Photobookstore

• VOID 2023
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

Following the death of her grandmother, artist Elena Helfrecht embarked on a photographic journey through her family’s estate in Bavaria. Employing the interiors, objects and archives, she began to explore the ideas of inherited trauma and postmemory—the relationship following generations have to the traumas of those who came before.

In her black and white photographs, Helfrecht uses the house and its contents to stage an allegorical play. The interiors and still lifes, which at first glance appear to show mundane objects and scenes, become increasingly unsettling: stalactite-like deposits drip sideways from walls, dark chasms open up beneath the floor boards, a snake coils around a dolls’ house and chairs hang from the beams. As the narrative progresses, motifs of eggs, birds and fleshy growths (a nod to the title, ‘Plexus’—a network of nerves or vessels) are interwoven with archival family photographs, hinting at links and connections between inscrutable symbols, people and places.

Helfrecht’s images symbolically allude to the unreal and imaginary creeping into recollections of personal and cultural histories. Confronting a past spanning four generations, ‘Plexus’ represents through photographs the intersecting and reverberating echoes of mental health, war and history.

The book features a short story by Camilla Grudova, who was named on the Granta Best of Young British Novelists list 2023. Grudova’s piece ‘The House Surgeon’ revolves around a disturbing growth that silently develops under the floorboards of a family home, drawing further upon the themes of inherited trauma presented through Helfrecht’s photographs.

• Dashwood/Session Press 2023
• Softcover, 1st edition,424p
  
• New

With the publication of his serialized photo-essay Hikari to Kage (Light and Shadow) in the first issues of the magazine, Shashin Jidai, Daido Moriyama announced his return to photography after nearly a decade. Moriyama had been mired in an acute creative slump from his mid thirties, since the publication of his seminal book, Shashin yo Sayonara (Farewell Photography) in 1972.  Unable to take nearly any photos for a prolonged period, he turned to illicit drugs, ultimately wasting away to little more than 40 kgs before he hit physical and emotional rock bottom.  Lured back by Akira Hasegawa, Shashin Jidai’s editor, he was invited to contribute photographs for each issue.  This began a long relationship between Moriyama and Shashin Jidai.  He would ultimately make a total of six serialized essays that appeared through sixty-three issues (in every issue but one) until its’ demise in April 1988.  During this period Moriyama worked almost exclusively for Shasin Jidai and was given a free hand to explore and experiment and in the process evolved a new aesthetic that still informs his photography today.  Tragically, more than eighty percent of his negatives were lost from this pivotal body of work.  In Daido Moriyama Shashin Jidai 1981–1988 the complete run of essays or chapters that appeared concurrently in Shashin Jidai are brought together for the first time, representing the only way to appreciate them without acquiring the original magazines themselves.  Each complete essay is reproduced alongside a selected portfolio of images and written essays by Moriyama from each chapter as they appeared in the original magazines.  Text appears in Japanese with English translation.

In over 400 pages it provides access to a pivotal period in the evolution of one of the most revered and influential photographers of the twentieth century, as yet undocumented in book-form. 

Accompanying there is a short essay “The Photo Age: Daido Moriyama and Shashin Jidai” by Kotaro Iizawa. Translation throughout by Daniel González, Essays by Daido Moriyama, Text by Kotaro Iizawa, Design by Geoff Han, Editing by David Strettell and Miwa Susuda.

Softcover with poster.

• Photo Editions 2021
• Softcover, 1st edition with print
• New

In anywhere but here, Alison McCauley expresses the restless feeling that has haunted her throughout her life: that the place she is in isn’t where she should be, and a conviction that the next place will be better. Taken from 2008-present, these images—taken in various locations around the world—are a deeply personal reflection of the artist’s emotions, photography being a cathartic means of coming to terms with her constant desire to move. As someone who has always led a semi-nomadic lifestyle, McCauley seeks to explore the idea of not belonging. Though she feels like she is supposed to belong somewhere, McCauley doesn't want to, as she recognises that it is the wonder of this belonging that is the impetus behind her work.   

Devoid of geographical and temporal reference points, the images are figuratively and literally blurred to emphasise that this is not about a location or time, but rather a state of mind. For the viewer the series takes on a narrative of its own, unfolding like a dream sequence: a body submerged in water, a flurry of balloons released into the open sky, city lights streaming through a hotel room, and fleeting scenes captured from a car window. Just as she is drawn to movement, it is these liminal spaces that the artist gravitates towards – the chaos, the stillness, and the magic in between. “The work comes from reality, but it’s a reality that’s distorted by subjectivity,” says McCauley. “It’s an expression of my state of mind during these restless off-moments.” 

Special edition of 25 signed copies, with a signed and numbered A4 print on Hahnemühle William Turner textured paper.  See the alternative special editions available here.

Extra special edition, print made in November 2023, books signed on press in 2021.

• Stanley Barker 2023
• Hardback, 1st edition, 104p
  
• New

In 1972, Melinda Blauvelt traveled to the small Acadian fishing village of Brantville, New Brunswick on Canada's Eastern coast. She lived with a fisherman and his family, ran a day camp, and made a series of remarkable, compassionate portraits of the Acadian community that summer and on three subsequent visits from 1972 to 1974. Her photographs are now published as a series for the first time.

Melinda Blauvelt was in the first class of women at Yale and then the first woman in Yale's MFA photography program where Walker Evans became her mentor. Blauvelt would later teach at Harvard and at the University of Virginia where she established the photography program. Her pictures are held by major museums throughout the United States. She lives today in a small village on the coast of Rhode Island.

“I bought a used Deardorff 4x5 camera and spent the summer making photographs in Brantville, where I lived with fisherman Ulysse Thibodeau, his wife Jeannette and their three young children. Weekdays were spent with the campers making puppets and performing “Le Corbeau et Le Renard”, playing Capture the Flag and Croquet. Weekends, Ulysse and Jeannette took us fishing for mackerel, to the beach and included us in family dinners, bingo, picnics, and birthday parties. Whenever I set up my Deardorff, the Thibodeaus, their extended family and other Brantville friends were my enthusiastic collaborators.”  - Melinda Blauvelt

• Stanley Barker 2023
• Hardback, 1st edition, 120p
  
• New

The images in Bill Henson’s cinematic new book The Liquid Night, derive from work the highly acclaimed artist shot on 35mm colour negative film in New York City in 1989. They present a kaleidoscopic, nocturnal journey through the frenetic, neon-lit streets of a long-lost America.

• Here Press 2023
• Softcover, 1st edition, 134p
• New

Click farms are shadowy operations that are responsible for artificially inflating the engagement metrics of content on social media, manipulating the algorithms with serious consequences – from influencing consumer behaviour to compromising the integrity of democratic processes.

Jack Latham’s audacious project seeks to expose the inner workings of click farms for the very first time. By juxtaposing the captivating with the covert, he challenges our perception of the digital landscape and urges us to question the authenticity of the content we encounter daily.

Edition of 750 copies. 134 pages with 20 fold outs. 4 different dustjackets, assigned at random.

Signed copy.

• Bluecoat Press 2023
• Hardback, 1st edition, 220p
  
• New

Book of the Road celebrates the 50th anniversary of Daniel Meadows’ pioneering 1970s documentary project Free Photographic Omnibus. Driving over 10,000 miles in a double-decker bus, the wild-haired young Meadows spent 14 months mapping the length and breadth of England, photographing 958 people and offering a free print to each of his subjects. Along the way, amongst countless breakdowns, parking tickets and random acts of kindness, he had chance encounters with the likes of Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant. Meadows’ determination allowed him to assemble all this material into a cartographic census of an evolving nation.

“This country is changing quickly… we might soon forget those interesting relics of the past that are disappearing under the redevelopment of the future.” This future is now here, and Meadows’ pictures remain as relevant as ever. Book of the Road cements the Free Photographic Omnibus as an essential document of 1970s England – an urgent and timeless visual record.

Just 21 years old when he set up the Free Photographic Omnibus, Daniel Meadows is now one of Britain’s greatest documentary photographers. He worked mostly on instinct, and many of his DIY techniques anticipate documentary media’s progress in the following decades. He remembers sewing a tape recorder into an old tweed jacket so that he could photograph while also capturing audio. The original bus – a low-bridge decker from Barton Transport – cost him just £360. Meadows’ subjects collected their free portraits the following day, after he had spent many restless hours developing film and printing in the bus’ makeshift darkroom.

 Book of the Road gives readers the stories behind the photographs, from battles with angry parking attendants, nights of acute loneliness and moments of joy. This mix of images, diary entries and audio transcripts offers a unique commentary into the 1970s social climate – as well as Meadows’ mindset during the project. In Southampton in 1974 he met Florence, a part-time cleaner who he remained close with for five decades, eventually speaking at her funeral. “It was one of the great privileges of my life,” Meadows recalls.

The book offers a survey of English life when modernisation was seeping into everyday values and communities. Cobbled streets in tight-knit parishes and bustling city centres accompany familiar green pastures, but Meadows also takes us behind the curtain at marble competitions, circuses and beauty contests. Throughout, his subjects of all ages and social classes stand proudly for the camera, unaware that they were to become part of history.

• Akio Nagasawa 2023
• Softcover, 1st edition, 72p
• New

A collection of works featuring stray cats that Daido Moriyama has encountered on the streets.

Signed and numbered edition of 350 copies with a silkscreen printed canvas cover.

Due in stock early December, available for pre-order now.

• Mack 2023
• Softcover, 1st edition, 488p
  
• New

• Loose Joints 2023
• Softcover, 1st edition, 528p
• New

Sam Youkilis's immediate and generous indexing of everyday life reaches across space and time in his debut monograph – a 528-page typology of human experience.

Sam Youkilis has been building a continuous archive of photographic works through his phone for the last six years. Working instinctively, Youkilis is drawn to universal themes of human experience, using the casual language of the cameraphone to evoke something profound, anthropological, comprehensive and yet incomplete. Youkilis’s work springs from an attitude, a way of experiencing the world, that contains depth beyond the offhand ease in which his images freely circulate.

In Youkilis’s first publication, the depth of this engagement with human patterns of behaviour is archived and scattered across a diverse range of themes, divided into chapters that playfully tease the tensions between categorisation and chance that inform his observational works. Somewhere scours Youkilis’s database for images of everything from the time of day–7:07AM, 12:33PM—to unmade beds, the act of cutting, thresholds, dancing couples and gestures of romance.

Presented as a dense 500-page sequence, Somewhere activates the archive and the typology as a source of human joy and communion while emboldening his subjects and unlocking the deep essence of different places worldwide. Youkilis embraces the real by engaging with both ephemerality and sincerity, while steeped in reverence for the photographic medium through a meticulous engagement with composition, colour, chiaroscuro and framing.

• Art Paper Editions 2023
• Softcover, 1st edition, 288p
• New
  

“Fashion” is a concept that represents what is trending at the moment. Paul Kooiker’s fashion photography, on the other hand, is characterised by its timelessness. The artist portrays the biggest fashion brands and today’s most famous faces, but transports them to a world of their own. Disconnected from time and place, his surreal images feel like film stills with stories we can only guess.

His photography transcends classic gender roles: his models adopt unusual poses and their faces are often left out of frame, obscuring their identity. At times, it is not even clear whether the subject is human or a doll. In order to capture the extravagance of luxury objects, Kooiker magnifies its means of pre­sen­tation, like for example mannequins and displays, to such a degree that it is ultimately our desire itself that is captured by his camera.

Over the span of 10 chapters, he endeavors to articulate his perspective on fashion. This commissioned work, bearing the same title, was showcased prominently in a solo exhibition at the Museum Folkwang Essen in 2021 and at Foam Amsterdam in 2022.

• Thames & Hudson 2023
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

Hyperborea presents unforgettable visual tales of life in the Siberian Arctic that photographer Evgenia Arbugaeva knew when she was growing up in Tiksi, a town on the shore of the Laptev Sea in the Republic of Yakutia. Her work discloses both the fragility and beautiful desolation of the land and those who inhabit it, and her rigorously composed photographs glow with rich otherworldly colour, bristle with the raw vibrancy of the climate and exhibit the quiet intensity of lives borne out in seclusion and extremes.

• Getsuyosha 2023
• Softcover, 316p
• New

Newly designed and formatted edition of Moriyama's classic 1972 Farewell Photography, which maintains the original format of images across the gutter, and reading from right to left.

257 x 182mm.

Signed copy.  

• Chose Commune 2023
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New
  

In 2021, Irina Rozovsky and Mark Steinmetz were invited to take part in two photographic projects in Italy, one in Castelfranco Veneto (the Veneto region) and the other in Lecce (Puglia). The subject intended to drive the work was ‘nature’; a word with so many variations of meaning in the context of today’s diversified, fragmented landscape, which constantly reflects our lives as well as condition the way that we observe reality.

This book compiles a selection of the artists’ photographs of these two Italian regions so far apart from one another. These are places where nature reveals itself through different forms of expression and where the relationship between body and space, captured in a combination of light and shade, seems to take on an inconsistent and sometimes absolute value.

Insieme (together) tells of a photographic experience in Italy that was composed in the form of an intimate, personal diary. With the artists’ dual gaze gently organizing a narrative structure, Rozovsky and Steinmetz’s photographs sit alongside one another, alternating and rotating in harmony with a discontinuous, fluctuating rhythm, just as in life’s episodes. These pictures, which seem almost poised to capture unexpected events and unusual encounters but especially moments of a shared daily life, express a singular familiarity with the places being found, conveying the natural character of their authenticity.

• Deadbeat Club Press 2023
• Hardback, 1st edition, 84p
• New

For much of the last decade, working from his home base of Fairfield, Illinois, Nathan Pearce has produced a series of mostly low-fi zines and books rooted in a tender and obsessive investigation of place. It's been apparent from the beginning that Pearce is invested in the rural southern midwest and the people who live there, and he has succeeded in finding in that place a world as interesting and exotic as anything a bored Midwestern kid would encounter in an ancient copy of National Geographic in the waiting room of an alcoholic dentist's office. Pearce's is a quiet world—one of those nowhere-to-go, nothing-to-do kind of places that tends to give over-stimulated types a panic attack.

In the quiet photographs gathered in High & Lonesome however, there is an unmistakable and almost subversive act of stewardship taking place, a cultivation of mysteries and devotion that both embraces and subverts the mythology of the rural Midwest. These are quiet photos, but not entirely silent; beyond them you can hear the watchwinding racket of the natural world, or the forlorn and distant surf of traffic. They're also eerily out-of-time; there's a photo of a January 1993 page from an advertising calendar that's an apt metaphor for a place that seems to be trapped in amber. There's very little in these pictures, in fact, to indicate the 21st-century is anything but a still-distant nightmare from a pulp science fiction novel. William Gass, in The Heart of the Heart of the Country, wrote, "Of course there is enough to stir our wonder anywhere; there's enough to love, anywhere, if one is strong enough, if one is diligent enough, if one is perceptive, patient, kind enough—whatever it takes." High & Lonesome is a master class in whatever it takes.

Signed copy.

• VOID 2023
• Hardback, 1st edition, 112p
• New
  

‘Levee’ by Adrianna Ault invites us to embark on a powerful journey of healing as she navigates the complexities of grief and loss after her mother’s passing. Along the serene Mississippi River, Ault finds solace in frozen moments that transcend time, capturing the very essence of life’s joys and heartaches. The series began as a way to better understand the surrounding landscape of New Orleans, where she was raised as a child. There she discovered how the city’s surrounding waterways expose the land to a constant state of vulnerability. The physical landscape is parallel to an emotional landscape rooted within the culture of New Orleans and its people.