Tanya Poll 2009
72 pages Colour reproductions. No ISBN
15 x 19 cm English text. Softcover
The images in 'There's No Place' were taken on Tanya’s journeys in and around London, Tokyo, Sydney, and Auckland. The work is personal and alludes to displacement and fragmentation in relation to belonging, home/place, and experience. The photos in the book contemplate a kind of absence or ambiguity, but also stillness. There is a vague narrative quality that tells a story about place, belonging and memory.
Tanya Poll was born in Auckland, grew up in Vancouver and now lives in London. Price: £15.00
Steidl 2008
168 pages Colour reproductions ISBN 9783865211392
20 x 20 cm English text. Hardcover
Although Edward Steichen exhibited some of Saul Leiter’s color photographs at the Museum of Modern Art in 1953, for forty years afterwards they remained virtually unknown to the art world. Saul Leiter: Early Color provides the first opportunity to see a comprehensive presentation of images by one of photography’s great originals.
Leiter moved to New York in 1946 intending to be a painter and through his friendship with the abstract expressionist Richard Pousette-Dart he quickly recognized the creative potential of photography. Though he continued to paint, exhibiting alongside Philip Guston and Willem de Kooning, Leiter’s camera became — like an extension of his arm and mind — an ever-present interpreter of life in the metropolis.
The semi-mythical notion of the ‘New York street photographer’ was born at the same time, in the late-1940s. But Leiter’s sensibility — comparable to the European intimism of Bonnard, a painter he greatly admires — placed him outside the visceral confrontations with urban anxiety associated with photographers such as Robert Frank or William Klein. Instead, for him the camera provided an alternative way of seeing, of framing events and interpreting reality. He sought out moments of quiet humanity in the Manhattan maelstrom, forging a unique urban pastoral from the most unlikely of circumstances.
None of Leiter’s contemporaries, with the single and partial exception of Helen Levitt, assembled a comparable body of work in color. The lyricism and intensity of his vision come into fullest play in his eloquent handling of color: to the rapid recording of the spontaneous unfolding of life on the street, Leiter adds an unconventional sense of form and a brilliantly improvisational, and frequently almost abstract, use of found colors and tones. Leiter’s visual language of fragmentation, ambiguity and contingency is evoked in Saul Leiter: Early Color by one hundred subtle, painterly images that stretched the boundaries of photography in the second half of the twentieth-century. Price: £31.50
OUT OF STOCK
Thames & Hudson
520 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 9780500287118
20.5 x 26.5 cm English text. Softcover
This lavishly illustrated survey presents the work of nearly
120 international artists at the forefront of the boom in photography, among them Elina Brotherus, Tacita Dean, Luc Delahaye, Alec Soth, Jens Ullrich and Michael Wesely.
Each artist is introduced by an essay, followed by four pages of their superbly reproduced work. This is a valuable and forward-looking reference book for photographers, collectors and photography lovers everywhere.
RRP £24.95
10% online price saving Price: £22.45
Steidl 2009
408 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 9783865218292
20.5 x 26 cm English text. Hardcover
Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard focuses on a collection of 9,000 picture postcards amassed by the American photographer Walker Evans (1903-1975) that are now part of Walker Evans Archive at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The postcard came of age after 1907 when American postal deregulations allowed correspondence to be written on the address side of the card. By 1914, the craze for picture postcards had become a boon to local photographers as their black- and-white photographs of small-town main streets, local hotels, and new public buildings were transformed into millions of handsomely colored photolithographic postcards
Sold in five-and-dime stores in every small town in America, postcards satisfied the country’s need for human connection in the age of the railroad and Model T when, for the first time, many Americans regularly found themselves traveling far from home. At age twelve, Walker Evans began to collect and classify his cards. What appealed to the nascent photographer were the cards’ vernacular subjects, the simple, unvarnished, “artless” quality of the pictures, and the generic, uninflected, mostly frontal style that he later would borrow for his own work with the camera. Both the picture postcard and Evans’s photographs seem equally authorless - quiet documents that record the scene with an economy of means and with simple respect. Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard proposes that the picture postcard represented a powerful strain of indigenous American realism that directly influenced Evans’s artistic development.
RRP £40.00
10% online price saving Price: £36.00
Contrasto 2009
96 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 9788869651397
24.5 x 31 cm English text. Hardcover
Flamboya is the first comprehensive catalogue to feature the independent work of Dutch photographer and Prix de Rome winner, Viviane Sassen. It includes over fifty recent photographs taken across Africa from Cape Town to Kenya and Zambia that disregard traditional boundaries of genre and tackle the problematic bond between photography, imperialism and the colonial imaginary. Renowned for being a visionary and a creator, editorial artist and fashion photographer, Sassen imbues her portrait of Africa with the lush chromaticity and compositional appeal that secured the impact of her ad campaigns and editorial series created for such brands as Miu Miu, Adidas and Louis Vuitton, and for publications such as iD, Purple, Dazed & Confused and Vogue.
RRP 26.95
10% online price saving Price: £24.25
PP Group 2007
104 pages B&W reproductions. No ISBN
21 x 27 cm Softcover
A collection of Slimane's best photographs and a new exhibition project curated by Slimane 'Sweet Bird of Youth' in collaboration with emerging artists
RRP £18.95
10% online price saving Price: £17.05
576 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 9783865217158
30 x 38 cm English text. Hardcover
For over a decade Juergen Teller has worked with Marc Jacobs on the advertising campaigns for each of the Men’s and Woman’s Marc Jacobs collections, Marc by Marc Accessories and perfumes lines. Teller’s idiosyncratic visual style and use of unusual models has been instrumental in establishing what has become one of the pre-eminent fashion brands of our times. Reflecting the intelligence and individuality of the Marc Jacobs’ brand, the models have included Sofia Coppola, Charlotte Rampling, Meg White, Kim Gordan and Thursten Moore, Michael Stipe, Rufus Wainwright, Harmony Korine, Cindy Sherman, William Eggleston, Samantha Morton, Winona Ryder, Roni Horn, Victoria Beckham and Juergen Teller himself among others…
This book brings together a selection of images from all the campaigns into a collection that marks how significant this collaboration has been in both fashion and visual culture.
RRP £78.00
10% online price saving Price: £70.20
Photoworks / Steidl 2009
112 pages Duo-tone reproductions. ISBN 9783865218384
23 x 30 cn English text. Hardcover
Over the last ten years, dissatisfied with the often complacent values of the photography world, Clare Strand has assembled a body of work that is both subversive and celebratory in its approach to photographic conventions.
During this period Strand’s art has developed through a series of increasingly interesting and unique projects that have explored various photographic genres, from Victorian portraiture to crime scene and forensic photography. In these series she has dwelt on the oddity of photography’s strange backwaters, its utilitarian functions and its infiltration of every corner of our lives, to make us question the value and complex meanings of photographic images. This might be simply quirky and strange, but in Strand’s work it is resolved through photographs of incredible quality and genuine originality.
RRP £30.00
10% online price saving Price: £27.00
Vice 2008
144 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 9780955801525
26 x 26 cm English text. Hardcover
What started off as a small collection of photographs the 14-year-old Gavin Watson would take of his family and friends in Wycombe, middle England, in the 1970s and 80s would grow into one of the most important and influential photographic / youth culture books of the last 20 years. Published in 1994 and which The Times of London called “a modern classic,” Skins has influenced photographers like Terry Richardson and Jurgen Teller. It also helped sow the seeds for pretty much every kind of “youth” photography popular today. Three years ago, Vice Magazine Editor Andy Capper brought Gavin Watson out of a selfimposed exile and uncovered hundreds of new, unpublished photos that showed a different side to his incredible, natural talent.
Skins & Punks is a singular retrospective complete with commentaries and an introduction by the director Shane Meadows (This Is England, Dead Man’s Shoes). The photos get what it is to really be a rebellious working class youth growing up in the 1980s. This is documentary photography at its best, a stunningly intimate window into a cultural movement. Gavin Watson is an acclaimed documentary and portrait photographer. His natural eye for a moment in time and the stark brutal honesty of the images he captured have made his collection of work one of the UK’s finest documentary portfolios. He has done work for many global companies including Levi’s Dr Martens, countless music magazines, album covers and his work has been featured in fashion bibles such as Vice, i-D and The Face and in numerous exhibitions.
Thames & Hudson 2008
144 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 9780500410974
12.5 x 19 cm English text. Softcover
Saul Leiter is one of those photographers who seek neither fame nor commercial success, despite their talent for imagemaking.
Born in Pittsburgh, he spent the 1940s and 1950s in New York, in an intensely creative environment where ideas from Europe and America came together and intermingled. There he encountered Rothko and the Abstract Expressionists, and discovered street photography and the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson. His mastery of colour is displayed in unconventional cityscapes in which reflections, transparency, complex framing and mirroring effects are married to a very personal printing style, creating a unique kind of urban view. Price: £8.95
Fondation Cartier 2009
308 pages Colour reproiductions. ISBN 9782869250833
20.5 x 28 cm English text. Softcover
In November 2008, the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain will present Native Land, an exhibition that will explore humans attachment to the Earth and its role in forming ones identity, as well as human migrations and the trajectories that they generate. These issues will be explored by Raymond Depardon, director and photographer, and Paul Virilio, urban planner and philosopher. Composed mainly of moving images, either created especially for the occasion or obtained from various sources, the show will offer a unique consideration of what it means to have a homeland. The catalogue Native Land reflects the diversity of these various themes. Reuniting several authors, including Michael Agier, Bruce Albert, Marc Augé and Paul Virilio, this book will use the exhibition as a point of departure to explore the different facets of issues linked to the importance of ones native land.
RRP £32.00
10% online price saving Price: £28.80
152 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 9783865215871
20 x 24 cm English text. Hardcover
“I started out as a fashion photographer. One cannot say that I was successful but there was enough work to keep me busy. I collaborated with Harper’s Bazaar and other magazines. I was constantly aware that those who hired me would have preferred to work with a star such as Avedon. But it didn’t matter. I had work and I made a living. At the same time, I took my own photographs. Strangely enough, I knew exactly what I wanted and what I liked.”
Saul Leiter was a painter and only became a photographer when color photography could encompass the distinct color palette he wanted to include in his images. Since the 1940s, this inveterate walker has trawled the streets of New York, capturing its colors and spirit. His liking for disarray, solitude and elusiveness make him a unique artist, quite unconcerned about joining the throng.
“I spent a great deal of my life being ignored. I was always very happy that way. Being ignored is a great privilege. That is how I think I learnt to see what others do not see and to react to situations differently. I simply looked at the world, not really prepared for anything.”
This book contains several previously unpublished color pictures and his early black and white pictures.
RRP £22.50
10% online price saving Price: £19.75
Rizzoli 2008
272 pages Colour reprodcutions. ISBN 9780847831494
22.5 x 28 cm English text. Hardcover
Mark Borthwick is among the generation of photographers who in the ’90s broke through the conventions of fashion photography. Integrating elements of architecture and design, he has developed a very personal and intuitive style, and knows how to turn a static photo into a performance. His work is about the movement of the model, and the serendipity of accidental clutter is as important to his images as the garments. This book showcases over 200 images from Borthwick’s best fashion editorials, celebrity portraits, and advertising work, as well as excerpts from his personal journals. The journal pages, consisting of Polaroids, sketches, and notes on shoots, reveal the workings of a photographer’s mind—the "behind the scenes" of the makings of a fashion image.
RRP £25.00
10% online price saving Price: £22.50
Abrams 2008
144 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 9780810995437
26. x 20.5 cm English text. Hardcover
No Wave is the first book to visually chronicle the collision of art and punk in the New York underground of 1976 to 1980. This in-depth look at punk rock, new wave, experimental music, and the avant-garde art movement of the 70s and 80s focuses on the true architects of No Wave from James Chance to Lydia Lunch to Glenn Branca, as well as the luminaries that intersected the scene, such as David Byrne, Debbie Harry, Brian Eno, Iggy Pop, and Richard Hell.
This rarely documented scene was the creative stomping ground of young artists and filmmakers from Jean-Michel Basquiat to Jim Jarmusch, as well as the musical genesis for the post-punk explosions of Sonic Youth. It is here revealed for a new generation of fans and collectors.
Thurston Moore and Byron Coley have selected 150 unforgettable images, most of which have never been published previously, and compiled hundreds of hours of personal interviews to create an oral history of the movement, providing a never-before-seen exploration and celebration of No Wave.
RRP £14.00
10% online price saving Price: £12.60
180 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 9783865215840
21.5 x 19 cm Englsih text. Hardcover
Robert Frank’s The Americans was first published on May 15, 1958 by Robert Delpire in Paris. It featured 83 of Frank’s photographs taken in America in 1955 and 1956, accompanied by writings in French about American political and social history selected by Alain Bosquet. Delpire’s Les Américains formed part of the Encyclopédie essentielle series, which presented foreign countries to a French audience. Each of Frank’s photographs in this edition is placed on a right-hand page, with the texts on the left-hand pages.
The first English edition of The Americans was published in 1959 by Grove Press in New York. It presented the same photographs as the Delpire edition, however a text by Jack Kerouac replaced the French writings. The book begins with Kerouac’s introduction, followed by Frank’s photographs in the same sequence as the Delpire edition. On the left-hand pages are short captions from Frank, which describe the location.
Since 1959 The Americans has been reprinted by different publishers, in multiple languages and formats. Frank has had varying influence on these editions; some were printed without his input, approval or knowledge. In July 2007 the Steidl edition of The Americans was printed. Frank was involved in every step of its design and production. The 83 photographs were scanned in tritone at Steidl’s digital darkroom from vintage prints in Frank’s collection, which revealed that many images in past editions were actually crops of the originals. For the Steidl book Frank studied and revised these crops and in many cases included the full photographs; in only a few cases the Delpire and Grove Press compositions remain.
The Steidl edition also reproduces two photographs printed from negatives different to those used for all previous editions. These photographs depict the same two subjects as in other editions (Metropolitan Life Insurance Building–New York City and Assembly Line–Detroit), but from a slightly different perspective.
Kerouac’s text and Frank’s captions remain unaltered from the Grove Press edition, the typography however was redesigned. As well as revising the book’s design, Frank also chose the paper, endpaper and book linen. He opted for a thread-stitched book, and conceived a new dust jacket made from the same paper as in the book (Xantur 170 g from Scheufelen, Germany), sealing it with a simple varnish. Frank personally oversaw printing on July 18, 2007, inspecting and approving each sheet at Steidl’s press in Göttingen. Price: £20.00
160 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 9780810972711
26 x 21 cm English text. Hardcover
“The Dolls told me: We know you as you really are, and you’re OK by us.”--Morrissey, from his Afterword
Formed in New York City in 1971, the New York Dolls prefigured Punk, New Wave, and Glam Metal Rock with their over-the-top style and their ingenious sound, setting the tone for many rock bands that would later come on the scene. Comprised of singer David Johansen, guitarists Johnny Thunders and Sylvain Sylvain, drummer Jerry Nolan, and bassist Arthur “Killer” Kane, the Dolls are the acknowledged influence of bands as diverse as Blondie, the Ramones, Motley Crue, Guns N Roses, Morrissey, the Smiths, and the Sex Pistols.
Legendary photographer Bob Gruen has compiled the first photography collection devoted to the New York Dolls and their iconic and unprecedented style. Featuring over two hundred unforgettable images New York Dolls: Photographs by Bob Gruen celebrates one of the most important bands in music history.
RRP
5% online price saving Price: £14.24
Steidl 2007
112 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 9783865212887
21 x 29 cm English text. Hardcover
Bettina von Zwehl has built an international reputation for her subtile and unnerving photographic portraits. Her concise series of images are highly controlled both in terms of their minimalist aesthetic and the exacting conditions she imposes on her subjects. Von Zwehl photographs them as they wake from deep sleep, hold their breath, recover from physical exertion, are drenched in rain or listen intently to music in a darkened room; orchestrating a climate in which the sitters relinquish control of the way they are represented. The portraits reveal not the conscious projection of an identity but a space between the subject's private and thoughtful world and their public appearance. With their pared-down backgrounds and balanced compositions, von Zwehl's portraits have the texture and poise of Renaissance paintings. Their stillness is arresting and demands the kind of attention and absorbtion from the viewer that we see depicted. We are directed to the slightest of details: blemishes on the skin, wrinkles, stray hairs, raised color in the cheeks, a striking variety of profiles. Surveyed in this comprehensive monograph, the fifth in the Photoworks Monograph series, Bettina von Zwehl's work forms a delicate and exquisitely detailed catalogue of human physiognomy. Price: £19.99
Hatje Cantz 2008
236 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 9783775722575
"This dynamic survey of contemporary photography shows myriad talents ..." Martin Barnes
This publication is a photographic sensation: the visual dynamics of Iranian photography in all its fascinating beauty and heroic resistance is unveiled for the first time, revealing a rich new aesthetics from inside Iran as well as from the Iranian diaspora. We see innovative responses by photographers living in a country under political restrictions, as well as an important body of work from Iranians who have been living in exile for the last thirty years creating works of great political and cultural relevance. The aesthetic response to political terror is provoking, pioneering, and artistically sophisticated, documenting the willingness of a generation of artists to protect freedom with the weapons of their imagination.
This book offers a surprisingly broad spectrum of artistic expression that outshines the Western mainstream. Among the most renowned photographer-artists are Abbas, Reza Aramesh, Shirin Neshat, Parastou Forouhar, Abbas Kiarostami, Kaveh Golestan, Amirali Ghasemi, and Shadi Ghadirian. Their visual imagery constitutes an exciting and instructive journey for the reader, who may have never had access to these histories before. Each of the thirty-six contributing photographers was asked to supply a statement on his or her life and experience as an artist. It is high time to give a voice and a platform to photographers from Iran.
Zone Books 2008
258 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 9780942299663
24 x 19 cm English/French text. Hardcover
La Jetée is the book version of the legendary 1964 science fiction film about time and memory after a nuclear apocalypse. Chris Marker, the undisputed master of the filmic essay, composed the film almost entirely of still photographs. It traces a desperate experiment by the few remaining survivors of World War III to recover and change the past, and gain access to the future, through the action of memory. A man is chosen for his unique quality of having retained a single clear image from prewar days: no more than an ambiguous memory fragment from childhood — a visit to the jetty at Orly airport, the troubling glance of an unknown woman, the crumpling body of a dying man. These elements become crucial hinge-points in the ensuing narrative, thickening and accumulating nuance with each successful expedition into the historical past. The image of the woman, increasingly suffused now with the time- and eros-bestowing capacities of a deep but impossible love, provides the kernel for the recovery of the dimension through which humankind and history will be saved, as well as the tragic abyss into which both the hero and the narrative inexorably fall. The story Marker tells — a stunning parable of our modern fate — is about the death of the world, about loss, memory, hope, and the indomitable power of love. This edition reproduces the original film’s images along with its accompanying text in both English and French.
RRP £28.95
5% online price saving Price: £27.50
Taschen 2008
192 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 9783836507813
14 x 19.5 cm English text. Softcover
"Defining images of photographic art in this century." -Photo Art International, United Kingdom
The photographic collection of the Museum Ludwig Cologne is one of the most important collections of contemporary photography in the world. This book provides a fascinating insight into its rich diversity: conceptual art, abstraction, reportage - about 200 works works by around 100 of the 20th century’s most famous international photographers, from Ansel to Joel Peter Witkin. Price: £3.99
120 pages Tritone reproductions. ISBN 9783865217042
29.5 x 20.5 cm English text. Hardcover
Raymond Depardon arrived in New York in the winter of 1980. He was visiting a friend who had just taken up a job in the city and to kill time he strolled around the streets with his Leica. He decided to take pictures without ever looking through the camera’s viewfinder, working incognito in the nooks and crannies of New York. He amassed two or three rolls a day but at the time was thoroughly disappointed with the results.
Depardon never mentioned the work to anyone and only decided to unveil these “blind” pictures 27 years later. He was surprised to discover that most of his subjects were aware that they were being photographed. Their knowing glances towards the camera lens imbued with a pretence of indifference immortalises the very spirit and charm of this, the ultimate city.
powerHouse 2005
132 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 1576872637
18 x 26 cm English text. Hardcover
“The mid-1970s was England’s darkest, dreariest hour. The UK was sliding deeper into unemployment, reeling from strike after strike, power cuts, the three-day work week, and IRA bombs. It was time for a new order and in London’s restless streets a handful of snotty young men, feisty females, and first generation Jamaican musicians created the UK’s punky revolution. They made it up as they went along and it touched every corner of the Disunited Kingdom. For a few glorious years the UK was the center of the cultural universe.” —Vivien Goldman
When punk first rocked, the rough and rugged style on the streets was a world away from the super-slick music videos and corporate stylists that were to follow. And photographer Janette Beckman was on the front line of that hyper-energized time, capturing “the look” of the musicians and kids who were loudly defining an era. Collected for the first time in Made in the UK, Beckman’s powerful portraits celebrate the music and the attitude of Punk, Mod, Skinhead, 2 Tone, and Rockabilly culture in the UK.
Made in the UK: The Music of Attitude, 1977–1983 documents a time when British music pushed every boundary. Beckman began her career working for Melody Maker, one of London’s premier weekly music papers. She soon had extraordinary access to the musicians topping the UK charts—icons of an era when music had an agenda—including The Clash, The Sex Pistols, The Jam, The Undertones, The Specials, The Beat, The Police, The Ramones, The Rockats, The Raincoats (Kurt Cobain’s inspiration), Billy Idol, and Echo and the Bunnymen. Among these groups, this generation still had the radical idea that each and every punk, skin, mod, rude boy, and ted was just as important as the bands. Janette Beckman’s gritty aesthetic placed her on good footing among the kids on the street—and the portraits she made prove that attitude never dies. Londoner Janette Beckman began her career at the dawn of punk rock working for The Face and Melody Maker. Moving to New York in 1982, she was instantly drawn to the underground hip hop scene. Her photographs of the pioneers Run-DMC, Afrika Bambaataa, Salt-N-Pepa, and Grandmaster Flash are collected in RAP: Portraits and Lyrics of a Generation of Black Rockers (St. Martin’s Press, 1991). Beckman’s work has appeared in Esquire, Rolling Stone, and Glamour, to name a few. She lives and works in New York. Price: £9.99
Powerhouse 2007
335 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 9781576874103
26.5 x 33.5 cm English text. Hardcover
The VICE Photo Book just came out and it is a fucking tome. The thing is 11x14, weighs a good eight pounds, and is filled with all of our favorite pictures and fashion spreads and photo stories from the past ten years of the magazine. It's also got new stuff like long, in-depth interviews with the photographers who made us like pictures and helped shape our aesthetic, three separate histories of photography in Vice, and probably even more. In short we have put together a huge, glossy monolith of eye-food that will suck away hours of your life as it constricts the blood vessels in your lap. We shouldn't even have to mention how good it looks on a coffee table with crap strewn all over it.
RRP £27.95
10% online price saving Price: £25.15
Aperture 2008
128 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 9781597110617
25.5 x 33 cm English text. Hardcover
Dutch photographer Erwin Olaf delivers velvet-gloved emotional impact with his highly stylized mode of image making. His work offers a blend of mid-century modern and noir aesthetics seen through a contemporary, fashion-inflected lens. The ambiance of the series presented in this volume—the first time these three bodies of work have been presented as a whole—is truly enigmatic and enticing. Olaf seduces the viewer via a mannered, restrained palette that is replete with faded avocado greens, golden-hued oranges, and subtle lilacs.
Each richly colored and sleekly composed image offers a sly reinterpretation of Norman Rockwell-like iconography and characters, manifesting a nostalgia that both burlesques and wryly celebrates America of the 1950s and ’60s. As a whole, the material investigates what critic Jonathan Turner defines as “Olaf’s recent fascination with the visual representation of such emotions as loss, loneliness, and quiet despair.... [He] plays games with the idea of cold reality versus cruel artifice, capturing that precise moment when innocence, hope, and joy are lost.“
RRP £35.00
10% online price saving Price: £31.50
Hayward Publishing 2008
168 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 9781853322655
22 x 24 cm English text. Softcover
A document of British photography from the late 1960s until the late 1980s, No Such Thing as Society draws from the collections of the Arts Council and the British Council to give a radically new picture of these two turbulent decades.
The early 1970s saw the emergence of new and independent approaches to documentary photography, which focused on social realism. The leading exponent, Tony Ray-Jones, captured the comedies of social class and the absurdities of human behaviour within the constraints of British culture.
By the end of the 1970s, the status of photography within the artistic context had been established. Motifs of intense political dissatisfaction spread across the urban vistas of Ian Dobbie, while Philip Jones-Griffith and Paul Graham employed more conventional forms of photojournalism of urban conflict in the North of Ireland and the streets of South London.
The human costs of de-industrialisation and globalisation were the great central themes of the documentary photographers active in the North of England in the late 1970s and 1980s. The social disasters captured in Chris Killip’s work extended into the darkly-coloured, claustrophobic interiors of DHSS offices photographed by Paul Graham, and Martin Parr’s lividly coloured documents of holiday makers in New Brighton, Liverpool. Price: £17.99
336 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 3865212719
28 x 31 cm Englsih text. Hardcover
Police officer and photographer Arnold Odermatt became famous in his retirement on the publication of Karambolage, his photographic journal about the traffic accidents that were part of his professional life in the Swiss canton of Nidwalden. The small police force in the Nidwalden communities was worried about who could take over its work because the village youth did not see themselves wearing uniforms and walking the beat. On Duty brings together the photographs which were Odermatt’s attempt to disabuse them of their misconceptions. He sent his colleagues to the barber shop and theatrically recreated the adventure in their daily routines. On Duty is a compelling sequence of colourful tableaux and an impressive document and insight to a hidden world.
RRP £45.00
10% online price saving Price: £40.50
Steidl 2006
336 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 3865212778
38.5 x 30 cm English text. Hardcover
In late September 2005, the photographer Robert Polidori travelled to New Orleans to record the destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina. Arriving at night he found few remaining inhabitants amongst the devastated ruins of the city. The next day he began photographing and entering the abandoned houses, many of which were still water-logged or carried the 8 ft tide-mark of the floods. Slowly he began to learn the system of graffiti signs and codes applied to the exterior of the buildings by the rescue forces. Each room he entered seemed to Polidori to be like a womb and he thought of his photographs as the work of a psychological voyeur, mapping the lives of the absent people through their abandoned belongings. The discovery of an abandoned body in one house reinforced his struggle with the problem of making beautiful images from human disaster. As with all his work, Polidori has succeeded in producing much more than a series of documentary images. Price: £45.00
Royal Mail 2006
224 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 094616553X
30.5 x 21 cm English text. Hardcover
Unseen UK opens with hastily snapped photographs of an alarm clock reading 4am, bleary-eyed postmen sorting mail, a fry up and a sleepy looking family gathered in a double bed. The viewer is launched, with an early morning jolt, into life as a British postie. The 240 photographs that make up Unseen UK are the final edit of 20,000 photographs submitted to photographer Stephen Gill for an experimental project, undertaken by the workforce of the Royal Mail, in aid of the charity Help the Hospices. Employees were given disposable cameras with which they had free reign to take pictures of their daily experiences.
With no specific brief to work from, the photographs are varied and at times random in content. An image of neighbours gathering to watch firemen attending to a house fire is followed by a blurry, action shot taken through the handlebars of a post bike. Among the unique and eccentric sights that posties encounter on their daily rounds, such as a miniature village set up within a front garden, certain subjects like scary dogs, staircases, front doors, landscapes, fellow workers and mail recipients appear regularly. The majority of the images obviously lack photographic expertise, several are out of focus, too dark and flash-exposed, but it is the instantaneous and impulsive feel to the photographs that make the collection attractive.
Gill has been wise to keep his edit diverse in location, allowing observers to feel like they are scanning all corners of Britain as they flick through the book. From typically suburban areas to the rural isolation of Inverie, in the Scottish Highlands, where postman Tommy McManmon, complete with Wellington boots and a postbag slung over his shoulder, climbs up a pebble shore away from an engulfing loch. He and his van are taken to Knoydart by landing craft, a village on the UK mainland unconnected to the road network.
In a light-hearted and entertaining way and with the ubiquitous British postie as an excellent guide, Gill allows us to glimpse a different perspective of the sights, scenes, places and people that form the fabric of daily life throughout the UK. Price: £20.00
Phaidon 2007
160 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 9780714846620
25 x 29 cm English text. Softcover
Stephen Shore’s photographs of ordinary America have had an extraordinary impact. Shore spent the 1970s criss-crossing the continent to assemble his two best known bodies of work, American Surfaces and Uncommon Places. These photographs focused on the minutiae of modern life, unveiling the exceptional beauty to be found in banality and, in the process, pioneering the two most important photographic idioms of the past thirty years: the diaristic snapshot (later taken up by such artists as Nan Goldin and Wolfgang Tillmans) and the monumentalized landscape (as practiced by such photographers as Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky). Shore was also one of the first art photographers to work in colour, capturing the sky blues, mustard yellows and avocado greens of a nation whose chromatic enthusiasm occasionally outstripped its taste.
Less well known are Shore’s earlier works. While still in high school in the mid-1960s he undertook a three-year project shooting Andy Warhol’s legendary studio, the Factory, at its creative peak, featuring a revolving cast of characters that included the Velvet Underground, Nico, Edie Sedgwick and of course Warhol himself. Soon afterward, inspired by the intellectually fertile late-1960s New York art scene, Shore produced a body of conceptual work seldom exhibited but fully engaged with the revolutionary ideas shaking the foundations of modern art. These works are fascinating not only for their contribution to the redefinition of the art object but also for the way they prefigured much of Shore’s work to follow, including American Surfaces and Uncommon Places.
Since the 1970s Shore has continued to expand his repertoire, moving effortlessly between black and white and colour, landscape and portraiture, large format and small. In so doing, he has proven himself to be one of contemporary art’s most vital photographers. As fellow photographer Joel Sternfeld writes in the Focus section, ‘What may ultimately be at stake in his pictures is the pure condition of sight itself.’
Christie Lange's Survey tracks the artist’s remarkable development from his precocious beginnings to his most recent groundbreaking work. In the Interview Michael Fried asks the artist what steps he takes when composing photographs to embody them with such a vivid sense of spatial empathy. Joel Sternfeld’s Focus looks at Holden Street, North Adams, Massachusetts, July 13, 1974, a deceptively simple image that masterfully interweaves colour, content and composition. Artist’s Choice features a range of historical quotes that distill centuries of wit and wisdom into a handful of timeless maxims. With language as uncluttered as his photographs, the Artist’s Writings offer a clear view of his incisive thinking on the subjects of photography, vision and experience.
192 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 9783836508858
14 x 19.5 cm English/french/German text. Hardcover
As sweet as raspberry ripple, as tempting as popcorn: welcome to the seductive photographs of Pierre et Gilles, the masters of glam, kitsch, nostalgia, and everything fabulous. Bizarre and full of obscure significance, glitter, flowers, and hearts, the portraits are reminiscent of stills from film melodramas.
This saccharine collection of kitsch encompasses selections of Pierre et Gilles's most delectable works on the recurring theme of sailors and the sea. Price: £3.99
Walther Konig 2006
320 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN-10 3865600549 ISBN-13 978-3865600547
22 x 28.5 cm English text. Hardcover
This beautifully produced book, published to accompany the travelling exhibition of the same name, presents the work of 24 contemporary photographers who are concerned not so much with the portrayal of reality, but rather of an artistically grounded idea of the world. Their photographs - marriages of documentation and artistic testimony - are introduced by scholarly essays exploring the 'documentary factor' in contemporary photography. Price: £38.00
Steidl Verlag 2008
216 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 9783865216083
30.2 X 30.4cm English Text. Hardcover
At the start of the 20th century, long before the triumphal march of the illustrated press, photography in the form of postcards was all the rage. This volume presents the extraordinary inventiveness in postcard production that unites elements of popular culture with photographic images. At the center of attention is the intense interaction between the so-called fantasy postcards and the avant-garde art of the 1920s and 1930s, the Dadaists and Surrealists. Paul Eluard, Andre Breton and Salvador Dali were enthusiastic collectors of fantasy postcards and Hannah Hoch, Herbert Bayer, Man Ray and many others used them as material for their work.
288 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 9783836501910
24.5 x 32 cm English text. Hardcover
Who took 1970’s porn esthetic and made it fashion chic? Terry Richardson. Who made the trailer park trendy and the tractor hat de rigueur? Richardson again. Who’s equally at home in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Purple and Vice? Our boy Terry. Who uses his fashion money to fund an X-rated website? Yes, Richardson. And who can’t resist getting his clothes off and jumping in front of his own lens? Well, that would be Terry Richardson as well.
Porn stars, supermodels, transsexuals, hillbillies, friends, pets, and celebrities all do for his lens what they’ll do for no other. And if anyone ever wonders why they did it, just blame it on Terryworld, where taboos are null and void, and fashion finds sex a perfect fit.
Includes over 70 new photographs not featured in the original edition Price: £11.99
Thames & Hudson 2007
272 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 9780500286623
17.5 x 23 cm English text. Flexicover
• How does the picture editor of The New York Times Magazine decide which photographer should shoot the next fashion spread?
• What kind of a photograph is worthy of being hung on a wall in The Photographers’ Gallery in London?
• What advice would art book publisher Gerhard Steidl give to a budding photographer?
Image Makers, Image Takers is the first book to examine systematically what inspires today’s photographers and what it is that makes them succeed. It reveals how some of the world’s most established photographers, from art, documentary, fashion, advertising and portraiture, actually work, and explores what it is that picture editors, curators, gallerists, agency directors and art book publishers are looking for when choosing an image.
Anne-Celine Jaeger delves into the working practice of famous photographers, unveiling the mysterious process of artistic creation involved in making and taking a photograph.
Whether it is basic questions of what to look for in an image, views on cropping or the use of colour over black-and-white, the shapers and makers of taste provide a unique and indispensable account of their working methods.
Anne-Celine Jaeger is a journalist and critic who has written for many publications, including Wallpaper*, the London Times and the Guardian, as well as the Süddeutsche Zeitung and Art Investor magazine in Germany. She first became fascinated by photography at the age of six – she later graduated from the University of Oxford and then City University, London.
RRP £17.95
10% online price saving Price: £16.15
140 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 9780810993808
41.5 x 30 cm English text. Hardcover
Best known for his elaborately choreographed, large-scale photographs, Gregory Crewdson is one of the most exciting and important artists working today. The images that comprise Crewdson’s new series, “Beneath the Roses,” take place in the homes, streets, and forests of unnamed small towns. The photographs portray emotionally charged moments of seemingly ordinary individuals caught in ambiguous and often disquieting circumstances. Both epic in scale and intimate in scope, these visually breathtaking photographs blur the distinctions between cinema and photography, reality and fantasy, what has happened and what is to come.
Beneath the Roses features an essay by acclaimed fiction writer Russell Banks, as well as many never-before-seen photographs, including production stills, lighting charts, sketches, and architectural plans, that serve as a window into Crewdson’s working process. The book is published to coincide with exhibitions in New York, London, and Los Angeles.
RRP £29.99
10% online price saving Price: £26.99
176 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 3865212387
30 x 21 cm English text. Softcover
At the beginning of the 1995 football season, Hans van der Meer set out to take a series of football photographs that avoided the cliched traditions of modern sports photography. In an attempt to record the game in its original form - a field, two goals and 22 players - he sought matches at the bottom end of the amateur leagues, the opposite end of the scale to the Champions' League. And he avoided the enclosed environment of the stadium and tight telescopic details and hyperbole of action photography. Preferring neutral lighting, framing and camera angles, he chose instead to pull back from the central subject of the pitch, locating the playing field and its unfolding action within a specific landscape and context. In 1988 he had curated a book, Interland, containing archival images of the Dutch national team between 1911 and 1955. He was heavily influenced by the old tradition of photography in which a wide view of the action often resulted in elements of the locality being present in the image. With the addition of graphic lines, these images were then used in newspapers to illustrate the movement of the ball to the goal. Van der Meer has applied his democratic viewpoint across the playing fields of Europe over the past decade, having travelled to every country with a significant history of the game. He began by focusing on sites within the Netherlands and in 1998 he published "Dutch Fields", followed by a DVD, "Flemish Fields", in 2000. His European odyssey has since taken him from small towns in the remote regions of Europe - from Bihariain in Romania to Bjorko in Sweden, from Torp in Norway to Alcsoors in Hungary, from Bartkowo in Poland to Beire in Portugal - and to the fringes of the major conurbations of Greece, Finland, England, France, Germany, Scotland, Switzerland, Holland, Slovakia, Denmark, Ireland, Wales, the Czech Republic, Belgium, Spain and Italy. These acute and subtle observations of the poetry and absurdity of human behaviour connect the game of football to the basic futility of the human condition. The small tragicomedies are dwarfed by the serenity and permanence of the natural or man-made world that surrounds them but in their pathos can be found the original passion and humanity of the game. Price: £17.50
Kunstmuseum Basel / Hatje Cantz 2007
128 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 9783775720199
25 x 30 cm English / German text. Hardcover
New groups of work by Andreas Gursky: an up-to-date view of the magnificent panoramas from the “megastar of the international art scene.” (Die Welt)
Andreas Gursky (*1955 in Leipzig) is one of the most important artists in the world to use large-format photographs as a means of expression. The Düsseldorf-based photographer is especially interested in congregations of people and the sites of their gatherings, ranging from the Tokyo Stock Exchange to mass raves. The realistic appearance of Andreas Gursky’s final images—the elements of which are adeptly reduced and digitally restructured—also allow for conceptual interpretation; they are always based on the interplay between accurate reproduction and abstraction.
This opulent publication focuses on the artist’s most recent creations, which is on display at the Kunstmuseum Basel. Two new groups of works in particular, reflecting on Formula One races and the famous Arirang Festival, a meticulously choreographed mass spectacle in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang, will be shown alongside the landscapes.
Wako Works of Art 2004
80 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. No ISBN
15 x 22 cm Softcover
Artists' Book edited and designed by Tillmans Price: £24.50
Princeton Architectural Press 2006
190 pages Duotone reproductions. ISBN 1568985304
17.5 x 21.5 cm English text. Softcover
One afternoon not long ago, Jason Bitner was on his way to the legendary demolition derby at the LaPorte County Fair. He stopped for lunch at B&J's American Cafe, and inadvertently stumbled on a forgotten archive. In the back of the restaurant were box upon box of studio portraits of the townspeople of LaPorte, Indiana. Each portrait in its unique way reveals a public and private face, reflections in a mirror of the everyday moments and events that define all our lives. Price: £10.99
P.S.1 / Steidl 2006
72 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 3865212638 ISBN-13 9783865212634
23 x 28 cm English text. Hardcover
Freedom From the Known is Wolfgang Tillmans’ first exhibition for an American museum, and unlike any he has ever previously mounted. The exhibition focuses on the artist’s purely abstract photographs, and explores the presence abstraction has had within his figurative and representational work. Twenty-four of the twenty-five large-scale works on view were produced specifically for this exhibition and have never before been shown. Price: £15.95
Aperture 2007
48 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 9781597110532
18 x 21.5 cm English text. Boardbook
Thomas Allen selects the pulpiest of pulp paperbacks and then lovingly slices out a figure from the cover, gently folds it into position, and constructs a witty scene around it. In Thirst, a sultry dame reaches from her cover toward a guy with a bottle on a nearby volume; in Teeter a man careens toward the edge of a stack of paperbacks ready to topple.
Inspired by a love of pop-up books, Allen revels in taking on different roles in creating his scenarios: "In addition to being a photographer, I play talent scout, casting director, stage manager, lighting supervisor, and film editor." He photographs these engaging tableaux in shallow focus, rendering his prints with the dreamy effect seen in the View-Master stereoscopic toy that also inspired him.
Well suited to the three-dimensional heft of a board book, the images in Uncovered are combined into an almost toylike object that will delight photography lovers, graphic designers, and bibliophiles with a sense of humor.
RRP £12.95
10% online price saving Price: £11.65
Nobody Press 2007
104 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 9780954940553
24.5 x 24.5 cm English text. Hardcover
‘Stephen Gill has learnt this: to haunt the places that haunt him. His photo-accumulations demonstrate a tender vision factored out of experience; alert, watchful, not overeager, wary of that mendacious conceit, ‘closure’. There is always flow, momentum, the sense of a man passing through a place that delights him. A sense of stepping down, immediate engagement, politic exchange. Then he remounts the bicycle and away. Loving retrievals, like a letter to a friend, never possession… What I like about Stephen Gill is that he has learnt to give us only as much as we need, the bones of the bones of the bones…’ - Iain Sinclair
Continuing to photograph where his award-winning book Hackney Wick left off, Stephen Gill has made Archaeology in Reverse in his cherished area in East London. Still making pictures with the camera he bought at Hackney Wick market for 50p, this time he focuses on things that do not yet exist.
This magnificently produced book features traces and clues of things to come in a poetic, sometimes eerie and quiet photographic study of a place in a state of limbo prior to the rapid transformation that this area faces during the build-up to the Olympics in 2012.
5% online price saving Price: £28.50
Magnum 2007
212 pages Colour reproductions ISBN 9782952410212
24 x 30.5 cm English text. Softcover
'While Fashion Magazine has a single photographer-author, it's still a magazine, not a book. So it doesn't follow my usual mode of slow, solitary production. It's collaboration. The ideas for the collaboration were formulated very quickly. I was approached by the folks at the Paris office of Magnum to work on this issue late last year. I immediately said yes. I was a huge fan of the previous two editions (by Martin Parr and Bruce Gilden) and was looking for an excuse to play with fashion. ... I often say that when I am making a portrait, I'm not 'capturing' the other person. If the photograph documents anything, it is the space between the subject and myself. Something similar is at work with Fashion Magazine. I'm not really comfortable saying I know anything about Paris or its fashion world. And I suspect that most fashionable Parisians know just as little about Minnesota. What is interesting is the space between us. My favorite example of this involves Chanel. In Paris, I photographed Karl Lagerfeld at the Grand Palais. In Minnesota, I photographed a girl with a Chanel shopping bag in front of Sally's Beauty Shop. With this magazine, I'm trying to explore the distance between those two places.' -- Alec Soth Price: £13.95
Abrams 2007
104 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 9780810992856
31 x 31 cm English text. Hardcover Often it takes an artist to show us that the familiar is in fact truly remarkable. Jeffrey Milstein's elegant photographs of commercial airliners have quickly become contemporary icons, published in 2005 in photomagazin, Graphis Photo Annual, and American Photography 21, and winning first place in the PDN Digital Photography Contest. Milstein's meticulously composed large-format photos of airliners in flight reveal the beauty and power of these sleek, complex machines and restores some of the glamour to the experience of air travel.
An eloquent foreword by Walter J. Boyne helps the reader appreciate these amazing technological wonders, and the book gives technical data on each airplane pictured. Not just for the aviation buffs but for anyone who appreciates the sublime beauty possible in even the most complex technology.
RRP 15.95
10% online price saving Price: £14.35
192 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 3865212077
23 x 28.5 cm English text. Hardcover
Eden or Paradise, that place of great or perfect happiness and satisfaction, is an ideal that is still sought today. It resonates across time and cultures, charged with both political and environmental concerns. "Picturing Eden" offers a rare opportunity to view the work of contemporary photographers who examine the many facets of paradise, from a place of contemplation and restoration, to a site of loneliness and despair. Organized in four sections - Paradise Lost, Paradise Reconstructed, Despairing of Paradise, and Paradise Anew - "Picturing Eden" explores the development and changing styles of the garden and concepts of paradise. By looking at the notion of paradise and the garden through the photographic lens, the book highlights the original lost innocence, the ongoing significance of a humanistic, culturally charged environment, and its place in the history of art. "Picturing Eden" includes selections of the work of Greta Anderson, Wayne Barrar, Jayne Hinds Bidaut, Binh Danh, Ed Dimsdale, Ruud van Empel, Adam Fuss, Sally Gall, Lyle Gomes, Gavin Hipkins, Matthias Hoch, Simen Johan, Izima Kaoru, Michael Kenna, Mark Kessell, Sally Mann, Lori Nix, Han Nyugen, Michael Parekowhai, John Pfahl, J. John Priola, Michael Rauner, David Robinson, Liz Ridel, Josephine Scabo, Vincent Serbin, Jiri Sigut, Camille Solyagua, Alec Soth, Mike and Doug Starn, Hongbin Sun, Maggie Taylor, JoAnn Verburg, Terri Weifenbach, Jo Whaley and Masao Yamamoto. Price: £30.00
120 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 3865211321
30 x 31.5 cm English text. Hardcover
Juergen Teller has spent the last year carrying out a study of the "Reichsparteitagsgelande", the site of the Nurnberg Rallies, and a place he used to visit in his youth. The results are a series of images of stone and flora, photographed over the four seasons of a year, in seed, bloom, demise and finally dormant in the snow. It amounts to a study of mortality, the process of birth, growth and death. The book combines these works with self-portraits and family photographs through the same period, adding the perspective of the personal and quotidian life cycle. Price: £50.00
Aspex Gallery 2007
112 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 9780955025815
28 x 22 cm English text. SoftcoverThe Caravan Gallery is a gallery in a caravan and visual arts project run by artists Jan Williams and Chris Teasdale who are on a mission to record the ordinary and extraordinary details of life in 21st century Britain.These photographs represent aspects of leisure, landscape and lifestyle in the UK today; some illustrate current trends and preoccupations such as ‘regeneration’ and the consequences thereof, others arise from chance encounters and accidental discoveries.
RRP £12.00
10% online price saving Price: £10.80
The Ice Plant 2006
80 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 0977648125
18 x 23 cm English text. Hardcover
Originally published in 2002 by J&L Books, OK OK OK quickly sold out. It was described by Printed Matter as "a series of beautifully composed Polaroids. Sequenced like a dream, the nameless places and close-up abstractions...belong together but to a different time. Price: £18.50
Film and Video Umbrella 2005
96 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 1904270212
31 x 28.5 cm English text. Hardcover
This elegant, beautifully illustrated publication presents three ambitious new series of works by the Israeli-born, London-based artist Ori Gersht, including The Forest, a major new film work commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella
Published to coincide with an exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery, London, this book with an essay by Jeremy Millar, explores the representation of history and catastrophe in photography, film and literature, and the possibility — or impossibility — of bearing witness to such events. A major new publication on one of the most thought-provoking young artists in Britain today, this book will appeal to those concerned with the importance of remembrance, and in the representation of history and place in contemporary culture. Price: £18.99
Steidl 2005
336 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 3865212093
Man beholds in the animal a part of himself and his relation to the world. Photographs show the animal as a true friend and a tool, as a dignified being and a monstrous creature. Animal pictures are reflections of the times in which they are made - whether it's a big-game hunt in the 19th century or a recent shoot for a cat food commercial. There are innumerable occasions for photographing animals: for research purposes and as trophies; to document what man has grown fond of or has exterminated; to arouse emotions or to create a work of art. This book presents the photographed animal from photography's beginnings up to the present in a depth and variety never seen before. This unique selection brings together work from the daguerreotype to modern press photographs, from amateur snapshots to images captured by famous photographers, covering practically all aspects of animal photography. Price: £28.00
48 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 386521195X
25.5 x 33 cm English/German text. Hardcover
Spawned by a commission from fashion designer Marc Jacobs for an advertising campaign, "Ohne Titel" is a collection of largely unpublished images of Juergen Teller and Cindy Sherman, which derive from Jacobs' initial concept. Both artists are known for blurring boundaries: film and fashion, advertising and art, public and private, real and fictitious. Sherman made her name with the "Untitled Film Stills" series (1977-1980), in which she played a number of mysterious characters vaguely reminiscent of scenes in international cinema. Juergen Teller's debut was marked by the front cover of "Sueddeutsche Zeitung" featuring a nude model with the word 'Versace' drawn in a heart across her chest. Teller epitomises the shift away from formal fashion photography to the more raw, apparently spontaneous look perfected in his Marc Jacobs campaigns and his personal work. Marc Jacobs' ads have often reflected his close relationships with artists, and in this instance he invited Cindy Sherman to work with Teller. Over the years, Sherman has regularly used fashion in her work - always working alone in her studio as the photographer, model, stylist and consumer, etc. This is her first collaboration with another photographer. Price: £17.50
Kunstverein Hannover 2005
248 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 377571622X
30 x 26 cm English/German text. Hardcover
In his photographs, Gregory Crewdson (born in 1962 in Brooklyn, New York) presents artfully condensed stories that essentially deal with the penetration of the mysterious into normalcy. In an image from his Twilight series (1998-2002), we see yellow school buses parked outside white wooden houses. Groups of students stand or lie around passively in different places. An idyllic scene, but only at first glance, as the image seems oddly "uncanny" in the Freudian sense. It shows something familiar yet unsettling, different, and somewhat inexplicable. What is really happening here? Crewdson goes to great lengths in dramatizing his disturbing suburban scenes, employing means more typical of Hollywood film productions. Using elaborate lighting, cranes, props, and extras, he stages his scenes, which are at the same time always an accurate portrayal of everyday life in America, with obsessive attention to detail.
This publication is the first to assemble all of the artist's photographic productions in a single volume and includes his most recent, previously unpublished series Beneath the Roses. Price: £29.99
Booth-Clibborn Editions 2005
108 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 1861542763
20 x 26 cm English text. Softcover
Through reportage photographs of people in the private and public environment, Tunnels explores the idea of isolation and the boundaries of knowing others and ourselves.
André Principe’s work is about emotions. In Tunnels, the artist looks at loneliness and the difficulty of communication while also reflecting on the limits of photography itself. The ability of the photographic medium to evoke "ghosts", a feeling of absence, is a recurring themes of Tunnels: people are often shot through windows, with their backs to the viewer or simply hiding away. Principe’s photographs communicate important issues around otherness and our inability to live in the present.
Tunnels is the first in a trilogy on photographic work about absence by Principe, with Bridges and Walls to follow. The three books are edited like novels dealing with abstract, non-pictorial themes that are usually associated with other genres such as literature or film.
André Príncipe studied Psychology at Porto University and Film Studies at ESTC in Lisbon. He works with film, video and photography. Price: £22.00
192 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 1568985576
25.5 x 25.5 cm English text. Hardcover
Today, the photo album is something we practically take for granted, and "scrapbooking" is a billion dollar industry with its own television network. It was not always so. Before the camera, ordinary families had little more than the family Bible, a portrait of grandpa, and a drawer full of documents. Then Eastman Kodak introduced the Brownie, giving Americans the means to document and record their daily lives. Hundreds of thousands of these cameras were pro- duced, and as a result small collections of photographs were assembled and preserved in an astonishing assortment of albums, with photographs as the raw material for collages, constructions, and text experiments.
Snapshot Chronicles is a visual exploration of the creative outpouring made possible by the camera. Friends, family, travel, domestic life, special occasions, the workplace, farm and city life—these were all intermingled in early albums in surprising and dynamic forms. Men, women, and even children became the creators of their own visual biographies, and documenters of previously unprecedented aspects of American life.
Four essayists weave together the history of the photo album, making them not just a part of our past but a significant aspect of Americana. Snapshot Chronicles is designed by noted graphic designer Martin Venezky It Is Beautiful...Then Gone. Price: £25.00
88 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 3865210252
30.5 x 23.5 cm English/French text. Hardcover
For three years, from Shanghai to Paris, by way of Bamako and New York, Gilles Coulon has traveled the world making photographs bathed in the elusive haze of neon light. The atmosphere of these images transports us into the atmosphere of each city he has photographed. Whether a restaurant in Cairo, the lobby of a building on Broadway, or a Niamey market at night, his photographs bear witness to the presence of man and cause our eyes to linger in familiar places. Price: £28.00
144 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 3865211984
17.5 x 22.5 cm Hardcover
From 2002 through 2005, Bertien van Manen visited families all over Europe to take pictures of their private photographs. In doing so, she collected traces of people's lives, of happiness and sadness, of war and suppression, and she encompassed a century of history, across differences in culture and the meeting of human minds and hearts. Van Manen took photographs of photos from family albums, of photos hanging on walls, and of photos simply present in people's lives. With the advances of digital or mobile-phone camera technology, this means of keeping private photos and retaining memories and histories is slowly disappearing. From 1990, Bertien van Manen travelled through the former Soviet Union to take photographs of people and families. The resulting book "A Hundred Summers, a Hundred Winters" was published in 1994. In 1997, she started a similar project in China. "East Wind West Wind" was then published in 2001. Van Manen received several prizes and awards, including a nomination for the City Bank Photography Prize in 2003. Her photographs are in the collections of Maison Europeenne de la Photographie, Paris, Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Collection la Salle, Chicago. Price: £17.50
powerHouse 2006
120 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 1576872521
24.5 x 23 cm English text. Hardcover
“At least a dozen of Helen Levitt’s photographs seem to me as beautiful, perceptive, satisfying, and enduring as any lyrical work that I know. In their general quality and coherence, moreover, the photographs as a whole body, as a book, seem to me to combine into a unified view of the world, an uninsistent but irrefutable manifesto of a way of seeing, and in a gently and wholly unpretentious way, a major poetic work.”
—James Agee
World-renowned for her iconic black-and-white street photographs, New York City’s visual poet laureate Helen Levitt also possesses a little-known archive of color work, which has been collected for the first time in Slide Show, her third powerHouse Books monograph.
In 1959, and again in 1960, Helen Levitt received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation to photograph in color on the streets of New York, where she had photographed two decades earlier in black-and-white. But tragically, the best of these pioneering color pictures were stolen from her apartment in 1970 and she had to start over again. In 1974 the new work was shown as a continuous slide projection at New York’s Museum of Modern Art—an early example of a slide show presentation by a museum and one of the first exhibitions of serious color photography anywhere in the world.
Slide Show presents more than one hundred photographs—including eight surviving images from the 1959–60 series—more than half of which have never been exhibited or published before. This impressive monograph is a worthy successor to her magnum opus, Crosstown, which included the largest collection of her color pictures to date, and to her more intimate volume of black-and-white work, Here and There, which presented more than eighty “unknown” Levitts taken over six decades. Price: £28.99
104 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 3865212123
30 x 24 cm English text. Hardcover
Nicolas Faure has been working on the theme of Swiss landscape since the 1990s, concentrating in particular on the blend between the Traditional and the Modern. The motorway is the meeting point of technology, architecture and a certain concept of Nature, and through his photographs, Faure elicits aspects that characterise Switzerland. A landscape always has a cultural component and landscape is one of the major concerns of Swiss culture. The motorways, which criss-cross the country virtually, divide it. They constitute a whole "new territory", enlivened by apparently natural but essentially man-made surroundings. These "natural surroundings" are but illusions. These places are the epitome of paradox: built amidst concrete artefacts, they are not accessible to visitors and almost invisible to motorists. Price: £30.00
Buchhandlug Walther Konig 2005
112 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 388375952X
17 x 24 cm. Hardcover
‘Fairy tales are more than children’s stories… they reveal fundamental truths and wisdom. If there is a collective unconscious, then fairy tales are surely firmly grounded in it and whoever is prepared to get involved with them can find them everywhere, knowing full well that everything will always end well.’ (Ute Behrend). Published alongside an exhibition at Museum Ludwig, Köln in 2005, photographer Ute Behrend plays with the idea of fairy tales, categorizing the world into good and bad. By placing them into the reality of our complex everyday life, she initiates a process of associative connections that don’t stop until we have created our own individual story. Her images abduct us into a different, unreal world that is nevertheless coherent, juxtaposing photographs of children at play, flowers and animals, toadstools and sinister, lonely landscapes. Price: £21.00
Princeton Architectural Press 2005
224 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 1568985622
During the late 1920s and '30s, as photography was establishing a firmer monopoly on the visual documentation of the built landscape, architectural photographer Samuel H. Gottscho created a now-classic portrait of New York as the quintessential modern metropolis. Silhouetting Manhattan's new skyscrapers, celebrated buildings - such as the American Radiator Building and Rockefeller Center - and signature skyline with a vision uniquely his own, Gottscho's carefully embraced the tenuous line between the documentary and the artistic in photography and shaped a New York through his lens that was distinctly Gottscho, yet unquestionably New York. "The Mythic City: Photographs of New York" by Samuel H. Gottscho, 1925 - 40, the first book on Gottscho, presents over 170 images of this great city and provides an impressive window to the New York City architecture and design of the 1930s - of individual buildings, aerial views of Manhattan at midday, or dramatic night shots. Price: £28.00
Twin Palms Publishers 2005
154 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 1931885346
28 x 35.5 cm English text. Hardcover
Art, fashion and pornography have their own standards of decency. The hierarchy is so rigid. Fine art has been elevated to the top, fashion is a bit lower than that, and porn's even a bit lower than that. I wanted to break through and introduce those genres to one another', jeff burton says, allowing the different levels of expression to merge. The sexualization of absolutely everything- bar sex. Burton reinterprets the very concept of pornography: His photographs capture the idea of seduction and sensuality, without the crude harshness of explicit hard-core imagery. Burton captivates, titillates and yet only hints at what is really going on. these scenes might be quite harmless, but nothing is as banal as it seems, and the atmosphere suggest a drama about to unfold. his viewers are thrown into the rather embarrassing but irresistible role of voyeur. Price: £47.00
Edition Patrick Frey 2005
112 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 3905509563
19.5 x 28 cm English text. Flexicover
In 1977, Pietro Mattloli took portraits in Zurich's first Punk and New Wave nightclub. Their reduced and austere aesthetics followed a simple formula: the sitters were photographed with a flashlight in front of a neutral background, a fast and immediate look that was as outrageously sensationalist as it was coolly narcissistic. Mattioll created portraits that still look as fresh as if they were taken last night. They are combined with views of modernist housing tracts. Their juxtaposition atmospherically hints at the epochal shifts that took place in the late 1970s, proving that style sometimes indeed does presage the future. The portraits are inside views from the incubator of what would later be hailed as "postmodernism". They are part of the immediate pre-history of the moment celebrated by this once inflationary term that in the meantime has as mysteriously and silently disappeared. Price: £24.95
192 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 1568985568
18 x 23.5 cm English text. Softcover
The book is a selection from Harvey Tulcensky's private collection of real photo postcards from the turn of the century (predominantly early 1900s). The cards are real silver gelatine printed photos depicting Americana, the pioneer life in the West, rural and city life, Main Street, the development of technology, transport, arts, electrical light, etc. Lots of the cards are surrealist photo-montages and exaggeration cards; they show fairgrounds, circuses, collages, people, etc. The book documents the very first steps of amateur photography (although some were taken by professionals in studios). They are beautiful photographs in a 3X5" format. Price: £10.99
Damiani 2005
176 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 8889431148
22 x 32 cm English text. Hardcover
Diana’s work actually requires few words. Even the most cursory of glances through this incredible collection gives the viewer the most intimate insight into her electric, scary, sexy, witty, hilarious otherworldly existence. Whether catching a glimpse of a solitary midnight swim, a moment of intense climax, or a naked masked ghoul on the back seat of the family saloon Diana’s subjects are the anti-heros of our bland coffee table culture. Every page crackles with a raw energy and a visual dexterity, leads you helplessly onwards through this fantastical exhibition of sex, nightmares, life, death, rock n’roll and everything along the way. Most importantly there is always a punchline and always a reason to celebrate being alive.
This new book; truly shocking, memorable and inspiring from start to finish is a moving and decisive exploration of all aspects of the human condition, a real test of the last few boundaries of public taste and decency, and a damn good ride.
Fundamentally these images are about life and all it can possibly throw at you, there is no other story worth telling and few other photographers I would rather hear it from… enjoy!
Rankin Price: £29.95
Scalo 2005
264 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 3039390015
26 x 31 cm English text. Hardcover
Swiss photographer Balthasar Burkhard's oeuvre continues the tradition of his compatriots Robert Frank and Jakob Tuggener, their ever-questioning search for the truth hidden in the surfaces of the world and their contemplative precision. This monograph provides the first comprehensive overview of his work from the 1970s to 2004. Burkhard's black-and-white photographs are characterized by rich details, perfect focus, and a mastery of craft that translates technical perfection into conceptual precision. Burkhard transforms the objective reality of his motifs into autonomous visual worlds with an immediacy and tender-sharp sensuality of their own. He carefully chooses detail and large-scale views of the visible world that are capable of asserting their presence in the most intimate realms of the viewer's mind. Price: £29.95
Aperture 2005
112 pages Colour and duotone reproductions. ISBN 1931788812
25 x 29 cm English text. Hardcover
Katy Grannan's striking portraits capture the desire of her subjects to offer themselves up to the camera lens. Each of her well-known series - "Poughkeepsie Journal," "Dream America," and "Morning Call" - began with a simple ad placed by Grannan in local newspapers: "Art Models. Artist/Photographer (female) seeks people for portraits. No experience necessary. Leave msg." After an initial telephone conversation, Grannan travels to the caller's home. Photographing her models in their own surroundings, she pays meticulous attention to the elements of their domestic settings: wood paneling, patterned wall-paper, and other mundane but often telling details. The subjects choose to remain clothed, to model nude, or to pause somewhere in between, working with Grannan to arrive at the pose. Throughout Model American, the influence of portraiture from classical painting to fashion advertising can be sensed in the poses and gazes her models adopt. Evoking everyone from Ophelia to Cindy Crawford - some with more savvy than others - they express a collective sense of the do's and don'ts to be observed in presenting oneself to the camera. The resulting images reflect the intensity of the relationship between artist and model. With subjects centrally framed and directly facing the camera, each image resonates with the tension of a first encounter. In Grannan's series "Sugar Camp Road" and her most recent work, she moves the exercise outdoors, using a municipal park as the backdrop. Even though the parklands that serve as her set bring the private encounters of her earlier series into the public landscape, she maintains a delicate - yet charged - sense of intimacy. Price: £22.00
Thames & Hudson 2005
120 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 0500543046
27 x 36.5 cm English text. Hardcover
Surprising and at times shocking, this visual journey takes us through the narrow streets and broad cityscapes of one of the most heavily populated corners of the globe. Yet it is also an insight into a peculiarly unpopulated place, inhabited only by the traces of city dwellers.
The scale of Wolf’s vision alternates between the grand and the intimate, capturing both the striking facades of the buildings themselves and the minute human interventions that mark them.
Wolf’s photographs reflect a deft combination of Western aesthetic formalism and Eastern wabi-sabi. The accompanying texts by Kenneth Baker and Douglas Young explore the choices people make of lifestyle, forms, functions, identity and design, as well as the notion of Hong Kong as a brand. Price: £29.95
224 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 0500285829
23.5 x 27 cm English text. Softcover
What are young photographers up to at the outset of the twenty-first century? How do they see the world? How much do they respect, build on or reject tradition? Are they busy in the darkroom or the computer lab – or both?
reGeneration sets out to discover answers to these intriguing questions, previewing the work of fifty photographers who, if they live up to their promise, may well emerge as some of the finest photographers of their generation.
This remarkable book, the broadest and most enterprising survey of its kind, showcases the creativity, ingenuity and inspiration of these up-and-coming photographic artists in over 200 superb images.
Curators at the world-renowned Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne selected the photographers from hundreds of candidates submitted by more than sixty of the world’s top photography schools. The panel’s choice was made with one key question in mind: is the photographer likely to be known in twenty years’ time? The results show that, as the new century builds momentum, the art of photography is alive and well, and that photographers of extraordinary talent are well on their way to making their mark. Price: £18.95
Abrams 2005
160 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 0810957868
Hilly Kristal originally intended his club to showcase the type of music his venue's notorious letters stand for: Country, Bluegrass, Blues. Little did he know his club on the Bowery would be the birthplace of a new era of music in New York City: Punk. While CBGB ultimately didn't describe the music the club was known for, OMFUG (Other Music for Uplifting Gormandizers) still represents what the club provides for all voracious “eaters” of music.
CBGB & OMFUG is a musical and cultural landmark, recognized worldwide and visited by countless tourists and music lovers each year. In these luminous pages, CBGB's influence and legacy is honored with 200 photos of some of the most celebrated artists in music history. With an introduction by Hilly Kristal, an afterword by David Byrne, and additional commentary by numerous performers and patrons, CBGB & OMFUG: Thirty Years from the Home of Underground Rock features unforgettable images by the many photographers who documented an American institution. Price: £12.99
Museum Schloss Moyland / Kerber Verlag 2005
68 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 3938025190
21.5 x 15.5 cm English/German text. Hardcover
Taiji Matsue (*Tokyo, 1963) belongs to the circle of young Japanese photographers who are making a name for themselves internationally. His low-contrast aerial images of natural and urban landscapes are taken from places throughout the world, alternating from densely populated city centres to suburbs, parking lots to geological formations. Matsue's work is rigorously conceptual and favours documentation over the spectacular, an approach informed by his qualifications as a geologist. Seen from above, these images present the surface of the earth, either as natural occurrences or man-made developments. Price: £15.00
Metroplis Books 2005
250 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 1933045043
35.5 x 28 cm English text. Hardcover
"..a smashing new book of photographs of arguably the most photogenic city in America…Looking at Los Angeles doesn't get mired in conventional stereotypes, but it smartly reconfigures our idea of 'lights, camera, action'."
--Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times
Loved, hated, revered, scorned, real, imagined: this is Los Angeles. Looking at Los Angeles is a fascinating journey into the center of the city’s heart and soul. Pictured within its pages is a Los Angeles of powerful dreams and startling realities. Editors Marla Hamburg Kennedy and Ben Stiller have gathered pictorial representations of Los Angeles from the last three-quarters of a century, resulting in this selection of more than 200 stunning, beautifully reproduced color and duotone depictions of the city from different eras and different points of view. Along with the carefully chosen images by approximately 100 photographers who have time again turned to Los Angeles for inspiration, a preface and foreword by the editors describe their great affection for the city, while David L. Ulin’s essay offers a critical and loving look at Los Angeles. A portion of the proceeds from the sale of this book will be donated to the Los Angeles Conservancy, and the organization provides an essay about the importance of saving this city's rich architectural heritage. ~Looking at Los Angeles is at once a lesson in history, architecture, style, and culture, and a remarkable visual and written tribute to one of America’s greatest cities. Includes photographs by: Robert Adams, John Baldessari, William Claxton, Will Connell, Joe Deal, John Divola, William Eggleston, Sam Fentress, Anthony Friedkin, John Humble, Dennis Keeley, Florian Maier-Aichen, Grant Mudford, Karin A. Mueller, Catherine Opie, Ed Ruscha, Stephen Shore, Julius Schulman, Joel Sternfeld, Timothy Street-Porter, John Swope, Andy Warhol, Julian Wasser, Robert Weingarten, Garry Winogrand, Max Yavno, and others. Price: £45.00
144 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 3865210848
43 x 28 cm English text. Hardcover
These pictures, made in the seventies and eighties, offer a window onto the beginning and breadth of Mitch Epstein's career. Most of these photographs are previously unpublished - culled from a body of work that goes back thirty years. Ordinary things here startle, while the extraordinary appears at perfect ease in the world. Teenage girls abandon a baby to fondle a snake; children sleep ass to the wind on a car in an open campground. People stake their private ground in public, if only for a moment - during which Epstein's camera finds them. Gesture gives many of these pictures their pulse. Tender hand, strained shoulder, swiveled hip. It isn't the fact of thirteen year olds smoking that shocks, but the grace and knowledge in the young fingers that hold the cigarettes. Epstein's sharp wit is laced with compassion. He has turned these rituals of boredom and beauty, excess and denial, alienation and possibility, into no less than a distillation of modern America. Price: £40.00
Kerber Verlag 2005
256 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 3936646740
17.5 x 24.5 cm English/German text. Hardcover
Concrete photography is a new category within concrete art and appears alongside other established modes of artistic expression, such as concrete painting, concrete music and concrete poetry. Although it is a subsection of photography, it is a phenomenon or discipline that to date does not contain a conclusive theory or comprehensive documentation even though autonomous images that emerged in the early 20th century have been influential today. This is the first publication to present the history, aesthetics and technique of the genre and features approximately 150 works by 80 international artists. Price: £26.00
120 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 3938025077
44 x 22.5 cm English/German text. Hardcover
Parking lots, multi-storey parking garages, underground parking: their only use is the temporary ‘stowing away’ of our mobility. As everyday spaces they consist of architectural modules that have the same appearance the world over. On account of their simplicity and obviousness, we normally take such places for granted. Nevertheless, they shape our urban surroundings and are part of an ever-present architecture in this age of globalization. The photographer Carsten Meier presents views from the tops of parking garages; beyond the railings the city seems to sprout from a void below. He shows the empty parking lots of recently closed or just built shopping centres, and depicts truly virtual locations with such convincing reality as to arouse a strong suspicion of manipulation.
Essays by Cindy Gates, Thomas Kaestle and others. Price: £64.00
Hatje Cantz 2005
144 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 3775715940
29.5 x 25 cm English/German text. Hardcover
Flamingo, Stardust, Caesar's Palace - the towering neon signs above the grand casinos and hotels along the strip also appear in the brilliant Las Vegas photos by Andreas Schmidt (born in 1967), but the images are altered - blurred, shot from a passing car, reversed, or reflected in a window pane. Schmidt is a master of the unexpected twist, the unusual perspective: a super-wide-angle shot sandwiches the spectacular panorama of the Las Vegas skyline into the narrow horizontal gap between two levels of dark concrete in a parking garage, endless hotel corridors vanish into nothingness, and vast, still-empty convention halls and carpets flow together to form absurd, magnificent patterns. The glamour and glitter of the strip is exposed in Schmidt's pictures as pure façade, as the ultimate megalomania - yet it loses none of its fascinating allure. Price: £29.99
248 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 3865210945
22 x 28 cm English text. Softcover
12.95
The American Pit Bull Terrier is one of the most maligned breeds of dog, especially in recent years, with sensational media reports of violence and viciousness. But pit bull people - old-timers, breeders and owners - have long shown the dogs fanatical devotion, establishing an entire culture around them. It is these people and their pets that have captured Marc Joseph's gaze over the past two years. American Pit Bull offers an alternative view of a controversial world. Travelling across America to visit his subjects in their backyards and homes, at dog shows, wild hog hunting events and weight-pulling competitions, Joseph has been granted unprecedented access to a culture known by few outside its own community and law enforcement agencies. There are the few remaining old-time dog men and they there are the rap stars and ghetto kids for whom owning a pit bull has become de rigueur. There are the regular folks, all across the country, whose pet pit bulls form an integral part of their family. And there are the pit bull owners in Europe and Asia, for whom the breed has attained a mythic, cult-like status. Price: £12.95
224 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 386521083X
21.5 x 28 cm English text. Softcover
For 25 years Tom Wood lived in New Brighton, just across the river Mersey from Liverpool. He became known locally as "photie man" because everyday he was out on the streets with his camera. Most of the pictures collected together in this book were taken within 5 minutes walk from Wood's home. The work focuses on the inhabitants of the town and its regular visitors, from Liverpool day-trippers to clubbers who attended the Chelsea Reach nightspot. Wood's images are a dazzling selection of cocky youths, friends, lovers, fathers, mothers and babies that provide insight into the area, it's inhabitants and the rites of passage inherent in growing up. Artist and curator Padraig Timoney has collaborated with Wood in the selection and sequencing of photographs to make a significant book-work. Price: £28.00
96 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 1931788545
25 x 28.5 cm English text. Hardcover
Though the sense of realism in German photographer Loretta Lux’s striking portraits of children remains eerily intact, Lux does not strive to create faithful photographic representations of her young subjects. Instead, each image–invariably comprised of a lone child in a sparse landscape–is painstakingly composed and manipulated to create psychically charged explorations of the nature of childhood and the process of self-discovery.
Originally trained as a painter, Lux continues to draw influence from paintings by Old Masters such as Velasquez, Goya, and Runge. This influence is especially apparent in Lux’s compositions. After carefully choosing the models, costumes, and backdrops–sometimes using her own paintings–she digitally combines and enhances each element to form meticulously structured tableaux. The consistently forlorn expressions of her models combined with the hyperreality of the image create portraits that transcend their subjects and remind us that childhood is as chaotic and multidimensional as any other part of life.
Loretta Lux was born in Dresden, Germany in 1969 and currently lives and works in Ireland. Her work has been exhibited extensively and is included in several collections in Europe and the United States, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Norton Museum of Art, the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlung, Munich, Artothek Munich, Photo Museum Munich, and Fotomuseum Den Haag. Price: £19.50
142 pages Duotone reproductions. ISBN 0500542996
18 x 25 cm English text. Hardcover
In the course of over forty years of artistic endeavour, the Bechers have focused unrelentingly on the same subject matter, and have thus gradually compiled a photographic encyclopaedia of industrial buildings and plants which is of unsurpassed importance.
Basic Forms of Industrial Buildings brings together sixty-one photographs that constitute a representative selection from the broad range of subjects chosen by the Bechers in what are characteristic ‘portraits’ of the objects in question. Subjects include cooling towers, water towers and winding towers, blast furnaces, lime kilns, gravel plants, grain elevators, gas tanks, and even details of the interiors of these industrial edifices.
Rendered timeless by the camera and isolated from their original, often perplexingly complex surroundings, they appear as monumental symbols of their own history – with all the stylistic diversity of great masterpieces of architecture. Price: £19.95
224 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 3775715754
29.5 x 24.5 cm English text. Hardcover
Impressively serene, touching, or close to the edge-the young Finnish photography scene has many facets. A real find!
Photography is one of the most successful items of cultural export in Finland. Now, for the first time, the internationally acknowledged artists are gathered together in one extensive book accompanying an exhibition travelling around the world. The Helsinki School presents works from over thirty different artists who have been studying or teaching at TaiK, the University of Art and Design in Helsinki. The goal is to introduce a new approach to where photography is in Finland today. Based on a concept by Timothy Persons and Jorma Puranen the amply illustrated volume presents an astounding overview.
Artists featured (selection): Nanna Hänninen, Ilkka Halso, Ulla Jokisalo, Aino Kannisto, Sandra Kantanen, Pertti Kekarainen, Ola Kolehmainen, Janne Lehtinen, Niko Luoma, Riitta Päiväläinen, Jyrki Parantainen, Jorma Puranen, Pentti Sammallahti, Jari Silomäki, Santeri Tuori Price: £24.95
Steidl/Barbican 2005
192 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 3865210953
30.5 x 25 cm English text. Hardcover
Price: £25.00
Universe 2004
160 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 0789312042
24 x 31 cm English text. Hardcover
Richard Kern offers an unusually intimate look at women. His inspired, unique, and "real" approach is as daring as ever in this volume. Beyond traditional portraiture, his photographs manifest a strong eroticism while incorporating the cinematic power of his earlier "Transgression" works. Richard Kern offers an unusually intimate look at women. His inspired, unique, and "real" approach is as daring as ever in this volume. Beyond traditional portraiture, his photographs manifest a strong eroticism while incorporating the cinematic power of his earlier "Transgression" works. Preface by Matthew Higgs Price: £30.00
Steidl dangin 2005
96 pages Colour reproductions. IBSN 3865210341
26.5 x 23.5 cm English text. Hardcover
In Half-Frame Marcy Robinson transforms simple objects into awe-inspiring forces. A rare half frame camera discovered in a closet during Robinson's teen years inspired this title. The instrument, originally her father's, uses only half the area of a 35-millimeter frame. Robinson exploits this to establish a unique viewpoint. She freezes the details of everyday scenes using plays on light and proportion that make photos, beds, window shades, traffic cones, chandeliers, paintings, grassy knolls, and trees appear larger than life, yet diminutive and fragile. Robinson makes the ordinary extraordinary: A wooden telephone pole spears a cloudy blue sky. A ghostly rectangle of dirt crosses the sinking black lines of a gutted swimming pool. The face of Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz peers out from a lone coffee mug standing before a window of dark iron bars. A tiny dead deer lies across the never-ending yellow lines of a highway. The disproportion of such tender objects against dark or vast scenery, like the deer stretched out on the infinite ribbon of the interstate, strikes the eye like a flame. This collection - never before seen - gives the viewer a unique gift: new eyes with which to gaze on our environment. The result is that neither the small nuances nor the intimate relationships they denote to the artist go unnoticed. Price: £22.00
Nobody 2005
64 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 0954940504
31 x 26 cm English text. Hardcover
This book of photographs show is a paradox: how florescent saftey-clothing, which is intended to make workers in potentially dangerous occupations conspicuous, can make its wearerrs invisible. They are the latest series by a photographer with a sustained interest in the way cities work. It is as if the metropolis is a complicated clock
which no one ever sees - or rather notices - being wound up. Mark Haworth-Booth Price: £22.00
powerHouse Books 2004
144 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 1576872157
21 x 26 cm English text. Hardcover
Rocking on tour with America's heavy metal superstars - Kiss, Poison, Iron Maiden, Slaughter, Ted Nugent, Dokken, and Cinderella - photographer David Yellen captures the classically trashy style of the headbangers, metalheads, burnouts, and self-styled fanatics, tailgating in anticipation of the show or hanging by the backstage door hoping to make it to the promised land of the bands' dressing rooms. In Too Fast For Love, Yellen travels from Michigan to Miami, from Pennsylvania to Omaha, to explore a moment frozen in hairspray, bleached perms, mullets, spandex cat suits, denim cutoffs, more pleather than you can imagine, leopard, tiger, and snake prints, ripped fishnets, bare breasts and hairy chests, G-strings and platforms, pierced nipples and tongues, studded belts and bracelets, raccoon eyes, press-on nails, and hyper lip liner. Bang your head to this! Price: £22.50
Aperture 2004
112 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 1931788480
25 x 29.5 cm English text. Hardcover
Over the last thirty years, Candida Hofer has created meticulously composed images of the interiors of public and institutional spaces - spaces marked with the richness of human activity, yet largely devoid of human presence. Whether it be a photograph of a national library, or a lounge room at Volkswagen's corporate headquarters, Hofer's images ask us to conduct a distanced examination through the widow she has created. Seen as a collection, Hofer's rhythmically patterned images present a universe of interiors wholly constructed by human intention, unearthing patterns of order, logic, and disruption imposed on these spaces by their now absent creators and inhabitants. Price: £19.50
Ikon Gallery 2004
120 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 1904864015
27.5 x 22.5cm English/Japanese text. Hardcover
This catalogue accompanies the Ikon exhibition Somebodies, the first solo show in the UK by Japanese photographer Noguchi Rika. Consisting of four photographic series, I Dreamt of Flying, 2004, Colour of the Planet, 2004, About the World Below Zero, 2001– 2 and Rocket Hill, 2001, The Planet demonstrates the artist’s distinct vision of our world as an alien place. Noguchi does not manipulate her images, either through direction of her subjects or through darkroom processes. ‘I wish to photograph the truth’, she explains, and '[to find] new ways of looking at the earth’.
Essays by Noguchi Rika, Atsuo Yasuda (curator, Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan) and Jonathan Watkins. Price: £19.95
San Francisco MoMA 2004
208 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 0300106041
24 x 26.5 cm English text. Hardcover
Japan's brilliant and influential postwar photographer Shomei Tomatsu (b. 1930) has created some of the most dramatic images in the history of photography. Many of his photographs have become icons of the twentieth century. This important book is the first in-depth English-language study of Tomatsu's work. Richly illustrated and handsomely designed, it features more than one hundred plates representing - in ten thematic sections - the full range of his career. Tomatsu emerged in the 1950s with his sensitive pictures of postwar Japan. In the 1960s the artist turned his camera to the aftermath of the atomic bomb and the lingering presence of the U. S. military in his homeland.
In subsequent decades his lens has captured the elation of Japan's economic boom and the problems inspired by his culture's increasing westernisation. Throughout, Tomatsu's pictures have consistently resonated not only with Japanese society but also with American culture. Included in this book are essays by distinguished scholars on all aspects of the artist's life and career as well as a selection of brief excerpts from Tomatsu's own writings, many of which have never appeared in English. Skin of the Nation is both a literal and metaphorical reference to the surfaces that have appeared in countless pictures throughout Tomatsu's career. For the artist, skin is more than just a surface, it is a kind of map in which one can read the story of Japan - its essence and its future. Price: £30.00
Photoworks/Steidl 2004
144 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 3882439769
23 x 29.5 cm English text. Hardcover
Nigel Shafran's work is characterized by the quiet observation of everyday life. His chosen subject matter is deliberately low-key and often domestic in nature: doing the dishes, his Dad's office, charity shops, flea markets. And yet, his work extracts from this something profound and consistently beautiful, the sense of a natural order in ordinary things, or, as Shafran puts it, "an acceptance of how things are." This monograph surveys Shafran's work from early portraits and fashion photography for, among others, Vogue, Harpers Bazaar, The Face and i-D, through more recent series such as Ruth's Book, Washing Up 2000, and Dad's Office. This publication will also include Shafran's most recent domestic interiors and a new homage to scaffolding, as well as a selection of his favourite snapshots and excerpts from his scrapbooks. To emphasize the delicate, unpretentious quality of his work, the book will also will be punctuated by the drawings and doodles that often animate his ideas and decorate his workbooks. ~Nigel Shafran is the first in a new series of Photoworks books entitled Contemporary Photographers that will survey the work of the most important emerging photographers in the U.K. and establish a benchmark the exciting photographic work published to the highest standards. Price: £19.95
Scalo 2004
176 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 3908247799
35 x 29.5 cm English text. Hardcover
Larry Sultan's most recent body of photographs, The Valley, examines the adult film industry's use of middle-class houses as stage sets. Sultan first gained access to these sets through an editorial assignment in 1999 and became intrigued by the idea of staging erotic fantasies in such banal circumstances. He does not focus on the sex acts themselves, but instead frames his photographs to include the surrounding architecture and the off-camera activities of the actors and crew.
His last major project, Pictures from Home, took his own family as its subject and explored photography's role in creating a familial mythology. In this new series, Sultan turns to broader questions of domesticity. Glamorous stage lighting cannot conceal the almost unbearable ordinariness of these homes, with their knick-knacks and big-screen TVs, fine-art prints and dining room sets. His pictures beg the question: What is it about these houses and their middle-class decor that makes them suitable settings for projected sexual fantasies?
Although they are nominally about adult films, Sultan's pictures are also interrogations of the photographic medium itself. He shows how photography can create the illusion of fantasy, and then he uses his pictures to dismantle those same fictions. Lush backyards are exposed as mere painted backdrops; even the beautiful, sexually uninhibited porn stars seem less exotic and more familiar when seen between takes, waiting for makeup or instructions from the director-especially when Sultan catches the actors in moments of contemplation, boredom, and fatigue. Price: £49.50
Schirmer/Mosel 2004
208 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 3829600615
24 x 30 cm English/German text. Softcover
Famous for her unusual portraits of women and female nudes, French photographer Bettina Rheims' focus is the visualization of female eroticism. She will be celebrated in a major travelling retrospective starting in Helsinki in February 2004. This accompanying book provides a representative overview of her work created between 1979 and 2002. Price: £29.95
Twin Palms Publishers 2004
144 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 0944092780
24 x 30 cm English text. Hardcover
Designed by Jack Pierson and Jack Woody. Published in conjunction with Jack Pierson's participation in the Whitney Biennial in New York City in 2004. The book is made up entirely of portraits, all of them of a quiet yet eloquent simplicity and elegance. The collection's rigorous focus is on his male subjects, as Pierson sees and celebrates them, with an interesting emphasis on their faces, close-ups (such as the cover image) that show the human face in a new and arresting light. There are many sexually suggestive poses but the men are in their underwear or have their hands over their genitals. This Artist Book is the First Volume of a projected two-volume collection that Twin Palms/Twelve Trees Press will publish. The two books will be devoted exclusively to his male portraits. The Second Volume (due in Spring 2005) will show the same models as full-frontal nudes. Meanwhile, here they are, the dishevelled faces of male beauty, as Jack Pierson sees them, wilfully, movingly and convincingly.Limited Edition of 4000 copies. Price: £47.50
Ridinghouse 2003
114 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 0954171039
22 x 17 cm English/Spanish text. Hardcover
The first monograph dedicated to the photography of Enrique Metinides, this publication includes an essay by respected intellectual Néstor García Canclini who considers Metinides' oeuvre in relation to themes of transcendence, the city and the accident. An interview with Metinides by the artist Gabriel Kuri offers an absorbing portrait of the man and an analysis of the unusual context in which he worked. The book is lavishly illustrated with 75 colour and duotone plates and is published in a bi-lingual Spanish and English edition. Price: £14.95
Skira 2003
224 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 8884914914
27 x 22 cm Italian text. Hardcover
The work of Armin Linke is one of the most committed and interesting attempts to represent, on a global scale, images of the transformations taking place in the world today. An emerging artist on the international scene, over the last decade Linke has worked on the project 4flights, which is a 360-degree interpretation of the profound metamorphoses that urban and natural landscapes have undergone due to current political changes and modern man-made constructions. For this project Linke has produced thousands of images, with this volume presenting the first significant selection of 200 photographs. Organized as both an atlas and an impossible archive, Transient is a courageous undertaking which sheds new light - from the South Pole to Las Vegas, from Lagos to the ex-Soviet Union - on the transformations taking place in today's landscape and on man's place in this new world. The book is designed by Cornell Windly (another emerging figure in graphics and contemporary art) and includes text and dialogues by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Stefano Boeri, Stalker, Amedeo Martegani and Luca Molinari. Price: £25.95
2003
112 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 3883756970
17 x 24 cm English/German text. Hardcover
Born in London in 1961, Adam Fuss creates photograms in colour and black and white and glossy daguerreotypes from magnesium plates. Since the early 90s Fuss, who is now based in New York, has been setting standards in contemporary photography with these photographic processes. His work can now be found in the world’s most important collections, and the Metropolitan Museum in New York has been collecting his photographs for over ten years. This book presents over 100 new works in which Fuss attempts to record life and death. Colourful spirals lead into the depths; snakes create waves in water; babies appear to be x-rayed by his photographic light. Price: £21.50
Black Dog Publishing 2003
96 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 1901033198
24 x 20cm English text. Hardcover
In this book of photographs by the acclaimed and controversial performance artist Franko B, a document of the ignored and marginalised people in the city is presented without sentiment or sensation. This dossier of the homeless focuses not on the individual portrait, as in conventional documentary photography, but instead looks at the hidden aspects of their lives and environment. These pictures chart an experience of loneliness and abandonment through the many makeshift beds, concealed living spaces and hoarded rubbish turned to new use as protection and shelter. Rather than a straightforward political statement, Still Life explores issues of safety and vulnerability in more general terms. Price: £16.95
Editions Treville, Tokyo 2002
96 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 4309904939
26 x 18 cm Softcover
Fans of Mika's previous books will remember 'Baby Blue Sky' and 'Pink Rose Suite' with its bright blue and pink printed lenticular cover, and this new title, bright green, with strawberry and fish printed lenticular cover, will not be a disappointment. Containing images in glorious 'technicolor' reminiscent of the American 50's Dream quality but from a Japanese perspective, you'll just want to decorate your house with these pictures. Price: £24.50
