Aperture aggregates the best posts from this past week in the photography blogosphere.

• Art Nouveau magazine interviews artist Hank Willis Thomas, of the monograph Pitch Blackness (Aperture 2008) whose transmedia installation Question Bridge: Black Males is still on view at three different locations around the country, on his latest body of work Strange Fruit which makes ”vivid comparisons of black perception between the pre-slavery era and post-Civil Rights Movement.”
• Joerg Colberg posts on Conscientious Extended about “How To Make a Photobook,” though he admits early on, “My headline is slightly disingenuous: There actually is no simple recipe for photobook making.”
• New York Times‘ Lens blog does a Q&A with Mexico City-based photographer Dominic Bracco II about one of his images “showing death with humanity and dignity,” as well as the Eugene Richards’ photograph from the series “Below the Line: Living Poor in America,” which inspired him.
• Jess Dudley, Wonderful Machine Producer, posts a very informative piece on APhotoEditor, “Pricing and Negotiating – Non-Fiction Book Cover,” in an attempt to elucidate the often murky realm of reproduction rights through a real-life annecdote.
• New Yorker‘s Photobooth profiles “Lost & Found: Salvaging Snapshots in Japan,” with a slideshow of the recovered family photographs from the Japanese town of Yamamoto devastated by the tsunami one year ago, featured in Aperture issue 206, and on view at Aperture Gallery April 2, 2012 – April 27, 2012.
• Time’s Lightbox profiles the independent photo project on Afghanistan (Danger and Aftermath, on view at Museum London in Southwestern Ontario through April 1, 2012),  by Magnum photographer Larry Towell, who’s work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine Photographs (Aperture 2011) and Access to Life (Aperture/Magnum Photos/The Global Fund 2009).
• NPR’s The Picture Show takes “A Peak Inside the Copy Cat Building: Where Baltimore Artists Work – And Live.” Alex Wein and Rob Brulinski’s photographs portray the living spaces of over 100 eclectic new tenants of a building which once housed Copy Cat printing, and was the birthplace of the Crown Cork bottle cap, “a worldwide standard for the beer and soda industries.”

Aperture aggregates the best posts from this past week in the photography blogosphere.

• LensBlog explores why Rodrigo Abd‘s photograph of a young Syrian boy expressing grief over the death of his father landed on the front page of three of the most prominent national papers in the United States.

• Time magazine’s photo blog Lightbox celebrated it’s one year anniversary, revisiting their first post and the continuing saga of War is Personal by legendary photojournalist Eugene Richards, of the controversial 1994 Aperture monograph Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue.

• Conscientious, GalleristNY and LVP Magazine weigh in on Cindy Sherman’s retrospective at MOMA and on the “unanimity” among critics in New York reviewing it.

• One year after a devastating tsunami hit the coast of Japan on March 11, 2011, The New York Times does a “Side-by-Side look at Distruction and Renewal.” The Big Picture at Boston.com, Huffington Post, National Geographic, and The New Yorker ran similar posts, as did Time’s Lightbox, featuring a slideshow of photos by James Nachtwey, whose work is in The New York Times Magazine Photographs (Aperture 2011) edited by Kathy Ryan.

• NPR prompts the question: “You know Ansel, But Who is Robert Adams (And Why Should You Care)?” Bob Adams, of the recently reissued Aperture monographs The New West and Summer Nights, Walking, has a traveling retrospective The Place We Live now on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

• Sarah Palmer was just announced winner of the Aperture 2011 Portfolio Prize for her series As a Real House. Read her 2009 review of Eirik Johnson’s Sawdust Mountain, Robert Adam’s Summer Nights and Joel Meyerowitz’s Legacy, from when she was editor at Metropolis Magazine.

• Finally, Jonathan Blaustein‘s intensely personal column on APhotoEditor.com reviewing Donald Weber‘s beautifully put together photobook Interrogations is one of the best-written posts we’ve read all week. Interrogations will also be reviewed in the upcoming second issue of The Photobook Review.

From The Blue Room, © Eugene Richards

Lecture/Book Signing: Eugene Richards
Thursday, March 5, 2009 at 7:00pm
Boston University Photonics Building, room 206
8 St. Mary’s Street
Boston, Massachusetts
(617) 975-0600

$10 Members/$20 Non-Members/$5 Full-time Students/Free for students of Institutional Members.

This Thursday, internationally renowned social-documentary photographer Eugene Richards is visiting the Photographic Resource Center at Boston University for a lecture and discussion of his new book The Blue Room.
This is the first color project by Eugune Richards, and the book depicts his moving and highly personal work on the abandoned and forgotten houses of the American West in areas such as Nebraska, Kansas, New Mexico, and the Dakotas. Richards’ reflective and beautiful photographs inspire us to imagine the lives of the former occupants, and mysterious images such as snow falling on a bed by an open window make a quiet statement on the inevitability of the circle of life and death, and the vulnerability of man in the phase of a shifting economy and climate.

Richards is perhaps best known for his books and photo essays on cancer, drug addiction, poverty, emergency medicine, and pediatric HIV, many of which have been accredited with prestigious awards. Some of his most recent publications include Stepping Through the Ashes (2002), The Fat Baby (2004) and A Procession of Them (2008). His book Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue, Aperture (1994), a groundbreaking document on the consequences of hardcore drug use, received the Kraszna-Krausz Award for Photographic Innovation in Books.

During his professional carrier as a photographer, Eugene Richards has received numerous honors including a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment of the Arts Grant, and the W. Eugene Smith Award. His photography has appeared in countless publications including The New York Times Magazine, Time, Newsweek, and LIFE. His work has also been featured several times in Aperture, most recently in the Spring 2005 issue.