All photographs © Richard Misrach

PDN readers voted Richard Misrach’s 2007 book On The Beach one of the most influential books of the decade in a survey conducted for our January 30th Visions of the Decade issue. Taken from hotel room windows in Hawaii over the course of three years from 2002–2005, Misrach’s large-format photographs of beach scenes were published by Aperture in a beautiful oversize book. (more…)

All Photographs © Josef Koudelka. Behind the CKD Praha factory, looking towards the Hloubetin district.

In a recent survey leading up to the release of the 30th anniversary issue of PDN, readers voted Josef Koudelka’s Invasion 68: Prague (Aperture, 2008) one of the most influential books of the decade. The book (which has been published in in ten countries, most recently in Russia) gathers more than 250 of the photographs Koudelka took in August 1968 during the Prague Spring, when Warsaw Pact tanks invaded Prague and Soviet soldiers clashed with citizens and protesters. (more…)

All photographs © Gary Cialdella. Two Houses, Steiber Street Whiting, IN 1999.

Once a major crossroads for American industry, the Calumet Region sits on the south shore of Lake Michigan, just east of Chicago, straddling the border between Illinois and northern Indiana. Like so many American post-industrial regions, the Calumet is a mixture of rail yards, refineries, abandoned or underused plants, once-prosperous Main Streets, modest homes, changing neighborhoods and signs of urban renewal.

Photographer Gary Cialdella grew up on the Eastern edge of the Calumet in Blue Island, Illinois. When he left for college, he had no thoughts of returning, but as an adult he moved to nearby Michigan. More than 20 years ago, he reacquainted himself with the area and began photographing it. He recently released his book of black-and-white landscapes, The Calumet Region: An American Place (University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago/Brauer Museum of Art, Valparaiso University). The work is also on display at the Brauer Museum of Art through March 21, 2010.

For more on Gary Cialdella’s project The Calumet Region, see our article, “Ain’t That America” (Exposures, January 2010). (more…)

All photos © Bernard Edmaier. Mount Merapi at dusk, Central Java, Indonesia.

“Every time a volcano erupts, we are violently reminded that we live on a fireball,” geologist Angelika Jung-Hüttl writes in the introduction to Bernard Edmaier’s new book, Earth on Fire: How Volcanoes Shape Our Planet, recently published by Phaidon. Texts by Jung-Hüttl that discuss how volcanic activity has altered the natural landscape in beautiful and fearsome ways accompany beautiful aerial photographs Edmaier took throughout the world. Photographers will appreciate Edmaier’s large-format images of volcanic eruptions, lava floes and other fiery activity in places like Mount Etna, Sicily, and his more abstract, artistic compositions depicting land formations and other geological phenomena, like the Painted Hills in Oregon’s John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, which were formed as layer upon layer of volcanic ash settled in the area millions of years ago. (more…)