Holger Feroudj

The streetscapes of Istanbul as photographed by Nobel prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk in an exquisitely printed clothbound editionThe dominant color in Orhan Pamuk's new book of photographs is orange. When the Nobel-Prize-winning novelist is finished with the day's writing, he takes his camera and wanders through Istanbul's various neighborhoods, visiting the backstreets of his town, areas without tourists, spaces that seem neglected and forgotten, spaces with a particular light. This is the orange light of Istanbul's windows and streetlamps that Pamuk knows so well from his childhood--from the Istanbul of 50 years ago, as he mentions in his introduction.But Pamuk also observes that the homely, cosy orange light is slowly being replaced by a new, bright and icy white light from new lightbulbs. His photographs from the backstreets of Istanbul record and preserve the cosy effect of this old, disappearing orange light, as well as the recognition of this new white vision.Whether reflected in well-trodden snow, concentrated as a glaring ball atop a lamppost or subtly present as a diffuse haze, orange literally and aesthetically gives shape to Pamuk's pictures, which reveal to us the unseen corners of his home city.

The street life and political tensions of Tod Papageorge's late 1960s New York, in a two-volume clothbound presentationThis publication comprises two books of pictures Papageorge made after moving to Manhattan as a young man. As different as they are from one another--each book advances a distinct argument supporting Papageorge's belief in photographic "fiction-making"--together they amount to a comprehensive portrait of an uneasy city during a grim, fevered time. Down to the City follows (and ironically twists) the first sentences of Plato's Republic, threading phrases from Socrates' description of a religious festival through a stream of pictures seized in Manhattan's secular streets. This novel-like flow builds the sense of a place haunted by dystopian disorder, which is amplified late in the book when the war in Vietnam takes center stage, clarifying the tensions leading to that moment. The Dear Common Round traces a softer arc. Here the actions and exchanges that a city's people make in the streets thousands of times a day are photographically honored simply and directly, as if the style of picture-making, at least initially in the book, had reverted to the first days of hand-camera photography. This changes as the sequence progresses, but for all its increasing visual and narrative complexity, The Dear Common Round holds true to the promise of its opening: this is a city sweet, if serious, at its heart, built to belong to and cherish. Tod Papageorge was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1940, and began photographing during his last semester of college before graduating with a degree in English literature in 1962. His work has been widely exhibited and is represented in over 30 major public collections. Steidl has published Papageorge's Passing Through Eden: Photographs of Central Park (2007) and Dr. Blankman's New York (2018).

An unconventional illustrated book for children and all those with a healthy relationship to their inner childImaginatively combining retro images with new rhymes, Rhyme Time brings visual nostalgia and the traditions of children's verse up to date. The illustrations are 1960s line drawings that Monte Packham (born 1981)--author of ABC Photography and Photo Adventures--carefully colored in as a child in 1988; now, more than 30 years later, he has rearranged these vibrant images into playful stories and captured them in rhyme. The unexpected results are both original tales, like that of Humphrey who chased a pesky elf from his garden with a cricket bat, and tongue-in-cheek reinterpretations of beloved fairy tales and nursery rhymes--if Snow White isn't actually the fairest in the land, then who is? And why did Jack and Jill really climb that steep and nasty hill?