National Photography Month!

We’ve all heard a picture is worth a thousand words, so why not enjoy all those words in their natural habitat, a book! From the weird and macabre to the streets of New York, these books will bring you exciting new places and enchant you with new stories to tell.

The Photo Book; text by Ian Jeffrey
The Photography Book brings together 500 inspiring, moving and beautiful images of famous events and people, sensational landscapes, historic moments, ground-breaking photojournalism, insightful portraits, sport, wildlife, fashion and the everyday. Each image is discussed in detail, bringing it to life and offering us an understanding of this art form which plays such a large role in our everyday lives.

Vivian Maier: Street Photography; text by Allan Sekula
Vivian Maier, who from the 1950s until the 1990s, took over 100,000 photographs worldwide—from France to New York City to Chicago and dozens of other countries—and yet showed the results to no one. It wasn’t until local historian John Maloof purchased a box of Maier’s negatives from a Chicago auction house and began collecting and championing her marvelous work just a few years ago that any of it saw the light of day. Her photos portray urban life and feature subjects such as the elderly, African Americans, historical buildings, and the homeless.

Untitled by Diane Arbus
Untitled may well be Arbus’s most transcendent, most romantic vision. It is a celebration of the singularity and connectedness of each and every one of us. It demands of us what it demanded of her: the courage to see things as they are and the grace to permit them to simply be. For Diane Arbus, this is what making pictures was all about.These photographs achieve a lyricism, an emotional purity that sets them apart from all her other accomplishments.

Talking Pictures: Images and Messages Rescued From the Past by Ransom Riggs
With the candid quirkiness of Awkward Family Photos and the confessional intimacy of PostSecret, Ransom Riggs’s Talking Pictures is a haunting collection of antique found photographs with evocative inscriptions that bring these lost personal moments to life. Each image in Talking Pictures reveals a singular, frozen moment in a person’s life, be it joyful, quiet, or steeped in sorrow. Yet the book’s unique depth comes from the writing accompanying each photo: as with the caption revealing how one seemingly random snapshot of a dancing couple captured the first dance of their 40-year marriage, each successive inscription shines like a flashbulb illuminating a photograph’s particular context and lighting up our connection to the past.

Happy Reading!