Large format photography books published in 2010

Compiled by Q.-Tuan Luong, part of the books section of Largeformatphotography.info

Links point to amazon.com

Nadav Kander: Yangtze, The Long River Personal journey along the 4,100 miles of the Yangze River, whose banks are home to more people than live in the USA. Behind the calm beauty of muted vast landscapes shot in contemporary style, the book is a meditation on history, progress, the hugeness of ideas and the state, the place of the individual person.
Mark Power: The Song of Two Songs (can also be purchased on Mark Power's website) Mark Power became transfixed by Poland whilst photographing a one-month assigment in the country for Magnum. Subsequenly he made twenty further personal visits over five years resulting in this global portrait of a country caught between the past, the present and the future, both in terms of attitudes and of the contradictions in its landscape.
Cuny Jansen: My Grandma Was a Turtle Dutch photographer Cuny Jensen studies the young descendents of the Turtle clan of the Delaware tribe in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, trying to find what traces of their origins could be seen in these modern Native American children. As in her previous books, she combines intimite portraits of children with photographs of the unspoiled landscapes surrounding them. Hand-pasted reproductions make this book feel like a photographic album, a presentation fitting for the elegiac character of the work.
Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre: The Ruins of Detroit Photographed as a collaboration between two young photographers in their twenties, this is a book of architectural photography depicting several places in Detroit, each the subject of a distinct chapter. The book starts with automobile factories, and then moves on the train station, theaters, residential areas, schools, and police stations. Rich texts provide a historic context to this examination of the mortality of civilizations. There is at least another book with similar subjects photographed in LF, Andrew Moore's Detroit Disassembled but I prefer Ruins of Detroit for its conceptual rigor and organization, the quality of the reproductions and of the texts.
From Here to There: Alec Soth's America Fitting for Alec Soth, who's started a "new wave" in contemporary photography, his first mid-career retrospective is refreshingly quirky and personal, with images from several recent projects and even a small artist's booklet.
Sally Mann: The Flesh and The Spirit The first survey of Sally Mann's work, the book is an in-depth study of the role of the body in her work. Instead of presenting a list of "hits" like a conventional retrospective, the book shows many previously lesser-known or even unseen images, including self-portraits, and color counterparts of well-known series, such as Family Color (instead of Immediate Family) or Matter Lent (decomposing human corpses as in What Remains).
Hiroshi Sugimoto This updated monograph presents images from each of the famous series of Sugimoto, characterized by great conceptual and philosophical rigor, preceded by Sugimoto's concise artist statement for each of them.
Kenro Izu: Thirty Year Retrospective For thirty years, Kenro Izu has lugged his 14x20 camera to create platinium prints of sacred places from many cultures and religions all around the world. This oversize book (11x15) presents a hundred of those exquisitely beautiful images. Besides the sacred places, there are a few portraits from Bhutan (which as a whole could be considered a sacred place).
Framing the West: The Survey Photographs of Timothy H. O'Sullivan Possibly the best survey of the 19th century mammoth-plate landscape photographer - the previous one was published 30 years ago - with excellent reproductions and scholarly essays, helps connect how O'Sullivan carefully framed the West without romanticization, with contemporary trends.
The Dusseldorf School of Photography A great part of contemporary photography looks the way it does because of the influence of the Dusseldorf school: the industrial typologies of the Bechers, the huge, detached color prints of the students such as Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky. This book shows how it all fits together, presenting in a readable text the evolution of the school, and the similarities as well as differences between its 12 members. Their work is the subject of 12 sections which presents selections allowing to discover the lesser known works.

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