Gallery: The Best Photo Books From This Year's Arles Festival
Grant Hutchinson01diepr
Each year the [Recontres d’Arles exhibition not only celebrates photographs on the wall](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/rawfile/2012/07/arles-2012/), but in the sheds down at Arles' old railway station you will also find hundreds of recently published photography books. They're selected through open-call submissions, with no restrictions in terms of publisher or self-published works. This side of the festival is always enriching and really is a fantastic way to recap a year in photography. This year's Book Prize went to [*The Latin American Photobook*](http://www.amazon.com/Latin-American-Photobook-Horacio-Fernandez/dp/1597111899) published by [Aperture](http://www.aperture.org/). It's an excellent overview of Latin American photography edited by Horacio Fernandez. The book starts in the 1920s and covers imagery up until today. It's a beautifully designed and thorough book and it certainly deserved the prize. Read on for a few of the other books on display that are not to be missed. *Above photo: Willem Diepraam, Lima 1988 from* The Latin American Photobook
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### *Redheaded Peckerwood* By [Christian Patterson](http://www.christianpatterson.com/redheaded-peckerwood/) Published by [Mack](http://www.mackbooks.co.uk/books/15-Redheaded-Peckerwood.html) Patterson is a photographer from Brooklyn, NY. The title of the book is a term used by Southern blacks to refer to poor white people from rural areas. Besides creating images, Patterson collected found photographs, documents and letters which trace various events between Nebraska into Wyoming. Patterson visited several scenes, including murder sites, neighborhoods, police stations and more trying to solve puzzles while creating a dark mythology. There is a mixture of fact and fiction is this book which leads the viewer down a satisfying, winding path of images which are unsettling yet at the same time awkwardly beautiful.
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### *Street Photographer* By [Vivian Maier](http://www.vivianmaier.com/) Published by [powerHouse Books](http://www.powerhousebooks.com/) Maier was an amateur photographer who worked as a nanny for almost 40 years. Her work went almost unknown until a local Chicago historian discovered her archive of over 100,000 photographs in 2007. Maier passed away in 2009. Her humanistic street photographs take place postwar on the streets of New York and Chicago. There is an occasion self portraits in the book that shows Maier watching herself in the world she was photographing. Her images have a profound curiosity, similar to that of Diane Arbus, but they also somehow feel loving of her world.
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### *Documenting Science* By [Berenice Abbott](http://web.mit.edu/museum/exhibitions/abbott.html) Published by [Steidl](http://www.steidlville.com/books/1291-Documenting-Science.html) with [Commerce Graphics](http://www.commercegraphics.com/ba_bio.html) After years of photographing the growth of New York City, Abbott turned to science. These images started in 1939 as Abbott’s photographic experiments, but eventually lead to the Physical Science Study Project at MIT. The images created during the project were used to illustrate textbooks about physics, This work is certainly her most creative and the images are exquisite.
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### *Billy Monk* Published by [Dewi Lewis](http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1907893180/dewilewispublish) This body of work explores the of nightclub life Cape Town in the late 1960s. Monk worked as a nightclub bouncer and died in a street fight around the time of his first exhibition. The images are often desribed as seedy, but these black and white snapshots show a non-judgmental truth of this party-going lifestyle. Perhaps Monk was an accidental artist, but his relentless urge to photograph reveals a world of freedom and life on the edge.
