Artbook Image Gallery

Cultured penicillin, radio tubes, a bouncing ball, mold growing on cheese, soap bubbles, a pendulum in motion and light passing through a prism are just a few of the "scientific" phenomena and objects that Berenice Abbott photographed from the 1930s through the 1960s. Many of these images capturing "the basic laws of physics" were included in the 1960 exhibition The Image of Physics in Manchester, New Hampshire, which is covered extensively in one section of Fondación Mapfre's gorgeous new overview. If photographic "interpretation is profound and true," Abbott said, "it strikes home. Then the picture is significant. It communicates to us." Featured image is "Lamps 1950s (RCA Research Laboratory, Camden, NJ)" (c. 1950s).

'Lee Friedlander: Signs' is a photobook for photobook lovers

Featured photograph, made in Arkansas in 1961, is from Fraenkel Gallery's superb new Lee Friedlander monograph, Signs. Designed, as always, by Katy Homans with tritone separations by Thomas Palmer and exquisite printing by Meridian to match, this is a photobook for photobook lovers, collecting—what else?—Friedlander's deadpan pictures of signs across America and Canada from the 1950s through 2017. Tailoring shops, movie marquis, segregated SROs and coffee shops, strip clubs, gas stations, fast food joints, churches, parking lots, billboards, stop signs and patriotic message boards all get their due, alongside a few photographs accidentally starring Friedlander and friends from long ago.

Trevor Paglen's new book offers an enigmatic glimpse into decades of covert operations

Featured image, an emblem for the headquarters of the United States Air Force Space Command program, Cyber Warfare Division, is reproduced from Trevor Paglen's new artist's book collecting fascinating ephemera produced around covert aerospace operations from the archives of Peter Merlin, aviation archaeologist. "Merlin's work as an aerospace archaeologist is animated by a simple premise," Paglen writes, "'Something always remains.' Everything that happens in the world leaves some kind of trace, whether it's paperwork, cultural artifacts, anecdotes or material remnants of the event itself… The segments of aircraft, the totemic patches and coins, the desk models, rocket ignition keys, ID cards and pamphlets in Merlin's collection recall the fossilized dinosaur eggs left over from a planetary crisis, albeit one that is far from over. They speak to a moment in time when the apocalypse was near: a moment in which political superpowers built stealth bombers and nuclear weapons with the potential to devastate the planet as thoroughly as the Chicxulub asteroid. Some of these artifacts tell their own stories. Most do not. Nonetheless, they are fragments of human undertakings whose implications remain largely unknown. The ultimate legacy of the programs they were affiliated with may be one of the greatest mysteries surrounding these bits of material culture."

IMAGE GALLERY

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