Shanghai Blink, by Inès Breton and Vincent Prudhomme

Why?

"What's interesting about this book and how it inspired me was a different type of photography than what I was doing before, which is not just documenting the kind of painterly, epic scenes. So, for me, the ultimate photograph was a scene that could not have been taken anywhere else but that place. It has the architecture, the costume, the flavor, the lighting, the geographical specificity that would say that this ... You could not have taken this anywhere else but in this, I don't know, backwaters of Laos."
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- Kevin Kelly, Co-Founder of Wired

Afghanistan: Paradise Lost, by Roland and Sabrina Michaud

Why?

"This book is by a French couple who were photographing for National Geographic in Afghanistan. They were fantastic images, but the kind of life they were describing, again, the scenes, the culture, were just so time shifted, they were from another era, they were so different from what I could possibly see, and I wanted to do that for the rest of Asia."
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- Kevin Kelly, Co-Founder of Wired