This comprehensive survey of Todd's work from the late 90s to the present day investigates her focus on "female characters [who] seem to suffer some malaise, explicit or implicit ... cosmeticians, cripples, anorexics, dowdy Christians, tragic heiresses, cult members and showgirls". Lately, she has moved on to portraits of "business men".
The book opens with Todd musing over the question, "Do I Even Like Photography?" "My interest in disasters converged with a rampant enthusiasm for televised beauty pageants," she writes in a telling introduction to her oeuvre, shaped by her upbringing on the North Shore. Phrases leap out: "Todd is a master of untrustworthiness" (from Anthony Byrt's chapter), and her latest series, Ethical Minorities (Vegans) comprises portraits of 17 real-life vegans, a "vegetarian subcult". It all adds up to a really interesting read, peppered by the odd snort of laughter.
Photography: The Definitive Visual History
by Tom Ang
(Dorling Kindersley/Penguin $60)
In the introduction to this large-format (and good value for money) book, Auckland-based Tom Ang points out that "the rapid proliferation of photographs - from a few million images to a billion - has nearly all taken place in the first decade of this century, and more than a trillion new photographs are now created every year".
Ang opens with The Dawn of Photography (1825-49) and the rise of devices like the silhouette machine, the camera obscura and the daguerrotype, with inventor Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre boasting, "I have seized the light. I have arrested its flight."
Each page of this high-quality production is filled with fact boxes, notes on technique and a dazzling range of images which tell the history of humanity from the 1800s up to the present day. It's a remarkable collection, which ends with photos depicting environmental issues, including "Living On Thin Ice", a polar bear on a tiny melting iceberg in northern Norway.
Imperfect
by Emma Bass
(Blackwell Photographer Monograph series $95)
Produced in association with Black Asterisk Gallery, this is an exquisite series of photos of flowers arranged in antique vases. Look closely. The flowers are past their best, their petals falling, the stems starting to droop. They are becoming "imperfect".
"But surely the beauty of these living objects lies in their transience," writes David Lyndon Brown in the foreword, while Emma Bass explains her choice of subject: "I have sought to ... explicitly embrace the demised, the maligned, the blemished, the slightly broken and the ordinary in order to reframe and reconstruct other forms of beauty."
Bass collected the flowers, weeds and branches from friends' gardens and roadside plantings.
Sometimes she discovered her arrangements crawling with ants, a praying mantis, flies. Along the way, she has also become an "eBay vase aficionado".
Who hasn't?
