Photobooks of 2019: Maki
In My Mind There is Never Silence by Diego Moreno
After his very interesting first book “Huesped” published in 2018 Diego Moreno came this year to Arles photo festival with this new and limited photo book which confirms the talent of this mexican photographer as well as the depth of his work. Particular care has been taken in the originality of the production of this hand-bound book. Also besides this intriguing and beautiful photo series about “Los Panzudos Mercedarios”, the stout guardians of the neighborhood of La Merced in San Cristóbal de las Casas in Chiapas, the text by Diego Moreno brings us directly into his thoughts about his dearest beings in precarious situation but also about his life as a gay boy in Mexico.
Stockholm by Anders Petersen
A massive and very interesting new photobook by one of the Swedish masters of black and white photography, documenting for the first time in an entire photo book Stockholm, his hometown. Anders Petersen at his best.
The Best Days by Seung Woo Yang
Since my first meeting with this Korean photographer he has never stopped growing from an emerging photographer to one of the photographers to follow in Japan. He received the 36th Domon Ken Award and published 5 photo books in 6 years. This is a re-edition of his first photo book. A new luxurious edition slightly different from the previous one since some photos have been changed. A book in which he documents his life trajectory and people around him while he traveled between 1999 and 2006, back and forth between Japan and Korea, driven by the suicide death of his comrade. We can see here his former life and the lives of his friends who remained and rose to seniority in the Korean underworld. The photographs tell an unusual story from an unusual point of view – there cannot be many photographers who have had such access to the world of active gangsters in Korea. Zen Foto Gallery had the good idea to re-edit this astonishing work that has been long out of print.
The Coast by Sohrab Hura
This is maybe one of the books that this year brings together the most favorable opinions from people of all stripes, as many who like the conceptual photo as those who need a little more guts and content in the images… and for good reason, this book surprised me from every point of view by the images, the way in which were thought the sequences of photos, the subject, the layout… Everything is a great success. A book that can be perceived as a study on the possibilities of sequencing, meaning and interpretation of the image.
Showa 96 by Kazuyoshi Usui
Showa 96 is the third and final part of Usui’s Showa books trilogy. Vibrant, colourful, stylish, poetic and iconoclastic at the same time, with an imagined reality of Japan where good-bad taste reigns true…
Maki is a french photographer born and living in Marseille (France). He published in 2016 “Gûyu – Allegory” (Timeshow Press). His latest book “Japan Somewhere” has been published by Zen Foto Gallery in Tokyo. He is also a photo book collector and publisher of the collection of mini photo books “Media Immediat” (Ed Templeton, Onaka Koji, Morten Andersen, Daisuke Ichiba…) and runs the “Photobooks Collectors” page on Facebook in which he introduce the photobooks he likes and recommends as well as the “Japanese Photography” group. His next exhibition will take place in May 2019 at Kodoji in Tokyo.
Images: top – The Coast by Sohrab Hura, below – In My Mind There is Never Silence by Diego Moreno
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