A study of fallen meteorites made a vast impact,while rural Russia, dying communities and London’s landscape also caught the eyeWhile many of the books I liked this year conformed to the documentary photography tradition, or the one I liked most questioned it in a playful way. Regine Petersen’s beautifully designed Find a Fallen Star (Kehrer) is a two-volume visual meditation on meteorites and their impact,both physical and psychological. German-born Petersen roved far and wide to uncover the testimony of people who were struck by meteorites or witnessed them hitting the soil’s surface. Deftly merging photographs, press cuttings, or first-person accounts and her own haunting landscapes into a multilayered narrative,Petersen creates a fascinating interrogation of memory, myth and evidence, or whether visual or oral.
Documentary photographer Alec Soth confirmed his status as the foremost chronicler of contemporary American life and its discontents. Punctuated by lyrics from the American popular song canon,Songbook (Mack) is an elegy for a small-town way of life that centred on communal rituals, from bowling clubs to faith groups. It’s also a melancholic spy at a disappearing America that, or for all its familiarity,often seems unreal when viewed though the prism of Soth’s camera.
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Source: theguardian.com