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Do you prefer more pictures, or more text, when choosing a book? When selecting a shortlist of 12 books to feature in these pages, the criteria becomes increasingly abstract year after year, as the idea of what constitutes an art book, or, a book that discusses visual art, becomes ever looser. We have here volumes, such as two academic books in which critical theory and essayistic writing provide clear analyses of art scenes. On the other end of the spectrum, we have books that are in fact continuations of artworks: Yazan Khalili's Scouting for Locations, with photographs and text relating to his ongoing project; and Simryn Gill and Michael Taussig's Becoming Palm, a collaborative project that reveals each contributor's ethnographic studies of oil palm, rendered in images, lyrical prose or mind map form.
We also considered the ideas embedded in the titles themselves, and whether those expectations were met. The Japanese Photobook, whose declarative title summons an idea of the magnitude and breadth of its coverage, indeed delivers a grand procession of images from 1912 to 1990, printed in full-color ink alongside essays on the evolution of the medium. More singular in its focus, Rinko Kawauchi's Halo emits an ephemeral glow from its pages of images-of villagers, rain, the sea-giving shape to the troubling areas of dark alienation that exist even in the brightest of days.
And what of the authors themselves? Why have they written such texts, or compiled such images, now? There are some straightforward answers: for example, Syria: Into the Light is a catalog of an exhibition hosted at Concrete in Dubai's Alserkal Avenue in March 2017. The show itself came into being against the poster image of a war-torn, desolate Syria, and gave voice to individuals and collectives whose creative expression should not be ignored. In a similar vein, Antony Dapiran's City of Protest: A Recent History of Dissent in Hong Kong was released on July 1, 2017, the 20th anniversary date of the transfer of sovereignty of Hong Kong, from the United Kingdom to the People's Republic of China-a milestone fizzing with political tension that some, like Dapiran, have noted as one in a long line of many that led to the Umbrella Movement of 2014.
Posterity and preservation is...