Photobookstore

• Twin Palms 2022
• Hardback, 1st edition, 304p
• New

For the past twelve years, Stacy Kranitz has been making photographs in the Appalachian region of the United States in order to explore how photography can solidify or demystify stereotypes, and interpret memory and history in a region where the medium has failed to provide an equitable depiction of its people. Rather than reinforcing conventional views of Appalachia as a poverty-ridden region, or by selectively dwelling on positive aspects of the place and its people to offset problematic stereotypes, this work insists that each of these options are equally problematic ways of looking at place.

This work does not attempt to illustrate a certain type of injustice in the hope of remedying it. Instead, Kranitz has come to Appalachia to open up a new kind of narrative, one that examines our understanding of culture and place in a manner that is poised between notions of right and wrong.

As the narrative of As it Was Give(n) To Me unfolds, the book provides an intimate perspective on a region forced to transition away from coal extraction as its dominant source of economic stability, an opioid epidemic that has wreaked havoc on communities, and the role of Appalachia in a politically divided nation.

• Sokyusha 2019
  
• Hardback, 2nd printing
  
• VG/Near fine see below
  

Shiraishi Chieko’s Shimakage is a photographic journey into Chieko’s memory, exploring her reflections, experiences and fascination with the many small outer islands which surround Japan. Shimakage, literally translated as ‘Island Shadow’, brings together varying images taken from Japan’s surrounding islands and coastal areas such as Sakushima, Shingu and Kihoku Mie. The resulting images are gelatin sliver prints which utilize an old retouching technique known as ‘zokin-gake’ or ‘rag-wiping’ which was previously popular amongst amateur photographers in Japan during the 1920s and 30s. As a result, the images beautifully evoke a faded memory, the landscapes appear and disappear within the image embodying ‘faint signals’ from the photographers own memory, standing as faint silhouettes against the backdrop of an obscured memory.

2nd printing.  Signed copy.  

Imperfect copy with small bump to one corner.  

• Twin Palms 2021
• Softcover, 1st edition, 192p
• New

In the spring of 2020, Aaron Stern and Lucy Helton began exchanging images via a thermal fax machine in an attempt to navigate isolation by engaging in virtual conversation.

As the pandemic continued throughout 2020 and into 2021 – two strange years marked by global disruption – they began inviting other artists to submit work to the fax machine.

OK, NO RESPONSE presents 140 of the resulting facsimiles drawn from the work of twenty contributing artists. The transmission of these photographs reduced them to their most basic forms, introducing errors, static, and random glitches. While the source images were varied and diverse, their translation, transmission, and recomposition as thermal prints on paper unified them in surprising ways. What began as an impulse to connect during a time of isolation became an unexpected visual manifestation of our interconnectedness.

Featuring faxed photographs from Juan Brenner, Antony Cairns, Madeline Cass, Jerald Cooper, Jeremy Everett, Christian Filardo, Fryd Frydendahl, Matthew Genitempo, Lucy Helton, Anthony Hernandez, Kovi Konowiecki, Gabby Laurent, Pixy Liao, Susan Lipper, Mark Mattock, Christian Patterson, Aaron Schuman, Bryan Schutmaat, Nick Sethi, and Aaron Stern.

• Jiazazhi 2020
• Hardback, 3rd edition, 1st printing.
  
• Good - see below

"Carrying out this photograph project is because of the inspiration after reading the novel River of the North written by Zhang Chengzhi. Attracted by the powerful words in this novel, I decided to take a walk along the Yellow River to experience and feel the father-like broad and wide brought from this river, so that I could find the root of my soul .while along the way, the river from my mind was inundated by the stream of reality. The river, which once was full of legends, had gone and disappeared. That is kind of my profound pessimism. Nevertheless, as a vast country with a long history, its future is always bright. There is a descent in the matrix; there is her own nutrition to feed her babies; there is the power of creation to cultivate them strongly. The weak moaning finally will be drowned by the shout for joy. From this point of view, it seems, all shall be optimistic."

• GOST 2022
• Hardback, revised edition
• New

‘In 1989, I discovered them in my own back yard, landhungry and dirt poor. They came looking for work in the vegetable fields and fruit orchards of Lambton, Essex, Kent and Haldimand-Norfolk Counties. I liked them a lot because they seemed otherworldly and therefore completely vulnerable in a society in which they did not belong and for which they were not prepared. Because I liked them, they liked me, and although photography was forbidden, they let me photograph them. That’s all there was to it.’

• Libraryman 2022
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

Photographer Annemarieke van Drimmelen (b. 1978, Dutch) and painter Jasper Krabbé (b. 1970, Dutch) have dedicated their new book to their two year old daughter, June.

Made for the most part on the Greek island of Hydra, the images in this publication reimagine a child’s gaze that still has an untethered and pristine view of the world. In trying to capture the unspoiled aspect of their surroundings, the artist couple found a new way of working that was inspired by things their daughter pointed out on their walks across the island.

It brought photographer van Drimmelen to focus on small and intimate details such as an animal shape formed by metal wire, debris that they found on the beach. Or the face they encountered in the deteriorating wall of a deserted hotel in an empty bay of the island. The photographs were then painted on by Krabbé to add an otherworldly second layer. The unexpected combination of paint and photo, sometimes with poems of Krabbé, collaged directly to the surface.

They bring about hybrid images that allude to a “third person”, composed of the collaborative view of two artists. Images are altered by going back and forth in a process of mutual trust; crossing out each other’s images on the way and welcoming the unexpected. To them making this work is a true journey into the innocence of the world view of the child.

First edition of 500 copies.

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

In 1968, the West African photographer Rachidi Bissiriou set up his photographic studio, Studio Plaisir, in his hometown of Kétou in Benin, which he operated until its closure in 2004. The timing of this was conspicuous – Bissiriou was only 18 and Benin had only declared its independence from French rule eight years earlier, in 1960. Armed with a Yashica twin-lens camera, Bissiriou documented these heady times, spending the next three decades shooting black and white photographs of the locals in a standard 6x6cm format. 

While traditional portraits from these times often showcased their subjects unsmiling and with a rigid formality, Bissiriou’s images are remarkable for their simplicity and a freshness that feels utterly contemporary. Shot against plain backdrops, or in the town where they lived, Bissiriou’s subjects posed wearing their own clothing, which could range from traditional West African attire such as grand boubou, head wraps and Ankara agbadas, to more modern styles that nodded to the explosion in youth culture at the time. The image of two men – each wearing shirts unbuttoned to their sternum, paired with flared trousers, or a group of three women in sunglasses posing proudly with their handbags clearly demonstrate the post-independence verve. Bissiriou’s skill was in forging a connection with his subjects, being able to put them at ease, and allowing their innate sense of self-expression to shine through. His camera often captured his subjects in a moment of quiet repose, by turns self-possessed, contemplative, and optimistic.

For Bissiriou, the desire to become a photographer was in his own words, 'because someone who is a photographer has the freedom to go anywhere and everywhere.' While the primary focus of his nearly three decades of photography were the residents and families of his hometown, the images are no less transportive, instantly painting a vivid picture of West African society during a ground-breaking moment of transformation.

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

Following on from the bestselling box set Gathered Leaves, published to accompany Alec Soth’s touring exhibition which opened in London in 2015, this unique publication brings together five of Soth’s major books in their entirety in a single, compact, and densely detailed volume. Across more than 700 pages of newsprint, Soth updates and reimagines the original version of Gathered Leaves by reproducing every spread from these five books with detailed annotations in the form of notes, text extracts, and additional photographs. This new roadmap through Soth’s oeuvre also includes a new introduction by the artist.

Soth’s meteoric rise to international acclaim began with his first book, Sleeping by the Mississippi (2004), an elegiac road trip down the ‘third coast’ of the United States, which has since has sold through numerous print runs and is widely acknowledged as a classic. The success of his subsequent volumes Niagara (2006), Broken Manual (2010), and Songbook (2015) elaborated Soth’s lyrical but unflinching approach and reinforced his position as a master of the book form. His most recent work, A Pound of Pictures (2022), brings a new, poetic perspective to the idiosyncrasies of American life and the practice of image-making, broached once again through Soth’s now-distinctive road trip format.

• the(M) éditions / IBASHO 2020
• Softcover, 1st edition, 192p
• New

"Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present."

-René Magritte

Photography duo Albarrán Cabrera uses photography as a tool to investigate reality. The images that make up their latest book ‘Photography Syntax’, function as the notebooks of their philosophical research. Together with the texts, the photographs testify to the use of photographic processes as a means of going deeper into the reasons and thoughts behind the images.

Texts in English by Albarrán Cabrera

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

“The week before Trula died, she began spending entire days reclined in her field. Her body would be so still we’d come up closer to be sure she hadn’t left us. A slight movement of her head chasing a loose swallow, or a finger grazing a plucked blade of grass was enough. Tuesday night she had come into the kitchen after a particularly long 12 hours in her field. Her hair disheveled like a bird nest. She looked at a rhubarb stalk on the table and said to us “all this time I’ve never seen the flowers growing, but they’re taller every morning.” - Paul Guilmoth 

Paul Guilmoth’s At Night Gardens Grow is an elegy to a queer world that rests between the personal landscapes of home, and the ubiquitous terrains of identity. At Night Gardens Grow is about the island it was created on, just as much as it’s about the interior worlds we carry with us. Combining carefully crafted large-format photographs with more impulsive documentary photographs, Guilmoth moves through the found and fabricated landscapes of somewhere that’s never quite fixed or distinguished, but palpably familiar.

These photographs have one foot in modern America and the other in a land of the past—haunted by the ghosts of lived experience, family, and the land we inhabit. Any clear sense of locality is lost in favour of a more fluid and universal language of symbols and stories. A duality exists in this place that has both a desire to preserve, and an instinct to shed its skin, exposing a burgeoning folkloric force at work beneath its surface.

Signed copy.

From baptisms, monuments of spider-silk, funerals, house-fires, holes carved in rock, and birth: At Night Gardens Grow is about stories that are as fragile as the world they’re built on.

This book is for Trula Drinkard-Goolsby, who died on July 17th, 2021 after one last day laying in the field. 

Out of print, final copies.

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

• TBW 2022
• Hardback, 1st edition 2nd printing
• New

TBW Books is pleased to present River’s Dream, the latest monograph by Curran Hatleberg and a complete realization of the series exhibited at the 2019 Whitney Biennial. 

Hatleberg is known for traveling America, guided by intuition, to create scenes of American life and landscape. Working collaboratively with the people he meets, he recounts intimate stories of family and community. Here, in the follow-up to his first monograph Lost Coast (TBW Books, 2016), Hatleberg centers his narrative on the dog days of summer. Sweltering heat, dripping humidity, lush vegetation, and screaming insects– River’s Dream is a pulsing and episodic hallucination of life lived outdoors. In these sixty-five photographs, we move through swamps and groves, front yards and junkyards, encountering moments of haunting mystery and beautiful impermanence. Heightened by formal repetition, echo, and refrain, everyday scenes take on surreal, allegorical qualities. In the end, Hatleberg leaves us with the impression of memory, where the past is never gone, but appears and reappears endlessly, as in the flickering of a dream.

This book includes new texts by Natasaha Trethewey and Joy Williams commissioned for the publication. 

2nd printing (blue paper edges)


(Signed first printing shown in video - contents are identical)

• TBW 2022
• Hardback, 1st edition 1st printing
• New

TBW Books is pleased to present River’s Dream, the latest monograph by Curran Hatleberg and a complete realization of the series exhibited at the 2019 Whitney Biennial. 

Hatleberg is known for traveling America, guided by intuition, to create scenes of American life and landscape. Working collaboratively with the people he meets, he recounts intimate stories of family and community. Here, in the follow-up to his first monograph Lost Coast (TBW Books, 2016), Hatleberg centers his narrative on the dog days of summer. Sweltering heat, dripping humidity, lush vegetation, and screaming insects– River’s Dream is a pulsing and episodic hallucination of life lived outdoors. In these sixty-five photographs, we move through swamps and groves, front yards and junkyards, encountering moments of haunting mystery and beautiful impermanence. Heightened by formal repetition, echo, and refrain, everyday scenes take on surreal, allegorical qualities. In the end, Hatleberg leaves us with the impression of memory, where the past is never gone, but appears and reappears endlessly, as in the flickering of a dream.

This book includes new texts by Natasaha Trethewey and Joy Williams commissioned for the publication. 

1st printing (red paper edges), limited to 1000 copies, already out of print.

Signed copy.

• Skinnerboox 2022
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

Scapes contains some of John Divola's greatest series in black and white including “Four Landscapes", “As Far As I Could Get” and “Dogs chasing my car in the desert”.

"Cameras and their users are caught between the universal and the particular. Photography and photographs; humanity and whatever specific kind of human we happen to be.  There is at least something existentially universal about Divola’s photographic adventures. The lone observer moving through the world and reflecting upon it through various camera possibilities. But nobody is truly universal, or only universal. We each come wrapped in our particulars, just as each and every photograph belongs to the universe of photography precisely insofar as it is particular. Forever the two. 

When I look at Divola’s photographs, I sense something universal because I sense all the particulars. Yes, a white, male, middle class Southern Californian, post-conceptual artist of the kind that makes these kinds of photographs. But nobody makes photographs quite like Divola.

He is one of a kind, and therein are the universal and the particular." 

- from the text by David Campany

Edition of 750 copies.

• Des Palais 2022
• Softcover, 2nd edition 424p
• New

In October 2017 Depoorter met Agata in a strip club in Paris. Over the next three years, the women dove deep into a collaboration, creating a small alternative universe that served as a container for them to explore questions they each had regarding identity, performance, and representation: Who is the true author of these images? Who is the true subject? Who is Agata? Who is Agata when being photographed? Who is Bieke? Who is Bieke when making photographs? Why make these pictures? What are the motives and motivations? Who is responsible for what?

The book tells both the story of a young woman using a photographer to find some sense of identity, and the story of a photographer using a young woman to better understand photographic authorship and herself. These intertwined narratives are threaded via a combination of images, letters, and notes, but what defines the dialogue is the ever-present reflex of self-awareness and self-reflection. The result is a project that never lands on any sort of conclusive truth, instead highlighting the slippery nature of truth in situations where power, responsibility, and control are in a constant state of flux. 

As a whole, Agata is a project that asks more questions than it offers answers, first recognizing the well-worn idea of photographer-as-witness as a relative impossibility, then throwing all players involved under the microscope: photographer, subject, audience, and, of course, the medium itself. 

This book’s design is, like the dynamic it examines, complex and constantly shifting. Its contents are laid out chronologically, and the book is Japanese bound, with perforations on the fold. This  leaves the reader with the choice of whether to tear open the pages and see a hidden story; alternative narratives, versions of truth that do not fit squarely with the truth the photographer originally presents. 

Once a reader decides to open a sealed page, there is no undoing that choice. To some degree, this implicates the reader, involving them in how the multifaceted story is represented. Like the photographer and subject, the audience is then forced to consider their role in this triangle of responsibility. 

Softcover 2nd edition with poster.  Signed by Bieke Depoorter.  


Video courtesy Bieke Depoorter.

• Skeleton Key Press 2022
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

By recording thoughts, emotions, and other imprints of her reality, Antigone Kourakou explores the universal dynamic between the natural environment and human presence, and the ability of their interaction to transform us. Her photographs—most often shot in her native Greece—strikingly contrast bright light with deep, velvety shadows. Her collaborative subjects, most frequently women, often appear in contorted, twisted, or dancer-like poses, and alternately, in reflective states of longing, struggle, or lucidity. In Transfiguration, these images are thoughtfully arranged and sequenced throughout with depictions of water, stone, trees, plants, fire, and dilapidated interiors quietly assisting the book’s poetic arc. More revealing upon each viewing, Transfiguration poses more questions than it answers, while inviting viewers to participate in a fictional yet tactile world; one open to exploration and interpretation which gracefully reflects on the exuberance and struggle of existence.