Las Vegas Birthday Slideshow from Little Brown Mushroom on Vimeo.

British photographer Simon Roberts has generously offered a gift to the very next financial supporter of Lens Culture who contributes $250 or more. It's a signed copy of his excellent book, Motherland, along with a signed, limited edition print from that series made in Russia in 2005. The print is 11" x 14", number 44 of 50, signed verso. This is a £175 value, and about to be sold out completely.

Here is the cover, and below is the informal video interview made by Alec.

From the Library: Riley and His Story from Little Brown Mushroom on Vimeo.

The book looks great, and important, and especially timely. You can download a generous PDF excerpt (114 pages!) here, which apparently covers about 1/4 of the whole book. You can get more info about the book here.

Hamburger Eyes from Nick Fogarty on Vimeo.

As always, however, there were bits of articulate insight from that interview that didn't make it into the final cut for one reason or another. So, with absolutely no color correction or smooth transitions or titles or credits, we've decided to share these short "bonus" clips where Simon Roberts talks about why he deliberately made the shift from shooting primarily for magazines to authoring his own photobooks. We thought this might be another welcome point of view in the discussion about photobooks being hosted by our friends at LiveBooks.com.

We first discovered these trippy photo diptychs by Australian photographer David Helsham while reviewing all of the entries to our first Lens Culture International Exposures Awards. Even though the jury didn't award a prize to this series, we loved it so much we wanted to publish a feature in Lens Culture.

Here's some of the intro text by Zoë Fargher:

"Bongin Bongin is an aboriginal name, meaning "many shells". And it is the name of a bay in northern Sydney, Australia, where David Helsham swims every morning, all year round, with a group of friends.

"The bay and its surroundings provide the raw material for this magical series of diptychs: Helsham has photographed a small area of the beach and the ocean over several years. In Bongin Bongin, he juxtaposes found objects he discovered on the beach – from discarded toys, to shoes, to skulls – with views of the bay in all weathers and seasons."

See and read more... Also, look for David's Blurb book in 2010.

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

Our friends at LiveBooks.com and Flakphoto.com have initiated a spirited and intelligent online discussion that asks us to imagine the future of photobooks. There are lots of thoughtful ideas and insights to be garnered in this ongoing discussion, and you can take part, too.

Certainly there are two tracks that dominate the discussions: technology and creativity. What will the photobook of the future look like? How will we distribute and receive and store it? And what can a photobook aspire to be, creatively? Can anyone top the inventive, visual brilliance of William Klein's book Tokyo, from 1964? All of these are topics of great interest to people, like me, who are happily addicted to photobooks in all of their forms.

The video above plays out a yet to be realized fantasy about what the magazine of the future will look like, and how it will work. As these researchers and designers point out: the user experience will have to be stellar. And the iconic "badge" of affinity and identity that magazines currently convey about a reader or subscriber will have to be there, too. We can tell a lot about a person just by the magazines they choose to display on their coffee table, or by the magazine they choose to read in public.

I absolutely love the ideas in the prototype shown in the video. The designers seem to have envisioned the best of the best hybrid for the future. What do you think?