We’re pleased to see The New York Time Magazine‘s Top Ten Photo Books of 2011 features two excellent titles by past Light Work Artists-in-Residence Christian Patterson and Brian Ulrich, who both participated in the residency program in 2010.

Redheaded Peckerwood (MACK, 2011)
by Christian Patterson

(Note: This video pictures the original artist book that Patterson produced in an edition of 10 copies during his residency at Light Work, not the version published by MACK.)

Patterson takes his inspiration from the story of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, an Eisenhower-era teenage couple who murdered 10 people in Nebraska over three days before they were captured by authorities. Patterson, who approaches their story “as a poet and a gumshoe,” in the words of Luc Sante, whose essay accompanies the book, combines historical photographs, documents and his own creative wanderings into an unsettling dance between evidence and myth. – NY Times

Is This Place Great or What (Aperture/Cleveland Museum of Art, 2011)
by Brian Ulrich

A blunt assessment of Americans’ obsession with consumption. In 2001, after 9/11, Ulrich was struck by a speech in which President Bush linked “the vitality of the American economy” with “the willingness of Americans to spend.” The first two chapters, “Retail” and “Thrift,” of the ensuing project were photographed before the financial crisis of 2008. The final chapter, “Dark Stores,” which was started that year, examines the fallout of the Great Recession and serves as a sobering coda to the earlier work. – NY Times

See The New York Times Magazine‘s Top 10 here.