Blog Lomblad

This stack is less of a credit card balance buster than it seems. Instead of a year-end list inspired scramble, this pile accounts for most every book I bought between my birthday in the fall & last week. My favorite, at least at the moment, is the tag team of Gossage & Soth. Both books, a poster-booklet-zine story in Soth’s case, succeed more than I could have hoped when I first heard of the pairing. Gossage’s collection is especially inspiring for how active his picture-making is & the sheer volume of good images. Soth’s tale of finding, losing & then re-finding a portrait subject fits right in with the small book/zine works he’s made in the last few years. The more overt narratives (including text, ephemera, etc) have grabbed my attention in a way that some of his previous image-only projects haven’t (though I liked them a lot).

The rest of them are winners, more or less. I was happy to discover that Sternfeld’s First Pictures was stuffed with wonderful images. When you see a handful of great pictures on the internet, it’s easy to get hopes up but Sternfeld’s book doesn’t disappoint. I had a somewhat opposite experience with the Ernst Haas book. I’d seen some great photos online but was a little let down by the collection as a whole. It’s very good but not in the way that I expected. Both issues of Soth’s Lonely Boy Mag are great fun. Graeme Mitchell’s booklet is really solid & has helped stoke the fires of self-publishing for me. I’m embarrassed to say that I haven’t been through Brad Zellar’s book more than once but I do mean to get back to it, I swear. Friedlander’s retrospective catalog/doorstop is an overflowing fountain of great pictures, as expected.

Conductors of the Moving World by Brad Zellar
Lonely Boy Mag Nos. A-1 (Alec Soth’s Midwestern Exotica) & A-2 (Boys & Their Cars)
Savage, Dixie, Slaughterville by Graeme Mitchell
The Auckland Project by John Gossage & Alec Soth
Color Correction by Ernst Haas
First Pictures by Joel Sternfeld
Lee Friedlander by Peter Galassi

Haven’t made any of these for a long while. No time like the present, etc.