Did you know photography books are in the midst of a renaissance?
As the website for Dashwood Books, New York City’s only independent bookstore devoted entirely to photography, states: “The last ten years have seen a radical change in the publishing of books on photography…Many photographic curators now feature books as a significant part of exhibitions…and a strong collectors’ market has developed with prices for rare books tripling over the past decade.”
Dashwood Books was kind enough to curate a special collection for our GQ & Nordstrom Men’s Shop in NYC this week. Dashwood owner David Strettell shares six of his favorite titles below.
David Armstrong: Night and Day
“Brings together a selection of iconic Kodachrome pictures from David Armstrong’s archive of the late ’70s and early ’80s in downtown New York. The images illuminate an intimate and carefree epoch of innocent-bohemian wilderness—a time just before the tumultuous ’80s.” [purchase]
Elaine Constantine, Corinne Day, Nick Knight, Marc Lebon, Craig McDean, Nigel Shafran, David Sims and Wolfgang Tillmans (amongst others): W’HAPPEN
“Emerging British fashion photographers of the 1990s. As a reaction to the artificial, manufactured fashion images of the 1980s, the photographers and stylists featured in W’HAPPEN pushed into the 1990s with work that had a more direct grounding in reality.” [purchase]
Soviet Beauty Queens
“Although beauty contests did not find favor in the Soviet Union until the late 1980s, by 1991, before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Soviet beauty queen had become symbol of perestroika itself. These photographs were taken 1988–1990 in Leningrad, at various beauty contests and at the Leningrad Beauty Institute, an academy preparing aspiring beauty queens for competition, and were acquired in St. Petersburg by The Archive of Modern Conflict.” [purchase]
Antonio Lopez: Fashion, Art, Sex & Disco
“The most comprehensive book on the influential fashion illustrator who defined style during the disco era in NY and Paris in the 1970s and early ’80s. THE BEST fashion book of this year.” [more info]
Rico Scagliola & Michael Meier: Neue Menschen (New Human Beings)
“Highly stylized, hyper-modern depictions of teens in Zurich by Swiss artists Rico Scagliola and Michael Meier, both in their 20s, produced in a fat volume by the wonderfully eccentric publisher Patrick Frey.” [purchase]
Luigi Ghirri: Project Prints
“The work of Luigi Ghirri, who died in 1992, has been rediscovered of late after being including in a major exhibition curated by Thomas Demand entitled La Carte D’Apres Nature—citing work with a surrealist take on nature. For my money, this is the best book of the year—beautifully designed and reproduced, making the most of the artist’s exquisite touch.” [more info]
[Photos and quotes courtesy of Dashwood Books, 33 Bond Street between Lafayette and Bowery, NYC.]
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