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A man looks out of his window in a white tank top. A woman peeks over her balcony. Images of people looking out of their windows are juxtaposed in Peeper patterns with photographs of different patterns, at times flat, at times depicting three-dimensional space. The contrast between the isolated window-peepers and different lines, shapes, and curves conveys subtle, easy humor.

Peeper patterns

Accompanying the inaugural exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, in 2006–07, Super Vision contains works in a variety of media, which express both the ecstatic and threatening aspects of vision, and reveal visual experience as a source of pleasure and fear. The book includes essays by exhibition curator Nicholas Baume, art historian David Joselit, and media theorist McKenzie Wark.

Anne Collier uses a promotional trailer from the 1978 film Eyes of Laura Mars—Faye Dunaway plays a fashion photographer who experiences visions of real-life murders while on photo shoots—as a source for this series. In the extracted stills, the main character is featured close up, focusing a camera. As one flips the pages, the sequence of images invites contemplation: the viewer feels what it is like to be in Laura’s lens focus.

Woman With a Camera (35mm)

As a response to the flyers with incriminating photographs of looting teenagers, distributed by the police following the London riots of 2011, Daniel Mayrit generated similar images but of the hundred most powerful people in London, many of whom were blamed for the economic crisis. The book explores the ways in which photography is used as a medium for incrimination and assigning blame.

You Haven't Seen Their Faces

As the catalogue accompanying the twenty-second Noorderlicht International Photofestival, Data Rush presents fifty internationally renowned photographers and multimedia artists’ look at the tension between personal, identifiable information and digital freedom. It asks, To what extent do we retain control over our data? Their work hones in on the ways our lives leave traces, inherently part of a non-consensual tracking of our existence.

At the end of 2005, Anne Daems roamed the streets of New York’s SoHo neighborhood while she worked on an art-residency grant from the International Studio & Curatorial Program. Taking a page from the legendary New York Times photographer Bill Cunningham, she documented beautiful people in the city (in this case, without their knowledge) and framed them as models. The volume includes an interview with artist Dan Graham.

72 Girls and Some Boys Who Could Be Models

Based on the popular Tumblr blog, this collection of photographs depicts the former North Korean leader engaged in the act of looking at things, often accompanied by a group of military personnel or advisers. Accompanied by João Rocha’s captions—“looking at cows,” “looking at pastry”—the photographs take on a comical bent. The book includes an essay by visual-culture writer Marco Bohr.

Kim Jong Il Looking At Things

Benedetta Pomini’s book gathers information and images from the only public, online database dedicated to the research of missing persons, maintained by Interpol. The material represents the reported missing people at a given point in time. In July 2014, the database indicated 832 reports of missing people, of which 129 had no picture. It also reported the highest rates of disappearances in Jamaica, Colombia, and Honduras.

NTSOTWBH (Never Take Shortcuts On The Way Back Home)

Between 2011 and 2014, Henrik Malmström photographed from his living-room window the street scenes unfolding outside. The frames of the St. Georg neighborhood in Hamburg serve as harbingers of the area’s transformation. The photographer used an inexpensive digital camera with the ISO levels tweaked to reproduce the visual effect of a surveillance camera.

A Minor Wrong Doing

Blinds is the first in a trilogy of books that deal with the negotiation of public and private spaces. Blinds, which focuses on shades, is followed by Walls and Windows; all three volumes are published using unique printing methods like risography, photocopy, and offset. The three-part series draws from Tomaru’s experience living in architect Mies van der Rohe’s last residential apartments.

Brett Erich Suemnicht used Google Maps to cull images from the areas surrounding approximately seven hundred Planned Parenthood locations. The images show predominately white Americans, providing a window into the convictions that fuel the religious right and at-times violent acts that have been deemed domestic terrorism. Part of the proceeds of book sales will be donated to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Abortion Services

By investigating visual manifestations of surveillance, espionage, and weaponry, Harun Farocki and Trevor Paglen question the ways in which military activities transform and complicate our relationship to images and the realities they appear to represent. The publication contains commissioned essays by scholars, texts by Farocki and Paglen, and visual essays exploring themes that emerge from a dialogue between their respective works.

Visibility Machines: Harun Farocki and Trevor Paglen

Chad States’s volume sheds light on a part of gay culture known as “cruising,” the use of public spaces like parks, public restrooms, or wooded groves to meet other men and have sexual encounters. The volume offers a rare glimpse into the often beautiful and surreal places in the U.S. where forbidden fantasies come to life, where a slight movement in the brush can lead to chance, anonymous meetings of the most intimate kind.

Daido Moriyama has been one of Japan’s leading figures in photography since he began depicting the breakdown of traditional values in postwar Japan. Moriyama’s characteristic grainy, black-and-white style, which expresses a fascination with the darkness of cities and modern society, has defined the genre and influenced many photographers worldwide. This photobook takes the form of a pamphlet insert that accompanied a DVD release.

Departing from the figure of the Taowu, a Chinese mythological monster of evil inclination used recently by historians and writers to symbolize the violent fate of Chinese utopian modernity, this publication interrogates the role of systemic and structural violence in the making of modernity—and its artistic representations. The monster’s point of view embodies the dimensions of the global imagination.

Modern Monsters: Death and Life of Fiction

Dick Jewell’s book captures the urge of the Internet age to not only capture the perfect moment on camera but to share it immediately, and en masse. Jewell writes, “The shared digital image is encouraging not only more photography but also new behaviors in its subjects.” four thousand threads explores the relationships between this excess of images at a time when our photos serve as digital bookmarks of our lives.

four thousand threads

Doug Rickard’s Tom gathers vintage, found images that reveal the voyeuristic surveillance of a certain kind of woman in 1960s Los Angeles: stylish, stockinged, short-skirted. The women are unidentified but presumed to be the object of someone’s desire. Although the pictures’ origins are unknown, the sense of unease they provoke is more fitting today than ever.

Elisabeth Ida Mulyani photographed meeting rooms, waiting areas, and nameless corridors in embassies around the world, investigating these structures of power and diplomacy in quiet, objective images. Her photographs consider embassies as the physical representation of a country in another, as the embodiment of the transnational relations that diplomacy is meant to nurture, but also as an everyday workplace.

Elisabeth Ida Mulyani: Inside Embassies

Exposed examines how voyeurism and surveillance have inspired, challenged, and expanded the medium of photography. The exhibition catalogue examines the use of the hidden camera, the production of erotic pictures and pornography, and the intersection of photography with both celebrity and violence, representing the works of known and unknown photographers. The photographs are accompanied by Sandra Phillips’s commentary and essays.

Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance, and the Camera Since 1870

Figur I and Figur II are two black-and-white portrait series by Andrzej Steinbach, in which he asks viewers to carefully look and relook at two young women, whom he photographed against different backgrounds, in different poses, and wearing an assortment of clothes. The photographer explores how the gestural language of fashion photography informs and blurs the markers of gender and identity.

Figur I, Figur II

Foam Magazine #43: “Freedom of Expression under Surveillance” is a collaboration with Chinese contemporary artist and activist Ai Weiwei, who is under constant surveillance by the Chinese government. The magazine is comprised of Ai Weiwei’s documentation of his life through webcams and Instagram and is divided into four central themes: “Sousveillance,” “Self Surveillance,” “Urban Surveillance,” and “Art and Surveillance.”

Former The Face and i-D photographer Nigel Shafran’s new book assigns order to an interconnected series of photographs of domestic scenes and everyday places. His deadpan, color images capture cultural cues of the present while making captivating frames out of humdrum spaces. Shafran lends escalators and shop displays, supermarket checkout stations and even piles of receipts inexplicable allure.

Founder of the Blank Paper collective, Spanish photographer Fosi Vegue creates images that reveal narrow views into a series of rooms occupied by prostitutes and their clients. At times more distinguishable than others, the scenes in the book are heightened by the photographer’s deliberate use of digital noise, intended to represent the voice of the viewers’ subconscious.

Framing Bodies presents the work of fifteen photographers from around the world, whose work considers bodies in private and public spaces. Culled from the Hasseblad Foundation collection and spanning from the late nineteenth century to the present day, the selection of photographs explores the body through the lens of surveillance, transgression, labor conditions, and racial discrimination.

From an exhibition of the same title at Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, this compendium features well-known photographers’ explora-tion of the shifting and often blurry line between privacy and the public sphere. The volume includes work by Ai Weiwei, Merry Alpern, Richard Billingham, Mike Bouchet, Sophie Calle, Tracey Emin, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Nan Goldin, Birgit Jürgenssen, Leigh Ledare, Leo Gabin, Christian Marclay, among others.

Full of obscene images, Pornografie illustrates the irritating panopticon of everyday violence: press of street fighting, naked victims of war, tortured prisoners, and all kinds of artifacts around lust, power, exposure, and monitoring. Titled so as to disappoint voyeurs’ expectations, this classic volume, first published in 1971, reframes the definition of obscene, or pornographic, imagery.

Henner’s book presents aerial views of fifty-one overt and covert military outposts used by the United States in different countries across the world. The sites were located and the images gathered from information available in the public domain, including official U.S. military and veterans’ websites, local and international news articles, and both official and leaked government documents and reports.

Fifty-One US Military Outposts

In 2009, when artist Jessamyn Lovell’s identity was stolen, she hired a private investigator and tracked down the culprit, a woman named Erin Hart. For two years, Lovell shadowed Hart, creating this archive of grainy surveillance of her identity thief, embodying at once the roles of stalker, investigator, artist, spy, and citizen vigilante. In exposing the person who exposed her, she engages in a personal form of pixel-based justice.

In 2012, artist Jason Brinkerhoff discovered a collection of around 950 black-and-white Type 42 Polaroids featuring headshots and intimate close-ups of famous actresses, dating from the 1960s and later. Edited by Nicole Delmes and Susanne Zander, and introduced by Cindy Sherman, the book showcases a selection of 120 works from the archive, invoking nostalgia for old Hollywood glamour.

Type 42: Fame Is the Name of the Game: Photographs by Anonymous

In Fear of Disappearance, Ustymenko uses black-and-white and color photography to explore notions of identity and self-identity in relation to the architectural landscape. The book represents the photographer’s search for permanence in an environment marked by continuous change and redevelopment. The project includes a special edition of the book as well as a sculpture.

Fear of Disappearance

In Könnte Sein, Katja Stuke arranges photographs of people on the street, mostly women, with scenes from films and video games. The combination blurs the boundaries between reality and fiction, and between the mediums of photography and film. The juxtapositions of images are accompanied with writings by Stuke and by German film director and author Christoph Hochhäusler.

In N.A., Doug Rickard gathered stills from YouTube videos that allow a vicarious look into people’s lives. The resulting images illustrate America’s urban underbelly, addressing issues related to race, politics, technology, surveillance, and the ever-present camera. The title has multiple interpretations: it could mean “National Anthem” but also “Not Applicable,” or even “North America.”

In Oblivion, composed of black-and-white aerial photos of Los Angeles and its periphery, photographer David Maisel captures the contemporary metropolis with a sense of dystopia: it appears sprawling and seemingly endless, with its highways and exit ramps, strip malls and block of urban development. Through the use of inverted tonalities, the city is defamiliarized and abstracted even further

In Pictures of People Taking Pictures, street photographer and documentary filmmaker Cheryl Dunn refutes the notion that obsessive picture-taking is an iPhone-era obsession only. In this collection, Dunn captures varied frames of people snapping away. The differences in tone and wardrobe—and tellingly, the cameras used by the subjects—provide temporal cues.

Pictures of People Taking Pictures

In Privacy Settings, Dutch photographer Erik van der Weijde makes photographs of a sleeping child, his son. In each of the black-and-white images, his son is fast asleep, cast about the bed in different configurations, surrounded by rumpled sheets. Occasionally, he’s accompanied by his sleeping mother. Van der Weijde invokes the domesticity and vulnerability also present in Sophie Calle’s The Sleepers and Fred Hüning’s Private Rooms.

Privacy Settings

In Private Rooms, Fred Hüning gathers stills from videoclips uploaded to Youporn by private users. The resulting pictures are about sex, but they also reveal the subjects’ humanity via domestic settings and Hüning’s particular cropping, which yields puzzling frames and scenes imbued with subtle humor. In exposing vulnerability and a certain unawareness, the pictures gently nod to Sophie Calle’s The Sleepers.

In Spirit Is a Bone, artist team Broomberg and Chanarin coopted a facial-recognition system recently developed in Moscow for public security and border-control surveillance in order to create their own taxonomy of people in contemporary Russia. The low-resolution and fragmented portraits they produced were generated by a machine, without cooperation from the subjects.

Spirit Is a Bone

In The Thirty-Two Inch Ruler, American photographer John Gossage captures his Washington, D.C., neighborhood, populated by ambassadors’ residences, embassies, and the private homes of the city’s power elite. His images of streets, cars, homes, and yards were made on perfect spring or autumn days, with blue skies and flowers or foliage underscoring the almost too-perfect order.

The Thirty-Two Inch Ruler

In The Transparent City, Michael Wolf casts his telephoto lens on the buildings and windows of Chicago. Capturing both wide views of a gleaming metropolis and more fragmented, isolated frames that relate details of everyday domesticity, his photographs comment on the way life unfolds within ever-growing contemporary cities. The architecture in his photographs reinforces the idea of life on a grid.

The Transparent City

In the winter of 1993–94, Merry Alpern used a friend’s Wall Street apartment to take photographs of the windows of an underground sex club across the way. In eighty-seven grainy, black-and-white photographs, she captured scenes and transactions between businessman and sex workers, yielding a cunning document of surveillance. The transactional exchanges appear clearly in view, steps from the nation’s financial center.

In this book, Petra Stavast crafts a tender long-term portrait of her former landlady, Ramya. After Ramya’s death in 2012, Stavast complemented the existing portraits and quiet pictures of Ramya’s domestic surroundings with documents and images from Ramya’s personal archive, which illustrate her rich and unusual life. The project spanned fourteen years and contains still photography and video works.

In this guide for a society that lives under surveillance, Laura Poitras enlisted authors, artists, data journalists, and novelists to respond to and raise questions around the role and impact of surveillance. The book includes contributions by Ai Weiwei, Lakhdar Boumediene, Kate Crawford, Alex Danchev, Dave Eggers, Jill Magid, Trevor Paglen, Laura Poitras, Edward Snowden, and others.

Astro Noise: A Survival Guide for Living Under Total Surveillance.

Invisible: Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes is Trevor Paglen’s first photographic monograph. In the series Limit Telephotography, he photographs top-secret governmental sites with high-end optical systems; in The Other Night Sky, he tracks classified spacecraft in Earth’s orbit via amateur satellite watchers’ data. An essay by Rebecca Solnit recounts the history of clandestine military activity in the U.S.

Invisible: Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes

Japanese photographer Yoshinori Mizutani’s first book, Taxi Dirty Book, presents two types of pictures: photographs of taxi drivers in their cars, taken from the passenger seat in the back, and images of books or magazines, some pornographic, discarded on the ground in Tokyo. The book comments on distinct ways of experiencing Tokyo, and on different ways to interpret “looking.”

Taxi Dirty Book

Jason Vaughn’s project focuses on deer stands as focus points for the hunting tradition and sport in his adopted home state of Wisconsin. The project took on more profound meaning when Vaughn was diagnosed with cancer shortly after having his first child. “Ultimately, Hide became my reflection on legacies and family, my homage to the state that has become my home, and a narrative about accepting change,” he writes.

Kurt Caviezel has spent the past fifteen years monitoring fifteen thousand publicly available webcams all over the world. This book presents his archive of categorized images and includes all fifteen thousand web links used by Caviezel, as well as a foreword by German artist Joachim Schmid. A selection of photographs was included in the Public, Private, Secret exhibition at the International Center for Photography, New York.

The Encyclopedia of Kurt Caviezel

Made in a time of laxer airport security and less suspicion surrounding cameras, John Schabel’s Passengers depicts anonymous travelers shot through airplane windows before take-off. Using a long lens and photographing from the end of the runway, Schnabel captures the subjects lost in thought. The photos are published with almost no text, underscoring the isolation of the passengers.

My Wife is Petter Hegre’s vivid, personal depiction of his wife and the intimacy of their life together. Well before the current trend towards exhibitionism, Hegre began taking these candid photos; they oscillate between deeply personal, highly sexual, open, and candid. Hegre allows a glimpse into what most often goes unseen. We are behind the scenes with this uninhibited couple at their most private moments.

Negative Publicity gathers photographs and documents that address contemporary warfare and state control. British photographer Edmund Clark and counterterrorism investigator Crofton Black construct a paper trail of invoices, documents of incorporation, and billing reconciliations—evidence of the disappearance of groups of people into secret prisons. These transfers occur without legal process and are known as extraordinary renditions.

Negative Publicity: Artefacts of Extraordinary Rendition

No Man’s Land is made up of images of women in different desolate landscapes on the margins of European cities. Taken entirely from Google Street View, Henner obtained the coordinates for the women from online forums where men share information about sex workers. The book joins in the tradition of mining vast mapping databases of automated imagery for unexpected moments.

Non-attributed screenshots from random sources are compiled here into a digest format and published in book form. Made with filters that can blacken skin tones or block images altogether from being viewed in a browser, the volume draws attention to the technology used by certain organizations to monitor and censor what their employees can view while at work. The work provides a look into the accidental aesthetics of this technology.

North Warning System is the third and final book in Donovan Wylie’s Tower series, which focuses on the theme of vision and power in military architecture. In a mostly white palette, the photographer captured the short and long-range radar stations built along Canada’s border during the 1950s, which conformed the so-called Distant Early Warning Line, later renamed North Warning System.

Donovan Wylie: North Warning System

On the occasion of Audrey Tan’s return to her native Singapore, her first solo exhibition was accompanied by this volume, the artist’s first photobook. It provides a visual record of her years spent in London and uses portraiture and self-portraiture as a way of addressing themes of human connections, belonging, and isolation. You See Me, I See You is an example of self-surveillance in a metropolitan setting: we hide in plain sight.

You See Me, I See You

One of the by-products of surveillance is accountability through digital footprints, whether in the form of video footage from a CCTV camera or server logs. This book is a visual index that looks at the Wikipedia articles edited anonymously by the New York City Police Department. By allowing a window into the minds of the watchers, viewers are privy to the issues relevant to members of law enforcement.

Blanche on the Lam

Over a period of seven years, photographer Tomas van Houtryve enjoyed rare access to and documented the complex reality of life under twenty-first century communist regimes around the world. An award-winning documentary photographer, Houtryve reveals daily scenes in countries such as North Korea, Cuba, China, Nepal, Vietnam, Laos, and Moldova.

Behind the Curtains

Over the course of a year, photographer Natasha Caruana went on eighty dates with married men, recording and documenting the encounters with a disposable camera. By meeting the men within the context of an art project, she was, in a way, cheating the cheater. During the course of the project, she also learned that most men were driven to infidelity by loneliness more than desire for sex.

Pascal Anders’s self-published Podmoskovye features scenes from Moscow suburbs made by surveillance cameras. The images are printed full-bleed and left open to the viewers’ interpretation. Anders distributed this book for free to anyone who ordered it, a symbolic gesture to restitute the images that are stolen from us without our knowledge every day.

Photographer Richard Ross makes pictures of architectural spaces that exert power over the individuals within them, from the Iraqi National Assembly hall and the United Nations to a Montessori preschool. Situated in churches, mosques, and diverse civic spaces, including a Swedish courtroom, the images in Architecture of Authority all have one thing in common: they reveal omnipresent spaces of surveillance.

Architecture of Authority

Photographer and political activist Miklós Klaus Rózsa was under surveillance by different groups within the Swiss police for many years. This book includes Rózsa’s own photographs and the State Protection files on him from 1971 to 1989. The juxtaposition of these different types of information tells the story of a politically agitated time in Switzerland and highlights the police’s uncomprehending gaze.

Miklós Klaus Rózsa

Photourist is an exploration of the cultural obsession of recording experiences with the camera and the compulsion to share them immediately on social-media channels. A former music executive and music industry tastemaker, Andy Gershon presents a striking visual account of the habits of looking at the world through screens in this series of pictures-within-pictures.

Predator presents photographs that span from the 1920s through the 1970s and all have one element in common: they include the shadow of the photographer. Donat pushed this idea further and included only images in which the shadow is also wearing a hat. Any sense of identity is lost as the man with a hat becomes a repeated motto throughout the images.

Published for Printed Matter’s 2013 NY Art Book Fair, Corey Presha’s Lovers is a subset of a larger body of work titled Night Shift. The limited-edition zine contains photographs of anonymous lovers in New York City elevators taken from unidentified hotels’ security-camera footage, from the over-night shift. The zine suggests that we’re most intimate when we feel we are alone.

Rear Window focuses on the back of buildings in European capitals and around the world. Interested in the more unkempt side of structures, Dutch photographer Jordi Huisman captured balconies, satellite dishes, and tangled cable-webs. The eponymous film defined the genre for so many of us, exposing what’s behind the façade. But ultimately, Huisman’s project seems to indicate, the backs of buildings aren’t all that different.

Richard Gordon studied political science at the University of Chicago and has shot on city streets for decades. This work looks at the urban landscape of his native Chicago through the proliferation of surveillance cameras in January 2003. Working with an understanding of the law regarding photography in public and private places, he smartly captures the ubiquity of such cameras.

American Surveillance: Someone to Watch Over Me

Rodney Alcala is a serial killer and amateur photographer. John Berger is a British art critic and the alias that Alcala adopted while on the run. The Looking Game connects the archive of pictures taken by Alcala, made public by the Huntington Police Department in California, with Berger’s writing. It is the first installment of an ongoing project by Mirko Smerdel and M.F.G. Paltrinieri.

The Looking Game

Russian photographer Viktoria Binschtok selected New York street scenes from the vast archives of Google Street View, then traveled to those places to take a picture herself. The reference images are black and white and taken from a distance. Binschtok’s frames, in turn, focus on details, creating poetic meditations on minutiae and distinguishing her view from the machine’s by her use of color and foregrounding of intention.

World of Details

Shot on 10 meters of street, this work is a 2.5-second-long feature film comprised of images and sequences which reference the beginning of things, from technology, religion, the universe, the street, love, matter and its different forms to the basics of the human condition, contemporaneity, advertising and the end of existence.

Un universo pequeño

Simon Menner mined the archives of the Stasi, the East German secret police, to discover formerly secret photographs of officers and employees putting on professional uniforms, gluing on fake beards, and signaling to each other with their hands. While its seriousness as a document of police surveillance is not to be undermined, the photographs have also been rendered humorous and absurd with the passing of time.

Top Secret: Bilder aus den Archiven der Staatssicherheit

Simon Rimaz’s series is based on press photographs collected from newspaper archives across the United States. The artist focused on how the images were cropped for publication, then obeyed the crop marks and eliminated the selected section, leaving the viewer only with the frame and a view of the back of the cropped section. With its center amputated, the print remains as little more than a frame.

Unusual View of Unknown Subjects

Spinatsch’s fourth installment in his surveillance series focuses on the Vienna Opera Ball, capturing scenes via surveillance cameras. During the ball, two cameras moved around the room continuously, following a grid pattern, taking a picture every three seconds. These resulting images examine human behavior and reveal discrepancies between social pretense and social reality.

Jules Spinatsch. Vienna MMIX—10008/7000: Surveillance Panorama Project No. 4—The Vienna Opera Ball

Stop! You are not allowed to take that picture! Photographs not allowed in certain public spaces. The balance between national security and civil rights is the narrative focus here In NYC it is legal to photograph the Police In New York provided that the person does not improperly interfere with police work. That is not the case everywhere. An complex issue and important work.

A Treatise on the Camera Obscured

Temporary Discomfort presents Jules Spinatsch’s documentation of three cities—Davos, New York, and Geneva—in a state of emergency lock-down during the World Economic Forum and G8 global economic summits. The volume includes different photographic genres: landscape photography, photojournalism, and police photography, with the caveat that the lens is trained on the police. The book includes an essay by Martin Jaeggi.

Temporary Discomfort Chapter I–V

Temps Mort, by French-Algerian artist Mohamed Bourouissa, gathers Bourouissa’s exchanges with his friend Al over eight months, while Al was imprisoned. Their communication—consisting of texts messages, photographs, and videos—took place exclusively via cell phone. Bourouissa provided framing and shooting instructions to Al, who then took pictures with his low-res camera phone.

The Belfast Exposed photography archive, founded in 1983, was culled from photojournalists and civilians, and documents the Northern Ireland Troubles. While the collection includes images of protest and terror, it also features images of people drinking, kissing, and smoking. Their acceptance into the archive was marked with a dot-sticker; this book uncovers the portion of photographs beneath the stickers.

People In Trouble Laughing Pushed to the Ground

The Dutch government is one of the most vociferous in censoring satellite imagery to protect political, economic, and military locations critical for national security; their method imposes bold, multi-colored polygons over sites. Here, Henner presents the interventions as aerial landscape images that contrast supposedly secret sites with the environment around them, proposing an unlikely continuation of the Dutch landscape painting tradition.

Dutch Landscapes

The Epilogue tells the story of the Robinson family and the aftermath of losing their twenty-six-year-old daughter to bulimia. Laia Abril worked closely with the family to reconstruct Cammy Robinson’s life through testimonies, objects, letters, and images. The book draws attention not only to the suffering of this family but to all the direct and indirect victims of eating disorders.

The Man Who Never Returned is a fictitious tale told through photography, inspired by a folk tale about a man who disappeared. The images in this project, manipulated digitally to serve the story, point to the failures of surveillance and to the misguided belief in technological truth at a time of constant data collection. They also invoke the fantasy of secretly disappearing, which may resonate with those craving anonymity.

The Man Who Never Returned

The Nine Eyes of Google Street View gathers screenshots of strange and beautiful sights captured by the nine lenses on Google Street View camera cars as they record their surroundings. Featuring hundreds of images, the book comments on the cultural script that is generated in Google’s project of mapping the world and showcases Rafman’s keen eye in parsing the right images from a massive pool of potential narratives.

The Nine Eyes Of Google Street View

The United States Intelligence Community (IC) conducts research deemed necessary for foreign relations and national security. Its members collect and produce intelligence reports, contribute to military planning, and engage in espionage. Henner’s book is an archive of the source code of the agencies’ home pages, made for Kenneth Goldsmith’s Printing Out the Internet exhibition at LABOR in Mexico City in 2013.

The Watchers, the first published monograph of Haley Morris-Cafiero’s work, gathers uncomfortable images in which the photographer recorded the judgmental looks she received from strangers in different public settings. When her photographs went viral, thousands of anonymous comments offered further, unsolicited judgment. The book includes photographs and a selection of those online comments.

The first image in Identity Zine #1 is a black-and-white photo titled Filming Wolfe Moon inject testosterone, Los Angeles—7/23/14. What follows is a series of portraits, also by Dave Naz, that capture the gender-fluid world we live in today. The zine helps drive questions about the definitions and permutations of identity and gender, an issue at the forefront of cultural debates today.

The images in The Blue Hour stem from Uri Gershuni’s second visit to the English village of Lacock, home to William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the earliest practitioners of photography. Instead of wandering around as he did during his first visit, Gershuni moved through the village virtually, through Google Maps, producing 255 black-and-white images of the town from the online map-image database.

The photographs in this book were taken in the red-light district of Amsterdam in 2009. The title refers to the policy of not photographing sex workers in their environment. The images are printed on old photographic paper that is actively fading, and presented against a dark background. They suggest that the allure of what you might see is often more powerful than what you can see.

The result of three years of travel and research, Tommaso Tanini’s book invokes the history of the German Democratic Republic and the Stasi secret police. Through photographs and documents mixed with literary references, Tanini explores the oppression and dread of life in a state of suspicion and authoritarianism. H. said he loved us is a warning against the evils of totalitarianism.

H. said he loved us

The unit called “Tarnen und Täuschen” (Disguise and Deception) is a special division of the German army. Their focus is the research and development of camouflage technology and the fabrication of decoy weaponry—think inflatable tanks and vehicles, or imitation land mines. Schwarzlose’s photographs frame the militarization of her visual surroundings while commenting on the relations between aesthetics and ideology.

Disguise and Deception

This book collects fifty-four rich, black-and-white images that document Brazilian photographer José Diniz’s proximity to the sea. Invoking the mechanics of a periscope, an apparatus often used on submarines to view above the surface, Diniz’s frames place the viewer in midst of the aquatic landscape, where she is able to glimpse stormy waves, a shark’s fin, or a whale’s eye.

This book is about the generation born in the final years of the GDR, specifically a housing complex in Hagenow, East Germany. Trüb combines landscape photography with interviews and portraits of nine people who live in Hagenow and speak about life in the GDR and later on, following the fall of the wall. Surveillance records, unknown to them at the time, contribute here to the piecing together of their identities, years later.

Letzte Generation Ost

This book, the artist’s first, chronicles Sophie Calle’s two-week surveillance of Henri B. as well as her own emotions as she seeks, finds, and follows him through the labyrinthine streets of Venice. Her investigation is both methodical (calling every hotel, visiting the police station) and arbitrary (sometimes following strangers, like a flower delivery boy, hoping someone might lead her to him).

Suite Vénitienne

This class project from the department of Man & Communication at the Design Academy Eindhoven, directed by professor Annelys de Vet, looks at what the words “terrorism” and “terror” really mean. Through images and design, the students ask questions such as: Who or what is terrorizing your life? How does a terrorist-type face look? How can terrorism be sold as a product?

Jurkjes en Jason: 27 Views On Terrorism Today

This collection of images, taken over several decades, consists of anonymous self-portraits taken with different outfits and costumes. While folds, textures, and fabrics change from frame to frame, they consistently reveal nothing about the sitter. While the subject seems to be hiding something, the photographs demonstrate the concurrent urge to show and share something of him or herself with others.

This full-color volume represents the complete collection of favorited images by Flickr member Robber Queen. The photographs are organized by subject, ranging from the banal to the dark and violent. The book serves as a reminder that our digital identities are not only composed by the images and comments we post but also anything we “like” or star; it is the sum of all our networked gestures.

Robber Queen's Favorites

This series was taken of a public car park in Wellington, New Zealand. From half a kilometer away, for twelve months, “from the top floor of home, veiled behind an apron of black velvet, through double-glazing and a long lens,” Bruce Connew captured the comings and goings of unaware, ordinary people. The resulting images depersonalize their subjects while tapping into a surveillance-camera aesthetic.

This volume gathers Kohei Yoshiyuki’s infamous Park series, nighttime photographs taken with infrared film and flash in Tokyo’s Shinjuku, Yoyogi, and Aoyama Parks during the 1970s. The photographs capture illicit sexual encounters but also reveal spectators lurking in the darkness, waiting to join in. The Park points not only to issues of voyeurism and surveillance, but also suggests the loneliness and desperation inherent to love and sex.

Tiane Doan na Champassak’s second book features portraits of teens involved in the riots that took place in Tottenham in August 2011, following peaceful protests over the shooting of twenty-nine-year-old Mark Duggan by police. All the images in this book were found online by the artist and printed in risograph. Works from this project are included in the Public, Private, Secret exhibition at the International Center for Photography.

Using digital photography, Japanese photographer Taiji Matsue uses a technique he calls “super trimming” to isolate a portion of a photograph, or a “cell,” as he calls them. These cropped “cells” are enlarged many times, yielding frames at times disorienting, at times humorous, at times abstract. Similar to the film Blow-Up, Matsue creates new meaning by resorting to magnification for clarity.

Volume I of Tabula Rasa magazine, titled “Identity,” encourages photographers to explore their images from the perspective of fashion. They approach their own identities and the concept of identity as a whole, yielding an intimate look at creativity in photography. The issue moves away from uniformity, revealing instead unique outlooks from each of the participating photographers.

Wealth Management is an artist’s book by Spanish photographer Carlos Spottorno. Designed as a mock bank brochure issued by the fictitious WTF Bank, black-and-white images of the one-percent lifestyle—polo matches, skiing, and office escapes—highlight photography’s relationship to power and wealth. The book underscores the sobering reality that the wire transfers and hidden accounts that fuel this lifestyle remain out of sight.

Wealth Management

When Arne Svenson inherited a telephoto bird-watching lens, he began to record his neighbors in Manhattan, capturing them at unguarded times. Framed by their windows, the careful compositions show them taking naps, eating breakfast, talking on the phone. The series sparked controversy since its first exhibition in August 2013, echoing a general and acute anxiety over surveillance and privacy.

Wilcox’s zine is based on his gathering of anonymous receipts. “I want to know what people buy at the store, how much they have or don’t have, how they keep themselves afloat, and how close they are to drowning,” the artist writes. The receipts, mostly from ATMs, speak to individual circumstances but also point to society’s dependence on money. “Who are these people I share an ATM with and how does money separate or connect us?”

Getting to Know My Neighbors

Witness presents images of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy devoid of context or defining details. Exploring the connections between photography and memory, Solomon cropped stills from the Zapruder film and the Moorman Polaroid, rendering them ethereal and indistinguishable. The book prompts questions about the reliability of memory and eyewitnesses, and demonstrates how images can change over time.

One Picture Book #83: Witness

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Edition One