Articles / Best-Ofs

Sebastião Salgado traveled the Brazilian Amazon and photographed the unparalleled beauty of this extraordinary region for six years: the forest, the rivers, the mountains, the people who live there - an irreplaceable treasure of humanity.

In the book's foreword Salgado writes: "For me, it is the last frontier, a mysterious universe of its own, where the immense power of nature can be felt as nowhere else on earth. Here is a forest stretching to infinity that contains one-tenth of all living plant and animal species, the world's largest single natural laboratory."

Salgado visited a dozen indigenous tribes that exist in small communities scattered across the largest tropical rainforest in the world. He documented the daily life of the Yanomami, the Asháninka, the Yawanawá, the Suruwahá, the Zo'é, the Kuikuro, the Waurá, the Kamayurá, the Korubo, the Marubo, the Awá, and the Macuxi - their warm family bonds, their hunting and fishing, the manner in which they prepare and share meals, their marvelous talent for painting their faces and bodies, the significance of their shamans, and their dances and rituals.

Sebastião Salgado has dedicated this book to the indigenous peoples of Brazil's Amazon region: "My wish, with all my heart, with all my energy, with all the passion I possess, is that in 50 years' time this book will not resemble a record of a lost world. Amazônia must live on."Soon available in a Collector's Edition including a bookstand designed by Renzo Piano and four Art Editions, each including the Renzo Piano bookstand and a signed print.

Street photography may look like luck, but you have to get out there and hone your craft if you want to shake up those luck vibes. Matt Stuart never goes out without his trusty Leica and, in a career spanning twenty years, has taken some of the most accomplished, witty and well-known photographs of the streets.

From 1988 to 1991 Dawoud Bey made a series of portraits of African Americans in the streets of various American cities. Using a large format tripod mounted camera and a unique positive/negative Polaroid film that created both an instant print and a reusable negative, he asked a cross section of the populations of these communities to pose for him, creating a space of self presentation and performance in the streets of the urban environment. As part of every encounter, Bey gave each person a small black-and-white Polaroid print for themselves as a way of reciprocating and returning something to the people who had allowed him to make their portrait. Defying racial stereotypes, the resulting portraits reveal the Black subjects in all of their psychologically rich complexity, presenting themselves openly and intimately to the camera, the viewer, and the world.

A new installment in Miles Aldridge's ongoing homage to, and plea for the revival of, Polaroid film

The sequel to Miles Aldridge's (born 1964) Please Return Polaroid (2016), this book presents new and vintage Polaroids from the British photographer's more than 20-year archive, in a seemingly random sequence shaped by a dreamlike logic and surprising juxtapositions.

Please Please Return Polaroid explores Aldridge's dedication to analogue processes where cut-and-paste is still a manual process, made with scissors, gaffer tape, intuition and not a little patience. Aldridge continues to use Polaroids as part of his work-in-progress “sketches,” often scratching, tearing and taping them together, even drawing over them; each mark part of the creative act.

Known for creating immaculate photos of a less than perfect world, Aldridge revels in these unpolished images, transforming some into extreme enlargements filling double pages with their reworked and damaged surfaces.