Fernweh by Teju Cole. Published by Mack.
These days, I often turn to photobooks for a fresh perspective, what travel used to afford me before the pandemic, when photography took me away from home for half the year. And what better way to refocus and heighten one’s view than looking at the Swiss Alps through Teju Cole’s eyes. Although made before the coronavirus, his book Fernweh—which means “a longing to be far away”—seems eerily prescient, with its melancholy, unpeopled landscapes that call to mind Luigi Ghirri’s photographs from Lucerne or the alpine scenes in Olivier Assayas’ Clouds of Sils Maria, where the “light is clear, frank, bright and inexpressive, a paradoxically mysterious clarity,” to quote Cole. The thoughtful design by Morgan Crowcroft-Brown—who elevates Cole’s horizontal images to top of the page—keeps our eyes, fittingly, looking up.
Honorable Mentions:
Santa Barbara by Diana Markosian
The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer by Alessandra Sanguinetti
Rebecca Norris Webb often interweaves her words and photographs in her books, including her upcoming eighth book, Night Calls — in which she retraced the route of her 99-year-old doctor father’s house calls through the same rural county where they both were born — which will be released in December by Radius Books. She calls both Brooklyn and Cape Cod home.
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