Sale Books

• Self 2021
• Hardback, 1st edition. 96pp
• New
  

A book to celebrate 200 years since the discovery of Antarctica.

Signed copy.

• Charcoal Press 2022
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New
  

From Where Loss Comes is an unblinking look at how sacrifice and belonging are deeply rooted in the human experience.

Sixty photographs and close to 9,000 words consider a pain and suffering that is private, sacrificial, and yet rattles against values that are thought of as being inalienable — our fundamental human rights.

It is a story of the root causes of female genital cutting and mutilation (FGM/C). The practice presents a tragic dialectic. By submitting to a personal loss, a woman may be assured of membership in a community. Her alternative is to remain intact and enter into exile. It is an impossible choice.

For this work, Pradip Malde (Tanzania, 1957) returned to his birth country after an absence of forty-six years. WITH Sarah Mwaga, founder of the Anti Female Genital Mutilation Network (AFNET), he traveled more than 3,000 miles over three years, visiting remote communities to converse with and to photograph activist women (victims of FGM/C), the sacred sites where these rituals take place, and the cutting tools used by ngariba (Swahilli for “circumcisers”) who have renounced the practice.

Malde received a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2018 to complete the project. This book is dedicated to the life and work of Sarah Mwaga, who passed away in 2021 just as the book was at its final stages of production.

14"x 10" beautifully printed Swiss-bound hardback.

• Stanley Barker 2022
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

A week before the global COVID-19 pandemic took hold in 2020 the Australian artist Trent Parke found himself on a whirlwind road trip across India. 

The frenetic photographs in Parke's new book Cue the Sun were all produced from fast moving vehicles, of the outside world as it rushed by, almost as if in a dream. 

The people rendered at 1000th of a second, are working through the night, pushing towards a smartphone driven modernity. 

“I kept feeling as though I could have been in any number of other countries at a given time. Though the windows I felt the past and future collide. The contradiction, beauty, chaos and hope. Humanity on the move.” Trent Parke

This unique artist book is contracted as a unique, 20 meter long, double printed concertina, taking you on a fantastical journey through the kinetic Indian night to the breath-taking dawn. 

Out of print, final few sealed copies.

• Setanta 2022
• Softcover, 1st edition, 180p
• New

Black Country was made by Gilden in 2013 whilst on commission for Multi-Story projects. During his three week stay Gilden documented overlooked people, factories and homes in the Midlands in order to unveil and study the changing landscape of post-industrialised Britain.

Gilden focused on the neglected and marginalised communities; his goal was to shine a light not only on people who are often ignored in day to day society, but also on the trades and ideals that are slowly fading into history in the UK.

The design of his new monograph directly draws upon the themes which Gilden investigated whilst producing the work. Bound using stainless steel screws to appear like a factory manual, the book is presented in a beautiful cover printed with silver on black paper.

Screwpost bound softcover, 57 images with 6 gatefolds.

• Mack Books 2022
• Softcover, 1st edition
• New
  

With essays by Wendy Ewald, Abigail Winograd, and Edgar Garcia.  

• Stanley Barker 2022
• Set of 12 cards in folder, 1st edition
• New

This new limited edition object, includes twelve photographs produced by photographer Robbie Lawrence in his home nation of Scotland over the past five years. Together they form a meditation on the relationship between people and place, and create an affirmation of life north of the border against an increasingly fraught political landscape across the UK.

Released to coincide with an exhibition at Stills Gallery, Northern Diary draws inspiration from classic Valentine’s sets that in years gone by, one would purchase while away from a loved one to attempt to share an experience of their travels.

“I have never thought of myself as a Scottish photographer. But a growing interest in my cultural heritage led me to begin documenting my trips home to see my family. The phrase Northern Diary appeared several times in my notebooks over the years and became a kind of totem for the work.” - Robbie Lawrence

Embossed case containing 12 heavy weighted cards, size 200x150mm.

Out of print, now rare set.

• Chose Commune 2022
• Softcover, 1st edition
• Near fine - see below

In 1973, Seiichi Furuya left Japan for Europe on board of the Trans-Siberian train. He arrived in Austria where he first settled in Vienna, before moving to Graz where he met Christine Gössler in 1978. From this day forward, he started photographing her, in the intimacy of their home in Graz but also during their travels abroad — to Germany, England, Italy…and Japan, their most distant destination. Christine studied art history and worked for the radio, making documentary programs. After the birth of their son in 1981, she became increasingly involved in the world of theatre. As she was devoting herself to her acting lessons, she started to show signs of schizophrenia. Christine committed suicide in East Berlin in 1985.

Since Christine’s disappearance, Furuya has never stopped revisiting his archive. This initiative was presented in a series of five books entitled Mémoires, published between 1989 and 2010, and in Face to Face, published by Chose Commune in 2020. In 2018, Seiichi Furuya found super 8 film rolls in his attic. One of them was a recording of the very first trip he made with Christine, in Bologna in 1978 a few weeks after they had met. As an attempt to remember a trip he had completely forgotten about, Seiichi Furuya started extracting stills from the film, frame by frame. These images compose his new series First Trip to Bologna 1978. Together with this series, in the same book, we are releasing a newly edited version of Last Trip to Venice 1985, which was first self-published in 2002. This series presents photographs from Seiichi and Christine’s very last trip, before Christine took her own life.

Signed to a sticker.

Light damage to the cover - see photo example.  Otherwise fine.

• Stanley Barker 2022
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

Mimi Plumb used to live on the edges of the city where the rents were cheap. Nearby, on the summit of the hill, were folded layers of radiolarian chert, the fossilized remains of microscopic creatures called radiolaria. A large crevice in the hillside was a reminder of the ever-present threat of an earthquake. 

Warm Water Cove, along the bay, was a spectacle of tires and abandoned cars. One day Plumb photographed the chimney of the power station above the fiery destruction of the 25th Street Pier. She watched planes flying over the city dump of cardboard hillsides. 

“Downtown buildings on the far-off horizon reminded me of Oz. My cat, Pearl, kept watch on the rooftop of my flat.” - Mimi Plumb 

Plumb’s life was marked by nights out dancing at the Crystal Pistol in the Mission, or listening to a punk polka band at the Oasis. Neil, the clarinet player, wore faux leather naugahosen, with spikes protruding from his head. Sometimes they played pool at Palace Billiards. At the Exotic/Erotic Ball, a bird man and a nurse hid in the corners. A steely-eyed silver man in his tuxedo stared back at Plumb from behind his mask, the camera flash shining a light on him.

Plumb’s days were spent visiting abandoned schools and derelict gas stations, a billboard claiming ‘dangerously close to homemade.’ 

To Plumb the magical clanging of the San Francisco cable cars was a world away, and the idealism of the 1960s seemed long gone. The Golden City of San Francisco, fraying at its edges, showed the growing chasm between the rich and poor. 

The pictures in The Golden City were made between 1984 and 2020. 

Out of print, rare title.

• 1605 Publishers 2022
• Hardback, 1st edition
• good - see below

'Beauty's counter weight
Dark eyes falling, gesture, hands.
Infinitely joining key & lock & later maybe man.
Newton's only perfect proposition quietly realized.
Simply said: the true & trembling task.'

"After Beauty" is inspired by a poem of an artist and a poet Walter Fields, which also begins the book. According to Sullivan, it's more than just beauty that makes someone beautiful, it's the person's character and the attitude towards life.

"There is something magical about publishing that somehow makes the work more real. I love the conversations between the images on a printed page and the stories that unfold as you move through a book. I am so thrilled to share the pages of this book with some of Walter Fields' poetry..." - Maura adds.

Edition of 500 copies.  Signed to a bookplate.

Small dent to top edge of cover and first few pages - see photos.  Otherwise as new.

• Mack Books 2014
• Softcover, 1st edition
• New

Roe Ethridge’s practice is that of a restless maverick and his constantly evolving visual sensibility has spawned a myriad of copyists in what has become known as ‘the new school of synthetic photography’.

In this his latest artist book, Ethridge conflates a rich array of photographic tropes, combining personal documentary images made in western Palm Beach County, his mother’s childhood home, with surreal collage works, and a series discarded from a Chanel fashion shoot. These are interwoven with what appears to be a carefully directed scene depicting a teeth-white Durango SUV sinking into and then being retrieved from a canal. The clash of visual styles, histories and meaning establish a flatline of dissonance underscored by the touchline admonition of the neon title - SACRIFICE YOUR BODY.

Ethridge's storytelling invokes a sense of discomfit akin to David Lynch’s film-making, a lucid undermining of veracity and morality and the ingrained materiality that underpins American life.

Sealed.

• Self-published 2021
• Softcover, 1st edition, 358p
• New

Thomas Dworzak spent almost a decade between 2004-2013 following the Georgian military as it fought in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. His new book “Khidi” – The Bridge, shows his photos as a feature movie script, written by Dutch writers and directors Ineke Smits and Jeroen Stout. It follows a fictional unit as it defends a bridge from insurgents “in a war that maybe isn’t theirs.” The book’s release, unintentionally, coincided with America’s much-debated withdrawal from the country, closing a chapter of US intervention in the region.

Signed copy.

• Mack Books 2022
• Hardback, 1st edition with print
• New

• Kodoji Press 2021
• Softcover, 1st edition, 480p
• New

The Last Survivor is the First Suspect is at once a celebration and a requiem. The project, captured between 2005 and 2009 by photographer Nick Haymes, is a record of a drifting community of young friends based mainly between two distinct geographic points: Southern California and Tulsa, Oklahoma. The book's narrative merges a sense of joy in documenting burgeoning friendships and bonds, and a looming sense of dread that would ultimately culminate in a series of tragedies.

Weaving throughout Haymes intimate photographs are a series of digital screenshots which Haymes has identified as key to this moment in time, which offer the viewer a secondary narrative of engagement. Social media was still relatively young and Haymes became acutely aware of a new nodal sense of communication between these distinct groups of friends. Platforms such as MySpace, YouTube and online message boards engendered a sense of community by enabling connection, while also setting new and impossible standards and expectations. Diligently collected, these various forms of communication between the characters frame a foreboding.

In Haymes’ own introduction to the book he accounts how his camera allowed him to compensate for a sense of crippling shyness developed during his teenage years. ’I picked up a camera and hid, discovering I could once again be near people, intimate with them, without having to engage,’ he writes. To create this exhibition and publication, the artist has returned to a body of pictures, piecing together what happened to these people for himself. Here, Haymes invites us to form a contemporary engagement with this specific historic moment, where things are both different and the same in equal measure. L.P. Hartley famously opened his coming of age opus The Go-Between ’The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.’ The Last Survivor is the First Suspect shows this sentiment with remarkable clarity.

Edition of 700 copies.

• Aperture 2022
• Hardback, 1st edition, 312p
• New

Judith Joy Ross: Photographs 1978–2015 is an illuminating retrospective that explores the life and career of a revered American photographer, illustrated by two hundred of her images, many never before seen or published.

The work of Judith Joy Ross marks a watershed in the lineage of the photographic portrait. Her pictures—unpretentious, quietly penetrating, startling in their transparency—consistently achieve the capacity to glimpse the past, present, and perhaps even the future of the individuals who stand before her lens. Adolescents swim at a local municipal park, ordinary people are at work and play. From immigrants and refugees, to tech workers and students, military reservists and civilians—all are incisively rendered with equal tenderness in Ross’s black-and-white, large-format portraits.

Published alongside the largest exhibition to feature Ross’s work to date, and drawn from her extensive archive of photographs made over the span of more than thirty-five years, Judith Joy Ross: Photographs 1978–2015 encompasses the best work of this influential photographer.

• Mack Books 2022
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

‘There is so much I can’t say in my photographs, though it’s all there, just below the surface, if you know what to look for.’

In Look at me like you love me, Jess T. Dugan reflects on desire, intimacy, companionship, and the ways our identities are shaped by these experiences. In this highly personal collection of work, Dugan brings together self-portraits, portraits of individuals and couples, and still lifes, interwoven with diaristic writings reflecting on relationships, solitude, family, loss, healing, and the transformations that define a life. Dugan has long used photography to understand their own identity and to connect with others on a deeper level. Their process of working slowly and collaboratively discloses moments of heightened psychological intensity in images that transcend the specifics of a particular person or place, engaging with what it means to know oneself alongside and through others.

Using medium-format cameras and natural lighting, Dugan employs traditional photographic practices to depict these contemporary subjects, resulting in images that both evoke and reimagine the conventional dynamics of art-historical portraiture. Brought together here, these photographs function as an extended, oblique self-portrait as much as a catalogue of friends and loved ones. Through a diffuse but studied sequence of image and text, Look at me like you love me brings our attention to one of the most powerful and complex forms of intimacy – that of seeing and being seen.

The signed edition includes an extra image plate signed by the artist and glued into the inside back cover.

• Trespasser 2021
• Softcover, 1st edition
• New

Languor is an ode to NYC’s Central Park. With the pandemic at hand and the history of Seneca Village in mind, Smallwood created photographs of tentative comfort and appreciation as an examination of nature, home, tranquility, and escape.

Edition of 1500 copies.  11.5x14 inches. 56 pages. 35 tritone plates on uncoated paper.

• Mack Books 2022
• Hardback, 1st edition, 320pp
• New

Embossed linen hardcover with front and back tip-in, 17 x 24 cm

The signed edition includes a slip signed by the artist and bound into the inside back cover.

• Journal 2021
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

Using Dante’s Inferno as a loose narrative set in the contemporary world, the book is as a personal journey expressed through images that reveal a sense of unreality – a kind of veiled dreamscape – but at the same time reminiscent of the underlying unease of living in a world unable to deal with major crises threatening a fragile human existence. As such, the book is also a personal response to the current covid pandemic. 

The word “interregnum” describes a period with lack of clear leadership in a country, organisation or social order. Failed states will often be in an interregnum. 

Ronny Rønning explores a visual language that can represent the anxieties of living in a world seemingly out of control. The images has a reference to reality, but also contains something more ambivalent – an empty, dark, and foreboding landscape, as after the catastrophe, with only remnants of human life. 

As part of finding a visual language for the book, Ronny Rønning has experimented with the photo medium. He has used an analogue camera, black & white film and flash. During development the film has been exposed to light in an attempt to find a visual expression appropriate for the book’s topic. 

Text in English.

• RRB 2021
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

I photograph dying buildings and Quarry Hill was terminal by the time I got to it. Times change and I know there was no point in keeping Quarry Hill Flats. But what it stood for might have been worth keeping” - Peter Mitchell

RRB Photobooks are pleased to announce the forthcoming publication Epilogue -The Demise of the Quarry Hill Flats by Peter Mitchell. The book acts as a sequel to his 1990 publication Memento Mori, which documented the dramatic impact of the Quarry Hill redevelopment project in Leeds. 

The book contains over 40 new images, documenting the abandonment and subsequent demolition of the site, adding a poignant final chapter to the 1990 publication and its later facsimile edition. Largely eschewing the archive material seen in Memento Mori, Epilogue takes a more narrative approach to telling this final part of the story. Mitchell is again the lone wanderer in an increasingly unpopulated and other-wordly landscape.

Quarry Hill was a large housing estate in Leeds built in the 1930's as part of a ‘great social experiment’ to accommodate an entire community of 3000 people. By the 1970's both the vision and the flats were crumbling and the decision was made to demolish.

Though the notion of Utopia underpins the narrative of Quarry Hill, from its passionately visionary beginnings to its step-by-step decline and final end, there are no real morals or easy conclusions to be drawn.  As Bernard Crick wrote, it was “small things, not any inherent fault in the grand design, which destroyed Quarry Hill.”  It was more about timings than anything else - a sad ending. Peter Mitchell’s chronicles and photographs simply show what happens to utopias when they implode.

For a limited period all copies will also ship with a  5x5" signed c-print (horse image)

• RRB 2021
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

I photograph dying buildings and Quarry Hill was terminal by the time I got to it. Times change and I know there was no point in keeping Quarry Hill Flats. But what it stood for might have been worth keeping” - Peter Mitchell

RRB Photobooks are pleased to announce the forthcoming publication Epilogue -The Demise of the Quarry Hill Flats by Peter Mitchell. The book acts as a sequel to his 1990 publication Memento Mori, which documented the dramatic impact of the Quarry Hill redevelopment project in Leeds. 

The book contains over 40 new images, documenting the abandonment and subsequent demolition of the site, adding a poignant final chapter to the 1990 publication and its later facsimile edition. Largely eschewing the archive material seen in Memento Mori, Epilogue takes a more narrative approach to telling this final part of the story. Mitchell is again the lone wanderer in an increasingly unpopulated and other-wordly landscape.

Quarry Hill was a large housing estate in Leeds built in the 1930's as part of a ‘great social experiment’ to accommodate an entire community of 3000 people. By the 1970's both the vision and the flats were crumbling and the decision was made to demolish.

Though the notion of Utopia underpins the narrative of Quarry Hill, from its passionately visionary beginnings to its step-by-step decline and final end, there are no real morals or easy conclusions to be drawn.  As Bernard Crick wrote, it was “small things, not any inherent fault in the grand design, which destroyed Quarry Hill.”  It was more about timings than anything else - a sad ending. Peter Mitchell’s chronicles and photographs simply show what happens to utopias when they implode.

Special Edition of 100 copies, Inclusive of a signed & limited print of 'Abandoned Car' see first image after cover.  

For a limited period this will also ship with an additional 5"x5" signed c-print (horse image)

• Stanley Barker 2021
• Hardback, 1st edition, 208p
• New
  

The photographs in Mark Steinmetz's expansive new book Rivers & Towns were made in the 1980s in working class towns and cities in Connecticut, USA. 

"The brooding factories and mills built alongside rivers had seen their heyday and were beginning to decline. I was moved by these places and wanted to describe the bridges, houses, and streets, and to show something of people's inner lives. At the same time, I was trying to discover myself as a photographer." - Mark Steinmetz 

• studiofaganel 2021
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New
  
  

'Da Gorizia alle Ande' is Paolo Gasparini's art book published by studiofaganel.

As in his photobooks, 'Da Gorizia alle Ande' is also a confluence of 'images, graphics, the intersection of poetic visions, the work of translation and typographic printing’, as Gasparini calls it. Unlike his photo photobooks, in this new editorial project, the photographer involved two poets, Alejandro Sebastiani Verlezza (Caracas, Venezuela) and Francesco Tomada (Udine, Italy), and included a digital fine art print in each copy of the print run.

The story is thus jointly entrusted to the images of the photographer and the texts of the two authors who each 'speak' in their own language, Italian for Tomada and Spanish for Verlezza. Sometimes Gasparini also intervenes, using both languages, thus determines a three-voice dialogue.

The sequence of 32 black and white diptychs ends with a single image that is the original print applied to the book. The narration flows towards the end which is placed in the center of the book and is divided into two parts that start from the two covers, which have different colors and languages: blue and Italian for the 'European part', magenta and Spanish for 'the Latin American one'.

This subdivision symbolizes the photographer's two 'worlds' and his comings and goings between one world and another: the Italian one, of origin and returns, and the Latin American one, of residence, work and commitment.

To embrace the sequence there are two color photographs from the late 1970s, relevant to the artist on a personal and collective level, and two old photographs of the Gasparini's family archive.

Throughout the artbook, the metaphor of childhood and the spontaneity of a child's gaze is present and alive, which the artist always has had and was able to preserve, and which finds expression in the image entitled Los niños nos miran (1997) chosen as the original print.

This one is also the only photograph on which the two poets, Verlezza and Tomada, both encounter and write, focusing on the concept of beauty and sharing a message of hope.

The book contains a booklet in which all the original texts in Italian and Spanish are mutually translated, with the addition of the English translation.

Edition of 300 numbered copies.  Signed copy.

• EXB 2021
• Hardback, 1st edition, 224pp
• New

This monograph by Patrick Zachmann accompanies his major exhibition at the Museum of Art and History of Judaism in Paris presenting a selection of his work from the years 1970 to 2015.

The book brings together a dozen of his major series, some of which have never been published. The photographic work of Patrick Zachmann, member of Magnum Photos, is complex and dense. It can be read in particular in the light of several recurring themes that run through it. The first, and one of the most important, is the question of Jewish identity. This identity, he will seek it, explore it, discover it, starting by taking an introspective look at his own family before going to different countries in Europe. From his reflections will emerge other paths that the photographer easily takes, such as those of exile or disappearance. He photographs neo-Nazi gatherings in South Africa, in Rwanda, survivors of the genocide, or even in Chile, the disappearance of people during the dictatorship.

In this corpus, Zachmann points out the weaknesses of our relationships with others, while revisiting his own work.

Text in French only.

• EXB 2021
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

This new series by Paolo Pellegrin celebrates the eleventh title of the collection Des oiseaux (On birds). Magnum photographer best known for his works testifying to political, economic or even ecological upheavals, his curious mind leads him to focus on subjects that are sometimes more contemplative, where nature holds a major place. Thus, during a stay in Japan in 2019, Paolo Pellegrin, who left to witness the blooming of the cherry trees, is more struck by the majesty and the aerial ballet of a colony of black kites flying over the temple of Shimogamo, Shinto shrine of the 7th century, in the heart of a primary forest.

English Edition.


Video courtesy EXB

• EXB 2021
• Hardback, 2nd edition
• New

The first publication of End Time City listed Michael Ackerman as a major figure in photography. Twenty years later, this new edition, reimagined by the artist, presents a selection of his iconic photographs, enriched with many completely new images, taken during his recent trips to Benares, in 2018 and 2020. This new visual corpus gives to see a greater presence of animals in Ackerman's universe. 

The latter takes us on a crazy stroll through the narrow streets of Benares, the most sacred city in Hinduism, which welcomes pilgrims who have come to die here to erase their sins and put an end to the cycle of rebirth.

English edition.



Video courtesy EXB

• Journal 2021
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

He Called Me a Sparrow is a long-term project where Hannamari Shakya turns her gaze inwards and looks at what she’s been nesting inside. Soon she realised that the traumas that she had were only partly hers – and partly her parents. 

How to describe the indescribable and how to visualise the invisible? 

The book is a visual study of something that cannot be seen. When something cannot be seen, it usually cannot be recognised. When it cannot be identified, it cannot be validated.

Although He Called Me A Sparrow is an index of agony and struggle, at the same time it is a remembrance of love, affection and forgiveness.

• Stanley Barker 2021
• Hardback, 2nd edition
• New

On a map of the south-eastern U.S., the 245-mile Ogeechee River cuts a diagonal path across Eastern Georgia before curling south of the city of Savannah and emptying into the Atlantic Ocean. It is known locally as Blackwater River for its slow moving waters that are like black glass, reflecting the sky and flora overhead and masking the tangle of life forces beneath.

In November 2017, Robbie Lawrence, accompanied by writer Sala Patterson, travelled to the Low Country, the coastal region straddling Georgia and South Carolina near where the Ogeechee River meets the ocean with the aim of documenting the nuances of issues driving news cycles and political divisions through the lens of one place in America.

Blackwater River captures, in image and spirit, Lawrences time in the Low Country – a series of profound encounters and abstract reflections, some inspiring, others harsh but all indelible. Each moment is individually significant while collectively hinting at larger, more elusive truths.

2nd edition.

• Self 2021
• Hardback, 1st edition. 96pp
• New
  

A book to celebrate 200 years since the discovery of Antarctica.

• Stanley Barker 2021
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

After an unfortunate event on the streets of Boston in 1976, resulting in a head injury to an angry man while working with a 35mm camera, the American artist Mike Smith traded in his his Leica for a Linhof Press 23 camera, and moved away from spontaneous street photography to a more intimate portraits.

He would go on to produce a detailed record of the inhabitants of Boston’s streets in an inclusive, non-judgmental, and yet direct approach. Smith worked with a large camera with an even larger flat unit, a formidable machine that got peoples attention and held it long enough for him to complete the related tasks to operate it successfully. “The driving force, above of all, was my whole-hearted embrace of the photography as a way of life. As a Vietnam veteran (where I first discovered the medium) at the age of twenty, for the first time, I believed I had a future to pursue.”

• Mack 2021
• Softcover, 1st edition
• New

Dark Mirrors assembles sixteen essays by photographer and critic Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa focusing on contemporary fine art photographic and video practices that are principally, though not exclusively, rooted in the United States, written between 2015 and 2021. Wolukau-Wanambwa analyses the image’s relationship to the urgent and complex questions that define our era, through the lens of artistic practices and works which insightfully engage with the ongoing contemporaneity of disparate histories and the ever-changing status of the visual in social life.

The book sets out an argument that one of the most dynamic sites of artistic invention in photographic practice over the past decade has been the photographic book, and thus many of the essays in the volume assess artistic works as they are bodied forth in that form. Among the recurrent themes that emerge from these rigorous, probing essays are the complex interrelationship of anti-blackness and visuality, the fragility and complexity of embodied difference in portraiture, the potency of verbal and visual media as social forms, and the politics of attention.

With essays on Deana Lawson, Dana Lixenberg, Paul Pfeiffer, Arthur Jafa, Katy Grannan, and Robert Bergman among others. 

• T&G 2021
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

A cinematic meditation on nature and civilisation, Markus Andersen’s Intimate plunges us into minutiae of urban life in Sydney. Using a telephoto lens, he carves a silent path through the city, capturing a procession of nameless faces, their expressions blown up and immortalised in black and white.

“I shoot fast, take the frame and move. I guess it’s like trying to capture lightning in a bottle,” Andersen says. Shot in extreme close-up and drenched in sunlight, his moody, monochromatic images transmit the full spectrum of human emotion. The inner battles, the hidden vulnerabilities, are laid bare for all to see. Masterfully juxtaposing street photography with tender portraits of the environment, Andersen evokes a bittersweet sense of nostalgia, of disconnection, and denial.

At once mesmeric and beckoning, Intimate transports us to the dark heart of urbanisation and our seemingly limitless appetite for destruction. In doing so, he sheds light on our dormant yearnings to be reacquainted with the natural world and, ultimately, our complicity in its demise.

Signed copy.

Supplied with a signed C-Type print: 190mm wide x 127mm deep (5”x7”), printed on Kodak Archival Endura 260gsm (see image)

• Mack 2021
• Set of 2 Hardbacks, 1st Mack edition
• New

Kawada’s The Map / Chizu is the most famous and sought after book in the history of Japanese photography. Designed with the noted graphic designer Kohei Sugiura, Chizu has seen numerous editions since its original publication in August 1965. In November 2001, New York Public Library acquired the rarest version of the book, Kikuji Kawada’s unique, handmade maquette. The maquette presents a notably different physicality than that of the published edition—many of the pictures are the same but with variant croppings, tonalities, orientations, and a markedly dissimilar configuration with a pair of jacketed volumes—each nearly twice as large in format as the published version—separated by a black-and-white divider. With its pages made of thin, silvery darkroom prints, folded in half and pasted back-to-back, there are no folios to unfurl, only a progression of intense, full-bleed images. This MACK version is an exquisite facsimile of the two-volume maquette, and includes an accompanying bilingual booklet featuring new scholarship by Joshua Chuang and Miyuki Hinton, together with an extended interview with the artist, detailing the evolution of one of the greatest photobooks ever made.  

Two hardback books, each with a jacket, plus one paperback booklet with leporello fold. Housed in a buckram bound hardback slipcase, protected in a printed cardboard mailer.  Text in English and Japanese.

The signed edition includes a slip signed by the artist and bound into the inside back cover.

• Stanley Barker 2021
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

“This is how I remember New York City in 2002. I was 19 years old and had just moved to Manhattan from my family’s small farm on Long Island. It was the first summer after the September 11 attacks. Workers were removing the last of the debris from the collapsed Twin Towers. The city felt both immense and fragile compared to the groundedness of my childhood home.”

“On weekdays, I worked in Arnold Newman’s photography studio. After hours and on weekends, I walked through the city’s five boroughs with my camera. When someone made eye contact with me, I asked if I could make a portrait of them. At first, I assumed people would respond with caution. I was a stranger. The city was recovering from an event that shook its sense of security. Yet, most people said yes and looked straight into my camera lens. I am grateful they chose to trust me.” - Lucas Foglia

Published on the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, Lucas Foglia’s portraits show the tremendous diversity of New York City. Everyone is portrayed with dignity, regardless of age, gender, sexual orientation, or ethnicity. Today, as the world begins to heal from the coronavirus pandemic, the photographs remind us to approach strangers with compassion, across social distances.

• Super Labo 2021
• Hardback, 1st edition
• Near fine

"The first picture, gas station through the car window, starts the trip off.I drove eight days, in July,1991, from Atlanta, Georgia to Memphis, Tennessee along small roads, and stopped along the way. When I got to the cities, like Jackson or Birmingham, or Montgomery, I stopped at parking meters and walked around blocks. My intention was not to make a book---only pictures.

After thirty years, and the exposure of extreme political incompetence with the recent past governments, I looked at this work again and thought it might be an accidental view of the South in three parts: Black people, white people, and the infrastructure at the time. Cotton was an early, fundamental, economic driver, with profit enhanced and insured by slaves. Cotton is a picture book, but with a political and social backstory. I stopped at a small black church and used two pictures to emphasize the hold of religion and strong women.Instead of square miles of cotton fields I saw its trace in small cardboard boxes.

The book’s last picture of the five boys on the bench seems emblematic of the region’s resulting, and often segregated leisure. The camera made an unconscious litmus test with black and white film exposed to the acid nature of racism."

_ Mark Cohen

Final copies with very faint surface wear/marking to cover.

• Roshin 2017
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

In 2011 Jörgen Axelvall moved to Tokyo after living in NYC for 15 years. The work in “Go To Become” is Axelvall’s expression of his feelings as a newcomer to Japan. It is in every aspect biographical. The oxymoronic combination of feeling excluded and lonely on the crowded streets of Tokyo led Axelvall to seek out desolate and quiet environments. These places soon became his personal sanctuaries where he would find refuge and peace of mind from the hustle of the city, often in the middle of night. Several of these photographs earned Axelvall the New Exposure Award from US Vogue and Bottega Veneta in 2013. When asked by the jury for a brief description Axelvall said the following:

“I live in a big city the biggest in the world by some measure. I’m a foreigner here, at times I feel trapped, alienated and lonely amongst the millions of people calling this home. These images were all photographed in central Tokyo not far from my home in Shibuya at the sanctuaries where I find peace”

A lover of poetry and literature, Axelvall later teamed up with Mutsuo Takahashi, one of the most prominent and prolific poets in contemporary Japan. With more than 130 books published, including dozens of poetry collections, Takahashi’s poetry successfully spans all the major Japanese poetic forms. After listening to Axelvall’s story and looking at the photographs, Takahashi wrote the poem “Go To Become” [なりに行く in Japanese] specially for this project.

Signed copy.

• Mack 2021
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

Winner of the 2021 MACK First Book Award

“A raw and introspective portrayal of Harris’ experience as an autistic, non-binary, transgender artist, tracing their struggles with mental illness, self-love and gender identity.” – British Journal of Photography

“At first the focus of my project was my gender transition, but along the way I found out that it’s about an ongoing search for myself: being a human with feelings, who is continuously developing.” — Marvel Harris
 
MARVEL describes the journey of Marvel Harris’ personal battles with mental illness, self-love, acceptance, and gender identity, all told through a searing collection of self-portraits spanning the course of five years. These photographs present a new-found visual language; a tool with which Marvel was able to express those emotions that, on account of his autism, he previously struggled to make sense of. The process of making these portraits allowed him to connect to the world around him at the time he needed it most.
 
Winner of the MACK First Book Award 2021, MARVEL is an important new voice which contributes to an increased awareness of the issues surrounding gender identity and mental health. In doing so, this deeply personal book demands a more tolerant attitude from society towards transgender people and those who don’t identify as entirely male or female.

The signed edition includes a slip signed by the artist and bound into the inside back cover. 

• Mack 2021
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

‘Like that of all serious artists, [Schulz-Dornburg's] work [is] more than how it can be described: a keen political intelligence combined with a poet’s feeling for light, stone, form and shimmering horizons.’ – The New York Times

In 1983, Ursula Schulz-Dornburg accompanied two ethnologists and an architect on a research trip to Tana Toraja on the central Indonesian island of Sulawesi. Initiated by the Royal Tropical Institute of Amsterdam, the trip was intended to “explore the changing patterns in architecture and symbolism among the Sa‘dan Toraja”. On the way back from Rantepao to Ujung Pandang airport, Schulz-Dornburg passed the distinctive houses of the Bugis or To-Ugiq people, perched on the yellow paddy fields. Fascinated by their complex, expressive architectures, she began to photograph the houses in the short time she had before leaving, realising that the structures would likely not exist in their traditional form for much longer. The result is a body of work that not only surveys the houses’ physical forms but also considers wide-ranging ideas of physical and emotional homebuilding and the precarious place of tradition in the present day.

Poised between heaven and earth and standing above the water when the rice fields are flooded, the Bugis houses reflect the creation myth of their people, in which the gods of the upper and lower worlds came together to create man to populate the uninhabited middle world. The farmers depicted by Schulz-Dornburg are likewise suspended between historic tradition and the impending pressures of the contemporary world. As they go about their work or greet her camera, they and their homes are held in the balance between past and future, mythology and everyday reality.

With these shrewd and sensitive images, Schulz-Dornburg captures life as it is built and lived within a particular culture and landscape, offering a searching reflection on the places we call home.

The signed edition includes a slip signed by the artist and bound into the inside back cover.

• Stanley Barker 2021
• Hardback, 2nd edition, 1st printing
• New

Following the birth of his son Atlas, Christopher Anderson stepped away from war photography, turning his camera towards an intimate reflections of family life, resulting in his 2013 book Son. 

Stanley/Barker is proud to publish a beautifully reimagined edition which adds a second chapter of 80 new pages to the story, following Christopher and Atlas's relationship up to the present day. The book includes both Anderson's original images from Son (2013) plus 40 never before seen images.

“These photographs are an organic response to an experience that is at the same time the most unique and the most universal of experiences: the birth of a child. At the same time that I was experiencing the intense joy of new life, my father was diagnosed with lung cancer. It’s fair to say that I found myself reflecting on obvious themes of life and death. Through my son, my role as the son took on new meaning and my senses were hyper tuned to the evidence of my own life passing. Then these photographs just sort of happened. They are a record of love and a reflection on the seasonal nature of life.”  - Christopher Anderson 

1st printing of the Stanley Barker edition.  Final copies.

• Nazraeli 2020
• Hardback, 1st edition with print, 16pp
• New

Mark Steinmetz’s first book of cat photographs, Ancient Tigers of My Neighborhood, was published in a limited edition as part of our Six by Six series, and was nominated by Robert Adams as a “Best Book of 2010” at the Kassel Photobook Festival in Germany. For his first contribution to our new One Picture Book Two series, Steinmetz again has chosen cats as the subject and we are pleased to make this aspect of the artist’s work available to a wider audience.

Beautifully printed on Matt art paper, Cats features fourteen never before published photographs of cats and kittens making themselves at home in Athens, Georgia.

Mark Steinmetz is a Guggenheim Fellow, and his work is included in the permanent collections of many important institutions, including Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. 

Cats is limited to 500 numbered copies, each including a 5x7 inch original print that has been signed by the artist (see colour image).

Out of print, final copies.

• Mack Books 2021
• Hardback, 1st edition
• Near fine

‘We live our lives in widening circles, rarely appreciating their nature and how they bring us back. In a year, my daughter will be leaving home and is no stranger to a similar wanderlust I once knew. As a father, I always felt it was important to instill a profound sense of place, to identify with a certain place as home, even as these ideals have, over recent years, taken on relative meaning. I photograph close to home as memory loses structure, its architecture, trying to make light speak from the fixed edges of rooms long vanished.’ - Raymond Meeks

Inspired by his daughter’s entrance into adulthood and her imminent departure from home, Raymond Meeks studies the centrifugal forces of the places we live – how they anchor us, repel us, and return to us – through scenes that appear both fragile and immovable. In these photographs, gardens give way to thicket, houses are suspended on stacked railroad ties, and telephone wires and train lines suggest the networks we build to find our way through the world’s wilderness.

Among these domestic landscapes are portraits of Meeks’ daughter, which capture the introspection and inquisitiveness of early adulthood while paying tribute to the ultimate mystery of their subject’s consciousness. Following the success of Meeks’ previous book, ciprian honey cathedral, Somersault is a concise, poetic reflection on home and the ties that bind us to it — all the stronger as they fade into the half-light.

The signed edition includes a slip signed by the artist and bound into the inside back cover.

Faint surface wear to the white cover.  Inside as new.

• Deadbeat Club Press 2021
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

As the title of Kovi Konowiecki’s debut monograph – and in its place, another – reminds us, we are always and forever subject to the twin certitudes of transience and change. As is the artist, who has moved back and forth between California, Mexico, Europe, and the Middle East, all of which places are part of the fabric of this sprawling, unscripted book. 

Here we are confronted with the geographical and emotional margins of society and the mind: the external and internal boundaries that inhibit both human movement and human potential. The photographs portray individuals and communities that exist in a liminal space between belonging and abandonment, many of which exert feelings of desolation.

But what might seem on the surface political is made intensely personal through Konowiecki’s purposeful reliance on emotional connections in the pictures rather than specific relationships of place or subject. As he says, this work comes as a “happy accident, inspired by the frequent travels that nourished a sharp eye for the liminal types of communities to which I am drawn: people I have met in my wanderings, passersby in the street, a horse trained in a small Arab village, and untended gardens.”

The “unscripted” nature of the work has an impact on the form of the book, in particular in the variety of genres and colors, from landscape photography to portraiture and from black and white to color. The various forms of expression serve as ways to materialize the ideas at the core of the project and to break down barriers or restrictions within the photographic medium.

Signed copy.

• Mack Books 2021
  
• Softcover, 1st edition
  
• New
  

On the islands in the Strait of Hormuz, off the southern coast of Iran, there is a common belief that the winds can possess a person, bringing illness and disease. The existence of similar convictions in some African countries suggests that the cult may have been brought to Iran from southeast Africa through the Arab slave trade. This history is rarely spoken about but these winds and the traces they have left on the islands and their inhabitants are the touchstone for Hoda Afshar's Speak The Wind. Through her subtle and perceptive images of the extraordinary landscapes, the people and their rituals, Afshar's beautiful and complex book attempts to picture the wind and its psychic entanglements, to form a visible record of the invisible.

The signed edition includes a slip signed by the artist and glued into the inside back cover.

• Mack 2021
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

The British Isles is an account of thirteen years of life across the United Kingdom, as seen through the lens of Jamie Hawkesworth. In this sprawling sequence of portraits and landscapes, Hawkesworth surveys the characters and terrains that make up the everyday fabric of his home country: schoolchildren and shopworkers, markets and estates, priests and professionals, cities and construction sites.

These photographs chart an alternative history of this eventful period of British history; a period punctuated by austerity, referenda, celebration, and conflict. And yet as much as a historical document this book is an exercise in curiosity, presenting a radically democratising portrait of the United Kingdom in which individuals, buildings and natural scenes are imbued with Hawkesworth's generous and dignifying eye. 

Signed to the title page in pencil.  

• Super Labo 2021
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

123 Polaroids is not simply a selection of 123 images from 223’s extensive and fabulous collection of Polaroid work, on which he embarked in the early 2000s from his hometown of Guangzhou, China. It is a deep dive into his intimate memories of dear ones, his inexpensive Polaroid films and his travels across China, Tibet, South East Asia, Japan and Europe. It is a panoply of his love, fashionable nudity, of expressive glaring portraits, of colorful landscapes and people, of embracing bodies in playful melancholy, of eroticism, of a sense of absence and untold more, all fashioned by the touch of the stunning imperfections of this medium and the master’s talent.

223 once told me that labeling or selecting 1, 2 or 3 of his photographs as the best ones would be extremely difficult because each one speaks about a memory, an intimate moment from a period in his life. To those words, I add that the beauty of a photograph is not just the image, with its composition, colors, albedo, and perfection or simplicity –– it is also an entanglement of actual memories, and of the sensations the image can ignite. In that light, 123 Polaroids conveys the intent and breadth of a poet, uniquely giving voice to the intercourse of 223’s intimate souvenirs, ignited sensations and 123 Polaroids.

Pink cover only.

• Stanley Barker 2021
• Hardback, 1st edition, 128pp
• New

In 1986, the American artist Judith Black was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship with the intention of documenting a cross-country road trip with her four children. Unlike Robert Frank’s iconic Guggenheim-funded road trip 30 years earlier, Black’s mission was much more intimate. Rather than documenting America, her intention was to photograph her children, friends, and family as she traversed the country. Her itinerary included stops in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and various sights along the way.

During the trip, Black visited her aunt at the Michigan cabin, where as a child Black and her family went each August to avoid the brutal summer heat of her hometown Springfield, Illinois. Ironically, it was there at the age of seven that Black purchased her first Brownie camera, while staying with her grandmother. 

After returning to Massachusetts, Black continued photographing family and friends during vacations, recording various celebrations, birthdays, reunions, and births.

“Sweet memories and histories embedded in each photograph.” - Judith Black 

• Xavier Barral 2021
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• New
  

To celebrate the 10th title of the collection, we are publishing a new series of photographer Rinko Kawauchi. Last spring, she turned her lenses on swallows at the the birth season, and more particularly, on small nests the birds build away from prying eyes, made of ground, clay, water and dry herbs to protect their clutches. With all the poetry and sense of detail that characterize her work, Rinko Kawauchi reveals the magic of our daily life and the ephemeral beauty of suspended moments. The swallows, thanks to their sharp wings, perch everywhere with great ease and elegance, filled with an opalescent light.

This publication is part of the Des oiseaux (On birds) collection celebrating, through the vision of different artists, their immense presence in a world where they are now vulnerable. 

English edition.