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BOOK REVIEWS

Briefly Noted

Edited by Alice Currey


 

Eyewitness

By Manoocher Deghati
FotoEvidence, 2024
Two volumes | 80€

Eyewitness is a retrospective photo book of Manoocher Deghati’s life work and his biography, written by Ursula Janssen. Award-winning photojournalist, Manoocher Deghati has been photographing conflicts, social issues, everyday events, and human stories around the globe. Beginning with the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the subsequent war between Iran and Iraq, Manoocher focused his humanistic lens on major historical events. Exiled from Iran in 1985, Manoocher worked for numerous agencies and the United Nations and served as the director of photography for the Associated Press in the Middle East. His work has appeared in dozens of publications and in 2002 he founded the AINA Photojournalism Institute in Afghanistan to train photojournalists and support the development of photojournalism in the Middle East. Manoocher’s archive spans decades and more than a dozen countries. His biography depicts his experience: remarkable encounters, and incredible coincidences. It’s the story of an indestructible zest for life that exposes the nature of oppression and celebrates the relentless pursuit of freedom.

 

Lebensborn: Birth Politics in the Third Reich

By Angeniet Berkers
The Eriskay Connection, 2024
272 pages | 40€

In 1935, Germany initiated a program to provide the Third Reich with a new generation of leaders: Lebensborn (Source of Life). The birth rate in Germany fell dramatically after World War I, and all Germans were called upon to have more children, with the slogan “Give the Führer a child”. Abortion was banned, contraceptives suppressed, and incentives and tax breaks devised for families with children. The Lebensborn had a special task: to increase the number of ‘Aryan’ offspring. This plan aimed to improve the ‘racial quality’ in the new empire to be built on a National Socialist basis with blue-eyed, blonde-haired, and light-skinned children. When the program wasn’t effective enough, thousands of children were kidnapped from Eastern Europe and taken to Germany to be ‘Germanised’. After the war, these children were often stigmatized and mistreated or abused. Angeniet Berkers documented the stories of nine individuals in their 70s and 80s. Lebensborn uses found materials to tell the compelling story of this history.

 

In Light of Everything

By Debbie Fleming Caffery
Radius, 2024
256 pages | $60

In Light of Everything immortalizes in book form Debbie Fleming Caffery’s first major career retrospective presented at the New Orleans Museum of Art. Examining the deep emotional relationship between people and place, Caffery is recognized as a leading photographer visualizing the American South. Her shadowy, blurred images thoughtfully feature elements of luster to reveal elements of the shared human experience—childhood, spirituality, labor—and ultimately bring darkness to light. This publication is her most comprehensive to date, showcasing projects produced within and beyond the American South to Mexico, France, and the American West. Caffery’s sixth title, In Light of Everything, is the first to feature all series over the course of her career.

 

Sea Beach

By Ismail Ferdous
Imageless, 2024
156 pages | $60

As a young boy, Ismail Ferdous first visited Cox’s Bazar; it was his parents’ first holiday together. Growing up in Dhaka, he returned throughout his youth, first with family, and later with friends. From his early days playing in its sands to coming of age through the free roaming of adolescence, and now decades on returning as an adult, this beach on the Bay of Bengal has remained an enduring presence in his life. Cox’s Bazar is where people from across Bangladesh’s districts, dialects, religions, and social strata come together, as if in a diorama. Ordinary life is illuminated by the refraction of sunlight on the sea, animating the rich breadth of Bengali and Indigenous cultural heritage. The journey outward leads inward, and the further Ismail has traveled, the more he has come to perceive the landscapes of origins. Waves repeat endless cycles of departure and return, as with every shoreline on Earth, and we find a communal crossroad here between vastness and intimacy.

 

The Enemy Within: The Miners Strike 1984/85

By Michael Kerstgens
Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2024
152 pages | 35€

On March 6, 1984, miners in Yorkshire went on strike. Six days later, the strike was made official across Britain; the UK’s biggest strike since the General Strike of 1926.It ran for almost a year until March 1985 — a year of bitter conflict between the miners and Margaret Thatcher and her government and marked the end of the mining era in Britain. 24-year-old Michael Kerstgens was studying photography in Germany at the time. But he had strong links with South Wales having been born in Llanelli and spent his early years there. His father had also spent twelve years working in South Wales for an engineering company in the mining industry. As a sixteen-year-old Kerstgens took a summer job at the company’s Swansea office. He also experienced the underground life of the miners at Cynheidre Colliery. It’s not surprising therefore that once Kerstgens heard about the strike he went to South Wales to find out what was going on and to start what would be his first major photography project. The resultant photographs offer a powerful insight into a brutal strike that tore a rift through British society, entire mining communities, and even individual families.

 

Ukraine: Love+War

By Sarah Leen
FotoEvidence, 2024
296 pages | 70€

The book Ukraine: Love+War (2014-2024) is a product of the 2024 FotoEvidence Book Award and it is dedicated to the impact of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine on children and families. It is a collection of photographs and witness accounts by 94 Ukrainian and international photojournalists from 23 countries. Following FotoEvidence’s historical publication Ukraine: A War Crime, the photojournalism community unites for a second time to document this tragic period in Ukrainian history for future generations. With texts and images from more than 90 Ukrainian and international photojournalists, Ukraine: Love+War, documents the profound impact of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine during the last decade. The book focuses on daily life and the disruption, displacement, destruction, and death visited on innocent Ukrainian civilians. The bilingual book was released in September 2024 in Europe and the USA in Ukrainian and English. The production of the book Ukraine: Love+War is supported by the Open Society Foundations Western Balkans and Grodzins Fund.

 

Burnthouse Lane

By Michelle Sank
Dewi Lewis, 2024
120 pages | 35 €

The Burnthouse Lane estate was first dreamt up by Exeter Council in the idealistic 1920s to rehouse impoverished people from the West Quarter slum. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher’s Right to Buy scheme meant that some of the properties became privately owned, but Burnt House Lane is still referred to as a council estate. The deprivation it was supposed to overcome has continued to haunt it, but the isolated nature of the estate and its intricate labyrinth of lanes, have also made for positives, such as a close-knit community and a sense of solidarity among the residents. Michelle Sank has developed a reputation for her environmental portraits and landscapes. She has published four previous books and has exhibited widely across the world. Her work is in many private collections. Born in South Africa, Michelle Sank settled in the UK in 1987. She grew up during apartheid and is the daughter of Latvian immigrants. She cites this background as informing her interest in sub-cultures and the exploration of contemporary social issues and challenges. Her crafted portraits and landscapes meld place and person creating sociological, visual, and psychological narratives. 

 


JML NYC 02-23

By Joseph Michael Lopez
GOST Books, 2024
112 pages | $60


The photographs in JML NYC 02-23 were taken over two decades as Joseph Michael Lopez traversed the streets of the boroughs of New York by foot. Devoid of the visual tropes associated with the city, the images instead present a vision of New York as it was experienced. Each picture is carefully composed of an untold story, happening before and continuing after the frame. They show details of the city: a man sprawled on the floor of a train, the spray from a city fountain, a bird in flight, a shard of light on park railings, a crying child being carried down subway steps, and couples lost in each other. The people in the photographs appear constantly in motion, moving in and out of frame against the static backdrop of angular city details and architectural canyons. Collectively the photographs in JML NYC 02-23 impart not how the city looks, but how it feels. 

 

Legacy of Lies: El Salvador 1981–1984

By Robert Nickelsberg
Kehrer, 2024192 pages | 55€

In the early 1980s, the Cold War clashes that had bloodied other parts of the world shifted to Central America. Following the overthrow of Nicaragua’s Somoza government by the left-wing Sandinista rebels in 1979, the United States sought to prop up El Salvador’s right-wing military government as a backstop against home-grown insurgents and rising Soviet and Cuban influence. Its role helped fuel a lethal 13-year civil war. Legacy of Lies contains previously unpublished black-and-white images that American photographer Robert Nickelsberg produced on behalf of Time magazine and is supplemented by essays by renowned journalists. Robert Nickelsberg worked as a Time magazine contract photographer for nearly thirty years, specializing in political and cultural change in developing countries.

 

Fashion Army

By Matthieu Nicol
Mack, 2024
192 pages | $50

Fashion Army investigates the evolution of military attire into iconic fashion. French visual researcher Matthieu Nicol presents a catalog of three hundred and fifty documentary images from the declassified U.S. Army Natick Labs archive, tracing military style from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. These images showcase the meticulous development of clothing and gear designed for both the battlefield and everyday military life, highlighting the profound connection between fashion, power, and aesthetics. Through this ambiguous and compelling sequence, Fashion Army offers a nuanced account of style, innovation, and the far-reaching influence of military apparel on fashion and identity, ultimately interrogating the signifiers of violence embedded in such attire. An essay by renowned fashion critic Angelo Flaccavent reflects on the interplay between military functionality and the fashion industry.


 

The Enchanted Ones

By Stephanie Pommez
Kehrer, 2024
128 pages | 48€

Within the vast expanse of the Brazilian Amazon forest is a community known as the Ribeirinhos or river dwellers. Among them live the traditional midwives who welcome life and share stories as they travel through the rivers that crisscross the landscape. The Enchanted Ones by Stephanie Pommez is a tribute to their legends and myths. These tales are intricately woven into the fabric of the Ribeirinho culture, enriching our understanding of the Amazon forest and the river dwellers’ profound connection with their environment. Stephanie Pommez is a photographer and filmmaker based in New York. Her images have been published and exhibited in various countries and her documentaries have been broadcast on channels such as National Geographic, Arte, TV Cultura, and TV5 among others.

 

The Synthetic Eye: Photography Transformed in the Age of AI

By Fred Ritchin
Thames & Hudson, 2024
240 pages | $29.95

A revelatory glimpse into the future of photography, one where the very nature of how images are created is fundamentally transformed by artificial intelligence (AI). The revolution caused by AI in terms of what a photograph can and cannot do is profound. This book looks at photography’s strengths, what it has meant for individuals and for society, its massive transformations caused by a variety of factors in the digital age, and the newer possibilities for image making. These include old and new media, with an emphasis on synthetic imaging as both a positive and terrifying development. The Synthetic Eye is about this transformative revolution. How can synthetic imagery be utilized to amplify our understanding of ourselves and our worlds? Can alternative photography deepen and expand the medium’s previous reach? What are the pitfalls? How will our senses of the real, the possible, and the actual be affected?

Edited by Alice Currey

 

Alice Currey recently graduated from New York University with an individualized major in photojournalism, specifically its use in conflict resolution and collective security. Having spent her childhood in Kenya and her teen years in Uzbekistan, she has adopted a cultural insight and empathy that uniquely understand the power of visual storytelling in implementing global change. As both a writer, photographer, and editor, she hopes to contribute to preserving the practice and integrity of photojournalism.
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