For me, the most beautiful photography book of the year was made by Awoiska van der Molen, whose Sequester (Fw Books €40) contains black and white images taken at night in the heart of the volcanic landscapes of the lesser-known Canary Islands – La Gomera, La Graciosa. Her landscapes are utterly silent and mysterious, while her use of long exposures makes everything – trees, mountains, leaves, sand – seem both alien and familiar. These are meticulously crafted and deftly sequenced images that possess an extraordinary atmosphere, summoning what James Joyce called the “whatness” of things.
The most haunting photobook of the year came from Paddy Summerfield, whose Mother and Father (Dewi Lewis Publishing £30) recorded the final years of his elderly parents’ lives in a series of observational images taken though the windows of their house looking out on to their garden. It’s an affecting meditation on age and mortality in sombre black and white.
The young British documentary photographer Chloe Dewe Mathews also excelled in the art of visual narrative with Shot at Dawn (Ivory Press £48.95), a series of empty, almost ordinary landscapes where terrible things happened. Every image was taken at sunrise across France and Belgium at the sites where soldiers were executed – by their fellow soldiers – for desertion or cowardice during the first world war. It is a reminder of another, often overlooked, aspect of the war that casts the longest shadow.
Closer to home – and to now – Ken Grant’s images of working-class life in Liverpool since the mid-1980s were collected in No Pain Whatsoever (Journal £32). They comprise a kind of visual lamentation for a city demoralised by Thatcherite policies. Grant is a poet of the everyday, and certain images – a pram wreathed in smoke or fog; a thin, shirtless boy bathed in light in a bar crowded with adults – are luminous and otherworldly. From the other side of the Atlantic, Jim Goldberg’s Rich and Poor (Steidl £48.20) was reissue of the year; a glimpse of the economic divide in all its extremity, his portraits are accompanied by often revealing texts written by his subjects. Goldberg calls himself a documentary storyteller, which he is par excellence.
For his book, Hidden Islam (Rorhof £30.40), Nicoló Degiorgis sought out the buildings – shops, lock-ups, disused warehouses and factories – where many of Italy’s 1.35 million Muslims worship. His images of the often mundane exteriors give way, in a series of fold-outs, to more intimate, brightly coloured photographs of the often crowded interiors. It’s a glimpse of a semi-hidden world of worship in a country with only eight official mosques.
I was taken too by The Winners by Rafael Milach (GOST £40), in which he met and photographed the winners of various, often surreal-sounding awards in Belarus – the best welder, the manager of the best potato farm, and – my favourite – the best milkmaid of the Slutsk region. It’s a witty, revealing book about propaganda, civic pride and post-Soviet culture, shot in a detached, deadpan style that suits the subject matter beautifully.
Finally, two books for Christmas, one scholarly, one sublimely postmodern. The Open Road (Aperture Foundation £40) by David Campany is an informed and deftly illustrated history of the road trip in American documentary photography, from Robert Frank’s The Americans in the 50s to the present. One for the curious and the informed alike. And if you are looking for a Christmas present that caters to the obsessive child that lurks in all photographers and photography book collectors, you cannot go wrong with Eleanor Macnair’s strange and wonderful Photographs Rendered in Play-Doh (MacDonald-Strand £19.99), which sounds silly, but is quite extraordinary in its attention to detail and composition. You won’t look at a Cindy Sherman or Guy Bourdin in quite the same way again.
