Photobookstore

• RRB 2021
• Softcover, 1st edition
• New

Growing Spaces by photographer Chris Hoare is a chronicle of urban land cultivation in Bristol. Since April 2020, Hoare has been slowly and methodically documenting the allotment-goers, landscape and seasonal changes across the official and unofficial growing spaces of the city. The resulting photographs, originally commissioned by Bristol Photo Festival, are published in this new book Growing Spaces to coincide with an exhibition of the work at the inaugural festival in summer 2021.

Hoare’s project documents eleven sites across the city from established allotment sites to community gardens and improvised plots on disused lands. The project was conceived pre- Covid-19 pandemic but its timing, coinciding with increased demand for green spaces for cultivating produce, allowed him to capture the formation and energy of a growing renaissance.

The allotment system recognised today originated in the 19th Century. Land was given to the labouring poor to allow them to grow food at a time of rapid industrialisation with no welfare state in place. Allotments were transformed during the famous ‘Dig For Victory’ campaign during World War II and since then their popularity has wavered. Over time, the stereotype of an allotment goer came to depict a middle-class pastime for retirees. However, in recent years this image of urban land cultivation has evolved as an increasing number of economically and environmentally-conscious young people, families and ethnic minorities are claiming plots. In the process, they are transforming the fertile growing spaces with their own choice of produce and farming methods.

With demand outstripping supply, urban dead spaces have been commandeered and
rejuvenated and their value realised through the process of growing. The allotment has provided the multiple benefits—increasing sustainable local food production whilst simultaneously providing a haven away from home, and an escape, during the current pandemic.

Signed copy.

• Max Strom 2016
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

The images in Hurricane Season are taken in the southern part of the federal state Louisiana in the United States. In this peculiar landscape live millions of America’s poorest citizens. It is as if nature itself indicates the level of segregation – the lower the country level is, the greater the proportion of black and poor. Every year these areas are flooded by the summer and autumn storms that trikes Louisiana. When these storms develop into major hurricanes the poorest and most low-lying parts suffer the hardest. Floods are a natural part of life and the inhabitants have in a fatalistic way adapted to the frequency of the hurricanes.

• Ikki Books 2021
• Hardback, 1st edition, 96pp
• New

Edition of 750 copies, hand numbered & hand stamped. 

• the(M) éditions 2021
• Softcover, 1st edition
• New

Limited edition of 545 numbered copies.

Temporarily sold out - more copies expected approx 23 April, pre-order now.

• Mack 2021
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

The themes of protection, freedom and oppression appear consistently throughout Polish artist Joanna Piotrowska’s oeuvre. Through three photographic series, Stable Vices focuses on these notions to crystallise a spectrum of concerns that drive her work. One series is inspired by illustrated self-defence manuals and Psychology and Resistance by the feminist psychologist Carol Gilligan. Piotrowska appropriates the formulaic step-by-step approach of the manuals but instead of showing two people in contact, she photographs the (re-) actions of one woman in conflict with an unknown, absent subject. While Gilligan argues in her book that teenage girls risk losing their voice in patriarchal societies, Piotrowska seeks to re-present their agency in corporeal form, and indicates – through the invisible opponent – the underlying pressures they have to confront. A second series reveals precarious shelters made out of furniture and blankets, situated in domestic spaces. Sculptural in form, these temporary refuges nod to the children’s game of making houses at home, as if domestic space would not provide enough protection. The constructions also reference the makeshift ‘homes’ of homeless people. In a third series, Piotrowska focuses on cages and comparable spaces created for humans, drawing parallels between the lives of certain communities and animals, and the environments in which they live.

The book includes essays from Sara De Chiara, Joanna Bednarek and Dorota Masłowska.

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

• Mack 2021
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

The Shabbiness of Beauty is a visual dialogue that crosses generational divides with the easy intimacy of a late-night phone call. Multidisciplinary artist Moyra Davey delved into Peter Hujar’s archives and emerged mainly with little-known, scarcely seen images. In response to these, Davey created her own images that draw out an idiosyncratic selection of shared subjects. Side by side, the powerfully composed images admire, tease, and enhance one another in the manner of fierce friends, forming a visual exploration of physicality and sexuality that crackles with wit, tenderness, and perspicacity. Spiritually anchored in New York City – even as they range out to rural corners of Quebec and Pennsylvania – these images crystallise tensions between city and country, human and animal. Nudes pose with unruly chickens; human bodies are abstracted toward topography; seascapes and urban landscapes share the same tremulous plasticity. These continuities are punctuated by stark differences of approach: Davey’s self-aware postmodernism against Hujar’s humanism and embrace of darkroom manipulation. The rich dialogue between these photographs is personal and angular, ultimately offering an illuminating reintroduction to each celebrated artist through communion with the other’s work.

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

• Ediciones Anomalas 2021
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

"Over the course of 2020 we have had occasion to take a deep look at Joan Fontcuberta’s archive, more precisely, at the early years of his career as a photographer. Our search was, of course, partly influenced by the concept of countervision, which we find fascinating and has proved critical to Fontcuberta’s career. Countervision describes the elements that erode photographic language itself, calling it into question and rising up against its logic.

Our task of selecting and editing images, many of which have never before been published, has included searching for elements that tend towards the unreal, the magical and the oneiric. We weren’t only interested in what actually appears in the images but also in what they conceal, what transcends them and what provokes our imagination. In short, all those images that in one way or another sidestep what we call reality."

Published with the support and participation of Fundación Antonio Pérez and Diputación de Cuenca.

Signed copy.

• The Gould Collection 2021
• Softcover, 1st edition
• New

The selection of photographs by Jo Ractliffe in this volume were made between 1985 and 2019, and come from many places: South Africa, from the Great Karoo to Gauteng and Limpopo provinces to Zimbabwe in the north, and from the Western Cape, up the coast to Namibia and Angola. The dialogue between Ractliffe’s images and Zadie Smith’s parable is simultaneously a forthright and subtle commentary on injustice and imbalances of power. Together, they work to displace familiar narratives of violence and unsettle clichéd depictions of Africa in favor of a more nuanced interplay between the real and allegorical.

The Gould Collection is a series of books that was created to honor the memory of Christophe Crison, a photobook collector from Paris who died prematurely in 2015 at the age of forty-five. Over the past five years, since its inception, The Gould Collection editors have brought together a diverse group of photographers and writers from around the world. A shared thematic sensibility underlies the editors’ selection of the photographer-writer pairings presented in each volume.