Documentary Photo Books
The First World War
Edited by Carl de Keyzer & David Van Reybrouck
Published by University Of Chicago Press
Thai Politics no.3
By Miti Ruangkritya
Self-Published
Thai Politics no.3 includes images taken of graffitied election posters found along the streets of Bangkok. The promotional posters show the intense frustration between opposing supporters of Yingluck Shinawatra’s Pheu Thai Party and Abhisit Vejjajiva’s Democrat party during the 2011 election.
Singers & Stages
By Shen Chao-Liang
The attraction was instantaneous. These colossuses, more like an allusion to “The Transformers” of box office success, were magically entrancing… — Shen Chao-Liang At the end of 2005, photographer Shen Chao-Liang was preparing to dive into a project about the Taiwanese cabaret. However, in his early field visits, he became more entranced by the elaborate stage trucks that were employed by the cabarets and other performers — and these stage trucks soon became the focus of his project. These mobile stages travel across the country, almost non-stop, to serve as short-term temporary performance spaces. The usage varies widely: from religious celebrations to village karaokes to cabaret shows. In less than an hour, the stages are able to transform from innocent looking trucks into 50-foot sensory spectacles, and back into trucks again, ready to roll off to their next destination. They come equipped with enormous sound systems, flashing neon lights, and garish painted stage sets. The often incongruous mix of icons and imagery is baffling and amusing: an enormous Eiffel Tower facing off with a Statue of Liberty, a neon horse-drawn pumpkin carriage, popular cartoon characters — you have to see them to believe them.
Confluence
BY IAN TEH
Publisher : Monsoon Masterclass
Pages : 176
Published in : 2014
“Abstract beauty collides with the gritty reality of contemporary Asia in Ian Teh’s work, producing an effect that is at once mesmerising and disconcerting. If his subject is the world of the unseen – the people and landscapes that are everywhere, but strikingly unnoticed – then his images, too, draw the viewer into that nebulous space between admiration and revulsion, though there is barely a difference between the two.”
Curse of the Black Gold
by Ed Kashi
(Paperback: 224 Pages, Publisher: Powerhouse 2010)