What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 18443-1999, Co-Editor
Edited by Russet Lederman and Olga Yatskevich. New York: 10×10 Photobooks, 2021.
What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843 – 1999, 10×10’s most recent “book-on-photobooks” anthology in its ongoing examination of photobook history, explores photobooks created by women from photography’s beginnings to the dawn of the 21st century.
Presenting a diverse geographic and ethnic selection, the anthology interprets historical photobooks by women in the broadest sense possible: classic bound books, portfolios, personal albums, unpublished books, zines and scrapbooks. Some of the books documented are well-known publications such as Anna Atkins’ Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (1843-1853), Germaine Krull’s Métal (1928) and Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph (1972), while other books may be relatively unknown, such as Alice Seeley Harris’ The Camera and the Congo Crime (c. 1906), Varvara Stepanova’s Groznyi smekh. Okna Rosta (1932), Eslanda Cardozo Goode Robeson’s African Journey (1945), Eiko Yamazawa’s Far and Near (1962) and Gretta Alegre Sarfaty’s Auto-photos (1978). Also addressed in the publication are the glaring gaps and omissions in current photobook history—in particular, the lack of access, support and funding for photobooks by non-Western women and women of color.
Two Men Arrive in a Village: Photographs by Jo Ractliffe with a Story by Zadie Smith, Co-Editor
Edited by Laurence Vecten, Russet Lederman and Yoko Sawada. Paris, New York and Tokyo: The Gould Collection, 2021.
The selection of photographs by Jo Ractliffe in this volume were made between 1985 and 2019, and come from many places: South Africa, from the Great Karoo to Gauteng and Limpopo provinces to Zimbabwe in the north, and from the Western Cape, up the coast to Namibia and Angola. The dialogue between Ractliffe’s images and Zadie Smith’s parable is simultaneously a forthright and subtle commentary on injustice and imbalances of power. Together, they work to displace familiar narratives of violence and unsettle clichéd depictions of Africa in favor of a more nuanced interplay between the real and allegorical.
The Gould Collection is a series of books that was created to honor the memory of Christophe Crison, a photobook collector from Paris who died prematurely in 2015 at the age of forty-five. Over the past five years, since its inception, The Gould Collection editors have brought together a diverse group of photographers and writers from around the world. A shared thematic sensibility underlies the editors’ selection of the photographer-writer pairings presented in each volume.
Tereska and Her Photographer: A Story
By Carole Naggar with Photographs by David “Chim” Seymour
By Carole Naggar. New York: Russet Lederman, Inc., 2019. Limited edition of 400 English copies, 300 French copies. Limited availability.
Tereska and Her Photographer: A Story is a photobook that presents a fictional story by Carole Naggar about the extraordinary parallel lives of Magnum photographer and co-founder David “Chim” Seymour and Tereska Adwentowska, a young Polish girl who was the subject of Chim’s most famous photograph.
In September 1948, while on assignment for UNICEF to report on Europe’s children, Chim photographed Tereska at a primary school in Warsaw, Poland. Millions of readers saw Tereska’s picture when it was published in Life magazine in December of the same year, and were moved by her plight. She had received a shrapnel wound during the Wola massacre, and her image became emblematic of children’s fate during World War II. In the aftermath of the war, Chim tried to discover her full name and story. However, both Chim and Tereska met absurd deaths before ever meeting again.
Based on historical facts, Tereska and her Photographer is a fiction built as a small opera, where all the characters in Chim and Tereska’s lives bring their various voices to the narrative. They include: Tereska, Chim, Tereska’s parents (whose father was a Freedom Fighter during Warsaw’s Uprising), Doctor Stanislaw Wiktor Sierpiński (a survivor of Otwock’s massacre), Enrique Meneses, Jr. (a journalist who explored Chim and journalist Jean Roy’s deaths in Egypt), and several others. The book’s chronology is nonlinear, weaving vignettes from 1948 and the present with those from Chim’s youth and Tereska’s early childhood. David “Chim” Seymour’s photographs, along with several anonymous historical images, are inventively presented and arranged by award-winning book designer Ricardo Báez with striking typography by Juan Mercerón. PLEASE NOTE: This book intentionally has a hole that runs from the front cover to the back cover. This is part of the book’s inventive design. The hole symbolizes the way that David “Chim” Seymour died—shot by Egyptian military at the Suez Canal.
On Keeping a Notebook: Photographs and Drawings by Jamie Hawkeworth with an essay by Joan Didion, Co-Editor
Edited by Russet Lederman, Laurence Vecten and Yoko Sawada. New York, Paris and Tokyo: The Gould Collection, 2019.
On Keeping a Notebook, volume four of The Gould Collection pairs forty-four photographs and five drawings by British photographer Jamie Hawkesworth with American writer Joan Didion’s essay On Keeping a Notebook. Through words for Didion and images for Hawkesworth, volume four focuses on the practice of collecting fragmentary thoughts and observations within an artist’s creative process. Hawkesworth’s photographs—shot from 2012 through 2019 in Japan, Mongolia, Romania, Russia, United States, United Kingdom, among other locations—are a personal record of his short pleasurable journeys. While Didion’s musings in her essay On Keeping a Notebook, written in 1966, examine the fluid line between fact and fiction through the comments and notes that fill her private journal.
How We See: Photobooks by Women, Co-Editor
Edited by Russet Lederman, Olga Yaskevich and Michael Lang. New York City: 10×10 Photobooks, 2018.
The comprehensive How We See: Photobooks by Women ‘book-on-books’ publication—released in mid-November 2018 and now in its second printing—documents the one hundred contemporary photobooks by women in the touring “How We See” reading room organized by 10×10 Photobooks. In addition to the international selection of books in the reading room, the publication includes one hundred historical books by women photographers, an annotated history, three commissioned essays and a visual index. How We See explores the distinctive content, design and intellectual attributes in photobooks produced by women.
Hypermarché-Novembre: Photographs by Motoyuki Daifu with Poems by Michel Houellebecq, Co-Editor
Edited by Laurence Vecten, Russet Lederman and Yoko Sawada. Paris, New York & Tokyo: The Gould Collection, 2018.
Printed in a limited numbered edition of 500.
Hypermarché – Novembre, the third volume in The Gould Collection, partners Japanese photographer Motoyuki Daifu with French writer Michel Houellebecq to critically explore themes of love, pain, family and daily life.
Through a probing and often humorous lens, Tokyo-based Motoyuki Daifu’s photographs explore the loving bonds and contradictions that shape his family’s interactions, surroundings and social spaces. Culled from his three ongoing series from 2009 to 2017—Project Family, Still Life and Untitled (Surround)—his works reveal a view of a real Japan stripped of the clichés portrayed in many western depictions. Interwoven between Daifu’s photographs are five poems by critically acclaimed author Michel Houellebecq, most recently published in his Unreconciled (2014) anthology. Raw views of universal love, loneliness, tragedy, dedication and redemption, played out in supermarkets and other mundane locations, expose the highly flawed nature of modern human existence. Together, Daifu and Houellebecq draw attention to the beauty that can be found in the inescapable disorder of contemporary life.
It Don’t Mean a Thing: Photographs by Saul Leiter with a Story by Paul Auster, Co-Editor
Edited by Laurence Vecten, Russet Lederman and Yoko Sawada. Paris, New York & Tokyo: The Gould Collection, 2017.
Printed in a limited numbered edition of 500.
It Don’t Mean a Thing, the second volume in The Gould Collection, presents two presents fifty-eight photographs by Saul Leiter with the story It Don’t Mean a Thing by Paul Auster. Black-and-white and color photographs by Leiter from 1947 through the 1970s — with many images never before published — are paired with Auster’s tale of interlinked life events and chance encounters. Reflections on New York City, its urban rhythm, people and places, feature prominently in both artists’ work and provide a unifying focus for the book.
CLAP! 10×10 Contemporary Latin American Photobooks, Co-Editor
Edited by Olga Yatskevich, Russet Lederman, Matthew Carson and Michael Lang. New York: 10×10 Photobooks, 2017.
Printed in a limited numbered edition of 600.
Published in conjunction with 10×10’s traveling CLAP! Reading Room, this lavishly illustrated 244-page anthology presents 130 Latin American photography books published between 2000 to 2016, selected by twelve Latin American photobooks specialists (either individually or in teams) – and features complete bibliographical information, an illustrated index, and trilingual essays (English, Spanish and Portuguese).
Paris Photo – Aperture Photography Catalogue of the Year Shortlist 2017
Walter Tiemann Prize Shortlist 2018
Change: Photographs by Mikiko Hara with a Short Story by Stephen Dixon, Co-Editor
Edited by Laurence Vecten, Russet Lederman and Yoko Sawada. Paris, New York & Tokyo: The Gould Collection, 2016.
Printed in a limited numbered edition of 500 (with signed copies available)
Special Edition: 26 numbered copies with a signed chromogenic print by Mikiko Hara. 24.8 cm high x 18 cm wide.
Change, the first volume of The Gould Collection, interweaves Stephen Dixon’s short story Change with Mikiko Hara’s untitled photographs from 1996 to 2009.
Isolation and social disconnect define both Dixon’s story and Hara’s photographs. Whether images of a bored mother and child on a Tokyo subway or dialogue that reveals missed social cues between neighbors, the people who inhabit the pages of Change try and often fail to genuinely interact with one another. Visually united through an inventive design that presents Dixon’s story on iridescent sheets interspersed between Hara’s color images, Change probes alienation and its role in contemporary life.
Winner of the Ihei Kimura Prize for 2016/2017
10×10 Japanese Photobooks, Co-Editor
Edited by Matthew Carson, Michael Lang, Russet Lederman and Olga Yatskevich. New York: 10×10 Photobooks in association with International Center of Photography and Photobook Facebook Group, 2014.
Printed in a limited numbered edition of 400, this “book on books” presents selections by twenty photobook specialists.
As a catalog associated with the traveling 10×10 Japanese Reading Room and Online space, the book offers an in-depth visual investigation of twenty highlighted books – one from each specialist’s selection of ten books – and a visual appendix that documents all 200 Japanese photobooks.
10×10 American Photobooks, Co-Editor
Edited by Matthew Carson, Russet Lederman and Olga Yatskevich. New York: bookdummypress and 10×10 Photobooks, 2013.
As a comprehensive overview of the 10×10 American Photobooks project, this limited edition (500 copies) publication presents illustrated selection lists from all the specialists, along with essays on American photobook culture by noted artists, writers, publishers, curators and bibliophiles.
Aperture Photobook Review and Aperture Blog, Photobook and Exhibition Reviewer
Blog: Exhibition Review, April 20, 2020
A Searing Exhibition Charts the History of Abortion
The Photobook Review: Issue #14, Spring 2018
Interview with Yumi Goto, Reminders Photography Stronghold
Blog: Exhibition Review, May 14, 2018
Review of The Incomplete Araki at The Museum of Sex, NYC.
Blog: Exhibition Review, October 3, 2017
Review of Daido Moriyama at Luhring Augustine Gallery, Brooklyn, NY.
Blog: Exhibition Review, February 15, 2017
Review of Acts of Intimacy: The Erotic Gaze in Japanese Photography at The Walther Collection, NYC.
Blog: Exhibition Review, April 16, 2016
Review of In the Wake at Japan Society, NYC.
Blog: Exhibition Review, January 29, 2016
Review of Yasuhiro Ishimoto: Katsura at Peter Blum Gallery, NYC.
The Photobook Review: Issue #8, Spring 2015
Review of Nobuyoshi Araki, Chiro Love Death (2010).
Foam Magazine, Contributing Writer
Foam #55 Talent (December 2019)
Essay on Camillo Pasquarelli
Foam #52: (December 2018).
10×10 Photobooks Bookshelf Selection
Foam #50 Water: Carrier, Barrier, Source (March 2018)
Essay on Yoshiyuki Iwase: Ama no Gunzo
Foam #48 Talent (August 2017)
Essay on Juyan Wang: Project 2085
Foam #46 Who We Are (December 2016)
Two Essays — Izumi Miyazaki: Kowai Kawaii
and Hiroshi Okamoto: I Want to Die
Foam #45 Talent (August 2016)
Essay on Taejoong Kim: Nature Revealed
Foam #42 Talent (August 2015)
Essay on Heikki Kaski: Towards Tranquillity
Foam #40 After Araki (December 2014)
Essay on Desire and Portraits of Sexuality as Filtered Through Life and Death
Foam #39 Talent (August 2014)
Essays on Nerhol and Jing Huang
Monsters and Madonnas, Contributing Writer
The International Center of Photography Library Blog, New York City
2011 to the present.
Regular posts highlighting photobooks in the International Center of Photography Library and permanent collection. Although not the exclusive focus, many of the articles explore aspects of the library’s strong holdings in Japanese pre and postwar photobooks.
Selected topics covered include:
Parallel Universe: Tokyo Through Western Eyes
Anouk Kruithof: Interview
LA Report: Beyond the Book Fairs
Japanese Photobooks at the ICP Library: Revisted Part 2
Japanese Photobooks at the ICP Library: Revisited
Miyako Ishiuchi Wins 2014 Hasselblad Award
Recent Japanese Photobook Reprints
David Solo: An Inveterate Photobook Collector
Let’s Pretend! The Contemporary American Photobook
Collaborations in Japanese Photobooks: Shuji Terayama, Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno
The Photobook: Turn the Page Please
Hidden Dangers: Japanese Photobooks in the Shadow of Fukushima
Provoke: Takuma Nakahira and Yutaka Takanashi
Ivan Vartanian: Performance, Bookmaking and the Photobook
The Daido Moriyama Photobook Collection at the ICP Library: Nippon Gekijo Shashincho / Japan: A Photo Theater
Delpire & Co.
Kohei Sugiura: The Japanese Photobook as Object
Ed van der Elsken and Eikoh Hosoe: A 30-Year Dialogue
Kiyoshi Suzuki: It’s All About the Photobooks
Yasuhiro Ishimoto (1921-2012): The “ Visual Bilinguist” in Japanese and American Postwar Photography
New York Antiquarian Book Fair 2012
Magnum Contact Sheets: An Interview with Kristen Lubben
New York: Daido Moriyama and William Klein
Children’s Photobooks: Not Just for Children
Paris Photo / Books 2011
Hello Japan! (An interview with John Gossage)
From War Time Propaganda to a Postwar Platform for the Avant-Garde
Caught Between Two Worlds: Japanese Photobooks from the Mid-1990s to the Present
The Impact of Hiroshima & Nagasaki on Japanese Photobooks
The Eyes, Photobook Reviewer
Vol. 10, Autumn 2019/Winter 2020
Review of Chloe Dewe Mathews Caspian: The Elements (2018).
Vol. 9, Autumn 2018/Winter 2019
Review of Carmen Winant: My Birth (2018).
Vol. 8, Autumn 2017/Winter 2018
Review of Peter van Agtmael: Buzzing at the Sill (2017).
Essay: Victoria & Albert Museum: Photography Expanded
Vol. 7, Autumn 2016/Winter 2017
Review of Provoke: Between Protest and Performance (2016).
Vol. 6, Spring/Summer 2016
Review of Seiji Kurata: AKB 80’S (2015).
Vol. 5, Autumn 2015/Winter 2016
Review of Sohrab Hura: Life is Elsewhere (2015).
Vol. 4, Spring/Summer 2015
Review of Paul Strand: Master of Modern Photography (2014).
Vol. 3, Autumn 2013/Winter 2014
Review of Shomei Tomatsu: Chewing Gum and Chocolate (2014).
Vol. 2, Spring/Summer 2014
Review of Eternal Chase (2012) by Tamiko Nishimura, pp. 150-151.
Vol. 1, Autumn 2012/Winter 2013
Review of Various Small Books: Referencing Various Small Books by Ed Ruscha (2013), pp. 148-149. (Download PDF).
IMA Magazine, Essayist and Photobook Selector
20 Photobooks Around Gender, Vol. 36, Autumn/Winter 2021
A selection of postwar photobooks by Japanese women.
IMA: Best Photobooks of 2016, Vol. 18, Winter 2016
Recommendation with Jeff Gutterman: Provoke: Between Protest and Performance (Exhibition Catalog); Moholy-Nagy: Future Present (Exhibition Catalog); Masahisa Fukase, Hibi , Nuogo kuno teorija: The Theory of a Naked Body (Exhibition Catalog); and Hiroyasu Nakai, North Point.
IMA: Our Favorite Ararchy Books!, Vol. 16, Summer 2016
Recommendation: Araki’s, Oh Nippon (1971), Chiro My Love (1990), and Tokyo Kannon (1998).
IMA: Depth of Monochrome Photography, Vol. 14, Winter 2015
Recommendation: Yasuhiro Ishimoto, Someday Somewhere (1958); Yasuhiro Yoshioka, The Photography of Yasuhiro Yoshioka (1962); and Kazuo Kitai, Resistance (1965).
IMA: New Ground of Documentary, Vol. 12, Summer 2015
Recommendation: Shomei Tomatsu and Ken Domon, Nagasaki-Hiroshima Document 1961 and Alyse Emdur, Prison Landscapes.
IMA: Personal Narratives, Vol. 5, Autumn 2013
Article on the historical precedence for personal narratives in the work of Japanese photographer Tomoko Sawada. Text in Japanese. Download PDF.
Various Photobook Magazine / Blog Reviews and Selections
Punto de Fuga (in Spanish): “Antes y ahora: fotógrafas japonesas de las décadas de 1970 y 1980 vistas a través de sus libros de fotografía” (Vol. 8, Issue 1: March 2020).
Exposure: Emi Anrukaji, A Passage Through Pain and Pleasure (10 September 2018)
Photobookstore Magazine: Best Books 2018 – 10×10 Photobooks Selection (5 December 2018)
Photobookstore Magazine: Best Books 2017 – 10×10 Photobooks Selection (8 December 2017)
Photobookstore Magazine: Best Books 2016 – 10×10 Photobooks Selection (2 December 2016)
photo-eye Blog: Best Books 2015 – 10×10 Photobooks Selection (8 December 2015)
Photobookstore Magazine: Review of Ichiro Kojima, Tsugaru: Poems, Texts, and Photography (6 March 2015)
photo-eye Blog: Book of the Week Review: Student Radicals: Japan 1968-1969 by Takashi Hamaguchi (24 February 2015)
photo-eye Blog: Best Books 2013 – 10×10 Photobooks Selection (31 December 2013)
Trans Asia Photography Review, Essayist and Photobook Reviewer
“Then and Now: Japanese Women Photographers of the 1970s and ’80s Revealed Through Their Photobooks” (Volume 8, Issue 1: Art and Vernacular Photographies in Asia, Fall 2017).
“Recent—and Not So Recent—Japanese Photobooks” (Volume 7, Issue 2: Technologies, Spring 2017).
“Recent Photobooks from Japan And China” (Volume 7, Issue 1: Self and Nation, Fall 2016).
Contributing Essayist
“Stand Up and Speak Out! A Celebration of Photobooks by Women” in The Photobook in Art and Society, edited by Markus Schaden, Anne-Katrin Bicher and Ruth Gilberger (Cologne: Jovis, Feb 2020).
“The Archive” in Greenfield by Pablo Lerma (New York: Meteoro Editions, 2018).
“A Journey to Japan Somewhere” in Japan Somewhere by Maki (Tokyo: Zen Foto Gallery / Shashasha, 2018).
“USA: Untitled Scapes of America” in USA: Yojiro Imasaka (New York: Miyako Yoshinaga and Yojiro Imasaka Studio, 2014).
“More Truthful Than Picture Perfect” in Mikiko Hara: In the Blink of an Eye (New York: Miyako Yoshinaga, 2017).
“Anton Cabaleiro: The Space Between” in Float by Anton Cabaleiro (La Coruña, Spain: Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, 2013).
Shashin: Photography from Japan Festival Tabloid,
Contributing Editor and Writer
April 2015
Interview with Sandra Phillips: A Path Towards Japanese Photography.
Fotobook Festival Kassel
Kassel photobook Award: 2008-2018, edited by Dieter Neubert
(Kassel: Kesseler Fotografie Festival GUG, 2018.
Contributed review of Mediations by Susan Meiselas
On Daido, edited by Dieter Neubert
(Kassel: Kesseler Fotografie Festival GUG, 2013. Reprint 2015
Limited Edition of 150. Contributed essay “The Outsider”
Photobook Award 2013, edited by Dieter Neubert
(Kassel: Kesseler Fotografie Festival GUG, 2013)
Nominated Shomei Tomatsu: Photographs 1951-2000
British Journal of Photography, Vol. 159, Number 7805, October 2012, p. 62-64.
Interview with Ivan Vartanian on Daido Moriyama’s Printing Show at Aperture Foundation (NYC, November 2011) and Tate Modern (London, October 2012). Download PDF.
