In 'Picture Summer on Kodak Film', a poem by two sisters echoes across Fulford's photographs, comprised of recurring motifs: time, test strips, refracted light, rainbow colour, and distortion through shadows. Characters and places are repeated in kaleidoscopic compositions throughout this vivid sequence. Though taken across the world (in Canada, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Nepal, Thailand, USA and Vietnam), these photographs come together to create a singular visual language: one bright, timeless, fictional place. A place imbued with the unexpected beauty, humor and meaning, that one has come to expect from Jason Fulford.

"This Equals That ... takes viewers on a whimsical journey, while introducing them to the fundamentals of visual literacy and teaching them associative thinking"-- Aperture learning guide.

A picture-rich field guide to American photography, from daguerreotype to digital. We are all photographers now, with camera phones in hand and social media accounts at the ready. And we know which pictures we like. But what makes a "good picture"? And how could anyone think those old styles were actually good? Soft-focus yearbook photos from the '80s are now hopelessly—and happily—outdated, as are the low-angle portraits fashionable in the 1940s or the blank stares of the 1840s. From portraits to products, landscapes to food pics, Good Pictures proves that the history of photography is a history of changing styles. In a series of short, engaging essays, Kim Beil uncovers the origins of fifty photographic trends and investigates their original appeal, their decline, and sometimes their reuse by later generations of photographers. Drawing on a wealth of visual material, from vintage how-to manuals to magazine articles for working photographers, this full-color book illustrates the evolution of trends with hundreds of pictures made by amateurs, artists, and commercial photographers alike. Whether for selfies or sepia tones, the rules for good pictures are always shifting, reflecting new ways of thinking about ourselves and our place in the visual world.

The picturesque vistas and apparent stability of Switzerland have made it an elusive subject for contemporary photography. Over a five-year period (2014-2019), Cole found a distinctly new way to look at a country that has been the quintessence of tourist experience for almost two centuries. Fernweh muses on the German word for a longing to be elsewhere. Cole's meditative and scrupulously composed work, made with colour film, is evocative of the hidden history of the Alpine nation as well as of its highly curated terrain. Returning to Switzerland year after year, Cole shares the patience and mild palette of luminaries of contemporary European photography - but the constructivist tension in these images is all his own. With photographs shot in every corner of the country - from Vaud to Graubünden to Lugano - Fernweh creates a vision of Switzerland that, though largely devoid of human presence, is rich in human traces; none more so than Cole's own distinct way of seeing. --

In 'Lago', Ron Jude returns to the California desert of his early childhood as if a detective in search of clues to his own identity. In a book of 54 photographs made between 2011 and 2014, he attempts to reconcile the vagaries of memory (and the uncertainty of looking) with our need to make narrative sense of things. Using a desolate desert lake as a theatrical backdrop, Jude meanders through the arid landscape of his youth, making note of everything from venomous spiders to discarded pornography. If one considers these traces to be a coded language of some sort, Jude's act of photographing and piecing them together becomes a form of cryptography like a poetic archeology that, rather than attempting to arrive at something conclusive, looks for patterns and rhythms that create congruity out of the stuttering utterances of the visible world. According to Jude, these harmonies, when we're lucky enough to find them, are probably the closest we can get to discovering actual meaning and grasping the potency of place.

Evolving from a series of road trips along the Mississippi River, Alec Soth's Sleeping by the Mississippi captures America's iconic yet oft-neglected "third coast." Soth's richly descriptive, large format color photographs describe an eclectic mix of individuals, landscapes, and interiors. Sensuous in detail and raw in subject, his book elicits a consistent mood of loneliness, longing and reverie. "In the book's forty-six ruthlessly edited pictures," writes Anne Wilkes Tucker, "Soth alludes to illness, procreation, race, crime, learning, art, music, death, religion, redemption, politics, and cheap sex... The coherence of the project places Soth's book exactly within the tradition of Walker Evans' American Photographs and Robert Frank's The Americans." Like Frank's classic book, Sleeping by the Mississippi merges a documentary style with a poetic sensibility. The Mississippi is less the subject of the book than its organizing structure. Not bound by a rigid concept or ideology, the series is created out of a quintessentially American spirit of wanderlust. This is the third print run and third new cover of a book which has become one of the most highly collected and widely acclaimed photo-books of recent times.

"The early settlers dubbed California The Golden State, and The Land of Milk and Honey. Today there are the obvious ironies -- sprawl, spaghetti junctions and skid row--but the place is not so easily distilled or visualized, either as a clichéd paradise or as its demise. There's a strange kind of harmony when it's all seen together--the sublime, the psychedelic, the self-destructive. Like all places, it's unpredictable and contradictory, but to greater extremes. Cultures and histories coexist, the beautiful sits next to the ugly, the redemptive next to the despairing, and all under a strange and singular light, as transcendent as it is harsh. The pictures in this book begin in the desert east of Los Angeles and move west through the city, ending at the Pacific. This general westward movement alludes to a thirst for water, as well as the original expansion of America, which was born in the East and which hungrily drove itself West until reaching the Pacific, thereby fulfilling its "manifest" destiny." -- Publisher's description

Tiré du site de l'éditeur: "What kind of gaze does the city license? What kind of gaze does it induce, determine, inform, program, organise? What is the nature of the city as reality, as image and as symbol? What is this object of desire, at once near and ungraspable, fascinating and repulsive, attractive and intractable, necessary and unbearable, intimate and impenetrable, available and inaccessible, that it is for itself as well as for the man of the crowd, for the man in the street, for the man of the city, for those who inhabit it and those merely passing through it, for anyone who knows that it is a labyrinth but nonetheless allows himself to remain trapped in it? Hubert Damisch. Takashi Homma uses fragments collected in camera obscura constructed in metropolitan areas of Japan and the US to build a city image by image. Homma does not seek to index any particular city but to render a shadow world, a city's unconscious caught in a dark chamber, suspended in the camera's box. The camera obscura offers a repetition, like the reflection shimmering in Narcissus's pool. The narcissistic city is a city transfixed upon its own image - a mirror city, laced with repetition (modular) and reflections (glass). A city looking at its reflection, a city caught in a dark chamber, a city observing its camera obscura inversion - flickering inside the camera's box."

What the Living Carry unveils a small town named Hoy's Fork, situated in the American South. Drawing on memories of the rural setting in which he grew up, Virginian photographer Morgan Ashcom brings together photographs, type-written letters and a hand-drawn map to build a fictional narrative of a foreboding place. Leading us on a trail through the town and its surrounding forest, Ashcom presents scenes that point to a mysterious history, and people whose familial connections remain unknown: a forlorn old man, with champagne to hand, reclines on the corroding steps of a once grand home; a bloodied mattress is carried through an overgrown field; a solitary child burrows into a meadow, while on the streets, a man dutifully cleans a white picket fence -- a vision that belies a local mural of a distant, ancient land. Interspersing this fragmented narrative is a set of texts -- four letters responding to 'Morgan's' request for DNA analysis -- written by 'Eugene' of the 'Center for Epigenetics and Wellness of the Spirit'. If What the Living Carry provides a set of clues to unravel the enigma behind this strange world, it is through a visual record that is simultaneously autobiographical and imagined, and inclined to elude.

"Features photography assignments, ideas, stories, and anecdotes from many of the world's most talented photographers and photography professionals"--Cover.