The Education of a Photographer
Edited by Charles H. Traub, Steven Heller, and Adam B. Bell
Review by Hans Durrer (Switzerland)

“This lively and idiosyncratic collection of writings from the diverse thinkings about photography will bring encouragement and insight to all of those engaged in lens-based media in the twenty-first century. From the early twentieth-century masters to the postmoderns and on to today's incisive visionaries, this thought-provoking book will navigate the reader through the varied landscape of photography, eloquently expressing what it means to be a photographer" one reads on the backside cover and that is, essentially, true save for the fact that not all authors express themselves as clearly and eloquently as, say, John Szarkowski or Berenice Abbott".

Talking Photography
Viewpoints on the art, craft and business
by Frank Van Riper
Allworth Press, New York

Review by Hans Durrer

“Award-winning photographer and Washington Post columnist Frank Van Riper assembles a collection of his most outstanding popular columns to delight readers with a treasure chest of photographic insights” one reads on the back cover of this book. Okay then, let’s look what the author’s photographic insights are.

Photoshop. Masking & Compositing
by Katrin Eismann

Review by Mariana Gruener

Perhaps you are of the likes of Katrin Eissman, who realized that she could not get all she wanted to express with a single camera shot and decided to make image composites. She started out cutting photos with her scissors, put them together with tape or did photo-montages in the darkroom, until one day she found that a computer offered the possibility of putting her ideas to practice in a much faster, easier and simple way.

PHOTOSHOP. Restoration and Retouching.
Second Edition
by Katrin Eismann.

Book review by Mariana Gruener.

The latest edition of Photoshop by Katrin Eismann helps everyone -from retouching personal photographs to professional portraits- to get started in Photoshop 7.

Whenever the Magnum agency is mentioned, the names of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa and David Seymour immediately stand out among the founding members list. However, there is another founding member that -perhaps because of his shyness and modesty- has been forgotten: British photographer George Rodger.

This makes Carole Naggar’s biography of Rodger; George Rodger: An adventure in photography 1908-1995 a book of great importance that not only allows us to get close to one of the top photo reporters of the 20th Century, but also tells us about an unknown episode regarding the founding of the most important news photo agency of the world.

Through the magnifying glass: Painters or Photographers?
by Doifel Videla

In December 2001, an eventful conference was held in New York, crowning two years of intense research during which the painter David Hockney collected evidence to prove the thesis that the nature of painting was radically altered when it adopted the projected image as a tracing pattern.

Crossing Over:
A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail by Ruben Martinez
Book review by Trisha Ziff
"Crossing Over, the recently published book by Ruben Martinez, is perhaps now a more relevant read than ever as the events of September 11th have spawned a new fervour of U.S. Jingoism"

Tlacotalpan.
Mariana Yampolsky / Elena Poniatowska.
By Alejandro Castellanos
"At once I felt the desire of capturing those images, a world I had not seen, a surreal world, a living museum with people who were anchored to the past without losing sight of the times ahead."

PhotoShop Restoration and Retouching
by Katrin Eismann
Book review by Pedro Meyer
"One of the problems that I get to hear most often, has to do with training. If someone states that they are interested in learning how to work digitally in photography then "what school do you recommend ?" is the next question that always follows."

The Latin American Canon
V LATIN AMERICAN COLLOQUIUM OF PHOTOGRAFY.
By Alejadro Castellanos
"This volume allows us to venture into some of the new directions taken by photography and its analysis in countries south of the Rio Grande..."

A Daily report 1999:
by Frank Horvat
Book review by Trisha Ziff
"There is something about Daily Report, which draws me to return to it. A book as the title indicates of images taken each day during the last year of the millennium by French photographer Frank Horvat; a visual diary."

Boystown: La Zona de Tolerancia
By Nell Farrell
"I slept well last night, cozy and warm in the silence and pure darkness. For breakfast I had hot coffee and sweet bread, sitting in the sun. But I feel hungover, tired, used and abused. I feel like my body has been handled by fat, clammy male hands, my throat stings from stale cigarette smoke, and I smell flat, warm beer. I have just read through Boystown."

Geeks: How Two Lost Boys Rode the internet out of Idaho By Jon Katz
By Nell Farrell.
"This book will make you wish you'd paid your dues while there was still time. Like learning a foreign language or musical instrument, becoming a geek is best done in the formative years, well, the anti-formative years: adolescence."

Book Review:
Remediation: Understanding New Media By Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin
by Nell Farrell
"A movie based on a novel, a written description of a photograph, a painting reproduced in a gallery in cyberspace. This is remediation. One media grows out of another, creating an entangled vine. None exists or even makes sense without those that came before."

Book Reviews: Chaos by Josef Koudelka
by Nubar Alexanian
"When I look at the images in Chaos, I hear the music of Miles Davis, of darkness and beauty. One could argue that the subject of this work is desolation and emptiness. And certainly these are part of almost every image. But the depth and breadth of this work comes from a kind of self-imposed challenge, one which wonders how dark an image can be and still maintain beauty.

Book Reviews: Migrations & The Children by Sebastião Salgado
by Nubar Alexanian

Sebastião Salgado has always been high on everyone's list of documentary photographers. But with Migrations and The Children (Aperture), his two recent books, Salgado has propelled himself into his own category with a body of work that could silence even his harshest critics.

Book Reviews: Signs and Relics by Sylvia Plachy
by Nubar Alexanian

In the foreword of Sylvia Plachy's new book, Signs & Relics, Wim Wenders writes: "Whoever came up first with that saying 'a picture is worth a thousand words' didn't understand the first thing about either one.