Carlos Diaz’s early 1980s carnival worker images and his Invented Landscapes are brought together for the first time in a beautifully presented volume published in 2017 by Obscura Land.

Diaz’s Invented Landscapes work spans three decades, starting with images he captured in the early 1980s at Coney Island in New York City. Although in today’s world one might think these images were generated digitally, Diaz began creating the Invented Landscapes a decade before Adobe^® Photoshop^® software was on the scene. The original collages combine silver halide prints with vintage nineteenth-century industrial engravings that he painstakingly cut by hand from books and other printed materials. He then carefully integrated the drawings with the photos to create these fantastical images.

The book includes essays from renowned photo critic, A. D. Coleman, and historian, Mary McNichols, PhD, as well as an artist statement by Diaz.

There are a total of fifty-five plates in this book: thirty-three Invented Landscapes, eleven carnival workers, nine postcards from early twentieth-century Coney Island, and two reproductions of original Coney Island tickets.

Like all projects produced by Obscura Land, the book has unique features that make it a work of art in and of itself. The first thing to note is that the 12×9″ book comes in a translucent-vinyl slipcover with solid white silhouettes of the nineteenth-century engravings printed on it. The cover of the book is a bright orange, archival Plike paper that has a great tactile feel. The title and selected silhouettes are spot varnished to appear like a watermark on the front and back cover of the book. All of these features make the book inviting and pleasant to hold in your hands.

The inside pages of the book are coated with a matte finish, which allows the original black-and-white photographs of Coney Island to pop with a subtle glossy finish. This allows the nineteenth-century engravings to appear matte and the photos to appear glossy—just as the original collages would if you were looking at them in person.

This is a truly beautiful and unique book.

Book #380 in edition of 500. In this calm yet emotionally charged photographic narrative, Japanese artist Mayumi Lake traces her family history back some 60 years and revisits her childhood fantasy of bringing back her grandfathers, both of whom were killed in combat during World War Two. Rural landscapes evoke memories of battlefields, and female portraits pay tribute to those who suffered the loss of their loved ones.

More nuclear bombs have been detonated in America than in any other country in the world. Between 1951 and 1992, the Nevada National Security Test Site was the primary location for these activities, withstanding more than a thousand nuclear tests that left swaths of the American Southwest resembling the moon. In The Nevada Test Site, renowned American photographer Emmet Gowin (b. 1941) presents staggering aerial photographs of this powerfully evocative place. Gowin remains the only photographer granted official and sustained access to the Nevada Test Site. For this book, he has revisited his original negatives, made in 1996 and 1997, and fully three-quarters of the images featured here have never been published before.

This book uses a series of photographs of women, taken in India over a five-year period, to trace the passage of life from birth to death. In The Circle, Sheikh concentrates on the power of the individual gaze, its ability to engage our empathy and our curiosity. The series of direct portraits reflects an intimacy between photographer and subject that does not form part of our collective notion of India and its women.

This is a near new copy of the the Violet Isle, the long out-of-print book by the husband and wife team of Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb.

"So, in the spirit of a duet—with its point-counterpoint—we decided to weave our images together to create a multi-layered portrait of this ‘Violet Isle,’ a little known name for Cuba that is inspired by the rich color of its soil, this island in a bubble whose people and animals seem caught out of time, a place that’s engaging yet unsettling, a place that’s vibrant yet vulnerable, a place that—for better or worse—probably won’t exist as it is much longer."

—from “Two Looks,” their afterword to Violet Isle, written in January 2009.