Compiled by DOUG Spowart & VICTORIA Cooper
This list is the third year in which we asked representatives of the Australian and New Zealand photobook discipline to nominate photobooks that were published in 2021.
We have continued to use the term ‘Selected’ as this compilation does not attempt to present a definitive selection of the ‘Best’ photobooks published but rather a list that represents a view of the Antipodean photobook discipline.
Once again it is intended that this list will present to an international audience a selection of photobooks from Australia and New Zealand and give an opportunity for these books and the stories they contain to have wider recognition in the larger world of photobooks.
THIS LIST INCLUDES BOOKS BY: Zahra Killeen-Chance and Solomon Mortimer, Tom Goldner, David Wadelton, Ying Ang, Bruce Connew, Jack Rossie, Sam Stephenson, Trent Mitchell
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Do Brumbies Dream in Red?
BOOK TITLE: Do Brumbies Dream in Red?
AUTHOR: Tom Goldner (Au)
PUBLISHER: Self-published
DESIGNER: Heidi Romano
OTHER COLLABORATORS: Creative collaboration with Angus Scott, text by Judith Crispin, cover art by Katherina Rodrigues.
ABSTRACT from the author’s website: Do Brumbies Dream in Red? is a research-driven project which explores anthropogenic changes in the Australian landscape through the use of conceptual documentary photography.
The project considers the systems which position the Snowy Mountain brumby and the catastrophic 2019-2020 Australian bushfires within a time of ecological uncertainty. The Snowy Mountain brumby, an Australian feral wild-roaming horse, appears as a metonym throughout the project and acts as an entry point into both the human and nonhuman world.
NOTE: This publication contains images of animals / wildlife which perished in the bushfires. The content may be disturbing to some readers.
NOMINATED BY ALISON STIEVEN-TAYLOR
Do Brumbies Dream in Red? is not a book about horses. Rather, these feral animals are an entry point to a complex narrative about climate change, and humans’ impact on the environment. In the summer of 2020, Goldner and videographer Angus Scott travelled to Kosciuszko National Park (NSW) where bushfires had destroyed eco-systems, wildlife, heritage sites, farms and homes. It was devastation on an epic scale, the ravages on the landscape profound.
Through Goldner’s pictures of fire ravaged landscapes, of homes now charred and twisted, the metal sheets piled high like autumn leaves, and in the hope that signs of renewal bring, the book weaves history, myth, economics and politics to ask: what might we do differently? How might we see in new ways? What do we want for the future?
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OTHER INFORMATION ABOUT THE BOOK:
THE PHYSICAL BOOK
FORMAT: Codex, 33 x 26cm, 54 photographs
NUMBER OF PAGES: 120
EDITION: STANDARD edition of 1000, a LIMITED edition of 100 is signed, numbered and includes a 8×10” print (option of three) and vintage Australian brumbies 33c postage stamp
PRINTING TECHNOLOGY: Offset by Lithocraft Pty Ltd
SPECIAL FEATURES: cover with tipped on image, red foiled spine, exposed binding with concertina text insert.
ISBN – 9780646831015
PRICE: STANDARD edition A$75, LIMITED edition: A$135 (Sold Out)
BUY THE BOOK: HERE
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A REVIEW OF THE BOOK by Matt Dunne – MATCA X C4 Journal
A Vocabulary
BOOK TITLE: A VOCABULARY
AUTHOR: Bruce Connew (NZ)
DESIGN: Catherine Griffiths and Bruce Connew
TYPOGRAPHY: Catherine Griffiths
PUBLISHER: Vapour Momenta Books
OTHER COLLABORATORS: Essay The Sandfly Nips…The Conversation Continues by Rangihīroa Panoho.
ABSTRACT (edited from the publisher’s website): “I step mindfully onto the farmland to photograph a panorama of the battle site from both Māori and Pākehā points of view. After several footsteps, and with some bafflement, I stop dead in my tracks at a strange sensation deep inside my belly, which today I’m still unable clearly to throw light on. History was here, I grasp that, but this was out of that range. Does earth hold memory, and deliver that memory when the gravity is ripe? … Over several recent years, not the least abstractedly, I’ve roamed more, this time after the many memorials and gravestones for the dead of these wars, or more specifically, the texts on these testaments to folly. A vocabulary of colonisation.” Bruce Connew.
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TWO NOMINATIONS
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NOMINATED BY DAVID COOK
By paying attention to the carved words on memorials to New Zealand’s violent and unjust colonial history, Bruce Connew creates an epic poem. This lament keeps drawing me in, and I discover new word associations each time I pick it up. The book is a magnificent collaboration with typographer Catherine Griffiths and Rangihīroa Panoho. It’s a finely crafted book, printed and bound in Aotearoa.
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ALSO NOMINATED BY ALLAN McDONALD
“A Vocabulary is Bruce Connew’s project remembering the New Zealand Land Wars through memorial and headstone, and then most evocatively through a small number of pou whakamaumahara. However I say it is Connew’s project advisedly, as though I’m sure he was the driver, this is a project where several collaborators have contributed to resolve a densely layered photobook.
Rangihīroa Panoho’s text underwrites the project with a haunting polemic of this layered and complex history.
Language is everywhere, in his text, in the photographs and their accompanying captions. Catherine Griffith’s brings her finely tuned design sensibilities to keep the whole project afloat. No small task in over 300 pages documenting our colonial tragedy.
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OTHER INFORMATION ABOUT THE BOOK:
THE PHYSICAL BOOK
FORMAT: 20.6 x 13.7cm upright, cloth case-bound, 604 pages, section sewn, round spine, ribbon, 496 colour photographs as 306 works
EDITIONS: A STANDARD edition of 325 and a SPECIAL EDITION of up to 50 with ‘Heke’s Pah’ signed, pigment print, 158 x 105mm image size, on 308gsm Hahnemuhle Photo Rag
PRINTING TECHNOLOGY: Offset
SPECIAL FEATURES: Artists Book
ISBN 978-0-473-54543-7
PRICE: STANDARD Edition – NZ$95.00 Aotearoa New Zealand, NZ$110.00 Australia + Pacific, NZ$125.00 rest of the world
SPECIAL Edition with print NZ$250.00
Free postage worldwide
PURCHASING INFORMATION: HERE
A REVIEW by John Hurrell, EyeContact, 11 February 2021
https://eyecontactmagazine.com/2021/02/creating-a-common-vocabulary
A PODCAST by Kim Hill, Radio New Zealand
Mooning the sun
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BOOK TITLE: MOONING THE SUN
FINALIST – Aotearoa Photobook Award 2022
AUTHOR: Jack Rossie (NZ)
PUBLISHED BY: Bad News Books
DESIGN & EDITING: Jack Rossie
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NOMINATED BY HARRY CULY
Mooning the sun by Jack Rossie, took me back to a specific time in my life. When I moved out of the family home when I was 17, my friends and I moved to Australia to skateboard. I slept on a couch with bed bugs for 3 months, another memory I have is my friend making a bedroom in the kitchen by building a wall out of cut up card board boxes. We spent all our time together, a kind of dysfunctional family of friends stumbling towards adulthood.
Mooning the sun is a raw, intimate narrative showing a group of young people, growing up in a run-down flat in Wellington New Zealand. Jack Rossie says Mooning the Sun is a “… a love letter, documenting the artist’s first home away from home, and more importantly, the friends they made there.” The photographs recall the authentic intimacy of Nan Goldin’s or Corrine Day’s work, yet placed in the contemporary New Zealand cultural landscape, with a focus on the fluidity of identity, sexuality and gender. At its core it’s about how people seek out a sense of belonging, a new sense of family at that shaky and transitional time of life.
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OTHER INFORMATION ABOUT THE BOOK:
THE PHYSICAL BOOK
FORMAT: 17.6 × 25.0cm, hardcover, exposed kettle stitch binding, colour printed on 128gsm Silk Matt, includes two single page foldouts
PRINTER: digital press
EDITION: 50
SPECIAL FEATURES: Hand bound by the artist in Wellington, New Zealand. The publication features an essay by Kat Lang
PRICE: NZ$ 95.00
AN ESSAY ON THE WORK: By Kat Lang on Photoforum website
BUY THE BOOK: HERE
Small Business
BOOK TITLE: SMALL BUSINESS
AUTHOR: David Wadelton (Au)
PUBLISHER: M.33
DESIGN: Yanni Florence
OTHER CREATIVE COLLABORATORS: Essay by Professor Natalie King OAM
PRINTER/BINDER: Artron Art (Group) Co. Ltd, China
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NOMINATED BY HELEN FRAJMAN (A publisher’s pick)
‘Small Business’ is a companion volume to David Wadelton’s ‘Suburban Baroque’ – with the focus this time on work rather than domestic spaces.
Small Business looks at the small but enduring family-run businesses that are fading away, often tucked away on suburban streets. David Wadelton has gathered a considerable photographic archive of these interiors from all over Melbourne and regional Victoria over the last ten years with a couple of side excursions to iconic interstate locations.
The layouts featured are often pragmatic and utilitarian, arranged decades ago – often without regard for conventional design trends — and left that way. Some were on trend in their day but now look like museum settings. Still others fall on a wide spectrum from spartan, all the way to a tangled disorder that makes sense only to the proprietor. Whatever form taken they are a time-capsule of a generation who toiled in their shop for decades.
This collection is an ode to the overlooked, the obsolete – to those who march to a different drum.
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OTHER INFORMATION ABOUT THE BOOK:
THE PHYSICAL BOOK
FORMAT: Hard Cover, 23.5 x 23.5cm
NUMBER OF PAGES: 172pp
EDITION: 500
PRINTING TECHNOLOGY: Offset printed
ISBN: 978-0-6484899-5-5
PRICE: $63.64 + gst in Australia
A REVIEW OF THE BOOK BY Dr Daniel Palmer HERE
BUY THE BOOK: HERE
Also available from good bookshops around Australia
Fake Nostalgia
BOOK TITLE: FAKE NOSTALGIA
AUTHOR: Sam Stephenson (NZ)
PUBLISHER: Bad News Books
DESIGN: Foreign_Design
OTHER COLLABORATORS: Paloma Pizarro, Willy Ackerman and Max Olijnyk
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ABSTRACT (from the publisher): From the first photo in this series – Sam Stephenson’s parents in bed with framed portraits of their children on the wall above them – the scene for ‘Fake Nostalgia’ is set. Love, isolation, beauty, coincidence, tricks and antics emanate from everyday banality. And through Sam’s meticulous eye, the everyday inevitably becomes particular.
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NOMINATED BY JAKE MEIN
Fake Nostalgia is an incredible look into memory and the construction of ones narrative. Taken between 2005 – 2015 Stephenson has amassed an archive of imagery documenting the intimacy between loved ones who are with us and who aren’t and how these memories are held and altered over the course of time.
OTHER INFORMATION ABOUT THE BOOK:
THE PHYSICAL BOOK
FORMAT: Codex 21.0 x 21.0cm, hard cover with black linen and tipped in photograph with white foil and lilac endsheets
NUMBER OF PAGES: 184 pages
EDITION: 199
PRINTING TECHNOLOGY: Digital press/Rizo
SPECIAL FEATURES: Includes pull out Risograph printed insert on lilac paper with text by Max Olijnyk and Willy Ackerman and Paloma.
PRICE: NZ$ 79.00
BUY THE BOOK: HERE
A REVIEW: Monster Children Magazine
By Max Olijnyk commenting on the body of work from which the book was created.
Inner Atlas
BOOK TITLE: INNER ATLAS
AUTHOR & Self-publisher: Trent Mitchell (Au)
DESIGN: Trent Mitchell
OTHER COLLABORATORS: Text by Leta Keens, Cover art by Pierre Voisin
PRINTER/BINDER: Momento Pro
ABSTRACT: An international award-winning photographic book* and series, Mitchell’s photographs explore man’s primordial relationship with the rhythms of the sea. In an ode to the mythical fountain of youth, Inner Atlas recognises the importance of our metaphysical relationship with nature and the restorative qualities the living world can provide for both our wellbeing and our future.
NOMINATED BY LIBBY JEFFERY
This book presents the sea in a singular way. Abstract black and white portraits of bodysurfers morphing into the waves like spiritual beings are woven together with seascapes swirling with refracted light. The underwater and above-surface photographs generate a visceral sensation of what it ‘feels’ like to be at one with the ocean. Their energy also conveys the all-encompassing power of the sea, a force that has fascinated Trent since childhood. It poetically concludes with imagery of a man emerging from the water as a boy – reflecting Trent’s belief that the sea is also the fountain of youth. The striking black-on-black embossing on the cover fittingly reflects the movement found within.
(Note: This book was printed by Momento Pro)
OTHER INFORMATION ABOUT THE BOOK:
THE PHYSICAL BOOK
FORMAT: Codex, 21.0 x 25.4cm, section sewn hardcover book with Midnight Matte cover, black end pages and a gloss black custom emboss.
NUMBER OF PAGES: 96
EDITION: First edition 50, Box set edition also available with clamshell box and signed print.
PRINTING TECHNOLOGY: HP Indigo digital offset
PRICE: First edition of 50: $125 (sold out), Single edition box set of 5: $795 (sold out)
An eBook version of the book is available for A$4.95 from the link below
BUY THE BOOK: HERE
A COMMENTARY: URTH Magazine
By Aaron Chapman commenting on the body of work from which the book was created.
A Room in Whanganui
BOOK TITLE: A ROOM IN WHANGANUI
AWARD WINNER – Aotearoa Photobook Award 2022
AUTHORS: Zahra Killeen-Chance and Solomon Mortimer (NZ)
PUBLISHER: Self published
DESIGNER: Solomon Mortimer
ABSTRACT: A Room in Whanganui is the result of the time Mortimer and Killeen-Chance spent at Tylee Cottage as part of a Sarjeant Gallery residency. The photographs explore the possibilities of the studio room of the cottage, playing with light, shadow and the human form to create compositions that border on abstraction. The final publication takes the form of a duplicate receipt book in the cottage’s signature cream and green. The pages have been manually pin perforated to allow the images to be easily removed. (Adapted from the Aotearoa Photobook Awards website)
NOMINATED BY VICTORIA COOPER
A room in Whanganui is a book that requires the reader to think about the act of reading… It’s challenges the idea of a narrative through the turning page and the reading as a guided experience. My ongoing interests in the notion of Truth in photographic documentation and the implications of collage and montage in photographic visual communication also underpin my “reading” of this book.
Each photograph is an exploration of light and form. Place, space and human form is dismembered and reassembled into tonal patterning that has little connection with reality. The uncaptioned photograph loses its connection to an original document of a time and place in the hands of the viewer/reader – as they imbue the image with their interpretation or “truth”.
As if to continue this disruption and destabilising of reading, each image is separated by a blank page. These blank pages are the contemporary version of carbon paper: paper coated with a layer of ink cells that when pressure is applied leaves a secondary impression on the page underneath. Again the reader is challenged … the unintentional mark will change the photograph by the authors. But is this an invitation by the artists to collaborate as a kind of exquisite corpse thus transforming the book through the reader’s active intervention? Does it also refer to the reader’s perception as a kind of second impression?
The reading of this book continues to perplex as the context of the carbon paper “original” and each of the authors’ images have serrations that suggest one or many can be removed from the book. This book has the potential for partial or total erasure.
It is hard to put this book down – seductive and puzzling – because it is without the familiar bookish architecture and narrative flow. I am also tempted to draw a secondary impression and tear out the carbon paper evidence. An important book for the photobook community…
OTHER INFORMATION ABOUT THE BOOK:
THE PHYSICAL BOOK
FORMAT: Codex – softcover and pages stapled, 15.0 x 21.0cm, 80 images, unpaginated
PRINTING / BINDER: H&A Print, Whanganui, NZ
EDITION: 100
SPECIAL FEATURES: The book is in the form of a duplicate receipt book with pages manually pin perforated for easy removal.
ISBN: 978-0-473-60909-2
PRICE: NZ$ 40.00
ENQUIRE ABOUT THE BOOK:
Anna Miles Gallery or DM Solomon on instagram @crispy.hedges
The Quickening: A memoir on matrescence
BOOK TITLE: THE QUICKENING: A MEMOIR ON MATRESCENCE
A MULTI PHOTOBOOK AWARD RECIPIENT*
AUTHOR: Ying Ang (Au)
PUBLISHER: Self-published
IMAGES + TEXTS: Ying Ang
EDIT: Ying Ang + Teun van der Heijden
CONCEPT + DESIGN: Heijdens Karwei, Amsterdam
TEXT EDITORS: Ashe Davenport + Jessica Friedmann
PRINTER: Joss Morree Fine Books, Netherlands
BINDING: Fopma Wier
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ABSTRACT from the author’s website: The Quickening explores the transformation and lived experience of a woman in her motherhood/matrescence and postpartum depression/anxiety. The work interrogates the under-represented transition of biological, psychological and social identity during a complex and yet ubiquitous phase of life.
The Quickening details the claustrophobia, myopia, paradoxical loneliness and luminance of new motherhood and the postpartum period.
NOMINATED BY DOUG SPOWART
Before writing these words I’ve just re-read The Quickening. My mind is filled with the images and words that are presented to me through the turning of the book’s pages. In my reading I enter the intimate space of the author’s deeply personal life experience. I observe, I feel, I become emotionally involved in the self-reflection that Ying Ang discloses in the work.
The book is Ang’s introspective view of the often hidden or invisible physical, psychological and emotional aspects of childbirth and rearing from the mother’s perspective as defined by the term matrescence. The book is a complex vessel for telling this story through texts; images of all origins and contents are coalesced by a thoughtful and considered design process. The Quickening discloses Ang’s transition into motherhood with all the intensity and rawness of emotions ranging from melancholy to warmth, despondency to joy.
As I close the book and place it on the table before me, it calls me to pick it up again and continue my read – there is still so much more to understand and to empathise with Ying Ang in what she has shared through The Quickening.
OTHER INFORMATION ABOUT THE BOOK:
THE PHYSICAL BOOK
FORMAT: Codex, 22.0 x 28.0 cm, softcover with linen sleeve French fold with Japanese stab stitch, combination of offset and riso print on various uncoated papers
PAGES: 90 pages with 116 images
PRINTING TECHNOLOGY: Offset / Riso
SPECIAL FEATURES: Riso and offset printed, hand stitched as a uniquely handmade book
ISBN: 978-0-646-83323-1
PRICE: Both Special Editions with Collector Prints SOLD OUT
US$180 // *150 Euros // *AU$230 inc. postage
*indicative exchange rate
First Edition SOLD OUT – though DISTRIBUTORS may have copies available
US$120 // *100 Euros // *AU$155 inc. postage
*indicative exchange rate
A COMMENTARY: Lensculture Magazine
By Daniel Boetker-Smith.
ENQUIRE ABOUT THE BOOK: HERE
*Shortlisted for the 2020 Lucie Foundation Prototype Book Prize, the Perimeter x PHOTO2021 International Book Prize and awarded with the silver award for the 2020 BIFA Documentary Photo Book Prize, an Honorable Mention for the Tokyo International Foto Awards, Official Selection for the London International Creative Competition 2020, a winner of the Belfast Photo Festival 2021, bronze medal for the Documentary Book Prize at the 2021 Moscow International Foto Awards and Honorable Mention at the PX3 Paris Photo AwardS
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ABOUT THE 2021 BEST PHOTOBOOK NOMINATORS
In late 2021 we contacted key contributors to the photobook discipline in New Zealand and Australia for their Selected Book nominations. The responses culminate with the publishing of this Blog post.
We thank the supporters of this initiative and look forward to, at the end of this year – calling again for nominations for ANZ photobooks published in 2022.
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Our 2021 nominators
ALISON STIEVEN-TAYLOR
Who/what I do: Alison Stieven-Taylor is a writer and scholar who is passionate about storytelling in pictures.
Alison writes for many magazines and online sites and is the publisher of the Blog Photojournalism Now.
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DAVID COOK
Who/what I do: David Cook makes photobooks about community. He lectures in photography at Massey University, Wellington, and co-leads the biennial Photobook NZ fes@val.
HARRY CULY
Who/what I do: Born in Wellington 1986, Harry holds a Master of Fine Arts from Massey University. He is an artist, and book designer based in Pōneke. Harry is represented by Jhana Millers Gallery and also runs the small publishing company Bad News Books. Recent exhibitions include ‘News from The Sun’ at City Gallery Wellington and ‘Mirror City’ at Jhana Millers Gallery. In 2021 he received an Arts Foundation Laureate award receiving the Marti Friedlander Photographic Award.
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JAKE MEIN
Who/what I do: Jake Mein, born in Ngaio, Aotearoa, 1988, is a photographer based in New Zealand. He holds a BDes (Hons) in Photography from Massey University. His work explores the sense of belonging, home, and the deterioration of familiar places. Jake’s work has been exhibited locally in New Zealand as well as in shows in London, Hungary, Japan and Australia.
His project Six for Gold was published by the independent publisher Bad News Books. In 2020 Jake was a winner of PDN’s Emerging photographer award and a finalist of the Lens Culture Exposure award. Jake was chosen as an artist for the second & fourth cycle of the PARALLEL European Photo Based Platform.
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HELEN FRAJMAN
Who/what I do: Helen Frajman is an independent editor and curator of photography and since 1994 the Director and Publisher at M.33, a small arts business based in Naarm/Melbourne.
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LIBBY JEFFERY
Who/what I do: Libby is the co-founder and marketing manager at Momento Pro Australia’s most established photo book print company. She was coordinator of the Australia and New Zealand Photobook Awards, and has hosted various events for the antipodean community over the last two decades. Libby enjoys helping photographers bring their photo books to life, advising on photo book design from concept to layout and self-publishing. She believes that the most successful books occur when the book’s purpose guides its format and design.
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ALLAN McDONALD
Who/what I do: Allan McDonald is a lecturer in photography at Unitec, Te Whare Wānanga o Wairaka. He works with an archive of images spanning more than 50 years from which he curates narratives of social history and place. These sometimes appear as small publications, most recently The Holding 2020. Another, Carbon Empire won the New Zealand Photobook of the Year Award in 2017. He is represented by the Anna Miles Gallery in Auckland
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VICTORIA COOPER
Who/what I do: Dr Victoria Cooper’s work has been acquired for the photobook and artists’ books, rare book and manuscript collections in many private, regional and state public galleries, national and international collections. She has judged photobook awards and has contributed to photobook review panels in Australia. She is co-founder of The Antipodean Photobook.
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DOUG SPOWART
Who/what I do: Dr Doug Spowart’s research on Australian and New Zealand Photobooks was featured at the Vienna Photobook Festival and he was commissioned by TATE Britain to select a collection of ANZ photobooks to be included in their Martin Parr Photobook collection. He is the founder of The Antipodean Photobook social entities.
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.PLEASE – Let us know about your experience in viewing this page…
UNTIL NEXT YEAR ……
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Photobooks in Australia + New Zealand 
Great write-up as always! The Brumbies book impacted me the moment I saw it exhibited, amazing how powerful a photobook can be.
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