In his ninth decade, at age 82, Daido Moriyama keeps on trucking. If anything, he seems busier than ever…

I’m always intrigued by how a timeless photobook comes together. Most often it’s the artist setting out to create a book following their personal vision, and after a lot of work—and perhaps many hours on press—accomplishing that. But sometimes great photobooks come from just a bunch of photos lying around, then edited down to the right shots and put in the right order by someone else, and it works…

As I was planning out this second piece on Stephen Shore’s new Mack book, “Transparencies,” I started thinking about the road trips that created the book, and, hmmn, decided I could call my piece “Getting Your Kicks on Route 66,” after the Bobby Troup song from 1946, first made a hit by Nat King Cole, before it jumped into various generations of rock and roll, from Chuck Berry to the Stones to Depeche Mode…

In the 2017 book “Stephen Shore: Selected Works, 1973-1981,” put out right before Shore’s last grand solo MoMA show, the photographer Paul Graham writes, “When writing about photography, a constant temptation is to weave a theme from the images, to hitch them together like clanking boxcars tethered to some conceit, to suit ourselves, to suit the mood of the times, to suit the author’s whims…

I wasn’t anywhere close to Japan when Daido Moriyama’s first book, “A Photo Theater,” dropped in 1968, but I like to think its effect on the Japanese photography world was like the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand” hitting America four years earlier. As in, “What was that? Wow, everything is different now—and always will be.” …

There are plenty of photobooks of punk rock days, it being such a visually wild time that it’s hard to not have them filled with vibrant photos, skinheads squeezed in at the front of a Ramones or Sex Pistols concert, tatted-up bodies leaping left and right, fists flying, teeth bared, blood erupting … powerful shots, but most of the books made from them are essentially music and star shots from clubs…

In my last piece for Photobookstore Magazine I wrote about Jeff Mermelstein’s “Hardened,” his grand exploration of all things shot out on the street. I mentioned some coincidences between Mermelstein’s street work and my own, and also wrote about what separates photographers simply snapping pictures on the street from those who create masterful books of street photography…

What do you do if you’re into Instagram, but want to move beyond selfies and shots of food truck delicacies? How about becoming a street photographer? I mean, everybody carries a phone, which of course has a camera, and there the streets are, with people on them, sometimes doing something kind of interesting; so why not snap, snap, snap?…

No question, Masahisa Fukase was one crazy cat…

Few things are as interesting when it comes to artists than watching them discover their true work, what they’re supposed to do, who they’re supposed to be. When I first moved to New York City many moons ago I used to plop myself in front of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon at MoMA as often as I could, watching in one painting Picasso discover cubism…

When you think about it, it’s surprising there aren’t more photobooks that simply set out to tell an actual story, with photos ordered to move the plot along, sort of like a comic book, or an old Mexican fotonovela. I can’t think of too many serious ones that do, at least after Ed van der Elsken’s “Love on the Left Bank.”…

In Part 1 of this piece on Laura El-Tantawy’s work, I quoted her as saying, “Trying not to repeat myself, every project deserves its own visual language. What that language will be and how I will consistently apply it across a body of work so it feels cohesive is always a challenge”—and I added, Not simply a challenge for her but for us…

Laura El-Tantawy’s most recent work, “A Star in the Sea,” the latest in her string of highly artful self-published book productions, raises for me a most interesting question. One thing that makes serious photobooks unique is that we’re looking at both photography and bookmaking, and where the line of emphasis between the two can shift from book to book…

How ambitious can a photobook be? In a handout to accompany the publication of Jason Eskenazi’s two new books, “Black Garden” and “Departure Lounge”—the completion of a trilogy launched by “Wonderland” in 2008 (to be reprinted in October of this year)—Eskenazi tells us: “I’ve always seen bookmaking as cinematic and in musical terms…

In Part 1 of my piece on Alec Soth’s new book, “I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating,” I wrote about how Soth, to get the book going, set out looking for subjects with singular presences, “to have an encounter that is visually strong.” He says he wanted to shoot people who filled up the spaces in their own homes…

In the promo materials for Alec Soth’s long-awaited, and quite wonderful, new photobook, “I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating,” Soth says, “I went through a long period of rethinking my creative process. For over a year I stopped traveling and photographing people. I barely took any pictures at all.”…

It’s pretty old-school. Just bang out photos, taken on the street, and let them amass, then put them out in an inch-thick book of four hundred and thirty shots, and have virtually every one of them be interesting and telling, placed next to another photo that makes them together even more interesting and telling … and have the whole book simply blow you away…

I’ve come to not like the term street photography. I feel in a way it’s time is over; it’s what Robert Frank and William Klein and Garry Winogrand and Joel Meyerowitz did so well fifty or sixty years back (put nicely in historical perspective by the book Bystander: A History of Street Photography, by Meyerowitz and Colin Westerbrook)…

So in Part Two of my Japan journal we left off with it being Sunday and my not knowing what to do. Well, I really didn’t do much. Sunday, you know. Walked around some, snagged a couple strong photos, bought a couple more Beatles LPs, but went back to the hotel early to rest up for my final week in Tokyo…

When I travel, I like to hit extremes, so here I am going from Kinosaki Onsen, a sedate town near the western coast in which the whole point is to wander from one hot-springs spa to the next (the only question being: how many baths does one person need, or can bear, a day? In my case, three) back to Tokyo for Halloween night…

I’m taking a short break from reviewing photobooks for the magazine here, off to Japan, traveling with my wife, with three main purposes: to look for classic Japanese photobooks to bring home; to take enough pictures to make a book of my own; and to write about it all here. The following is Part 1 of my Tokyo Journal…

Here’s the thing with street photography, it’s too easy to just take pictures of people walking down the street. And pictures simply of people walking down the street, or bunched up on it, or even a solo soul taking in the sun, are just about as interesting as walking down the street yourself…

In my last review for Photobookstore Magazine, I wrote of Morten Andersen’s roughly 8 x 12–inch, 300-plus-page, full-bleed-color photobook on his travels to the so-called Third World. Here I’m writing about Nick Sethi’s roughly 8 x 12–inch, 400-plus-page, full-bleed-color photo book simply of India…

Here’s one way to make sense of the world now, the unsettling of the old order, the historical tipping point we all seem to be on…

The dream springs eternal. Hit the highway (preferably along fabled Route 66) and discover America. Jack Kerouac did it, so did Robert Frank. So what that was over sixty years ago … the soul of America has to be out there somewhere, right?…

In my last review for Photobookstore magazine I looked into how story works in photobooks. By story I meant something less than an out and out narrative, but also something with a shape reminiscent of a story: a beginning, an end, and at least the feel of a narrative arc as we move through the book. In effect I was talking about the photobook as a form of literature…

How important is an actual story to a photobook? By story here I mean almost literal narrative, with characters and situations: a mini-movie or a play in photos. Clearly the best photobooks carry aspects of story such as theme, structure, motion, even narrative drive—can’t wait to turn to the next picture. But an actual story?…

Nobuyoshi Araki doesn’t need me to write about him. He probably doesn’t need anybody to write about him at this point, five hundred or so books in (or is it five thousand?), and a long, serpentine, impressive career behind him (with, one hopes, much more to come). I mean, what is there to say anyway?…