Last Copy

• Sokyusha 2020
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

Takashi Hara’s photobook “Yagi to toge” (Goat and Thorns) does not unlock itself to the viewer on the first quick browse-through. Its dark, slow photographs, taken with a medium-format Holga on black-and-white film, do not seem connected on first glance. But there is something about these pictures that hints at a deeper space hiding behind the surface; the longer one looks at the deep blacks and dazzling whites, the pictures reveal their true richness. As the pages add up and the impressions begin to overlap, Hara builds a strange new world of his own, of feelings like unease and allure – a world that evades being fully captured in words, one that can only be glanced at through photography.

“Looking at Yagi to Toge again after these thoughts, I strongly realized that photography exists somewhere beyond logic. Now I see why I could only say that his works gave me the impression of trying to grasp at the air. Indeed, Takashi Hara’s feelings are directly reflected in these photographs.” –– from writer Yoshitaka Takahashi’s essay (included in Japanese & English translation)

Signed copy.

• Mack 2021
• Hardback, 1st edition, 120pp
• New

From 1988 to 1991 Dawoud Bey made a series of portraits of African Americans in the streets of various American cities. Using a large format tripod mounted camera and a unique positive/negative Polaroid film that created both an instant print and a reusable negative, he asked a cross section of the populations of these communities to pose for him, creating a space of self presentation and performance in the streets of the urban environment. As part of every encounter, Bey gave each person a small black-and-white Polaroid print for themselves as a way of reciprocating and returning something to the people who had allowed him to make their portrait. Defying racial stereotypes, the resulting portraits reveal the Black subjects in all of their psychologically rich complexity, presenting themselves openly and intimately to the camera, the viewer, and the world.

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

• Nobody 2020
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• New
  

It was in 2017 that I began to have an inkling that a single fish might contain a universe of infinite proportions and how amazing a journey within its body could be. So I started to research everything I would need to embark on such an expedition. By January 2020 I had built a work top, obtained a microscope, a camera, optics, lights and fridge. Mentally, though, I was far from ready. I was lacking the courage, time, energy and mental strength to set out on this unknown voyage. 

By February, the world exposed and in the unimaginable grasp of the pandemic. Time moved in entirely new ways as so many were affected, taken ill and had their lives claimed. 

This void in time, with all movements restricted, somehow presented a platform from which I could finally launch my inwards fish journey. I was prepared to explore for an unknown period but first of all I had, of course, to catch a fish. Being really unskilled at fishing this took a total of nine trips and thirty hours. 

On the 10^th April 2020, at around 15.30, equipped with sleeping bags and instant noodles, my children and I arrived at a spot where flat rock, grass and shrubs meet the sea. I had almost got into the idea of never catching a fish by this point, so it was a sudden shock when a jolt was sent through the rod to my hands followed by a silver splash that appeared on the waveless water. My daughter Ada shouted, “Get the net dad!” and she saw the slight panic in my face as I had failed to remember the next thing required to land the fish. 

Knowing it would be a time-sensitive journey as decay commenced the following day, I started what was eventually a ten-week voyage. Nothing could have prepared me for what I was going to encounter along the way or how sick I was to become during the making of this work. 

- Stephen Gill

Signed copy.

• Mack 2020
  
• Softcover, 1st edition / 2nd printing
• New
  

"A collection of pictures so contemporary in feel, it's difficult to reconcile them with the Lange we know" – Wall Street Journal Magazine

"There is a peculiar grace to many of the photographs in Day Sleeper, prompting us to revise any preconceived opinions of Lange, who emerges as a surprisingly contemporary image-maker attuned to small, telling gestures as well as bigger defining moments." – Sean O'Hagan, The Observer

In this book Sam Contis presents a new window onto the work of the iconic American photographer Dorothea Lange. Drawing from Lange’s extensive archive, Contis constructs a fragmented, unfamiliar world centred around the figure of the day sleeper – at once a symbol of respite and oblivion. The book shows us one artist through the eyes of another, with Contis responding to resonances between her and Lange’s ways of seeing. It reveals a largely unknown side of Lange, and includes previously unseen photographs of her family, portraiture from her studio, and pictures made in the streets of San Francisco and the East Bay. Day Sleeper will be featured alongside other works of Contis’ in the exhibition Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures at the Museum of Modern Art, February–May 2020.

2nd printing.  Sealed.

• Gallery 51 2020
  
• Softcover, 1st edition
  
• New
  

"His trust humbles me. This book is my present to him. But it was also a present to me because I got to dive into his huge archive looking for unpublished work. What a delight! Especially the rediscovery of his early images enabled me to combine his urban photographs with those iconic fashion images and powerful abstract works.” (From the introduction by Roger Szmulewicz)

21x15cm softcover, 70p.

• Mack 2020
  
• Softcover, 1st edition
  
• Good (see below)
  

Nothing but Clouds were the words used by the research commission in Andrey Tarkovsky’s 1972 film Solaris to deny video evidence suggesting traces of alien life on the planet. Taking this disclaimer as its title, this meditative book by Kristina Jurotschkin brings together images from her photographic archive made in various places across Europe over numerous years. Jurotschkin’s alienating views of everyday spaces examine the fabric of our social reality and propose an archaeological survey of our future.

Signed copy.  Some light shelf wear to cover, and small bend to one corner (pages unaffected - see photo)

• Witty Books 2020
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• New
  

"I am like a waiter who was given a special identity. At this time, I may be a stranger, perhaps a maker of taste and emotion, maybe a peeper next door, maybe just a recorder using a camera to invade others. The young flesh came in and out. Our communication was limited to the narration of the shutter’s sound and an euphemistic dialogue. This is a colorful room filled with invisible desires and slow laziness. The body appears to be still, or just a dream, because it is not a strong oppressive relationship.”

- Lin Zhipeng aka No.223

Edition of 750 copies.

Out of print, final copies.

• Akina 2019
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• Near fine see below
  

THE GRAY LINE is Laura Rodari’s first book, ‘the work who came out of visceral feelings and melancholy’, as she would tell you. Laura whispers, sometimes. She does it to time, to thoughts, to the universe and to its inhabitants. The response is mutual, bodily gut-deep mutual. Landscapes bend under her eyes, faces crumble, time evolves in the opposite direction and its arrow moves continuously as the most unrest being. THE GRAY LINE is this place in between past present and future, barely visible, an acknowledgment of absolute solitude. Both the origin and the end, along with light, beauty, joy and death. Nowhere life is more viscerally needed.

the womb is frail, the distance ephemeral, the consumption of a latent promise, the fog, the sentimental no, the agreement of death, the key to the senses

the lack of language, hers, after her.

the womb is frail when empty, the presence ethereal, time produces quakes on the shroud of eternity, the thickness, the density, nearly here never again

men and women walking, the darkness they bear, beating the glimpsed years ahead until they are, you Mother, the dim and the faint, flowers in your garden smell, they died and they bloomed again, they die and they bloom always.


Slipcased edition of 300 handmade copies. 61 images of which 24 torn and tipped in.

Final few copies with faint bump to slipcase (see example image)

• Littlemore 2022
  
• Softcover, 9th printing
  
• New

9th printing.

• Stanley Barker 2019
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• Imperfect - see below
  

• Mack Books 2019
• Softcover, 1st Mack edition
  
• New
  

In this dark and beautiful book, Takashi Homma traces the blood trails of deers killed in Shiretoko National Park on the Japanese island of Hokkaido. Like ritualistic stains or calligraphic compositions, the photographs, which Homma made in the winters of 2009 to 2018, are at once abstract and symbolic. Considered by some to be sacred, deers in Japan have controversially faced culls due to growing populations, which upset agricultural communities struggling to protect their crops. To aid their mission in reducing numbers, the government encourages local hunters to take matters into their own hands. Homma photographs the effects – the red vestiges of wild life in the snow.

Out of print, final copies.

• Origini Edizioni 2019
  
• Softcover, 1st edition
  
• New
  

Orion is the memory of a gone love story: an experience of light and shadow; white, black and shaded in the contours. The subjects and the words of the author are sublimated by time and are returned to us as a brief experience of overwhelming passion, pain and inspiration. The Orion’s belt as an inscrutable cold keeper of this memory.

Signed and numbered edition of 150 copies.

• Nobody 2017
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• New
  

In March 2014, my family and I moved from east London to rural south Sweden where my partner Lena is from. I understood that these new surroundings would inform my work in very different ways and that nature would play a key role. I was looking forward to making work that did not feel restricted and suffocated by modern photographic technology nor would make an inaccurate projected impression of the natural landscape we had become part of. 

On my many walks, I soon came to realise that this new, apparently bleak, flat and open landscape was in fact teeming with intense life. Small clues appeared during daylight hours that helped me understand the extent of activity during the night. Clusters of feathers, animal footprints of all sizes showing regular overlapping routes, gnawed branches, eggshells, ant hills, nibbled mushrooms and busy snails and slugs working through the feast provided from the previous night

I started to imagine the creatures in absolute darkness on the forest floor driven by instincts and their will to survive. I imagined them encountering each other. I thought of their eyes – near redundant in the thick of the night – and their sense of smell and hearing finely tuned and heightened. 

Envisaging where this activity might unfold, coupled with a hopeful foresight, I placed cameras equipped with motion sensors, to trees, mostly at a low level, so that any movement triggered the camera shutter and an infra-red flash (which was outside the animals’ visual spectrum). 

The first results filled me with fascination and joy as they presented what felt like stepping off into another parallel and unearthly world.  The silent photographs also seemed to invent sounds. This frame of mind and way of working took me back to my first ever photo project at the age of 13, sitting in the bathroom window of my parents’ house in Bristol with a 10-metre cable release, attached to the camera, attempting to photograph garden birds.

As time went on I started to think, if I were a deer where would I drink from, or if an owl where would I prefer to perch, and positioned cameras in such places. I was already composing the rectangular view in my mind’s eye – even though the nocturnal animals were absent – imagining they were there.  Nature itself helped to decide the palette and the feel of the images as plant pigments were incorporated from the surrounding areas to make the final master prints.

I had grappled for many years with this idea of stepping back as the author of images to give space for chance and to encourage the subject to step forward. I had attempted this in various ways; for example, in 2005, by burying colour prints close to where they were made, as a collaboration, to entice the place itself to leave its physical mark on the images once they had been unearthed. Or, between 2009 - 2013, in the series Talking to Ants, I placed objects such as plant life, insects, seeds and dust from the place I was photographing inside the film chamber to create in-camera photograms creating a confusion of scale. Or, in 2012, in Best Before End, as a photographic response to the rise of high-energy drinks, I used the drinks themselves to part-process the film as they ate into the emulsion. These approaches added an element of uncertainty, without knowing exactly where the images would land, and relied on a point where intentions met chance with the hope that the subject itself could play a part, lead the way or become embedded in the finished images.

This time, though, it felt as if I was stepping out altogether, so that the subjects would orchestrate and perform and take on the role of author while at that moment I was likely to be sleeping. This was nature’s time to speak and let itself be felt and known. 

Stephen Gill


Signed copy.

• Super Labo 2016
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• Near fine

The Last Son is Goldberg’s second book in a personal, three-part Super Labo series weaving together an assemblage of visual memories that chart his own Bildungsroman. Goldberg, the youngest son of a wholesale candy distributor, traces his dreams alongside those of his father as he traverses the past through photographic and written montage. The conceptual inspiration comes from his recent remaking of Rich and Poor (Steidl, 2014), in which he examined more thoroughly the influence his early years have had on his work.

The Last Son charts Goldberg’s growth as an artist alongside his father’s acceptance of his own unrealized dreams. The narrative also reads more generally as a story about American perseverance, family dynamics, and the struggle to exceed the expectations of those closest to us. Mixing photographs, collage, handwritten text, and stills from home movies, Goldberg mines his archive to build a narrative of memories beginning with his first photographs taken. The book is a sculptural collection of overflowing pages, offering a palpable interaction with his process of storytelling. The Last Son allows a tactile glimpse into Goldberg’s empathic process of making meaning from one’s history.

Recommended.  Light rubbing to dustjacket edges.  Final copy.

• Skinnerboox 2017
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• New
  

[...] Indeed, there is a lot of detail in many of the photographs in this project.

A lot to look at, a lot to get lost in. Detail, of course, has always been part of the photographic illusion, part of its sleight of hand. Open the shutter and the camera will receive the light bouncing off whatever is before it. It could be a blank white wall. It could be a million pebbles. A photographer may have considered every little detail before taking the picture, or barely looked at all.

That possibility lurks in every camera image. We cannot look at a photograph with the same indifference, the same mathematical rationality with which the camera recorded it. To look at a photograph, any photograph, is to intuit that while it has been made to be seen, ultimately it does not belong to us. It belongs to the camera from which it came. And while the camera shows us worldly things according to its own construction, it leaves those things exactly as it found them.

This is an unusual series of photographs. Peter Fraser has shot them in many countries and his motifs could hardly be more varied. Only the theme of mathematics, as the photographer has understood it, could have brought these pictures together. And what of the enigmatic portraits that punctuate the series? Fraser has revealed that just before taking photographing five or six of these people he asked them to imagine that something they had held to be true for most of their life had just been proved wrong. We do not know what these people were thinking, what axiom each has imaginatively and momentarily undone. Fraser could not have known either. But in those brief states of self-critical thought, when contemplation was itself being contemplated, he photographed them. These portraits anchor the project but they also provide its most reflexive moments. There are deep affinities between the states of mind depicted here and what Fraser might be inviting from us, his flawed and inconsistent audience.

- David Campany

Edition of 750 copies. Text by Mark Durden and David Campany.

• Editions Bessard 2017
  
• Hardback, 1st edition with print
  
• New
  

South African photographer Guy Tillim photographed Beijing on a residency.  In a 2 week period a series of new street photographs were shot and an initial edit shown to designer Syb Kuiper.  The resulting book Edit Beijing, designed by SYB, skillfully presents this new material.

Quite different to the cityscape images of Tillim's work in African cities, Edit Beijing sees the photographer getting closer, as he noted, " I learned something valuable while making those 'cityscapes'. The more visible you are to people in the streets, the more invisible, in a certain sense, you become. So standing in plain sight with my tripod-mounted camera, I became instantly seen, assimilated, and ultimately, overlooked, which as you know, is often a desirable state of being for a street photographer." The photos in the book are placed side by side as if a continuous scene in a playful manner when in reality they are in fact single images. 



Immaculately designed and presented new book.  Slipcased numbered edition of 500 copies, each with a signed C-print, size 25cm x 16cm.


• Peperoni 2017
  
• Hardback, 2nd edition
  
• New
  

Thomas Hoepker, a member of Magnum Photos, had the opportunity to spend time with Cassius Clay aka Muhammad Ali and take photographs – in 1960, when he won the a gold medal at the Rome Olympics, in 1966, when Ali was world heavyweight champion already, in 1970, when he restarted his career and prepared himself for the "Fight of the Century" against Joe Frazier and years later, already weakened by Parkinson´s disease. Many of these pictures have become photographic icons. But many photographs in this book are lesser known or have been unpublished until now. They show Ali in private moments and public appearances outside of the ring.

Expanded 2nd edition.

Sealed copy but with one small bump to a corner - see photo

• spewedition 2017 
  
• Softcover, 1st edition
  
• New
  

spewediton is a publishing label that unites the Japanese photographers/ artists Daisuke YOKOTA, Naohiro UTAGAWA and Koji KITAGAWA. The artists mix abstract and concrete expressions to try and overcome the limits of photographic expression.

Sealed.  Limited edition of 300 copies.

• Stanley Barker 2016
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• New
  

Perhaps best known as a collaborator on the legendary Beatles album cover for Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Vandenberg’s first monograph brings together his London street portraits from the 1970-80’s, and has been released to coincide with Photo London at Somerset House, 19-22 May, where a specially curated selection of original prints from the book will be exhibited by Eric Franck Fine Art.

On a Good Day captures the style, mood and tone of 1970-80s London and features appearances from Motorhead’s Lemmy and Jordan (Pamela Rooke) the infamous shop assistant at Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren's shop SEX.

In his afterward for the book Martin Barnes, Senior Curator of Photographs at the V&A, notes that ‘Vandenberg sees all with a sincere and perceptive eye and a sensitive understanding of character, regardless of social standing and cultural background. Vandenberg enthuses: ‘"It’s a great time being young, with your whole life ahead of you. It’s a time for love, hope, dreaming, great creativity. It’s a time away from home, breaking free from parents, home, creating freedom. You feel you can be anything and do anything. The future looks very positive." Every picture in this book is imbued with a positive, uplifting intention.... He was gifted with somehow being able to strike a rapport with, and feel empathy for, his subjects almost instantly.'

Edition of 1000 copies.

• Mack 2014
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• NF/Fine
  

Spanning almost three decades, Moonshine is a portrait of the American Appalachian folk, a mythologised region populated by ‘moonshiners’. Van Manen’s images are defined by a fierce intimacy with her subject, as the viewer teeters on the edge of the frame, perpetually trespassing on private moments: rollicking children practicing handstands on the couch; a kneeling daughter combing the hair of her grandmother.

Van Manen first visited the region in 1985, to the Appalachian areas of Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia, returning periodically up until 2013 to visit mining families with whom she lived: the Boggs family with their ten red-haired sons; miners Mavis and Junior. The intergenerational images subtly trace the insidious changes undergone by Appalachia – the slow and steady demise of the mining industry, and the migration of inhabitants from ramshackle wooden cabins to the city, or urban trailer parks. Van Manen intermixes black-and-white images with later colour work – another register of time passing and the inevitability of change.

Bertien van Manen rolled into photography almost by accident, taking pictures of her children with an old camera. As her work became more public she was soon drafted into the world of fashion photography. In 1977 she tired of the industry, and on discovering the documentary photography of Robert Frank and Josef Koudelka, van Manen began to explore the developing relationship between herself and her subjects, keeping a closeness and developing a personal, organic style of photography.

Final copy, with a few faint marks to the cover, inside as new.