Booked Solid Joe Dilworth serves up wonderfully-obscure photography books.
Twyla artist and photographer Joe Dilworth loves listening to music and perusing photography books. He even co-owns a photography-focused bookstore in Berlin. Naturally, we asked him to hook us up with a list of his favorite photo books. What he gave us is a mini-crash course in the documentary genre that is sure to introduce you to great artists you’ve never heard of.
Exiles, Josef Koudelka
This classic photography book, originally published in 1988 and now in its third edition, features the work of Czech-born Koudelka. Once described as “unsentimental, stark, brooding, intensely human,” the photos capture his explorations in Europe and Great Britain after leaving Czechoslovakia in 1968.
Overriding Sequence, Mihai Barabancea
“I wanted to document some kind of weird-surreal-Mad-Max-post-apocalyptic-cyberpunk-eastern-European-underworld-society,” Barabancea, a Romanian photographer, has said about this work. Originally a street artist, Barabancea later moved to photography. This book of his often raw, blunt work depicts Bucharest street life.
Zusammenleben, Ute Mahler
This book captures the photographs of Ute Mahler, a fashion and portrait photographer from the former East Germany, for the first time. Translated as “Living Together,” Mahler’s photography gives us a glimpse into unvarnished, everyday life in East Germany before the wall fell.
Vater, Sohn, und der Krieg, Tom Licht
This book (which translates as “Father, Son and the War”) documents a trip that the German photographer Licht took with his father in 2013. Together they travelled in search of the Russian village where Licht’s grandfather was killed during in World War II. Licht’s powerful pics create a portrait of two generations facing a painful past.
Anton Podstraský, 1939–2007, Anton Podstraský
Podstraský was a Slovak photographer whose work was virtually unknown until fairly recently. He mostly worked in newspaper and magazine photography and he was one of the few Slovak photographers who captured real life under Communism there before its decline.
