special offers. You can unsubscribe at any time.