Photobookstore

• Powerhouse 2005
• Hardback, 1st Mack edition
• Good- see below

Mark Cohen first came to the attention of the photography world in 1973 with a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. This iconic show proved to the art world that Cohen was the heir apparent to the explosive street photography of the 60s. Now, after more than thirty years, Cohen’s complex and influential body of work is presented for the first time in Grim Street, an astonishing collection of Americana as original and effective as the work of Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, or Weegee.

Cohen’s photography confronts the viewer with a startling beauty, rapidly shifting from rough and confrontational to quiet, respectful, and serene. In Grim Street, filled with what Cohen calls “grab shots,” you can easily imagine the photographer guilefully patrolling the streets of Wilkes-Barre, the Pennsylvania mine-town he calls home. His camera, often prefocused and shot from the hip, scrolls around its subjects searching for tidbits of delectable detail. Then suddenly thrusting out towards its subjects, a strobe bursts, capturing a violently cropped spot of stockinged legs creeping around a corner, or a woman’s bared teeth and stretched lips. In these images emerges a cluttered world of visceral, sexualized encounters with the human body.

Used copy with wear, fading and small tear to dustjacket.  Page edges yellowed with age as expected.  Overall good to very good copy of this rare book.

• Mack 2021
• Hardback, 1st Mack edition
• Near fine - see below

“The force of Graham’s Beyond Caring photographs remains undiminished. [...] one of the most commanding and gravest monuments to Thatcher’s Britain produced by any British artist” – David Chandler

Originally self-published in 1985, Paul Graham’s renowned series, ‘Beyond Caring’, was made in the waiting rooms and corridors of the Social Security and Unemployment offices around the UK, documenting the long waits, queues and poor conditions of an overburdened system, to produce a powerful series of photographs conveying the hardship people experienced. Denied official permission to make the work, Graham’s photographs were taken discreetly, usually without looking through the camera, resulting in a spatial disorientation that emphasised the unmoored distress of vulnerable citizens. The work shocked many on its release – leading Magnum photographers were outraged by its use of colour in a classic documentary topic, while others celebrated how it straddled the world of activism and art (it was exhibited at both Trade Union conferences and the Museum of Modern Art, New York). Graham forged a fresh form of engaged photography, mixing elements of social documentary, ‘new colour’ and reportage to create a striking body of work that endures to this day. Many decades have passed since their making in 1984, but these images have grown not only in photographic importance, but also as a unique historic record of the mid-1980s unemployment crisis in the UK. This edition of Beyond Caring is part of Graham’s iconic 1980’s trilogy of UK books, being republished by MACK, which also includes A1 – The Great North Road(2020) and Troubled Land (Fall 2021).

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

Small mark to cover - see photo - otherwise sealed copy.

• Steidl 2011
• Hardback, 1st Steidl edition, 108p
• Used: near fine

• Mack Books 2024
• Hardback, 1st edition. 112p
  
• Imperfect - see below

Yorgos Lanthimos’s filmography, lauded for its ambitious world-building and absurdist explorations of human relations, has established him as one of the most distinctive auteurs in contemporary cinema. I shall sing these songs beautifully draws on his renowned visual language to tell a haunting new story through photographs Lanthimos made on the set of his latest feature, Kinds of Kindness (2024), inhabiting an ambiguous space between the real locations of New Orleans and the otherworld of cinema. Interwoven throughout are new texts by Lanthimos which evoke the fragmented lyricism of Sappho, from whose poetry the book takes its title. 

Lanthimos makes all his photography, both still and moving, on analogue film, relishing the creative intimacy the medium involves. These previously unseen colour and black-and-white images became a part of the formation of his new film's world. Here, they become fragments that elaborate an entirely new story, rich with the tensions and unsettling atmospheres that Lanthimos has made his own. 

Imperfect copy with lightly bumped corner - see example photo.

• Twin Palms 2013
  
• Hardback, 5th edition
  
• imperfect - see below

At 17 Mike Brodie hopped his first train close to his home in Pensacola, FL thinking he would visit a friend in Mobile, AL. Instead the train went in the opposite direction to Jacksonville, FL. Days later, Brodie rode the same train home, arriving back where he started. Nonetheless, it sparked something and Brodie began to wander across the U.S. by any means that were free - walking, hitchhiking and train hopping. Shortly after, Brodie found a Polaroid camera stuffed behind a carseat. With no training in photography, the instant camera was an opening for Brodie to document his experiences. As a way of staying in touch with his transient community, Brodie shared his pictures on various websites gaining the moniker “The Polaroid Kidd” [sic]. When the Polaroid film he used was discontinued, Brodie switched to 35mm film and a sturdy 1980’s camera. Brodie spent years crisscrossing the U.S. amassing a collection, now appreciated as one of the most impressive archives of American travel photography. When asked about his approach to travel and photography Brodie has said “sometimes I take a train the wrong way or…whatever happens a photo will come out of it, so it doesn’t really matter where I end up.”

5th edition of this photobook classic.

Large bump to bottom edge - cover only affected, pages mostly fine.  Otherwise a new copy.  See photos.

• Charcoal Press 2023
• Hardback, 1st edition
• imperfect - see below

The Seraphim is the second volume of the The Seven Seals septology by photographer Jesse Lenz. Delving deeper into the vision that started with The Locusts, the reader explores a realm of childhood enchantment where nature insists upon sets of fledgling counterparts. His children experience the joys, curiosity, and vulnerability of childhood alongside other creatures that seem to either be standing vigil over them, or stalking them from the shadows. The backyard becomes a labyrinth of passages as the children experience the cycles of birth and death in the changing seasons. The Seraphim depicts a brooding landscape in which life’s greatest mysteries can be witnessed through the prism of small, infinitesimal lives.

Signed copy.

Display copy with light scuff and scratch to cover - see photo.

• Stanley Barker 2021
• Hardback, 2nd edition
• imperfect - see below

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.

Out of print 2nd edition.

Rubbing to corners and spine ends - see photo.  Inside fine.

• Nazraeli Press 2024
• Hardback, 1st edition 136p
• Imperfect - see below

Published to coincide with a major 2024 traveling exhibition in Tokyo, Los Angeles and London, this gorgeous new monograph presents 100 of Michael Kenna’s most iconic photographs of the Japanese landscape, many published here for the first time. A perfect pairing of artist and subject, these photographs of Japan comprise perhaps Kenna’s best known body of work and have been the subject of countless exhibitions throughout the world. Michael Kenna first visited Japan in 1987 on the event of his inaugural exhibition there, and he has returned dozens of times and made thousands of photographs throughout the country’s vast and incredibly varied landscape. Our earlier monographs Japan and Hokkaido have been out of print for many years, so we are thrilled to announce this important new publication that includes work spanning Kenna’s decades-long love affair with the country. Japan / A Love Story is beautifully printed in duotone on natural coated art paper and quarter bound in linen and silk. It opens with an essay in Japanese and English by the renowned critic and historian Kohtaro Iizawa. 

“Japan has a long and rich tradition of reciprocal gift giving. I have been the grateful recipient of so much over so many years in Japan, and I know that I will never be able to give back in equal measure. I hope this work can be seen as a small token of my desire to do so. I also hope this work can be viewed as a homage to Japan and that it will serve to symbolize my immense ongoing appreciation and deep gratitude for this beautiful and mysterious country.” — From the Afterword by Michael Kenna

"He has been reflective when others have been militant, romantic when others have been skeptical. Such isolation can starve all but the most independent of talents, but for these it can provide a sanctuary where visions can develop undisturbed. Kenna is one of these.” — Joanna Pitman, The Times

Imperfect copy with marking to cover in several places - see photos.

• Session Press 2024
• Softcover, 1st edition. 184p
  
• imperfect - see below

Session Press is pleased to present Solace, the first U.S. monograph by acclaimed Hong Kong based photographer and film director, Wing Shya. Early in his career, Shya was invited by Wong Kar-wai to serve as an on-set stills photographer for films including Happy Together and In the Mood for Love. Granted rare access to the renowned director’s inner circle, over the years Shya captured poignant behind-the-scenes portraits of iconic actors such as Tony Leung, Leslie Cheung, Maggie Cheung, and Gong Li in unguarded moments between takes. These intimate images form the heart of Solace, interspersed with the best of Shya’s commercial shoots, as well as private snapshots of nature and cityscapes encountered on his travels. The resulting collection is a true testament to Shya’s ability as an eloquent storyteller and deeply introspective observer.

Hong Kong has long captured the West’s imagination as an enigmatic Other with dazzling neon lights and a chaotic electric pulse. However, in Solace, Shya reveals a more personal and meditative Hong Kong. Time slows, inviting the viewer to explore the subtleties of interpersonal chemistries from a distance in ephemeral, quiet moments that showcase Shya’s sensitive and intuitive approach toward his subjects. A nostalgic, dreamlike atmosphere emerges in his expired and exposed film, punctuated by flashes of vibrant color. In the words of William Chang, one of Wong Kar-wai’s most important collaborators, Solace is a “moving achievement that deftly captures ephemeral postures and fleeting snippets in time.”

We hope Solace will introduce an international audience to the sublime nuance of Wing Shya’s work, as well as the rich history and culture of Hong Kong as seen through his eyes.

Imperfect copy with bumped spine end - see photo.

• Self 2020
  
• Softcover, 2nd edition
  
• Imperfect - see below
  

No System is back!

Including over 200 of Vinca Petersen’s photographs, diary entries and ephemera, No System tells the story of a 10-year journey around Europe in the 1990’s putting on illegal free raves and festivals with other Techno Travellers.

“We are not rebelling against, so much as living outside the system. Free music to anyone that wants it is what we give and we need nothing back but space to roam.

Tribal beats have surrounded our planet for thousands of years. Technology is our addition to this continual rhythm. Age is no concern, background irrelevant. We exist now and in the future. Welcome to our way of living…”

Signed to the rear cover.

Faint bump to lower rear corner of cover - see photo.

• Mack Books 2024
  
• Hardback, 1st edition/1st printing, 112p
  
• imperfect - see below

Over two decades, Gregory Halpern has been photographing in and around his hometown of Buffalo, New York, meticulously crafting the series of photographs that forms his latest monograph. King, Queen, Knave is an idiosyncratic vision of a city amidst its contradictions, defying familiar narratives of post-industrial decline and embracing an enigmatic strain of reality verging on surrealism. Halpern’s mesmerising sequence unfurls as a stage across which distinct and unpredictable characters appear in and amongst solitary buildings, snowdrifts, and sun-bleached scenes of everyday transcendence. 
 
The images often locate their subjects within the specificities of the season and balance a historical project with the immediacy of a moment in its individual radiance. Embracing themes of reversal and ascension, Halpern confronts the complexities of his birthplace and of contemporary America at large, seeing beauty intertwined with ugliness and redemption with despair. This lyrical new work is testament to the endless complexity of a place at once familiar and unknown.

Signed copy.

Display copy with very faint bump to one corner - see photo.

• Thames & Hudson 2024
• Hardback, 1st edition
• imperfect - see below

During his six-year journey across the United States creating the project that became American Geography, Matt Black collected objects in the locations he visited. Each location is designated as an area of ‘concentrated poverty’ – a US Census definition for places with poverty rates of 20% or higher. Over time, the objects he found and collected began to take on symbolic significance.

• Roshin 2022
• Hardback, 3rd edition
• Near fine

Yukichi Watabe’s “Stakeout Diary” is a close-up documentation of two Japanese police detectives investigating a grisly murder in Mito, the capital of Ibaraki Prefecture, in 1958. With the mutilated body of the victim confirmed as a Tokyo resident (and a hand towel of a Tokyo-based hotel was found with the corpse), the investigation led the two detectives—one from the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, the other a Mito local—to hold stakeouts in various downtown areas of Tokyo.

Watabe’s photographs of the detectives slowly solving the case and finding the murderer ooze with so atmosphere and character that the series almost seems unreal. In photographs that would not seem out of place in an early Kurosawa film, we see the detectives interview witnesses, ride around the city in busses and trains, think things over in cafes and offices, and converse over cigarettes and food.

While some of Watabe’s photographs were published in a magazine at the time, the series itself was not published until 2011, five years after the photographs were rediscovered by chance in a Tokyo bookshop. The version by Japanese publisher roshin books features prints especially made for this book using negatives borrowed from Yukichi Watabe’s son.

3rd edition.  Light rubbing/faint bump to corners - see photo example.

• Mack Books 2024
• Hardback, 1st Mack edition, 320p
• Imperfect see below

First published in 1996 to enormous acclaim, Richard Billingham’s Ray’s a Laugh is one of the most significant photobooks of the turn of the twentieth century, as well as a cornerstone work of the Young British Artists generation. Formed of starkly intimate images of Billingham’s often chaotic parental home under the heavy effects of alcoholism and poverty, the book was produced in the 1990s with editors Michael Collins and Julian Germain. This new edition restores Billingham’s original vision for his deeply personal work for the first time. Including numerous unseen images and a distinct approach to sequencing inflected by Billingham’s training as a painter: it constitutes a ‘director’s cut’ and reintroduces a vital and consistently challenging work for a new era.

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

Small bump to one corner of cover - see photo example - pages inside are unaffected and this is otherwise a sealed copy of the signed slip edition of this book.

• GOST 2024
• Hardback, 1st edition, 88p
• New

• Twin Palms 2024
• Softcover, 1st edition, 412p
• New

Mike Brodie’s first monograph, A Period of Juvenile Prosperity touched down more than a decade ago, depicting his fellow rail-riders and drifters in a rebellious and wildfire pursuit of adventure and freedom. “Brodie leapt into the life of picture-making as if he was the first to do it,” Danny Lyon wrote about the book in Aperture. Next came Tones of Dirt and Bone, a collection of earlier SX-70 pictures Brodie made when photography first led him to hopping freights, when he was known as “The Polaroid Kidd.” And then Brodie seemed to disappear from the art world as suddenly and mysteriously as he’d first appeared. Maybe his vanishing was another myth. Maybe it was just a necessary retreat. “I was divorcing myself from all that,” he says. “I was growing up. I was pursuing this other life.”

In Nashville he became a diesel mechanic. Fell in love. Moved across the country again. Got married. Bought land on the long dusty Winnemucca road Johnny Cash sang about. Started his own business. Built a house. Put down roots. And when that life exploded, the open road called again. Throughout almost all of it, his cameras were with him, and at last those pictures are coming to light.

If Michael Brodie’s first monograph was a cinematic dream, Failingis the awakening and the reckoning, a raw, wounded, and searingly honest photographic diary of a decade marked by love and heartbreak, loss and grief — biblical in its scope, and in its search for truth and meaning. Here is the flip side of the American dream, seen from within; here is bearing close witness to the brutal chaos of addiction and death; here are front-seat encounters with hitchhikers and kindred wanderers on society’s edges, sustained by the ragtag community of the road. Failing often exists in darkness but is tuned to grace. Brodie’s eye stays forever open to the strange and fleeting beauty that exists in forgotten places — the open country and the lost horizons that sweep past dust-spattered windows in a spectral blur.

"Looking back, it's as if it never really happened. I was never a photographer holding a camera but a vessel to tell a story. It's like it all existed within a dream, and this is just God's plan for my life."

In stock - shipping begins January 3rd 2025.

• Twin Palms 2024
• Hardback, 2nd edition, 96p
• New

'pines grow pulling the old dreams through the soil pinesap climbing into its limbs lifting a ladder like solitude'

Inspired by the life and work of the poet and land surveyor, Frank Stanford, these photographs of hermetic homes and men living in solitude were taken in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas and Missouri

By capturing the foggy landscapes, cluttered interiors, and rugged men that are tucked away in the dark woods, Jasper explores a fascination with running away from the everyday. The work bounces between fact and fiction, exhibiting the reality and myth of what it means to be truly apart from society.

2024 2nd edition.  

In stock - shipping begins January 3rd 2025.

• Libraryman 2024
• Hardback, 1st edition, 96p
• New

This is a story of three houses, three women and three bedrooms. The houses are located on the same street.

At my parents house I have a separate bedroom with a big cupboard.
At my grandmother’s house, I share the bed with her.
At the neighbors there are two rooms: one big and one small. Sometimes we sleep in the same bed.

I have a recurring dream: I can’t clean up my room at my parents house, nor can I find my clothes. They must be in one of the three bedrooms.

- Katrien De Blauwer (b. 1969, Belgian)

• “It is like walking past a house you used to live in: the fact that it still exists, so concrete, makes everything that has happened since seem somehow insubstantial.”

• Rachel Cusk, excerpt from Outline

The book contains a text written by musician and singer Shirley Manson (b. 1966, Scottish).

• Stanley Barker 2024
• Hardback, 1st edition, 80p
• New

Pia-Paulina Guilmoth’s Flowers Drink the River reveals a dreamscape where mud, earth and stone envelop, and the forest floors are wet with glowing dew. Using a large format camera and careful analogue techniques, Pia finds an entrancing, mystical presence in her daily experiences amidst the forests, fields, and rivers of her home. Pia’s hazy images, filled with light aberrations and glowing spectres, leave us suspended mid-ritual. 

Flowers Drink the River spans the first two years of Pia’s gender transition, as she photographs her small community in rural Maine, and the beauty and terror of living as a trans woman in a small right-wing town. Scenes of moths and floating spider silk, mud-drenched bodies intertwining, a burning house, girlfriends pissing on each other from tree branches, nocturnal animals, and euphoric rituals adorn flash-soaked landscapes. Under the moon, the boundaries between people, animals, and the land soften and blur. Flowers Drink the River is an animistic search for beauty, resistance, safety, and magic in a world often devoid of these things. It’s a love note to rural working-class people, trans women, lesbians, queer people and the backwoods of central Maine. Pia finds beauty and belonging as she creates a utopia hidden just barely out of reach. 

Pia’s photographs begin with patient acts of co-creation. She stages delicate sculptures out of spider silk, flowers, and other natural materials, then she waits as the land and water, wind, light, or a stray moth, begin to interact with them in unpredictable ways. Sometimes the creation takes the form of building trust with animals, carefully, over many nights.

“each night for a week in august i would sit in the tall, tick-infested grass behind the orchard covered in Scent Killer Gold, wearing a ghillie suit, holding a tray full of crushed apples in one hand, and a 30 foot makeshift shutter release cable attached to my 4×5 camera in the other hand. the same family of deer would get more comfortable with my presence each night. eventually they were eating the ripe fruit from my hands. the following tuesday i would have my first hrt consultation. i was keeping it a secret, knowing there was no way i could safely transition in this place, but also no way i could hide my changing body over the following months and years.” - Pia-Paulina Guilmoth

Presented as large format 3/4 Swiss bound volume, Flowers Drink the River's cover is replete with reproductions of an aged pink craft paper that Pia found stashed in an abandoned house down the road from her home. She then covered a spider web found along the river in a powdered red pigment and adhered it to the paper. Over this a cloth nameplate has been added, while the inside cover features a tipped on facsimile 4x5" contact print that she made in her bathroom.

• GOST 2024
• Hardback, 1st edition, 144p
• New

The city of Atlanta in the US has endured constant change throughout its history. It has been destroyed and rebuilt several times over, survived slavery and racial segregation to become the cradle of the Civil Rights Movement, and recently recast the state of Georgia as a blue wave in a sea of neighbouring red states. The Makeshift City by Joshua Dudley Greer shows a contemporary Atlanta in a state of flux—both a unique city with a specific history and culture, and a generic American metropolis struggling to forge its identity.

The photographs in the book were made between 2020-2024—a period which encompassed the seismic events of the COVID-19 pandemic, the rise to prominence of Black Lives Matter, struggles for abortion rights, increased income inequality and the Stop Cop City movement. This backdrop provided the motivation for Greer to witness certain economic and political forces as they manifested themselves in the landscape, architecture and community in one of the largest and most progressive cities in the American South. Although the structure of the city changed dramatically during this period, the systems which governed it often remained immutable, constrained by capital interests and the two political parties see-sawing for power.

The images in The Makeshift City document Atlanta’s downtown street corners, suburbs, exurbs, film sets, cemeteries, rivers, and construction sites. They show landscapes ruptured by development and carved by highways, inhabitants improvising outdoor gyms, mosques and offices, sterile new-builds, empty lots and crumbling mansions. Greer weaves together all of these elements into a singular narrative that suggests the tensions of the past and the realities of the present.

‘I watched people go about their daily lives in spite of everything that might act against them. There were times of resilience, activism, selflessness, and joy. But there were also moments of banality, privilege and ignorance, even disdain. I’ve tried to make photographs that acknowledge the totality of experience that may beset one particular place during one particular time. Of course, I know I am unable to do this. There is so much about Atlanta that I don’t understand, and perhaps, probably, never will.’

The region where Atlanta stands today was originally Creek and Cherokee territory. The location was chosen to be a railroad terminus and the city was founded in 1837 as a transport centre. Atlanta was destroyed both in the Civil War by General William T. Sherman’s troops and again in a great fire of 1917—the mythical Phoenix rising from ashes adopted as the city’s official symbol. Throughout its history, Atlanta’s layout and growth was shaped and influenced by slavery, racial discrimination and segregation. And yet, Atlanta also became known as ‘The Black Mecca’ for its thriving Black businesses, political leadership, higher education and entertainment. Atlanta’s current population growth, real estate development and racialised gentrification set the stage for a new chapter, one that sits within an uneasy political era pointing toward an uncertain future.

Signed copy.