Books featured:

Berenice Abbott - The World of Atget

What fascinates me about this book are the underlying relationships and the presence among the published photographs of portraits of Eugene Atget (plate 6 and plate 179), taken by Berenice herself and which he was unable to see, as when she brought them to him, found out that he had recently died. It was also Berenice who brought Atget's work to the attention of Szarkowsky, then director of photography at MoMA, who acquired the photographs for the collection. To tell the truth, the rights to the images did not all belong to Berenice, but to Julien Levy, who founded one of the most accredited galleries in New York in the 1930s. However, it was thanks to his friendship with Berenice that he managed to acquire part of the Eugene Atget archive. The photographs selected by Berenice for this book tell the world of Atget, as the title says, but through the relationship that Berenice had with Atget himself and the two portraits she made.

Horizon Press, New York, 1964 - Edizione Berkley Windhover Book, New York, 1977, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 64-24540 SBN 425-03550-6 - 24 cm x 31,50 x 1,50

Laia Abril - On Abortion. And the ripercussions of lack of access

Books and projects must have a content and this book certainly does. Abortion is illegal in many countries and women do not know how to escape unwanted pregnancies and the violence that often precedes the relationships that generate them. Through punctual research and images and texts, Laia composes a study on the lack of access to a safe and free abortion, highlighting the suffered erosion of women's reproductive rights up to the present day. I was there at Paris Photo when it was announced she won the Aperture Best Book Award, in 2018 and I was really happy for her: well deserved.

Dewi Lewis, Stockport, 2018, Gran Bretagna, ISBN: 978-1-911306-24-5 - 24,5 cm x 18,8 cm x 2 cm

Robert Adams - Our Lives and Our Children

There are photographers who truly care about our future, as human beings, and our planet. One of them is certainly Robert Adams. In this book this is particularly evident: the risk of nuclear disaster and the scenarios evoked, however, pervade the whole book, with its disturbing implications. As known, in the early seventies of the twentieth century, one day he and his wife saw a column of smoke rising from the Rocky Flats nuclear plants, which was located near Denver, Colorado. Concerns about what appeared to be a nuclear disaster resulted in this work. He decided to photograph, near the Rocky Flat nuclear power plant, the value of what would inevitably be lost, that we would risk losing, namely care and relationships between human beings. Robert Adams' photography is both poetic and moral, a source of inspiration and hope. I was happy to have met him in 2021 in Astoria and been able to exchange books and apprehensions with him.

Aperture, New York, 1983, ISBN: 0-89381-142-4  - 21,50 cm x 28 cm x 0,80 cm

It was a woman, Anna Atkins, who in 1843 created what is considered the first book illustrated with photographs, part of three volumes "Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions" (1843-1853), of which not many copies circulated. Anna had learned the photographic technique from William Fox Talbot, a friend of her father and husband, but she made use of the cyanotype technique invented by Sir John Herschel. These splendid cyanotypes reproduce ferns, algae and other plants, Anna being also a botanist. ‘Sun Gardens’ presents a selection of the images, reproduced full size, as facsimiles. It is an updated version of the book by Larry J. Schaaf, published in 1985 by Aperture. This magnificent edition, edited by Joshua Chuang, was published to accompany the exhibition “Blue Prints: The Pioneering Photographs of Anna Atkins” held at “The New York Public Library” from October 19 to February 17, 2019. Leafing through its pages, one can dream of leafing through Anna Atkins' books.

Cyanotipes by Anna Atkins. Larry J. Schaaf, edited by Joshua Chuang - Prestel, Munich, 2018, The New York Public Library - 25,5 cm x 32 cm x 2,80 cm

When I look at this book I think of how happy I am to have met Liliana, Lilli, a kind and generous photographer, a feminist. I remember her stories, and our conversations, the political commitment for women, and with women, since the 1960s and 1970s, which this book encapsulate. Many photographs in this book seem to have been taken from a family album because, as we know, the personal is political”. ‘Donne è bello’ retraces her career, mainly as a photojournalist, but an "intimate" photojournalist, who manages to capture the gazes, relationships and prevarications of males, for example among the children photographed in 1974, near in piazzale Dateo, in Milan. In those shots, Liliana has captured, with ability and intensity, how the boys secluded the girls they were playing with, in the background of the picture.

Postcart, Roma, 2020 - ISBN: 978-88-31363-22-8 - 15 cm x 21,50 cm x 1,50 cm

We are in an era of great climatic changes and Marion Belanger documents the landscapes of the North American plate: the eastern border in Iceland, along the North Atlantic ridge, where it meets the Eurasian plate, and the western border in California, along the San Andreas fault where it borders the Pacific Plate. The double reappears in the very construction of the book and makes it an interesting and coherent object. The pairing of images, one for each tectonic edge, allows for a dialogue between different realities, dichotomies that lead us back to the difficult relationship between the geological force and the limits of man's intervention on the landscape, as Marion herself wrote to me: "The pairing are primarily visually based. I did not want the book to be illustrative, but rather an imaginative journey, sometimes mundane, other times fantastical along a geologic border that is in large part underneath and invisible. The boundaries represented in the book are the two edges of the plate, and also the boundary of the ground itself, between what is visible, and what is below the surface of the earth”.

Radius Books, Santa Fe, Stati Uniti, 2016, Essay by Lucy Lippard - ISBN: 9781942185154 - 31,5 cm x 25 cm x 2 cm

Here is the relationship with the mother, the protagonist of the book. So intense and arrived at the moment of the last farewell. It is the search for how this so important, lifelong figure and relationship, can nevertheless remain with us. A daughter looking for her mother, trying to hold back her mother. How? With her photographs, her diaries, with the images and the video of her death, shot minute by minute, in 2006. In this book - with a pearly white fabric cover, with a raised text embroidered in yellow - there are also images of the installation of “Rachel, Monique”, presented in the basement of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in 2010, where memories and experiences recurred, such as Sophie Calle's journey to the Arctic, the place where she left objects treasured by her mother , and Monique's last word.

Xavier Barral, Parigi, 2012 - ISBN: 9782365111171 - 18 cm x 24,9 cm x 2,5 cm

In the seventies Marcella Campagnano was already a member of the feminist movement, in the collective of Via Cherubini, in Milan, and she used photography to describe with other women close to her, the roles in which we are caged and defined, questioning through the various ‘disguises’ from housewife, prostitute, mother, wife, young lady, lover, lady……….the way we are represented and thought about. Simple and archetypal images, as Marcella defines them, which arise from a reflection, from a relationship between women and between the incessant dialogue between subject and object. A "work of self-awareness" attempted by this book, as Lidia Campagnano writes in the introductory text. Among its pages also other works, such as portraits of women on the street, in front of the walls and streets of the city. Looking at these images is a privilege, as being able to talk to Marcella and feel her closeness.

Moizzi Editore, Milano, 1976 - 21 cm x 24 cm x 1 cm

The subtle anti-masculinity that pervades this work recalls themes dear to the Surrealists, and at the same time brings to mind the image of the strong man and the fist slammed on the table by the armor, present since the "Caroselli" of the Sixties of the twentieth century. There is always a slightly retro taste in Francesca Catastini's works and a minimalism that makes the concepts exemplified concise, yet mysterious at the same time. I met Francesca in Vienna in 2016 when she won the Vienna Photobook Festival with the first book "The Modern Spirit is Vivisective", containing images of the Anatomical Theater of Bologna, where I live. Her work strikes me for those surreal and metaphorical elements also present in "Petrus", her second book, which she told me about when we met in Amsterdam a few years later, while the project was still in gestation. The book was published by Kherer in 2019 and is delicate and light in its structure and content, but full of hidden meanings.

Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg, 2019 - ISBN 978-3-86828-952-7 - 17 cm x 23,50 cm x 1 cm

A delicate relationship with the acquired daughter, Martha, and with her friends, is what is explored in this book and by the sequence of images, which arise from a question Martha asked when she was sixteen: "why don't you take pictures of me anymore"? In fact, Siân had shifted her attention to Alice, Martha's sister, to whom her first book is in fact dedicated. Siân outlines through the images a path, both of Martha's growth and transformation, from teenager to young woman, and of their relationship, no longer just between mother and daughter, but between women. The photograph that closes the book is in fact that of a self-aware young woman who is also a little tired, in the end, of being photographed.

Trolley Books, London, 2018, Essay by Kate Bush - ISBN: 978-1-907112-57-7 - 24,50 cm x 27 cm x 1 cm

Hanna Höch - Picture Book

Karen Knorr - Belgravia