© Harold Feninstein

After a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2011 which raised over $40,000, Jason Landry at Panopticon Gallery teamed up with Nazraeli Press to publish Harold Feinstein | A Retrospective, Feinstein’s first-ever monograph of his classic black-and-white photographs.  As Landry states, “Harold (who is now 81) would say to me, I’ve been waiting for a book of this work since I was 15 years old.  When he said it, I knew he meant it, and I had to figure out a way to deliver it.”

Feinstein was born in Coney Island in 1931, and would often say that he fell out of his mother’s womb onto the beach on Coney Island with a Nathan’s Hot Dog in his hand and the sounds of kids screaming on The Cyclone in his ears.

He began his career in photography in 1946 at the age of 15 and within four years, Edward Steichen had purchased his work for the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Feinstein joined the Photo League at 17 and became a prominent figure in the vanguard of New York City’s street photography scene, exhibiting his work at Helen Gee’s Limelight Gallery.

Over the years, Feinstein taught classes and workshops, telling his students, “When your mouth drops open…click the shutter.”

—Courtesy Panopticon Gallery
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All photos © Machiel Botman/Courtesy Gitterman Gallery, New York. Above: “Julia, 2007″.

An exhibition at Gitterman Gallery in New York City of Machiel Botman’s black-and-white photographs from the past ten years is concurrent with the release of his third monograph, One Tree (Nazraeli Press, 2011). A key figure in Dutch photography, Botman has always photographed as a way to understand life. He is not restrained by photographic conventions; rather, Botman utilizes a variety of exposures, depths of field and focal distances, resulting in a style that is uniquely his own. His books are equally singular. They are autobiographical and chronicle the stages in his life, but they do not follow a linear narrative.

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© David Maisel. Above:History’s Shadow AB3, 2010.

History’s Shadow, a new book by David Maisel (Nazraeli Press), examines art and artifacts through his photographs of museum conservation x-rays. Like spectral transmissions conveying messages across time, the images in History’s Shadow make the invisible visible – expressing the shape-shifting nature of time itself and the continuous presence of the past contained within us. “What do these works of art from past cultures have to teach us about our current point in human history or about our relationship to the past?,” writes Maisel in his essay. “The x-ray provides a filter and a means (much as perception itself is both filter and means) to read the intrinsic properties of these works, the trace elements with which these objects are imbued.” The book also includes X, Curator, a short story by Jonathan Lethem.

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All photos © Corey & Chris Arnold

Corey Arnold has worked seasonally in Alaska as a commercial fisherman for the past 15 years. He is best known for his ongoing photo series entitled Fish-Work, which is a photo essay chronicling the lives of commercial fishermen worldwide. His latest exhibition, Fishing with My Dad 1978-1995, opens at Ampersand Gallery and Fine Books in Portland Oregon on October 15th. The show is a collaboration of sorts between Corey & his father, Chris Arnold, who were avid sportfishermen and made these photographs of each other holding their catch throughout Corey’s childhood. The photographs speak to the fact that fishing and storytelling go hand in hand, and that cameras and their snapshots have historically served to verify the truth of often questionable narratives.

Recently published by Nazraeli Press in One Picture Book #69 (video of the book here) the photographs also record the trajectory of a life in which fishing and photography have never been far apart. He brings to this body of work not only his own firsthand experience as an Alaskan commercial fisherman; but a life-long passion for fishing, the roots of which we see here in snapshots that were made while fishing with his dad.

-courtesy Corey Arnold.

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