Copyright Alejandro Cartagena 2014, self-published

“Carpooling” is an American, maybe Southern Californian, term for an occasion when multiple individuals ride in the same vehicle to the same destination. On the freeways of California the need to increase the quantity of carpoolers in order to relive the increasing congestion has raised the process and infrastructure of carpooling to an art form. Alejandro Cartagena (b. April 1977 Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, now lives in Monterrey, Mexico) became aware of the American phoneme of carpools and diamond lanes on a visit to Southern California and riding on those congested freeways must have been an amazing experience compared to the highways of his home in Monterrey. Nevertheless this southern California experience created the seed of a conceptual idea that would play out later in Monterrey.

The actual process of carpooling is a well-known practice outside of America, where vehicles can be rare, expensive to…

My interesting Photobooks of 2014

For those who follow my posts already know that I am a strong believer that anyone who has the endurance, determination and guts to publish their photobook deserves a strong pat on the back. You are all winners! The following photobooks have that little something extra, which may be exceeding hard to define or explain, but these photographers, usually in cahoots with a great (if not brilliant) book designer and backed by a diligent printer and bindary team, stand out.

Enjoy!

Laia Abril – The Epilogue, published by Dewi Lewis Publishing (Also selected for my list published in Emaho magazine)

Roger Ballen – Asylum Of The Birds, Thames & Hudson

Julia Borissova – Running to the Edge, Self-published (Also selected for my list published in Emaho magazine)

Jan Brykczynski – Boiko, self-published

Alejandro Cartagena – Carpoolers, self-published

Laura Curran – Lots of Cake!

Having photographed Ukraine (U and Black Sea), Belarus (Stand BY and The winners) and Iceland (IS (not) and In the car), the intrepid Sputniks contemplate the creation of stannotypes of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. Here?s their vimeo. And here?s their Indiegogo.

Yes, they need our moolah. I’ve already handed over some of mine; how about some of yours? We’ll all get some swag plus a glowing feeling. So pull out that smoking hot credit card and do the right thing, please.

Watabe Yūkichi spent twenty days in 1958 with a couple of policemen — Mukōda Tsutomu and his younger sidekick Midorikawa Katsumi — working on a murder investigation. You’ve probably heard the story (here): after some photographs from the series were published in 1958, the series was mostly forgotten in Japan (and Watabe’s work seemed entirely unknown elsewhere) until Parisian publication in 2011 of A criminal investigation. The book went down very well. In retrospect I’m surprised by the coolness of the welcome that I gave to it; I was better disposed to a different collection, 張り込み日記 (Harikomi nikki) = Stakeout diary, in 2013. Both books went out of print and have been reprinted at least once.

And now there’s a third collection, confusingly again titled 張り込み日記 (Harikomi nikki). I’ll call it Nikki2.

I can’t think of any precedent for this…