The 2019 Best Antipodean Photobooks
The 2019 Best Antipodean Photobooks
Compiled by Doug Spowart & Victoria Cooper for The Antipodean Photobook website, February 2020.
Books by: Alice Connew, Ana Paula Estrada, Anna Maria Antoinette D’Addario, Brad Rimmer, Darren Sylvester, David Wadelton, Jane Wilcox, Lou Gilbert, Louis Lim & Beth Jackson, Maria Colaidis, Martine Perret, Mick Porter, Paul Blackmore, Paul Knight, Saynab Muse, and Felix Wilson.
At the end of each year photobook commentators and critics from across the globe gather to present the BEST BOOKS of that year. Their information resource is the books that they have encountered over the preceding 12 months. For the reasons of geography these lists are generally representative of the American, European and more recently the Japanese photobook scenes.
The photobook makers of New Zealand and Australia (the Antipodes) have limited opportunity to penetrate the northern hemisphere recognition space. Hence this first list of THE BEST ANTIPODEAN PHOTOBOOKS for 2019 has been prepared.
Please take a look – read the commentaries and visit the links to the larger stories of these books and the photographers, designers and publishers who made them.
And, as one of our nominators Mary Macpherson states, ‘Best Books lists should be seen as the opinion of individuals, based on what they’ve seen and prefer, rather than final verdicts on worth’.
Thank you
Doug Spowart
Alice Connew’s Still Looking Good Images: Courtesy of the author
Still Looking Good
Featuring text adapted from Things That Move Me (2017) by Oliver Connew
Author & Designer: Alice Connew
Description: 10.5×14.8cm upright, 88 pages, hard cover, 38 colour photographs
Printed in Lithuania
Standard Edition: 300 signed and numbered
Special Edition: 30 signed and numbered with signed and numbered inkjet print #37
NOMINATED BY VICTORIA COOPER
Have you ever had that kind of dream where you lost in the world with endlessly expanding spaces of desolation and destruction? You move amongst people not interested in helping you or what you are trying to tell them. I am a child from the era of the threat of nuclear war. Many of my childhood dreams were filled with an overwhelming desperation where I dream of trying to run or scream and I am frozen and silent unable to do either. This small book for me is about the reality of these dreams… a present where there is a kind of madness in and anxiety of the inability to stop and listen and reflect on what it means to be human.