if the united states looks more and more like a hopelessly divided political nation, peter van agtmael’s buzz on the sill (kehrer verlag £32) evokes that ominous sense of disunity in darkly poetic images and impressionistic prose. In recent years he has traveled extensively across the country, spending time at a rehabilitation center for traumatized soldiers, on a Native American reservation, with members of the Ku Klux Klan at a flag burning, and at a black-owned Louisiana bar. where an all-white audience attended a themed “white night”. a haunting book for these difficult times.
as well as, in a completely different way, monsanto: a photographic investigation by mathieu asselin (verlag kettler $55), a comprehensive look at the ways in which a multinational agrochemicals and agricultural biotech corporation impacts in the lives and settings of hundreds of communities across America. asselin spent five years delving into the company’s history, from the use of agent orange during the vietnam war to the introduction of genetically modified seeds in the late 1990s. a book about corporate impunity unfolding through the deft interweaving of asselin’s own images and a wealth of found material, from personal testimonies to court records.
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American mores are also under scrutiny in sam contis’s deep springs (mack £35), which is set in a remote desert community near sierra nevada, where a small, all-male university of liberal arts has been around since 1917. combining vintage photographs of his early students with his own, often intimate, studies of his contemporaries, as well as elemental landscape, contis explores the traditional idea of masculinity in the american west in a subtle and reflective. provocative way.
For the past two decades, Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi has created luminous images of the world around her with an unerring eye for the everyday sublime. in halo (thames & hudson £55), she widens her gaze, portraying the shinto rituals that occur annually at ancient japanese shrines and contrasting them with the natural wonder that is the winter murmur of migratory birds along the south east coast of england. here, the elemental and the tranquil are portrayed in moments of otherworldly beauty.
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british photographer stephen gill has also changed his gaze to evoke the magic of the natural world with night procession (no one reserves £48). Gill placed cameras equipped with motion sensors and an infrared flash on trees in the forest of rural Sweden, where he now lives. the resulting images of nocturnal animals in a spectral landscape have the aura of 19th-century photography. Gill writes of how he wanted to move away from the position of active observer “so that the subjects would orchestrate, perform, and play the role of author while I was probably sleeping. It was the moment for nature to speak and let itself be felt and known.”
for terra nostra (dewi lewis £35), london-based sicilian photographer mimi mollica took a look at her home island, a place of deep shadows and intense sunlight. the stark black-and-white portraits and landscapes suggest the persistent and insidious nature of mob crime and corruption in the land and the people. there’s nothing gory or violent here, just a sustained atmosphere of unease made even more palpable by the play of dark and light. In stark contrast, another Italian London-based photographer, Lorenzo Vitturi, continues his acclaimed debut, Dalston Anatomy, with money must be made (self-published, be happy £45), which evokes sensory overload from Balogun Market in Lagos, a daunting maze of streets selling cheap plastic products, fabrics and household items. vitturi’s combination of studio portraiture, sculptural still life and collage is an imaginative response to an overwhelming environment where everything is used, reused, recycled and resold.
Anyone looking for a Christmas present for their Brexiter-staying parent should look to merrie albion: landscape studies of a small island by simon roberts, large and beautifully designed ( dewi lewis £45). A portrait of contemporary Britain, it presents the nation in all its complexity, from city merchants to Muslim worshippers, while somehow evidencing a sense of place that is both palpable and strangely reassuring. shot with a medium format camera, often from a high vantage point, roberts sometimes composites the same scene, creating images that have the theatricality of one of his inspirations, william powell frith, the 19th century painter of pictures everyday english. a book that speaks quietly and powerfully about this increasingly disunited kingdom at a crucial moment.
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