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This is a photobook by Richard Billingham, and one of my favorites. It’s a very raw documentation of his family, and I find the brutal honesty of the photographs to be very compelling. There are a whole host of videos on YouTube of people flipping through the book since it is expensive and relatively hard to find, but the one I linked above is the best, despite misspelling his last name as “Bellingham”.
Jan 13, 2022
Related Recs
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This is a book of interviews with 12 pioneering artists who create photo books. It’s a long discussion about two of my deepest passions: photography and bookmaking. I found it because of the curator David Campany, and it is a must have for those who take their photography seriously. The most visceral interview is with the photographer Larry Clark, who talks about getting sued by the grandparents of a baby he photographed, leaving out pictures of sawed off shot guns, and his commitment to never making his friends look bad. There’s a lot of passages about book design, a range of photography styles, and the meaning of success. This book is a gold mine of insight, and I carry it with me like a bible.
Nov 15, 2022
realizing this platform is actually perfect for sharing artists that I like or am thinking about. eternal favorite of mine is optician and photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard (one of the coolest names ever). specifically his series The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater. you can see that full series here, they are so beautiful and strange and totally alluring. I also have a book that I like a lot that's all just photographs Meatyard took of this one priest he was friends with in Kentucky. Just a seriously talented and interesting person.
Jan 27, 2024
this is hands down the sickest photo book of 2024. Jim is an ace photographer, I've followed his work for the past decade-ish. he and my mom also dated for a while which was odd and not a particularly important detail. but the images in this book are just fucking insane. the fact that they were shot within this millennium is beyond, they should be from 1927 or something. I like to imagine what it must have been like to embed with these boys and photograph their unique lifestyle, would just be so surreal in the greater context of the wild fundamental Mormon sect they were raised in. beautiful images, a very beautifully put together book, and all around a really good deep dive into a weird corner of america.
Sep 24, 2024
Top Recs from @brian-karlsson
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This is my favorite book of all time. I have read it at least once a year since I first discovered it, which was by stumbling across this quote: “Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”
Jan 13, 2022
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This album by Reanimator (not to be confused with Re-Animator, which is a British thrash metal band that for some reason shares the same artist page on Spotify) is a beautifully produced, sample-heavy instrumental record that I’ve listened to countless times. I highly recommend listening to it straight through, in order.
Jan 13, 2022
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A talkative taxi passenger, a UFO buff who insists the U.S. has been on the moon since the 1950s, a JFK conspiracy theorist, an elderly anarchist who befriends a man trying to rob his house, a television set collector, and a hipster woman trying to sell a Madonna pap smear. (taken from Wikipedia) Slacker is a movie unlike any others that I’ve seen, following the various characters within for no more than a few minutes each before seamlessly cycling to the next. Every few minutes you realize how far removed you are from where you’d just been before, and it’s incredible. The whole movie is available for free on YouTube, linked above.
Jan 13, 2022