Around this time each year, it's become a tradition for Humble and dozens of other photoblogs and online magazines to list their favorite photobooks, and it's often a bit arbitrary. After what John Oliver recently deemed to be a particularly heartbreaking year for many - from the deaths of some of our beloved celebrities, to the tragedy in Orlando, the murders of unarmed black men, the proposed Dakota Access Pipeline, and the bubbling face of reactionary politics worldwide (the list goes on!), we decided to use this space to highlight photography titles with a particular focus on social concerns and civil rights. These books cover territory ranging from race, cultural, and gender representation to global warming, and include a particular title that we think should have been published over a decade ago (we'll let you figure it out). We encourage you to support these photographers and publishers as you begin making the holiday purchasing rounds. We recognize these lists are subject to our own narrow gaze, so if you think we missed a particularly engrossing book, please drop us a line at submit AT hafny DOT org. View our previous lists HERE and HERE.
1) Moises Saman: Discordia
Publisher: Self Published
From the Publisher:
Discordia, a new book by Magnum photographer Moises Saman, represents a personal memory of the nearly four years he spent living and working as a photojournalist in the Middle East during the Arab Spring from 2011 to 2014. In Discordia, Saman presents the unfolding of long and complex photographic sequences, absent of captions, an unexpected and less straightforward journalistic representation of the Arab Spring. The book includes a series of photo collages, created by the Dutch-Iranian artist Daria Birang from Saman’s photographs, grainy cut-outs exploring the repetition of human gestures and theatrics that Saman saw time after time during the events.
Discordia utilizes various artistic approaches to photographic material; double-page spreads, isolated images, provocative two-image comparisons, juxtapositions and the collages. Presented as such, the book builds a visual representation of Saman’s up-close experience with the events taking place around him. The photographs are often ambiguous, depicting fleeting moments on the periphery of the more dramatic events that Saman photographed for editorial publications. Discordia instead presents people gathered in conference, protests on the street, objects, and the continuation of day-to-day life amidst violence and uncertainty. The result is a personal comment on the complex nature of this period, and the ever-blurring line between victim and perpetrator.
2) Paul Turounet: Estamos Buscando
Publisher: Self Published
From the Publisher:
Estamos Buscando A navigates a personal exploration into the migrant experience along the U.S.–Mexico border region, with a series of intimate portraits, landscape photographs, illustrations, maps, advisories and personal narratives. The book has been designed to reference the migrant safety guides that are given to migrants by Grupos Beta and the Instituto Nacional de Migración of the Mexican government.which works for the protection and defense of human rights of migrants on Mexico’s northern and southern borders, through support actions such as search and rescue, humanitarian assistance, legal advice and guidance.
3) 1% Privilege in a Time of Global Inequality. Edited by Myles Little
Publisher: Hatje Cantz
From the Publisher: To be able to simply drift in the infinity pool on the roof terrace of the 57-floor Marina Bay Sand Hotel, while enjoying in the background the urban soundscape of Singapore’s imposing sea of high-rises; or to be personally welcomed to a private champagne party after an extended hot-air balloon ride over the Kenyan wilderness: the extravagant pleasures of the wealthiest 1% of the earth’s population represent an extreme contrast to those of the remaining 99%. Describing the gaping disparities in images is a challenge that has been taken up by photographers such as Nina Berman, Peter Bialobrzeski, Guillaume Bonn, Greg Girard, David Leventi, Michael Light, Andrew Moore, Matthew Pillsbury, Mikhael Subotzky, Brian Ulrich and many others. This volume provides visual evidence of the blatant discrepancy between people’s living conditions, which can be as fascinating as it is shocking.
4) Claudia Heinermann, Indré Šerpytytė And Michal Iwanowski: Post War Stories
Publisher: Kaunas Photography Gallery
From the Publisher:
The photography exhibition “Post-war Years” is a visual story about post-war years in Lithuania which actualises the past anew. Artists presented in the exhibition belong to the young and middle generation of creators who have not suffered from the horror of war directly. Still, their photographic series are related with the dramatic stories of their families and the nation in the post-war Lithuania. The book is divided in 3 parts giving an insight view on how the 3 artists handle the interview and the covered topics.
5) Various Artists. All Power: Visual Legacies of the Black Panther Party
Publisher: Minor Matters Books
From the Publisher:
In 1966 Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, two law students at Laney College in Oakland, California, launched The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. Officially active for less than twenty years (1966–1982), the Panthers indelibly pierced the public consciousness, and for many its legacy remains controversial—witness the virulent responses to Beyonce Knowles’ 2016 Super Bowl performance that included an homage to the Panthers through dancers in berets and black leather outfits. That visual—gun-toting, well-dressed black men with berets and gun-toting, well-dressed women with Afros—is what most of mainstream America, if they know anything at all, think of with regard to the Black Panther Party.
This book, All Power: Visual Legacies of the Black Panther Party, evolved from correspondence and conversation with a select list of contemporary black artists who answered the call and submitted work that was from their perspective related to the Party. They include emerging and internationally acclaimed practitioners from around the nation, women and men spanning thirty to seventy years of age.
6) Amanda James: Sweet Little Lies
Publisher: Self Published
From the Publisher/ Amanda James:
The series, "Sweet Little Lies," is about being a mother, a wife, and an artist. The daily snapshots of the Utah landscapes and the parameters of my home serve as a glimpse into my interior concerns. Growing up in a religious community, family was emphasized as being very important. This is where I feel the pressures and expectations of being a wife, a mother, and also a woman. There is an undeniable love that I have for my children, but also unfairness in these expectations. Besides the love and connection I felt with my brand-new baby as I welcomed him to earth, I also felt a loss of self and freedom.
7) Adam Golfer: A House Without a Roof
Publisher: Brooklyn
From the Publisher:
A House Without a Roof (AHWAR) scrutinizes the histories of violence and displacement connecting Europe, Israel, and Palestine. With photographs, appropriated imagery, and texts, fictions of Golfer's family history are woven together with representations from Israel’s founding and ongoing military occupation of the West Bank. Ethnic and national identities rupture as the project wrestles with contradictory histories and points of view. The narratives in the book are framed via relationships between three generations of men in Golfer's family: his grandfather – a survivor of Dachau, his dad – who lived on a kibbutz in the early 1970s, and Golfer himself. Memory and time fold into one another as the mythologies of Golfer's family become entangled with the ongoing narratives of violence and trauma in Israel and Palestine.
8) Kris Graves: Testament Project Volume 3
Publisher: +KG Projects
From Kris Graves' statement:
The Testament Project is an exploration and re-conception of the contemporary black experience in America. More often than not, black people are portrayed in the extreme—either as very rich or very poor, they are demonized, infantilized, ridiculed, idolized or hyper-sexualized; and within the art canon there is a noticeable scarcity of black representation.
In these glowing portraits, control of the colored lighting is given to my subjects, in order to create a space that is participatory and empowered. By including subjects in the creation of the scene and the altering of color, I seek to create photographs that portray individuality in addition to their blackness.
9) John Radcliffe Studio: Foreigner: Migration into Europe 2015–2016
Publisher: Mack Books
From the Publisher:
Foreigner: Migration into Europe 2015–2016 is a photography book that documents the lives of people at various stages of their migration to Europe. The book is divided into three sections, focusing on migration to Italy from North Africa, migration to Greece and through the Balkans from the middle east, and the migrant camp in Calais known as ‘The Jungle’.
Alongside the photography, written texts serve both as a context, and a means to share the stories of the people we met during the project.
The book was created in response to the imagery used in the media to discuss the issue of migration, which we felt was sensationalist, alarmist and was not giving people the time and consideration they deserved. We wanted to approach the subject from a calmer perspective, using medium format portrait photography as a means of meeting the people at the centre the crisis face to face
10) Amak Mahmoodian: Shenesnameh
Publisher: RRB and ICVL Studio
From Amrak Mahmoodian and the Publisher:
"I am Iranian. I was born in 1980, the same year as the Islamic Revolution. I learned how to wear my scarf when I was seven years old. I still remember putting it on for the first time, getting ready for my first day at school. It was me, my mother and a mirror. Two years later my Religious teacher stopped me in the corridor for letting my hair show. She told me to cover my hair completely. She said “When you die, Amak, you will go to hell and you will be hanged with your hair strand over a very big fire for all eternity because you didn’t hide it from the eyes of strangers in your lifetime.”
Six years ago, I was waiting in a reception room, holding the birth certificates of my mother and me. We looked similar in our ID photographs. That same day my fingerprint was fixed next to my image, and my mother’s fingerprint next to her image. Despite the outward similarity of the images the fingerprints were different; the scar I had on my finger became part of my identity next to my photograph. I decided this meant something, that our identities were entwined with these official identities, with these prints and these papers. In the following three years, I collected similar images and fingerprints from different women in Iran. Each was different from the other, and had a story to tell."
11) Amy Elkins: Black is the Day, Black is the Night
Publisher: Self Published
From the Artist/ Publisher:
Black is the Day, Black is the Night is conceptual exploration into identity and memory collapse through correspondence with men serving life and death row sentences in prisons throughout the U.S., all of which had served between 13 and 26 years at the point of contact. On average these men spent 22 1/2 hours a day in solitary cells; not only facing their own mortality, but doing so in isolation. Out of our letters a collaboration unfolded. I constructed images using formulas specific to each of their stories, age and years incarcerated. Through these formulas their portraits became more unrecognizable and their memories became more muddled with the endless passing years of their sentences. Shown side by side with objects collected and/or created, text pieces, prison screened letters, drawings, envelopes and more, this project is the culmination of several years of exchange and weaves a complex set of narratives surrounding several men who have lived most of their lives in prison. Elkins was a winner of the 2014 Aperture Portfolio Prize for this same body of work.
12) Stephen Hirsch: Gowanus Waters
Publisher: Powerhouse Books
From the Publisher:
The day Hirsch first visited the acrid and vile smell made him nauseous. While standing on the bank he noticed a large eruption of oil start pulsating on the surface. He photographed it for about 15 minutes and it disappeared as quickly as it started. So was born a fascination with the way two centuries-worth of chemicals and detritus mixed with the water. Hirsch has shot the canal surface dozens of times since that unforgettable day and the result is a series of eerily beautiful abstract photos, telling the visual story of what pollution and indifference hath wrought. The combination of the inky blacks and varied specks and sheens all appear to be galaxy-like, but the viewer must not forget that they are looking at heavily polluted water here on Earth and nestled in one of the nations most populous and affluent cities. Today, efforts are being made to clean up the canal and will need to continue to for years to come, and it is important documentation like Hirsch’s work which should help spur action.
13) Teju Cole: Known and Strange Things
Publisher: Penguin Random House
Note from Humble editors: Technically this isn't a "Photography Book" but it's an amazing book of essays on photography and related social issues from one of our favorite writers that we couldn't resist including it. If you haven't read Teju Cole's writing before add this to the top of your list.
From the Publisher:
With this collection of more than fifty pieces on politics, photography, travel, history, and literature, Teju Cole solidifies his place as one of today’s most powerful and original voices. On page after page, deploying prose dense with beauty and ideas, he finds fresh and potent ways to interpret art, people, and historical moments, taking in subjects from Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare, and W. G. Sebald to Instagram, Barack Obama, and Boko Haram. Cole brings us new considerations of James Baldwin in the age of Black Lives Matter; the African American photographer Roy DeCarava, who, forced to shoot with film calibrated exclusively for white skin tones, found his way to a startling and true depiction of black subjects; and (in an essay that inspired both praise and pushback when it first appeared) the White Savior Industrial Complex, the system by which African nations are sentimentally aided by an America “developed on pillage.”
14) Richard Misrach: Border Cantos
Publisher: Aperture
From the Publisher:
This project presents a unique collaboration between photographer Richard Misrach and composer and performer Guillermo Galindo. Misrach has been photographing the two-thousand mile border between the U.S. and Mexico since 2004, with increased focus since 2009—the latest installation in his ongoing series Desert Cantos, a multi-faceted approach to the study of place and man’s complex relationship to it. Misrach and Galindo have been working together to create pieces that both document and transform the artifacts of migration. Using water bottles, clothing, backpacks, Border Patrol “drag tires,” spent shotgun shells, ladders, and sections of the border wall itself, most of which were collected by Misrach, Galindo fashions instruments to be performed as unique sound-generating devices. He also imagines graphic musical scores, many of which also use Misrach’s photographs as points of departure.
15) Carrie Mae Weems: Kitchen Table Series
Publisher: Daimani / Matsumoto Editions
From the Publisher:
Kitchen Table Series is the first publication dedicated solely to this early and important body of work by the American artist Carrie Mae Weems. The 20 photographs and 14 text panels that make up Kitchen Table Series tell a story of one woman’s life, as conducted in the intimate setting of her kitchen. The kitchen, one of the primary spaces of domesticity and the traditional domain of women, frames her story, revealing to us her relationships—with lovers, children, friends—and her own sense of self, in her varying projections of strength, vulnerability, aloofness, tenderness and solitude. As Weems describes it, this work of art depicts "the battle around the family ... monogamy ... and between the sexes." Weems herself is the protagonist of the series, though the woman she depicts is an archetype. Kitchen Table Series seeks to reposition and reimagine the possibility of women and the possibility of people of color, and has to do with, in the artist’s words, "unrequited love."
16) The Edge of the Earth: Climate Change in Photography and Video
Contributors: Bénédicte Ramade, TJ Demos, Bénédicte Ramade, Paul Roth
Publisher: Black Dog Publishing, in partnership with Ryerson Image Centre
From The Publisher:
Increasingly and forebodingly, contemporary artists are turning their attention to the subject of climate change, in poignant and often confrontational ways. The Edge of the Earth: Climate Change in Photography and Video explores recent and historic work in the context of present-day environmental concerns, considering the future consequences of the age of the anthropocene, and humanity's harsh imprint on our planet.
The Edge of the Earth accompanies a major exhibition at the Ryerson Image Centre in Toronto, and includes works by pioneering and renowned artists such as Edward Burtynsky, Naoya Hatakeyama, Richard Misrach and Robert Rauschenberg; critical propositions on present situations by Chris Jordan, Gideon Mendel and Brandi Merolla; plus visionary works by Jean-Pierre Aube, Adrien Missika, Evariste Richer and Andreas Rutkauskas. Photojournalism from the RIC s Black Star Collection is also included, contextualising artistic reflections within half a century of historical reportage on the environment. Produced as a large-format book with high-quality reproductions throughout.
17) Pacifico Silano: Tear Sheets
Publisher: Silent Face // Dashwood Books
From the Publisher:
Silano creates composite images that appropriate gay iconography from 1970s and 80s porn magazines such as Blueboy, Torso and Honcho in order to negotiate his own identity and formative experiences as impacted by the AIDS crisis. Produced in an edition of only 350 copies with a poster dust jacket this is Dashwood’s first collaboration with Silent Face Projects a Queens based publisher for emerging young artists.
18) Zora J Muff: Corrections (2015)
Publisher: Ain't Bad
Humble/Editors Note: This book was released at the end of 2015, right around the time when best-of lists had already been published. Given Murff's stellar work and the subject matter, we thought it was important to include in our 2016 list.
From The Publisher:
Zora J Murff is an MFA student in Studio Art at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Zora attended the University of Iowa where he studied Photography and holds a BS in Psychology from Iowa State University. Collocating his education in human services and art, Zora's photography focuses on the experiences of youth in the juvenile justice system and the role of images in the correctional system; specifically how images are used to define individuals who are deemed criminals, and what happens when these definitions are abandoned or skewed.