TIME Picks the Best Photobooks of 2014

Why This Is Not the Golden Age for Photobooks

The More I Learn About Women J&L Books, selected by Gideon Jacobs, Creative Director, Magnum Photos Lisa Kereszi—J&L Books

“I always find that you can learn a lot about someone by asking them when they realized that their parents were people. The moment your creators stumble into some unforgiving light that renders them vulnerable, flawed, just as human as the rest of us, is the kind of moment that changes everything, one of those things you can’t “un-see.” So when I encountered Lisa Kereszi’s exploration of her father’s secret stash of snapshots from the life he led outside his family during the 70s and 80s, I was a kind of mesmerized. It’s a small book, just a handful of raw imagery of women, motorcycles and women on motorcycles, but it’s ambitious in all the ways that matter to me. Kereszi cropped out the faces of the “bimbos” her father photographed, and that process yields a strange collection of floating tattoos and breasts that read like an abstract collage of one man’s forgivable but utterly tragic humanness.”

— Gideon Jacobs, Creative Director, Magnum Photos