PHOTOBOOKS OF NOTE 2022 - Allie Haeusslein

Books I loved in 2022, in no particular order

Alessandra Sanguinetti, Some Say Ice (Mack) 

I know I’m joining the masses on this one, but I don’t care! We showed selected pictures from this project back in 2018. The room had this haunting, surreal quality that kept luring me back in to look again and again. The book brilliantly evokes those same feelings, and I know I’ll be pulling it off my shelf regularly.

Diane Arbus, Documents (David Zwirner Books/Fraenkel Gallery)

I am a nerdy researcher at heart. Nothing gets me going like a well-designed finding aid, a lengthy bibliography, or, better yet, donning a pair of white gloves to comb through letters, notes, or undecipherable scribbles. This book is made for people like me. Exhaustively researched, yes, but also gorgeously designed. It makes looking at hundreds of pages about Arbus a deliciously good time…maybe even for the non-nerds among us. 

Mimi Plumb, The Golden City (Stanley Barker)

I was born and raised in San Francisco, left for college claiming I’d never move back, and then moved back and have remained ever since; the earliest photographs in The Golden City were made just two years before I was born. I will not sit here and pretend I can identify the people, buildings, or the neighborhoods in this book. But I do recognize the undercurrent Mimi evokes through her adeptly sequenced, often puzzling photographs. 

Raymond Meeks and Adrianna Ault, A Geography of Abandonment (Origini Edizioni)

This volume is a stunning treasure, from the materials used and the way it is bound to the poetic sequencing of images both black-and-white and color. Looking through feels like a privileged glimpse into an intimate communion with this land, this place. 

Books I want to see in 2023, in no particular order

I’m going out on a limb here with a non-best-of-2022 list in the hopes that sharing will make these books a reality. Here are three books I would love to see published in 2023:

A mid-career survey of Matt Lipps (@_mattlipps_) – Matt has been making compelling, dynamic work for years and he doesn’t have a single book! He is long overdue…

Kelli Connell and Natalie Krick, o_Man! (@kelli_connell; @nattynattynatnatnat; @womanmoan) – two women reimagine Edward Steichen’s photographs and words through insightful cropping, compositing, re-editing, colorizing, and re-sequencing. Count me in. 

Eva O’Leary’s work from State College, Pennsylvania (@evaoleary)—Eva has been quietly working on a powerful, searing project about growing up and being a woman in State College, PA—home to Penn State University—a quintessentially American college football town with a culture O’Leary likens to “girls gone wild.” Next year may be too soon, but whenever Eva is ready to go, this work needs to go out into the world.

Allie Haeusslein is director of Pier 24 in San Francisco, our favorite place to see photography. She is also a writer on photography for many publications and periodicals we all know and love.