AMERICA

• Sturm & Drang 2024
  
• Hardback, 1st edition, 168p
  
• New

The Invisible Yoke, Volume IV: We, the Free, is the final volume in photographer Matt Eich's four-part series of monographs with publisher Sturm & Drang that began in 2016 with the critically acclaimed Carry Me Ohio. It was followed by Sin & Salvation in Baptist Town (2018) and The Seven Cities (2020). The photographic series considers the weight of collective memory in the shaping of American identity.

Departing from the formula of depicting a regional microcosm, the final photobook We, the Free features images from the United States as a whole. Spanning nearly 15 years, the images were made as the artist came of age while the American superpower began to decline, and facing a time of increasing national tensions. This significant body of work is Eich's chronicle of contemporary American society entering a point of no return. 

• Sturm & Drang 2024
  
• Hardback, 1st edition, 168p
  
• Imperfect: see below

The Invisible Yoke, Volume IV: We, the Free, is the final volume in photographer Matt Eich's four-part series of monographs with publisher Sturm & Drang that began in 2016 with the critically acclaimed Carry Me Ohio. It was followed by Sin & Salvation in Baptist Town (2018) and The Seven Cities (2020). The photographic series considers the weight of collective memory in the shaping of American identity.

Departing from the formula of depicting a regional microcosm, the final photobook We, the Free features images from the United States as a whole. Spanning nearly 15 years, the images were made as the artist came of age while the American superpower began to decline, and facing a time of increasing national tensions. This significant body of work is Eich's chronicle of contemporary American society entering a point of no return. 

Imperfect copy with small bump to spine end / one corner.  Otherwise new/sealed.

• Trespasser 2024
  
• hardback, 1st edition, 188p
  
• New

Sons of the Living is a photobook about the land and people along the highways of America’s deserts. Photographed over the course of a decade in the American West’s arid and sweeping terrain, this work depicts a human capacity for endurance. Schutmaat offers an updated view of the “open road” that addresses a new era of uncertainty and anxiety. Amidst a backdrop of environmental decline, economic dispossession, and societal neglect, Sons of the Living draws attention to trouble on the road ahead and searches for our hope to withstand it.

11.75x14.75 inches. 188 pages. 90 tritone plates on uncoated paper. Cloth cover and foil stamp text. Page edges painted black.

Due in stock November 2024, available for pre-order now.

• Mack 2024
  
• Softcover, 1st edition, 144p
  
• New

In I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours, photographers and longtime partners Carolyn Drake and Andres Gonzalez embark on a collaborative journey along the US–Mexico border, creating an imaginative portrait of life in these borderlands. Traversing towns and waterways together they photographed the same subjects from different perspectives, capturing everyday scenes that appear both staged and ad hoc. The resulting series of uncanny image pairings illuminates the serendipity of human connection while confronting the challenges of relating to one another, finding balance, and defying conventional identities.  

Through this striking sequence, Drake and Gonzalez reflect on their different family histories of migration and identity and the ways their backgrounds both intersect and diverge. Deliberately eschewing the temptation to follow a singular narrative or freeze a fleeting moment in time, their images instead suggest the multifarious nature of existence along the border.

Signed by both artists.

• Trespasser 2024
  
• Hardback, 1st edition, 108p
  
• New

Set amid the extreme heat and sprawling concrete of Tucson, Arizona, Dogbreath is a photobook that depicts a series of restless adolescents as they navigate a fraught and changing world. Through photographs of urban decay, sun-faded neighborhoods, scenes of mosh pits, and punk youths alongside their feral dog counterparts, the book paints a sympathetic view of teenagers adrift in what remains of their adolescence. Interspersed with elliptical texts about a mysterious boy named Dove, who speaks of underground pagans, scrap salvaging, and the search for gold, Dogbreath presents an enigmatic, psychologically engaging portrait of youth on the edge.

11.5x15 inches. 108 pages. 55 tritone plates on uncoated paper. 3 variations of cloth cover with tip-in image and foil stamp text. 

Please note that when you purchase this book, the colour will be selected at random.

• Mack Books 2024
  
• Hardback, 1st edition, 112p
  
• New

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 by Gregory Halpern on press.  

• Mack Books 2024
  
• Hardback, 1st edition, 72p
  
• New

Between 2022 and 2024, Alec Soth visited twenty-five undergraduate art programmes across the United States. Advice for Young Artists comprises work he made there. Its title – perhaps like the visits themselves – is misleading: rather than wisdom or guidance, Soth offers an angular and unresolved reflection on artmaking at different stages of life and the relations of photography, time, and ageing. The photographs here range from formal studies evocative of the classroom to more unruly works of self-expression. Ambiguous stagings, found forms, and lyrical portraits are interspersed with gnomic quotes and unfinished credos scrawled on Post-its. Among the students, Soth himself appears at intervals, an uncertain sage in their midst. 

Inspired by Walker Evans’s late Polaroids, this latest body of work reveals a new expansion of Soth’s practice and a new vantage, twenty years on from the publication of his first book. Recalling the conceit of Broken Manual, it uses an instructional format as a spurious cover for introspection and provocation. As much as a study of the experience of the young artist, this is a reckoning with the prospect of becoming an old one.

Signed to the title page by Alec Soth.  

• Atelier EXB 2024
• Hardback, 1st edition, 190p
• New 

Initiated by Clément Chéroux, this book and exhibition presented at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation in Paris, examine Stephen Shore's work through the unexplored prism of vehicular photography. Since the 1960s, Shore has made most of his images from a means of locomotion, be it car, train, plane or even, more recently, drone. The journey, as important as the destination, becomes a pretext for experimenting and constructing a singular photographic work. In this way, Stephen Shore explores the vernacular of the contemporary landscape, and what it reveals about American society itself.

The book presents a dozen series in chronological order, from his B&W work in Los Angeles, when he was just 21, to his two major series American Surfaces and Uncommon Places, as well as the more recent Topographies, conceived in 2020-2021, with a camera mounted on a drone. These series are punctuated by excerpts from a long interview between Stephen Shore and Clément Chéroux. Each of them wrote a text on the subject of the photographic road trip, considered a genre in its own right in the history of photography, from Jacques Henri Lartigue to Man Ray, Robert Frank and Joel Meyerowitz.

Text in French only. (No english edition available)

• Aperture 2020
  
• Hardback, 1st edition, 4th printing
  
• New

The North American frontier is an enduring symbol of romance, rebellion, escape, and freedom. At the same time, it's a profoundly masculine myth — cowboys, outlaws, Beat poets. Photographer Justine Kurland reclaimed this space in her now-iconic series of images of teenage girls, taken between 1997 and 2002 on the road in the American wilderness. "I staged the girls as a standing army of teenaged runwaawys in resistance to patriarchal ideals," says Kurland. She portrays girls as fearless and free, tender and fierce. They hunt and explore, braid each other's hair, and swim in sun-dappled watering holes—paying no mind to the camerea (or the viewer).Their world is at once lawless and utopian, a frontier Eden in the wild spaces just outside of suburban infrastructure and ideas. Twenty years on, the series still resonates, published here in its entirety and including newly discovered, unpublished images.

Justine Kurland (born in Warsaw, New York, 1969) received a BFA from the School of Visual Arts and an MFA from Yale University. Her work is in the public collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Guggenheim Museum, and International Center of Photography, New York, among other institutions. Her monograph, Highway Kind, was published by Aperture in 2016.

Sealed 4th printing.

• Editorial RM/PHREE/Ediciones Posibles 2024
• Hardback, 1st edition. 80p
• New 

"I Imagined It Empty" offers readers a deeply moving and introspective exploration of life, loss, and the enduring connections we forge with the spaces we inhabit. Immerse yourself in an emotional journey inspired by the author's personal experiences and the last photographs taken of her mother, capturing the beauty that emerged in her final days of life. Explore poetic and nostalgic imagery that subtly conveys the notion that our homes hold the spirits of those who lived in them, filling the space with memories beyond the physical presence. A beautiful, original design by one of the best photobook designers in the world today. I imagined It Empty was inspired by several pictures the author had taken of her mother in 2017, briefly before she passed away. “My mother rarely let me photograph her except in the last week of her life when she changed her mind. Each day as she approached her death, she became more beautiful.” The book is a silent and moving contemplation of life beyond life and the desire to find solace and presence within the walls of the place that we choose to call home. The loss of dear ones is reflected in the sense of belonging to a place, a house full of history, which also carries on the life of others. “I know that I will not live in this house forever. The house will hopefully outlive me, but I wonder if a part of me will outlive the house.”

English edition.

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

Taking its name from a line in Wallace Stevens’ short poem “The Gray Room,” Alec Soth’s latest book is a lyrical exploration of intimacy. While these large-format color photographs are made all over the world, they aren’t about any particular place or population. Whether made in Odessa or his hometown of Minneapolis, Soth’s new book is fundamentally about intimate encounters in private rooms.

“After the publication of my last book about social life in America, Songbook, and a retrospective of my four, large-scale American projects, Gathered Leaves, I went through a long period of rethinking my creative process. For over a year I stopped travelling and photographing people. I barely took any pictures at all.

When I returned to photography, I wanted to strip the medium down to its primary elements. Rather than trying to make some sort of epic narrative about America, I wanted to simply spend time looking at other people and, hopefully, briefly glimpse their interior life.

In order to try and access these lives, I made all of the photographs in interior spaces. While these rooms often exist in far-flung places, it’s only to emphasize that these pictures aren’t about any place in particular. Whether a picture is made in Odessa or Minneapolis, my goal was the same: to simply spend time in the presence of another beating heart.” - Alec Soth

1st edition / 1st printing.  

Signed by Alec Soth to the title page whilst on press 2019.

• Editorial RM 2020
• Hardback, 1st edition 384p
• New

Lee Friedlander present us with a vision of his work after the exhibition at MoMA in 2005. This book will become the most updated comprehensive review of the photographer's career. In an edition edited by Lee Friedlander and his wife Maria, the reader will find 350 images brought together in a fast-paced book of one of the most important American photographer of the 1960's generation. The book is the catalogue of a major exhibition at Fundación Mapfre in Madrid. Lee Friedlander (b. 1934 in Aberdeen,Washington) is one the most influential photographers of our time and one of the masters of photography in the twentieth-century United States. Since the 1960s, Friedlander has been a tireless chronicler of his own world and surroundings. His innovative and sophisticated photographs reveal both the common and unexpected aspects of everyday life.

This catalogue has been published on the occasion of a retrospective exhibition of the photographer's work, organized by the Fundación MAPFRE on its premises on the Paseo de Recoletos in Madrid, from September 30th, 2020 to January 10th, 2021. It contains reproductions of all of the works exhibited and includes texts by Carlos Gollonet, chief photography curator at the Fundación MAPFRE (and the curator of the exhibition) and by US photographer Nicholas Nixon, as well as an interview with Maria Friedlander conducted by Jeffrey Fraenkel, the director of the Fraenkel Gallery, and a chronology of the artist's life and career by Giancarlo T. Roma.

New.  Out of print English edition.

• Rizzoli Electa 2019
• Hardback, 1st edition, 176p
• New

Francesca Woodman took her first photograph at the age of the thirteen. From the time she was a teenager until her death at twenty-two, she produced a fascinating body of work exploring gender, representation, and sexuality by photographing her own body and those of her friends. Featuring approximately forty unique vintage prints, as well as notes, letters, postcards, and other ephemera related to the artist s burgeoning career, the volume, which accompanies an exhibition of the same name at MCA Denver, details both Woodman s creative and personal coming-of-age during the years 1975-1979. Francesca Woodman: Portrait of a Reputation considers how the artist came into her creative voice and her singular approach to photography at a notably young age. Ranging from portraits in her studio/apartment in college to self-portraits in the bucolic Colorado landscape in which she was raised, these works capture Woodman s hallmark approach to art making: enigmatic, rigorous, and poignant. The volume also includes select photographs of Woodman taken by friend and RISD classmate George Lange during this period. Taken together, they present a nuanced and in-depth study of this formative period in the development of this groundbreaking artist.

• Steidl 2018
• Hardback, reprinted edition, 128p
  
• as new

One day in the early 1970s, Robert Adams and his wife saw from their home a column of smoke rise above the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant, near Denver, Colorado. For an hour they watched the plume grow, tried without success to learn whether the fire involved the radioactive and extremely toxic plutonium, and experienced a sense of helplessness before what appeared to be a nuclear accident in progress. Ultimately it was announced that the fire was burning safely outside the plant, but as a result of their hour of uncertainty Adams decided to try to picture what of worth ― absolute worth ― stood to be lost in a nuclear catastrophe. Adams photographed Our Lives and Our Children in Denver and its suburbs; the individuals shown were within hazardous proximity of the Rocky Flats Plant. Their peril is representative, however, of a wider threat to all of us from nuclear weapons, one that continues in different forms to this day.

The new Steidl edition of Our Lives and Our Children presents an expanded sequence of pictures that retains the potent compactness of the sought-after first edition (out of print for nearly three decades), while faithfully expressing the full-bodied tonalities of Adams’s original prints

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

In the fall of 1977, Jack Lueders-Booth began teaching photography to the inmates of MCI Framingham, a women’s prison. 

During his decade at the facility, he would make a series of Polaroid images produced collaboratively with the women who lived in the prison. 32 of these images are presented in this new book alongside oral histories taken at the time by Booth. 

Founded in 1878, MCI Framingham was opened to house incarcerated women for the crime of giving birth out of wedlock i.e., begetting, (Hester Prynne’s crime in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel, The Scarlet Letter). Some few years later MCI Framingham began incarcerating women for shoplifting, organised prostitution, using and trafficking drugs, armed robbery, child abuse, and murder. Many women at Framingham were convicted for helping their husbands or boyfriends commit crimes. By the Mid-70s, the correctional facility was part of an ongoing normalisation experiment that sought to mitigate the psychological consequences of incarceration. In Booth’s images, neither inmates nor guards are uniformed, cells are made to look like dormitory rooms, and inmates can furnish and decorate them within the constraints of guidelines. Male inmates were introduced, constituting 20% of the communal population. Many of the inmates in Lueders-Booth’s images had dependent children who were placed in the care of relatives or court-appointed foster parents, they were allowed to visit with an adult.

“My time there was scheduled to end in 1979, but by then I had begun photographing these women, and what began at their request grew to occupy me personally, and fully. I wished to continue and did, remaining at MCI Framingham for another 7 years, photographing, while also tutoring inmates who had a continuing interest in photography.' Jack Luders-Booth 

Included alongside Luders-Booth's images, are a series of anonymized verbal accounts, and poems taken from female prisoners at MCI Framingham Prison

For all of my sisters who have felt the weight of
life’s cruelties as the knife of life’s coldness
pierced their hearts,
And all traces of warmth were drained away.
they vaguely remember something called love,
a distorted version of pimp,
as coat hangers, baseball bats, anything in
reach came at them through the air
And afterwards their pimp says, “It’s because
I love you baby.

-Tina Williams, 1980

Cover colour and image varies - assigned at random.

• Aperture 2021
• Hardback, 1st edition
• NEW

Following in the photographic lineage of Robert Frank, Stephen Shore, and Joel Sternfeld, Justine Kurland’s work examines the story of America―and the idea of the American dream juxtaposed against the reality. Her deep interest in the road, the western frontier, escape, and ways of living outside mainstream values pervade this stunning and important body of work. Since 2004, Kurland and her young son, Casper, have traveled in their customized van, going south in the winter and north in the summer, her life as an artist and mother finely balanced between the need for routine and the desire for freedom and surprise. Casper’s interest ―particularly in trains, and later in cars―and those he befriends along the way often determine Kurland’s subject matter. He appears at different ages in the work, against open vistas and among the subcultures of train-hoppers and drifters around them. Kurland’s vision is in equal parts raw and romantic, idyllic and dystopian. From highly symbolic pictures of trains moving across epic landscapes to allegorical depictions of mechanics and muscle cars, this book features the full scope of her road work―from her series This Train is Bound for Glory, to her most recent, Sincere Auto Care.

• Nazraeli Press 2024
• Hardback, 1st edition, 80p
• New

American photographer Mark Steinmetz photographed the people and environs of Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport between 2012 and 2019 as part of the High Museum of Art’s Picturing the South series, a photographic archive that examines a range of themes specific to the American South. 

The 64 black-and-white images in ATL emphasize “the quiet transitional moments in this liminal world,” writes curator Gregory J. Harris in the volume’s introduction. Steinmetz captures “the more introspective moments” of travel in and out of the world’s most heavily trafficked airport and includes travelers of all ages “leaving one chapter of their lives and going to another,” as the artist stated in a 2019 interview at the museum. Airline pilots, ground personnel, flight attendants, and janitors are also pictured, always working, often waiting; they share a space with the travelers but remain apart. 

Steinmetz also turns his focus to the open spaces around the airport, presenting vast, overgrown, and often unpeopled areas that provide a sharp contrast to the busy workings of the airport and its constantly changing population. A selection of images taken from aircraft windows depict the graphic beauty of clouds, light streaks, and jet trails, echoing the “sense of levity and mystery” felt by those traveling, as well as those viewing the photographs. 

Though taken over a period of years, this collection of images evokes the distinct timelessness of air travel, “capturing ordinary yet captivating human dramas that play out in the public spaces across the airport.” ATL is the 15th volume of Mark Steinmetz’s work published by Nazraeli Press. 

• Steidl 2010
• Hardback, 1st edition, 228p
• New

John Gossage, the renowned American photographer and photography book-maker, presents two companion volumes and his first ever books in color. Engaged in a dance, neither book comes first, there is no hierarchy or sequence to the pair of volumes. Gossage is one of the most literary of photographic book authors and in The Thirty-Two Inch Ruler, the narrative, whilst not autobiographical, is about a neighborhood in which he lives; one that is singular in the United States. At the same time provincial and international, it is a neighborhood populated by ambassadorial residences, embassies, and the lavish private homes of those who are in positions of power and influence in Washington. A project he began with the arrival of a new neighbor, the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and made over a full year’s cycle of seasons, these are images from the drift of privilege. The streets, cars, homes and yards of this neighborhood are photographed on perfect spring or autumn days, with sparklingly clear blue skies, and flowers or foliage accenting the order. These are photographs about how one might wish the world to be, how beauty might be seen as desire. In the same year Gossage made the Map of Babylon, photographing digitally from Washington, to Germany, to China and places in-between. This look away, to places beyond the immediate and local, is a classic exploration of particulars of the outside world.

Sealed.

• Chose Commune 2024
• Hardback, 1st edition. 304p
• New 

After publishing Leaving and Waving in 2021, which presented only a glimpse of Deanna’s Dikeman’s 3-decade journey to document her family, Chose Commune is proud to introduce the photographer’s larger series in an exhaustive 300-page book: Relative Moments.

In Relative Moments, Deanna Dikeman chronicles ordinary moments of her family’s activities. From gardening to cutting cake, from filling up the bird bath to mending a piece of clothing, from mowing the lawn to picking rhubarb, one gets to discover an everyday that might otherwise go unnoticed. In this book, which was generously edited and sequenced — 200 photographs in total — one is not only meant to see the moment shot in one photograph, but all the moments that compose the story.

This project captures a visual history of the photographer family’s life, yet, there is an ongoing narrative embedded in these photographs that conveys larger, more universal truths about American culture, familiarity, and the endless source of everyday wonder that surrounds us.

Text in French/English.

• Steidl 2024
• Hardback, 1st edition. 96p
  
• New 

• Thames & Hudson 2024
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

LOOK AT THE U.S.A. is a searingly honest portrait of post-9/11 America by Magnum photographer Peter van Agtmael. Broadly chronological, images from the front line of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are interspersed with conflicts at home, from protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline to the storming of the Capitol, and layered with van Agtmael’s personal reflections, critique and interviews with those he has encountered along the way.

• Loose Joints 2024
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

Fortune uplifts the long-enduring nature of Black culture and traditions in the American South across ten years of portraiture rooted in history and the landscape.

Flour, water, and salt. These are the sole ingredients that make Hardtack: a Civil War-era food long-associated with survivalism, land migration, and its extremely long shelf life. Drawing from this history as a metaphor for the long-enduring nature of Black culture and traditions, Hardtack uncovers the roots that tie Fortune's native landscape to the conflicts and nuances associated with the post-emancipation Americas.

In the follow-up to his breakout monograph I can't stand to see you cry, Fortune borrows from the language of vernacular and archival photography to interrogate the historical relationship of his community to photography; rooted in the landscape, Fortune often uses sites of historical and cultural interest as a guide but not a subject, implying the deep ties that bind modern Black communities resiliently to their regions, in the face of both adversity and joy.

A significant theme in Hardtack is Fortune’s striking portraits of coming-of-age traditions. Inside, young bull-riders, praise dancers, and pageant queens inherit and gracefully embrace these forms of community ritual. Fortune's dignifying eye pays tribute to these cultural performances' rigour, discipline and creative flair, alongside the intergenerational conversation between young people and elders handing down these traditions. Collecting together nearly a decade of work, Hardtack continues Fortune’s weaving of documentary and personal history, marking a sincere expression of love and passion to a region that has nourished the artist personally and creatively, while also marking an important contribution to photographing the American South.

• Steidl 2016
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• Used good:very good - see below

This book presents three independent bodies of work by Henry Wessel, each being a precise sequence arranged to give the viewer the experience of what it felt like to pass through the territory described.

The first series “Traffic” shows Wessel’s photos of drivers stuck in traffic as he commuted in the early 1980s from Richmond, California, to San Francisco in the morning rush hour. Wessel records the determination, impatience and blank boredom of his fellow drivers as they navigate a daily drill that seems at times daunting and hopeless. “Sunset Park” is Wessel’s series of night photos of the modest working-class neighborhood of Sunset Park in Santa Monica. Over four years in the mid-1990s, Wessel captured the nocturnal transformation of suburbia into a strange, sometimes eerie, landscape. In his words: “You can’t help but notice how the world is reconfigured by the lights at night. The spot lighting of particular areas, the lack of ambient light, the unnatural way that shadows are cast, all take us to an unfamiliar place…” Wessel’s final series “Continental Divide” takes the viewer on a ride from the dense, suburban flatlands of the Midwest, up across the Rocky Mountains, and down into the sparse desert landscape of the American West. Wessel depicts its houses, shacks, street corners, and the highway, reminding us of the inherent aesthetics of the everyday.

The photographic sequence is a fiction, an analogy for the thing it represents. It is about a particular experience that would not exist without the sequence. Henry Wessel

Used copy with faint bump to one corner, and other light wear to linen cover, inside fine.

• Kominek 2024
• Hardback, 1st edition, 160p
• New

• Editorial RM 2024
• Boxed set of hardback/softcover, 1st edition
• New

On May 2, 1986, images were captured that gave rise to the book A Day in the Life of America. Graciela Iturbide formed part of the team of photographers who, over the course of twenty-four hours, registered everyday life in different locations across the United States. Her contribution to the time capsule was a portrait taken in an apartment in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of East Los Angeles, California. There, she was welcomed by a group of Mexican Americans who were mostly deaf women with ties to the White Fence gang.

That initial encounter set the stage for a long-standing friendship as well as the composition of a photographic tale that could very well be described as the intermittent chronicle of a day prolonged for thirty-three years, from 1986 to 2019.

The present edition, comprised of two volumes, offers a selection of the portraits Iturbide took of her Angelino hosts as well as their surroundings, movements, and connections. It features an essay by Alfonso Morales Carrillo describing both the development of this photographic series and the historic background it ultimately conveys: the formation and persistence of communities of Mexican descent north of the Rio Grande.

Boxset with 2 volumes in a hardcover slipcase.

• GOST 2024
• Hardback, 1st edition, 304p
• New

‘…what does it mean to live in a land where the people responsible for protecting its citizens can so often be involved in their deaths?’

In the US, approximately 1000 people continue to die each year in encounters with police.  More than any other industrialised nation. My America is an archive of and memorial to victims of these encounters. The photographs, taken at locations where citizens were shot or tasered by law enforcement officers, create a quiet but chilling critique of the contemporary United States. The scale of the book­­­­­­­­­­ attests to the scale of the problem yet Matar asks us to remember these are individuals.

'Of the over 300 sites I visited only seven had any type of memorial. Something about these lives not being recognised, even on the land itself, upset me most. As a nation, we weren't taking stock. We rarely, if ever, marked the ground.'

The black and white photographs in My America are of city parks, shopping malls, parking lots,  mobile homes, empty fields, and roadside highways. By photographing these banal landscapes Matar declares that what happened at the locations matters and questions the link between landscape and memory.

'Can a photograph tell us anything about what has happened before the photographer arrives… even if not, I believe there is value in documenting the ground where violence has taken place... Perhaps a photograph can offer ways to remember acts of injustice that have been forgotten or never made transparent.' 

Previously, Matar, an American living in London, spent years documenting sites of state sponsored violence in North Africa, Eastern and Southern Europe. In 2015 she turned her lens on her own country and began researching who, how, and where citizens were dying in police encounters in the US. She created detailed maps in her studio and compiled information about each victim who died in 2015 and 2016.

‘I wanted to address the issue of police violence in a way that wasn’t just polemic.' 

A small grant from the Ford Foundation enabled her to make six road trips over the next four years. She photographed in states with the highest numbers and/or highest rates per capita of lethal encounters—Texas, California, Oklahoma, and New Mexico—travelling alone on highways, back roads, and city streets to reveal something beyond statistics. After Matar finished photographing, she spent two additional years researching the legal outcome of each case. The result is a book designed with respect to the victims but also rich with information about the structural reasons why these events continue to occur at such a high rate.

'In a world where millions of pictures are taken each day, I still believe photographs can contain meaning; they can become evidence of things not seen or heard... if, as I believe, to photograph is a desire to know something deeply and beyond the surface, I must be quiet to see. And attending to something says I acknowledge it matters.'

Signed copy.

• Charcoal Press 2023
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

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.