AMERICA

• Deadbeat Club 2024
• Hardback, 1st edition. 84p
  
• New

"Soft eyes", the late Henry Wessel once wrote in describing the way he went about looking for photographs, “is a physical sensation. You are not looking for something. You are open, receptive. At some point you are in front of something that you cannot ignore.” In this smart and tender act of homage, Wessel’s photographs (many of them previously unpublished) are combined with the work of two younger California photographers, Austin Leong and Adrian Martinez, and the resulting work is a surprising exploration of influence as well as a study of the sorts of connective tissue that provide a throughline in photography’s long and fascinating history of lineage. In some sense, Soft Eyesis a case of two photographers chasing a dead man’s shadows, but Leong and Martinez are both disciplined and devoted, and Wessel’s shadows are all over his old stomping grounds of Northern and Southern California, eternally pooling in expected and unexpected places and hiding in plain sight under the bleaching California sun. Wessel’s great gift was in making startling photos out of things and moments the average person might not notice, and his visual vocabulary was striking for its modesty; in a place long stereotyped for its hedonism, he had a quiet, almost Quaker aesthetic, and he was drawn to vernacular architecture, the seemingly prosaic, and the sort of social stasis (and static) that make all human activity and accomplishment look like a diorama in a museum of dreams. He was fiercely loyal to his Leica 35 mm camera, his wide-angle lens, and Kodak Tri-X film. He had his territory, staked out his place, and spent his career plumbing his preoccupations.

Given those self-imposed parameters—and those preoccupations—he has always been ripe for discovery by younger California photographers eager to carry on his work and explore the remnants of the world he left behind. As is evidenced here, there’s plenty of Wessel World still out there waiting for anyone lurking around with a 35 mm camera and soft eyes, and it’s a world where the photos of Leong and Martinez can almost effortlessly coexist with those of Wessel, while subtly—as curator Allie Haeusslein notes—extending Wessel’s sui generis visual vocabulary into the present.

Signed by both photographers, and stamped by the Henry Wessel estate.

• Stanley Barker 2014/2024
• Hardback, 10 year edition, 120p
  
• New

Tod Papageorge's Studio 54 takes us inside New York's most infamous club. During the late 1970's 54 was the place to be seen, attracting thousands of people that regularly included models, actors, rock stars, artists, designers and politicians. Papageorge's exquisite photographs are filled with all the decadence and glamour that one would expect from 1970's New York.

While photographers were common, most were there to simply search out only the rich and famous, Papageorge's images transcend the obvious, transforming the glitter into something akin to poetry.

This new limited gold edition of Studio 54 celebrates 10 years since it's first publication in 2014.

“The 66 photographs in this book were made between 1978–80 in Studio 54, a New York discothèque that, through those years, was the place to be and be seen, as the celebrities, partygoers, and those crazy for dancing who filled it every night were happy to prove. Unsurprisingly, given its reputation (which quickly flamed into notoriety during a short, 33-month existence), it was difficult to get into: the imperturbable doormen who doled out access as if they were controlling passage into a fabulous kingdom made sure that it would be. Only the famous or socially connected could assume they’d find themselves shooed around the flock of hopeful celebrants milling on the street side of the velvet rope and guided through the door; otherwise, the thing most likely to help was to be beautiful. Once inside, though, everyone there seemed thrilled by the fact, no matter how they’d managed it, an excitement fed by the throbbing music and brilliantly designed interiors, which, on a party night, could suggest anything from Caliban’s cave to a harem.”

• The Ice Plant 2024
• Hardback, 1st edition, 88p
  
• New

An unassuming sequence of 42 medium-format photographs depicting slivers of the semirural landscape of Central Illinois

Tim Carpenter’s (born 1968) Little is a visual memoir that completes a trilogy rooted in the sensibility and approach to the practice of “camera” he elaborated in the best-selling, book-length essay To Photograph Is to Learn How to Die (2022). In other words, he steadfastly upholds photography’s capacity to bridge the gap between self and other, and to cultivate meaning in an alienating world. Less formally rigorous than Local Objects (2017) and less introspective and linear than Christmas Day, Bucks Pond Road, this new installment channels the perspective of a child’s meandering mind, open to possible meanings, absorbing whatever the eyes encounter―marks, buildings, branches, paths, the daylight of a Central Illinois afternoon―nascent symbols everywhere, fleeting images improvised of mind and matter. Adapting a style in the lineage of the New Topographics photographers―Robert Adams, John Gossage and Lewis Baltz―these black-and-white photographs are affecting in their minimalism, imbuing poignance within the banal composites of the Midwestern landscape. The volume itself is beautifully produced with a flush-cut cover treatment and a foil-stamped title.

• PCT 2024
• Softcover, 1st PCT edition, 250p.
  
• New

New edition of the classic body of work, which saw Keizo Kitajima photographing New York in the 1980's.

Drawn to the land in which had dramatically changed the Japanese way of life since the war, Keizo Kitajima spent a period of six months wandering the streets of New York City. Here he met with the people whom embodied the very decadence which symbolised 80s New York. From the night clubs, parks, beaches and side streets, Kitajima's New York brilliantly captures a portrait of a city defined through the experiences of the many individuals and events, encountered throughout his journey.   

Originally published by Byakuya Shobo in 1982, Keizo Kitajima's New York has long been a sought-after photobook, this new book adds a series of colour images from 1986-1989, some of which were feautured in his equally sought-after book A.D. 1991.

This new edition features an afterword by Keizo Kitajima and an essay by Shino Kuraishi, in both Japanese and English.

In stock now.

• Gallery 51 2024
• Softcover, 1st edition, 88p.
  
• New

Saul Leiter – Carte Postale features a rare collection of intimate, postcard-sized photographs by Saul Leiter. 

These works were recently uncovered by Leiter’s estate and offer an unprecedented view into his early artistic vision. Originally printed on postcard-sized paper by Saul Leiter, these small yet profound images reveal Leiter’s nuanced portrayal of daily life, from the bustling streets of New York City to the intimate interiors where he sought refuge. Through this collection, visitors are invited to witness Leiter’s skill in transforming ordinary moments into poetic expressions, finding grace in everyday life.

Saul Leiter began his career as a painter, a sensibility he carried into his photography throughout his life. His images are not merely snapshots; each photograph is carefully composed, capturing delicate interplay between light and shadow, which reveals the quiet beauty of urban life. Leiter’s ability to uncover the poetic essence of ordinary moments makes his work deeply relatable, resonating on a universal, human level.

This new book includes the images from the recently uncovered collection, alongside a unique addition: two detachable, postcard-sized prints, ready to be shared or displayed as cherished keepsakes.

• La Fábrica 2024
• Softcover, 1st edition
• New

In 1966, at the age of 28, photographer Joel Meyerowitz embarked on a journey that would take him to the United Kingdom, Ireland, Spain, France, Germany, Eastern Europe, Turkey and Greece. In total, he drove 20,000 miles through 10 countries and ended up taking 25,000 photographs. This trip was a transcendental experience and formative in shaping Meyerowitz's instinctive and brilliant identity that he is known for today. Europa 1966–1967 compiles a selection of photographs taken by Meyerowitz on his yearlong trip through Europe, offering an exciting glimpse of the “New Old World” that, having lately overcome the trauma of World War II, opened itself to modernity and progress.

Meyerowitz witnessed societies in transition, stuck between dictatorship and economic blossoming. Yet he also documented unshakable cultural traditions, such as when he lived with a flamenco-performing family in Francoist Spain for six months. The strength and freshness of Meyerowitz’s gaze and the new codes that were captured in these pictures inspired the next generation of photographers.

• FW: Books 2024
• Softcover, 1st edition
• New

A defining moment for Simone Engelen was when she was sexually abused by two individuals during her high school year in the U.S. This devastating event not only influenced how Engelen interacts with others but also reshaped her perception of intimacy. In ‘27 Drafts’, she visually articulates this inner battle of dealing with her body, identity and feminity. Her inward journey began with shame, and led her to develop coping mechanisms involving addiction, anger and control issues. In 2022 Engelen decided to go back to the U.S. with her mother in order to find closure. It evolved into an exploration of a past life, in which the photographer used her camera as a filter to create necessary distance and engage in conversations long avoided. The title refers to the 27 attempts she has made to put into words the impact of this assault; simply seeking ways to share this single event - that shaped the most formative years of her life.

• FW: Books / Spaces Corners 2023
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

In the winter months, our planet slowly drifts towards the furthest reaches of its orbital path around the Sun who exerts just enough gravitational force to coax Earth back around one more time, lest we’re launched outward into the Solar System, starless and adrift. A steady shower of millions of individually designed crystal sculpted snow flakes create a soft temporary encasement enclosing trees, poles, wires, streets, hills and houses inside pillowed layers below. During some of those nights there is a heightened sense of stillness and quiet all around, as if the world itself was placed on mute.

The title “Winter Nights, Walking” is a reference to a celebrated photography project by the American artist Robert Adams entitled “Summer Nights, Walking”, which was made in the the city of Denver in the American West. While the project could be seen as a nod to Adams, Panar’s intention for “Winter Nights, Walking” is to make a Pittsburgh-specific project that highlights the unique qualities of the recent winter seasons in this region, with an eye towards the changing climate and the recent dark winters of the Covid-19 pandemic. Through the motif of wandering the city alone at night, Panar invites viewers to walk with him and consider the familiar space of the city in its uncanny delight.

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

During his six-year journey across the United States creating the project that became American Geography, Matt Black collected objects in the locations he visited. Each location is designated as an area of ‘concentrated poverty’ – a US Census definition for places with poverty rates of 20% or higher. Over time, the objects he found and collected began to take on symbolic significance.

• Deadbeat Club 2024
• Hardback with loose folded sheets, 1st edition
• New

Known for his textile and sound work, Christopher Robin Duncan recently turned to photography, rediscovering with a simple and sincere pleasure the medium that he had, for a while, set aside. 

Marked by the question of time, and informed by an intuitive, direct relationship with natural elements, Duncan's practice unfolds anew by the use of photography. Using a half frame camera which, by dividing the film in two, doubles time and space by the same action, Duncan creates interstices—the time of a heartbeat, of a fraction of a second—into which he slips, moves imperceptibly, creating suspended moments.

It is a delicate relationship to time that Duncan offers us with Poems. We find there the ties with seasons and natural cycles; we find there air, water, wind.

Like a volume of poetry, in which rhymes answer and echo each other, the lo-fi yet precious views Duncan gathers are combined in Poems, resonating in the distance, and eventually forming a complete cycle, a perfect revolution around its solar heart.

And, like the wind that blows across the photographed views, we too can experience the unbound pages, rearranging their rhymes into visual sequences each time reimagined.

Signed copy.

• Deadbeat Club 2024
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

To make the photographs in her debut monograph, A Poor Sort of Memory, Tracy L Chandler went back to her hometown in the California desert – and not without ambivalence. “As I revisited old hideouts in concrete washes and private bunks in rock formations, I was reminded of a past laden with trauma and my desperation to find both a sense of belonging and an independent self,” she says. The explorations of her youth had been a means to escape the morbid chaos of her family home and find refuge in the peripheries.

And so, in these pictures there is a palpable contrast between the serenity of the minimalist landscape and the artist’s unshakeable feelings of claustrophobia and alienation. As she re-navigated this terrain, she faced the dilemma of reconciling the objective reality before her with the subjective truths of her memories: “I found myself chasing ghosts and evading monsters,” Chandler says, “and I struggled to parse memory from fantasy and reflection from projection.”

Rather than shy away from this ambiguity, Chandler embraced the role of unreliable narrator, using the remnants of her history to craft a new photographic fiction. “Do I believe that making photographs will bring back some sort of truth?” she asks. “My experience is the opposite.” Instead, the work seemed to drive her further down the rabbit hole, evoking the White Queen’s words to Alice: “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.”

• Stanley Barker 2024
• Hardback, 1st edition. 88p
• NEW

• Trespasser 2022
• Softcover, 1st edition
• Used: near fine

Mother of Dogs chronicles the artist’s early evening walks with his partner alongside the railroad tracks near their home in Marfa, Texas.

Light signs of use - faint wear to top edge, small mark/smudge to the rear white cover, see photos.

• Chose Commune 2018
  
• Softcover, 1st edition
  
• Used: good to very good

Over the course of multiple summers, Raymond Meeks has ventured the few miles from his rural home in the Catskill Mountain region of New York, to a single-lane bridge spanning the tributaries of Bowery and Catskill Creeks. Beneath the bridge, a waterfall drops sixty-feet over moss-covered limestone toward a forbidding pond. The local youth have come here from time immemorial, congregating near outcroppings and around a concrete altar – a remnant of an earlier stone bridge. Most allow themselves a brief running start before launching their pale bodies into the void, where tentative suggestions of flight mark the response to gravity. Taken collectively, their gestures allude to ritual, a prayerful response to the exigencies of budding sexuality and a future rife with uncertainty. Halfstory Halflife is a distillation of the photographs made in the shadows of these falls, marked each summer by the emergence of young adults perched at a precipice both in space and in their lives.

Recommended.

Signed copy with some wear to one edge and mark to page edges.  Faint bump to rear corner.  See photos.

Signed in pencil by Raymond Meeks.

• Self published 2024
• Hardback, 1st edition 280p
  
• New

An exploration of Los Angeles’ neighborhoods and transient nature through an extensive typological record of its once-loved sofas.

• Aperture 2024
• Hardback, reprinted edition, 180p
  
• New

In the nearly seven decades since its publication in France in 1958, then in the United States in 1959, Robert Frank’s The Americans has become one of the most influential and enduring works of American photography. Through eighty-three photographs taken across the country, Frank unveiled an America that had gone previously unacknowledged—confronting its people with an underbelly of racial inequality, corruption, injustice, and the stark reality of the American dream. Frank’s point of view—at once startling and tenacious—is imbued with humanity and lyricism, painting a poignant and incomparable portrait of the nation at a turning point in history.

This edition of The Americans is a celebrated return of an iconic title to Aperture’s catalog, more than a half-century after the Aperture and Museum of Modern Art edition was published in 1968. Presented on the centennial of Frank’s birth and coinciding with a major exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, it has been produced following the finest tritone printing from the 2008 edition for which Frank was personally involved in every step of the design and production. 

Frank’s exacting vision, distinct style, and poetic insight changed the course of twentieth-century photography, and influenced subsequent generations of photographers, including Lee Friedlander, Nan Goldin, Danny Lyon, Joel Meyerowitz, Ed Ruscha, and Garry Winogrand. Now extolled as one of the most groundbreaking photobooks of all time, The Americans remains as powerful and provocative as it was upon publication and continues to resonate with audiences today.

• Stanley Barker 2024
• Hardback, 1st edition. 72p
  
• New

Larry Clark was 16 in 1962 when he and his friends started shooting Valo - a drug store nasal inhaler that contained a tremendous amount of amphetamine.

Clark returned to his hometown of Tulsa at 20 after two years serving in Vietnam. Here he graduated from amphetamines to heroin, and upended traditional documentary photography, by turning his camera on himself and his social circle, producing a ground-breaking series of raw and intimate photographs chronicling the disintegration of the American dream. 

Clark’s deeply intimate images exposed the previously unseen lives of suburban American teenagers, living a transgressive, outlaw lifestyle, hanging out in crash pads and committing burglaries and armed robberies to score dope. A small number of these photographs would come to form ‘Tulsa’, a cornerstone of contemporary photography. 

50 years on, Larry Clark has returned to his archive of vintage prints, crafting a powerful vision of his work from 1962-1973, to produce his new book ‘Return’, a meticulously printed, outsized monograph, which is as shocking today as it ever has been, even in a moment in which opioid addiction is more prevalent than ever before.

“I’ve always been interested in small groups of marginalized people who no one would know about otherwise.  I photographed my friends over a ten-year period in this secret world that nobody else could have possibly come in and done except someone from the inside like me. You see us from the time we were teenagers up until our twenties and how everything changed and how we changed. There weren’t supposed to be drugs back then. It was supposed to be mom’s apple pie and white picket fences. When I started making work, I said, “Why can’t you show everything?” - Larry Clark 

• Stanley Barker 2024
• Hardback, 1st edition, 104p
  
• New

In the Summer of 1980, Lisa Barlow was following the curve of Connecticut’s Route 69 in a beat-up rental car, when she came across a giant cross looming above the highway.

Barlow had heard about Holy Land U.S.A. but never encountered the painstaking replica in miniature of Jerusalem with illustrative scenes from the Bible, replete with precepts and biblical quotations engraved in cement. 

There was Pilate’s house, the Inn with a “No Vacancy” sign, a mummified lump spray painted white representing Lot’s wife turned to salt, and a repentant looking Lucifer locked in a small dog cage. Built 20 years earlier with concrete, plaster, wire and wood, the diorama had been sparingly repaired with modern materials such as plastic and aluminium siding. The Stairway to Heaven, cracked asphalt steps ascending the hill, had a cyclone fence along one side, and the Garden of Eden was completely obscured by thick vines under a tin sunshade. It was from there that Balow first saw the city of Waterbury spread beneath her, its church spires and factory smokestacks in odd juxtaposition with Holy Land’s little foot high buildings at her feet.

“Before long, it was more than a fascination with Holy Land that kept luring me back to Waterbury. It was the people who captured my attention, my imagination and eventually, my love. This is the story of that year in pictures.” Lisa Barlow 

Barlow’s images of Waterbury and its uniquely American idiosyncrasies are enthused with a rare empathy combined with a visual complexity that continues to unfold with each viewing. 

• Chose Commune 2024
• Hardback, 1st edition. 80p
• NEW

This is poet and photographer Rebecca Norris Webb’s first hybrid poetry collection, punctuated by more than a dozen of her lyrical photographs. This elegiac book explores the geography of loss—both personal and environmental— after the suicide of her sole remaining brother, compounded by the earlier loss of his identical twin. Glimpse by glimpse, she also follows the ever-shifting world of light beginning in Trieste, Italy, then traveling from Cape Cod to the Dakotas, from New England to the Carolinas, ultimately observing bird migrations in the American South and northern France, as this book is also a meditation on various kinds of twinning—birds and brothers, grieving and migration, loss and light, badlands and coastlines, words and images, and seeing and dreaming.

• GOST Books 2024
• Hardback, 1st edition. 112p
• NEW

• Stanley Barker 2024
  
• Softcover, 1st edition, 120p
  
• New
  

The quiet images of a waning American landscape featured in Jason Lee’s new book TX | CA 19 were made in June and July 2019 on a drive to California from his adopted home state of Texas. This would be the last of such photo outings before he would relocate back to his native Southern California that September.

“Many of these color photographs were made along and surrounding Highways 287 and 40/66, from Decatur, TX to California—a stretch that I’ve travelled one direction or another many times now and have become extremely fond of, making it a point to revisit certain locations and produce current photographs (collecting time-span exposures of familiar sights is for both curiosity and pleasure and remains ongoing). And so you will find quite a few scenes repeated in this companion to TX I CA 17. 

"Here, however, when in California this time, despite having photographed in the desert east of Los Angeles between Highways 40 and 10 where I’d previously made a handful of the pictures seen in the California section of 17, I didn’t expose any color film. Instead, the California images in this offering were made northbound along Highways 14/395 and 6 after departing L.A. for the drive home. A route that I don’t take often enough and did not take two years prior. Beautiful country out that way. And coincidentally it was thereabouts that I made some of my first pictures from the road when I started photographing the American landscape in 2006.“

• 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. 

Very faint wear to spine ends and corners (barely noticeable).  Otherwise new/sealed.

• 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,