Many photographers have been intrigued with the baffling distortions―both subtle and disquieting―that can occur when the camera “captures” the real world. Not always intentional, some images dazzle with impossible juxtapositions or disorienting spatial orders, while others confound the viewer’s belief in the documentary promise of photography. 
Drawn from the highly respected collection of Allan Chasanoff, the photographs in this intriguing volume confront viewers with the challenge of doubt and confusion in so-called “straight” pictures. Featured are perceptually provocative images by Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Clarence John Laughlin, Imogen Cunningham, and Lee Friedlander, among others. The book’s essays raise awareness of the interpretive nature of the lens and the interpolative nature of the medium.

First Doubt: Optical Confusion in Modern Photography: Selections from the Allan Chasanoff Collection

Arts & Photography

Chuang, Joshua

Photography & Video

Yale University Art Gallery

Studying the 19th-century cyanotypes of Anna Atkins, Meghann Riepenhoff (born 1979) was motivated in 2013 to get out of the darkroom and into the world to make her work. She began making cyanotypes directly in the environment, where elements like precipitation, waves, wind and sediment physically etch into the photo-chemistry. Two of Riepenhoff's cyanotype series, Littoral Drift and Ecotone, are brought together in this new publication.
Riepenhoff makes these images by placing cyanotype paper in the sea or setting it out in the rain and snow; the photosensitive chemicals simultaneously expose in the sunlight and wash in the water around them. The prints' receptivity to the environment means they are never wholly done processing, and they continue to change over time. This beautiful new publication documents Riepenhoff's fugitive cyanotypes, exploring our relationship to the landscape, the sublime, time and impermanence.

Meghann Riepenhoff: Littoral Drift + Ecotone

Cotton, Charlotte

Radius Books/Yossi Milo Gallery

In his new Horizons series, the British-American artist Sze Tsung Leong (born 1970) combines wide-angle photographs of landscapes from throughout the world that exhibit fundamental formal similarities and rhythms by connecting them with a common horizon line. Unconventional juxtapositions allow the viewer to transcend distances and boundaries and to leap from the glacial lake of Jökulsárlón in Iceland to the tropical Indian Ocean; from the Israeli separation barrier to the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River; from the suburbs of California to the plains of Kenya. More than ten years in the making, Horizons gives an unfurled view of the surface of the globe. Thought-provoking and witty, poignant and playful, the series is above all a cumulative reminder of the complex and perpetually transforming relations between regions, cultures and nations that constitute the planet we live on.

Sze Tsung Leong: Horizons

IYER, PICO

Forbes, Duncan

Hatje Cantz

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Books by Chuang, Joshua