Our Favorite Photobooks of 2021

Stefen Chow, Huiyi Lin, The Poverty Line

Opening the newsprint cover of The Poverty Line, by the Singaporean, Beijing-based duo Chow and Lin, feels reminiscent of unwrapping street food at a market. Inside are fruits, vegetables, protein, snacks, and grains, each representing the quantity of food that one could buy with a day’s worth of poverty-line wages. These photographs were made in 36 countries, with each food positioned over a page from that day’s local newspaper.

This typological project inherently invites transnational comparisons. The abundance of spinach that can be purchased in Norway accentuates the unaffordability of fresh vegetables in other nations, suggesting that some governments set their poverty line at an unlivable standard. In the US, the wealth gap is evidenced by a mound of dried pinto beans overlaying an article about vacation homes. And the impacts of imperialism on developing countries can be observed in Madagascar, where 75% of the population falls below the poverty line. There, a single fish consumes the day’s wages, and is presented atop a French newspaper, alluding to histories of colonization and revolt.

The cumulative effect of viewing morsel after morsel of delicious food is hunger—a response that feels fitting for a book dedicated to making poverty palpable by expressing it literally, as sustenance, or lack thereof.
–Dana Ostrander, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Photography

Rahim Fortune, I can’t stand to see you cry

Rahim Fortune’s I can’t stand to see you cry begins with an arresting portrait of a man: shirtless, pierced, inked, with leather pants layered over denim, arms down, fingers outstretched. His resolute gaze meets the camera, and his position in the book might stand as an invitation to attend to the intimate images of Black life in Texas circa 2020 along with this figure. The next photograph focuses on the sharp winter shadows of a tree beyond the frame, cast on a white picket fence. Several pages later we see an empty bed, in a home, with medical equipment, the quiet of the scene gently rocked by the motion of a ceiling fan and a blurred figment near the wardrobe. Such evocative presences, finely contoured or spectral, recur throughout Fortune’s photographs, as the temporal precision of each exposure swings from the ephemerality of a breeze catching the laundry to the mangled metal gate and plywood-covered storefront that indexes the aftermath of an unseen event. Similarly, Fortune’s focus turns from tender embraces, as on the cover, to violent impacts, as in the stitches running through a tattoo outline of the state of Texas repairing a wound from a police officer’s bullet.

I can’t stand to see you cry touches on the declining health and death of a parent, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the protests and uprising in response to the police murders of Black people around the nation. The volume’s relative dearth of text allows the photographs to lead, and an impressive precision guides the sequencing of pictures. Part elegy, part essay on time and place, Fortune’s book grapples with love, grief, family, community, and the presence of history and of those who precede us, all finely rendered in the subtle tonal gradations of black-and-white photographs.
–Phil Taylor, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Photography

LaToya Ruby Frazier, The Last Cruze

In The Last Cruze, LaToya Ruby Frazier documents the ripple effects caused by General Motors’ decision in November 2018 to “unallocate” its plant in Lordstown, Ohio. After more than 50 years in operation, in March 2019 GM called off production of the Chevrolet Cruze, leaving some 2,000 factory workers and their families uprooted. The events caused a historic loss of heritage in Lordstown, bringing intensified attention to the small Rust Belt town, which emerged as a subject of political dispute. The book pairs Frazier’s black-and-white portraits of working-class Americans with their unflinching testimonies, and brings together a selection of color images taken by Kasey King, an autoworker and photographer for the labor union UAW Local 1112, inside the plant (where Frazier was not allowed to photograph). A careful, research-driven project, The Last Cruze includes a timeline of union history in America and a series of incisive essays by writer Coco Fusco, art historian Benjamin J. Young, curators Karsten Lund and Solveig Øvstebø, and sociologist Werner Lange, alongside interviews with Marxist geographer David Harvey, US Senator Sherrod Brown, and the playwright Lynn Nottage. Frazier’s project amplifies a deep lineage of socially engaged photobooks by Gordon Parks, and is linked to the conceptual practices of Martha Rosler and Allan Sekula.
–Roxana Marcoci, Senior Curator, Department of Photography

Tarrah Krajnak, El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan

Housed within a thin, unassuming brown slipcase, Tarrah Krajnak’s book brings together a wide range of approaches and processes, gathered over many years. There is performance documentation, appropriated images from magazines, found passport photos, Xeroxes, reproductions of posed portraits, and, woven throughout all this material, the artist’s own extraordinarily poignant writing. At its core, the book is a form via which Krajnak has worked through her own relationship to the circumstances and place of her birth—Lima, Peru—from her complex perspective as a transnational adoptee. “When I went back to Lima for the first time since I was an infant, I was almost 30 years old. I felt outside my body, but as if my body belonged there,” she has described. “I did feel this intense sense of parallel existence and of loss or mourning at this bodily exile.” In utilizing re-photography, repetition of image and text, and a range of experimental processes, she lays bare the essential qualities of working-through: time, messiness, emotion. As an artist who is deeply interested in the materiality of photography—she explores different photographic media and often develops her own prints in the darkroom—Krajnak has found in this project that the “photographic process itself” can become an entryway into personal discovery.
–Lucy Gallun, Associate Curator, Department of Photography

Pacifico Silano, I Wish I Never Saw the Sunshine

Folds and fragments, the erotica of the dog-eared printed image and frayed binding of a sensuous archive of 1970s gay porn magazines are Pacifico Silano’s raw materials. His copy stand close-ups are devoted to the material specificity of the bound sources—the ways in which the pages may fall or fold produce montages without any need for the glue or cut-up or digital toolbox of conventional collage practices. In the accordion folds of I Wish I Never Saw the Sunshine, photographic elements readily succeed one another. Image edges largely coincide with the folds, but Silano’s photographs also home in on gutters, minor ruptures, and mis-registrations, where things don’t quite align, where uninked paper or cracked creases show.

The thrill of this book lies in the invitation to manipulate the uncoated paper into new photo-sculptural configurations that the concertina fold encourages—and in the process to rehearse the experiments of the artist and of the innumerable anonymous consumers who perused these images decades before. You’ll want to finger the seams and feel the raw edges of the trimmed boards. Silano’s montage at once amplifies the physicality of the archive and deconstructs its pictorial grammar. Sexuality is more evoked than explicit: fragments of exposed male bodies tease between abstract graphic elements and bands of color. Culled from the locations and set decor, landscapes and still lifes supply the scaffolding of fantasy and desire to articulate an erotics embedded in a historical gaze. These genre components, and Silano’s measuring of chromatic pattern, lend the project a significant amount of its affective range, fomenting what the artist describes as akin to a “fever dream.” There’s a wistful pleasure, freighted with the implicit intimation that these dream images emerge from a time before the AIDS pandemic. Is a closeup of a closed eye at the outset of the book a coy wink or a refusal to look back?
–Phil Taylor, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Photography