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Sarah Moroz

Sarah Moroz is a Franco-American journalist and translator based in Paris. She writes about photography, art, and various other cultural topics.

Charles Fox’s Buried

This artist’s book mixes vintage photographs, personal recollections, and hand-written captions to tell the story of one family’s experience before and after the Cambodian genocide.

Lorena Lohr’s Tonight Lounge

This book of photographs showcases snippets of what one might call the normal, or at least the ordinary, documenting glimpses of small towns using 35mm color film and assorted cheap cameras.

Karlheinz Weinberger’s Photographs: Together & Alone

Never-before-published intimate portraits of nude men the Zurich-based photographer invited into his makeshift studio, located within the apartment he shared with his mother, show the studio as a refuge for homoerotic desire away from relentless Swiss normativity.

Nigel Poor’s The San Quentin Project

Artist and educator Nigel Poor, who brings an incredible solicitude and sense of fellowship to The San Quentin Project, began teaching a history of photography class through the Prison University Project. These images reveal not only life inside one of America’s oldest prisons—but also great insight into how prisoners perceived these annals, and themselves.

Carmen Winant’s Instructional Photography: Learning How to Live Now

Winant finds aesthetic and symbolic value in the instructional bracket. By reinvesting what the genre can bestow, it suddenly takes on a new breadth: transitioning from dry inculcation to uncanny narrative ensemble.

Chloe Sells’s Hot Damn!

Rather than pure archive, this book shows writer Hunter S. Thompson through the eyes of his assistant.

Baldwin Lee

The monograph includes a selection of atmospheric images and graceful portraits of Black communities in the American South. Lee made these images conscientiously, knowing that there was no way to circumvent the charged and often ugly history of this American panorama.

Ryan Debolski’s LIKE

The photobook documents the laborers in the Persian Gulf with an affable eye, estranged from the grueling and under-compensated work that shapes their days, paired with an impassioned postscript to the images by the publisher that is critical of this exploitative socio-economic system.

Alex Majoli’s Opera Aperta

This composite project incorporates ideas about performance and the pandemic in a narrative that cannily straddles realism and symbolic exaggeration. The project highlights that reportages still contain subjectivity, making storytelling tricky to differentiate from non-fiction.

Elisabeth Smolarz’s The Encyclopedia of Things

“This is a book of portraits absent of the people they represent,” states Michelle Levy, who edited the tome, regarding the still life ensembles that fill the pages. Dreamed up by Polish-born New York-based artist Elisabeth Smolarz, the project began in 2014 and focuses on “opening the channels of communication to the inanimate and the subconscious” in conjunction with people she encounters.

François Halard’s 56 Days In Arles

This book is a tally of time in lockdown: a beautiful wordless diary in Polaroid glimpses by French photographer François Halard. The images feature corners of his abode, grand rooms, decorated with a bucolic-bourgeois sensibility and strewn with collections and curios, providing a kind of slanted self-portrait.

Elliott Erwitt’s Found Not Lost

Not only a visual showcase of overlooked images, this book further underscores how classifying, sifting, and intuiting what is essential from one’s own production is key to the artistic process, perhaps as much as the creative act itself. It shows how sidelined work can be reconsidered and even reframe a legacy, be it the way the artist regards the work, or the way viewers do.

Morgan Ashcom’s Open

Featured within are images from unprocessed film, exposed to light by Israeli security forces at a checkpoint. The book's design successfully connects material and content, embedding the metaphorical role of censorship into the work and into the reader’s experience of it.

Arthur Jafa: Revue Cahiers d’Art

These dialogues are indirect vehicles for Jafa’s articulation of selfhood, intercut with images from both interviewer and interviewee’s corpus, as well as excerpts of text by Man Ray and Saidiya Hartman. This scrapbook excels at summoning a feeling of intensity, thanks to his sharp-eyed snippets fashioned into observant, charged juxtapositions.

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The Brooklyn Rail

SEPT 2023

All Issues