AMERICA

• TBW 2020
• Hardback, 1st edition
• imperfect - see below

A foreboding meditation in the vein of Southern Gothic literature, Drake’s most recent body of work emerged through her collaboration with an enigmatic group of women loosely calling themselves “Knit Club.” The nature of the club is ambiguous. It is a cross between a gang, a cult of mysteries, and a group of friends bound by secrets only they share.

The book follows a narrative structure loosely borrowed from Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying–– that is to say, not one omniscient narrator but many disparate stream-of-consciousness voices. We sense the authorship of the photographs to be collaborative, the result of creative play between Drake and the club in which she found herself embedded, their process a kind of alchemy. In the style of the Gothic, Drake’s masterful use of color to create mood opens the door to the tension between the real and the supernatural. What we find, however, is not grotesque but something vital. A community that manages to exist outside the gaze or control of men. Women, children, and mothers, shrouded in masks and mystery to live a life on their own terms.

Following three critically acclaimed self-released books– Two Rivers (2013), Wild Pigeon (2014), and Internat (2017) –Knit Club is the first book Drake has made in collaboration with a publisher. Drake is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, among many other awards, and became a member of Magnum Photos in 2019.

Sealed copy but with indentations to the cover - see photo.

• TBW / Images Vevey 2024
• Hardback, 1st edition
• Imperfect - see below
  

TBW Books and Éditions Images Vevey are pleased to present Christian Patterson’s Gong Co., a monumental memento mori to the decline and decay of a family-owned grocery store in the heart of the Mississippi Delta, from which the book takes its name. 

When Patterson first encountered the store in 2003, it was still open for business but seemingly stuck in time, its shelves scattered with long-expired products. It was like an unintentional time capsule, and an uncanny fulfillment of Andy Warhol’s prophecy that “Someday, all department stores will become museums, and all museums will become department stores.” Over the next twenty years, Patterson diligently documented the store's slow disintegration. In 2013, its doors were closed, with its contents left inside. Patterson continued to access the store until the day it was gutted in late 2019.

Gong Co. invites readers to engage in a visceral and visual exploration. Through Patterson’s eclectic mix of on-site and studio photographs, monotypes, trompe l’oeil collages, and cryptic handwritten notes, the book becomes a dynamic and multi-layered experience. Marcel Duchamp’s readymades or Dieter Roth’s Flacher Abfall (Flat Waste) come to mind, where everyday objects are transformed into art through context and presentation. The book offers endless opportunities for interpretation.

The book format acts as a sculptural work in itself. Patterson has crafted an artist book object, presented as an aged and worn green, clothbound cover wrapped in a brown paper jacket resembling a grocery sack. Each page is a testament to Patterson’s meticulous attention to detail, incorporating elements such as mold and foxing marks, as if caused by heavy southern humidity, now forever embedded into the book's pages. 

Gong Co. is a profound exploration of how we engage with the artistic representation of America and “the South”—a place shaped in popular imagination by great photographers and writers like William Eggleston, Walker Evans, William Faulkner, and Harper Lee. But Patterson delves more deeply into the impermanence of it all; and of a now long-outworn sense of America itself.

First printing.

Faint bump to one corner, otherwise as new.  See photo.

• Nazraeli 2025
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• New
  

Chicago by Mark Steinmetz, made between 1988 and 1991, provides a compelling portrait both of the city itself and of the time in which they were made.

Steinmetz’s relationship with Chicago is an important and evolving aspect of his artistic journey. While he is primarily associated with the South, Chicago has long been a city that has inspired his creative exploration. Chicago’s distinct neighborhoods, architecture, and energy offered Steinmetz a rich source of material, allowing him to capture the city’s quiet moments and intimate portraits of its residents. Chicago showcases a unique perspective of the city and and is an important chapter in Steinmetz’s ongoing dialogue with the broader American landscape.

Born in 1961, Mark Steinmetz lives in Athens, Georgia. He is a Guggenheim Fellow, with work in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

In stock.

• TBW 2024
• Softcover, 1st edition. 124p
  
• New

In 2014 and 2015, Pieter Hugo met the subjects of his photographs in San Francisco’s Tenderloin and Los Angeles’s Skid Row districts. The high-key lighting of the relentless California sun characterizes these outdoor portraits made in the city streets. Bold colors and chiaroscuro form the language used by Hugo to complement the expansive gestures and curving forms of his subjects—wild and unrestrained. Hugo pairs this theme of abandonment with a style that invokes Dutch Golden Age or Baroque master painters such as Caravaggio or Frans Hals. The intensity of attention similarly brought to these sitters in their engagement with Hugo is palpable. The resulting photographs—so completely steeped in a careful handling of shape, form, color, and light—transcend beyond their specific moment in time to embody an overarching timelessness. Too frequently overlooked, Hugo brings our attention to these wildflowers blooming from the uncommon Californian land and its elusive promise of prosperity. Uninhibited and lawless, we bear witness to a truth that only they are capable of transmitting.

Proceeds from the sale of this book will go to Homeless Youth Alliance, which strives to empower young people experiencing homelessness to protect themselves, to educate each other, to reduce harm within the community, and to transition off the streets.

• Edition Bildhalle 2023
• Hardback, 2nd edition. 128p
  
• Fine

"Whether he focused his camera on subway rides, dancers at the legendary Studio 54 or hip-hop culture in the streets of New York, Spiller captured all the many facets of a bygone world in images as varied, as fascinating and as absurd as that world itself had been. In the process, Spiller combines his curiosity for his fellow human beings with a profound understanding of the beauty of the banal and mundane in the world around him. This secures his place in the annals of great Swiss photography. Like many of the well-known names that came before him, he managed to translate empathy into form through strength of willpower. Or, as his long-time friend and companion Paul Nizon so aptly put it: 'I’ve often asked myself what made Willy Spiller’s photography so forthright, so refreshing and so riveting. I believe it’s a blend of unabashed curiosity and roguish complexity combined with a fraternal sense of compassion. This isn’t something you learn at school: it’s more a question of class, of predisposition, and ultimately of character. Behind the swashbuckling, wheeler-dealing facade there’s a dreamer, a man hungry for life and beauty. And that is the reason he sides with humanity, which is just another way of saying that he has an innate love of mankind. That is the way he sees things. And he is driven by a highly developed artistic energy.'"

2023 edition.  Signed to the title page.

• Nazraeli Press 2025
• Hardback 1st edition
• New

Published to coincide with an exhibition of the same name, Los Angeles x Shinjuku presents a face-to-face selection of work from Daido Moriyama’s ongoing Shinjuku, Tokyo series and Avo Tavitian’s photographs of Los Angeles made over the past three decades.

Born in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1954, Avo Tavitian’s journey to photography is marked by a profound connection to his changing surroundings. Shaped by the experience of moving to the Eastern shore of the United States with his family in the late 1960s, following the 1967 Middle East war, Tavitian developed a sense of being an outsider during his formative teen years in New Jersey and New York City, a sensibility that would later influence his work as a photographer after his relocation to Los Angeles in the mid-1980s.

Born in 1938 in Osaka, Japan, Daido Moriyama is a pivotal figure in contemporary photography, celebrated for his evocative black-and-white street photography that captures the essence of urban life. In recording the subcultures of Tokyo during his career he gravitated to the dense, dynamic and often gritty ward of Shinjuku. He employs a raw, spontaneous style characterized by high contrast and grainy textures. His iconic images explore themes of identity, memory, and the fleeting moments of everyday existence.

Tavitian and Moriyama both focus on framing everyday subjects, capturing moments on 35mm film while embracing the unpredictability of the medium. Their work reflects a deep fascination with urban landscapes and a curiosity about the mundane, as they seeks to document the changes and constants in his field of vision. Through their explorations, both photographers use the camera to navigate the complexities of belonging and identity in an ever-shifting human environment.

• TBW 2024
• Softcover, 1st edition
• New
  

TBW Books presents What the Rain Might Bring, the debut release from photographer Dylan Hausthor. Designed as a work of art in its own right, the book features a frame—black edge and spine printing—and is completely devoid of text with only a simple title on its cover. The minimalist design sets the stage for an immersive sensory experience that intertwines the tactile and the visual, drawing readers into a world steeped in mysticism.

Inspired by David Arora’s mushroom identification guide, Hausthor’s large-format black-and-white photographs explore the rich interplay between human, plant, and animal realms. What the Rain Might Bring delves into themes of storytelling, faith, folklore, and the inherent queerness of nature. The images evoke a sense of pagan, Wiccan, religious, anarchic, and mystic rituals, offering a visual exploration that is at once candid and full of hidden secrets.

Within Hausthor’s untamed world, characters and landscapes become conduits, weaving together new narratives that challenge perceptions of reality. The imagery—an owl mid-flight, a procession of figures, an infant nursing at its mother’s breast, a towering mushroom, and spiders in their webs—paints a world where human roles feel fragile, overshadowed by the dominance of nature. Each photograph oscillates between the eerie and enchanting, the humorous and the haunting.

Central to Hausthor’s work is a fascination with the instability of fact in storytelling. The viewer is drawn into a space where the line between truth and artistic license is deliberately blurred. Hausthor’s photography integrates elements of ad hoc investigative journalism, disinformation, and performance, disrupting traditional approaches to nature photography. The result is an exploration of a post-fact world, where the boundaries between parable and reality dissolve, leaving the viewer to question what they believe.

The book’s structure is anchored by seven delicate gatefolds, symbolizing the consecutive nights Hausthor was visited by a moth—an intimate marker of times that lends the work a diaristic quality. These pages invite readers into a ritualistic experience, transforming the book into a meditative artifact that reflects the fractured, fluid, and deeply human nature of reality itself.

• Stanley Barker 2024
• Hardback, 1st edition. 72p
  
• Imperfect - see below

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 

Spine of book slightly askew - otherwise book is as new - see photo.  Enjoyment of book unaffected.

• Charcoal Press 2024
• Hardback 1st edition
• New

Jeff Dworsky dropped out of school at 14, bought a Leica at 15, and moved to a small island in Maine at 16. 

He became a fisherman.
He met a girl, got married, and moved to an even smaller island.

He built a life.

He dug a well. Built a boat. Planted a garden. Set foundation stones. Built a house. Built traps. Raised sheep. He fathered three children.

His wife left the island and the life they had built.

He stayed and raised the children.

He fished for 40 years.

He is there still, on a small island in Penobscot Bay.


Signed copy.

• Nazraeli Press 2025
• Hardback, 1st trade edition. 
• New

Nazraeli Press first published Americans Seen in 2017, as part of their limited-edition NZ Library series. This remastered trade edition makes this extraordinary body of work available to a larger audience.

The photographs in Americans Seen were made between 1979 and 1986, when Sage Sohier was a young photographer living in Boston. As Sohier writes in her introduction, “In that pre-digital and less paranoid era, families — and especially children and teenagers — used to hang out in their neighborhoods. A kind of theater of the streets emerged from the boredom of hot summer days and it was a great time to photograph people outside. Undoubtedly my own childhood afternoons, often spent in my neighbor’s basement creating theatrical productions with the four kids who lived there, helped to form my vision of the play of children as a kind of rite or performance. That our audience was comprised of our dogs never discouraged us.”

Over the next seven years, Sohier made portraits of people living in Boston’s many working class and ethnic neighborhoods, as well as in the towns she visited each summer during her annual road trips: one through small town Pennsylvania via dilapidated Newburgh, New York, another to mining areas in rural West Virginia, and once to Mormon enclaves in Utah and Idaho. During long Boston winters, Sohier would head south and photograph in the citrus-producing regions of inland Florida, or through the Florida panhandle to New Orleans and Cajun country.

• Twin Palms 2012
  
• Hardback, 5th edition
  
• imperfect - see below

At 17 Mike Brodie hopped his first train close to his home in Pensacola, FL thinking he would visit a friend in Mobile, AL. Instead the train went in the opposite direction to Jacksonville, FL. Days later, Brodie rode the same train home, arriving back where he started. Nonetheless, it sparked something and Brodie began to wander across the U.S. by any means that were free - walking, hitchhiking and train hopping. Shortly after, Brodie found a Polaroid camera stuffed behind a carseat. With no training in photography, the instant camera was an opening for Brodie to document his experiences. As a way of staying in touch with his transient community, Brodie shared his pictures on various websites gaining the moniker “The Polaroid Kidd” [sic]. When the Polaroid film he used was discontinued, Brodie switched to 35mm film and a sturdy 1980’s camera. Brodie spent years crisscrossing the U.S. amassing a collection, now appreciated as one of the most impressive archives of American travel photography. When asked about his approach to travel and photography Brodie has said “sometimes I take a train the wrong way or…whatever happens a photo will come out of it, so it doesn’t really matter where I end up.”

5th edition of this photobook classic.

Large bump to bottom edge - cover only affected, pages mostly fine.  Otherwise a new copy.  See photos.

• Loose Joints 2021
• Softcover, 1st edition
• used - good see below

For nearly two decades, Lichtenstein has worked in varied subgenres within photography’s historical archetypes: marginalized contemporary landscapes, refracted still life, performance-based portraiture and process-oriented abstraction. In Recorder, Lichtenstein embarks on an ambitious three-part series of images that recycle and reorient themselves within the limits of technology and photographic vision. 

Every image in Lichtenstein’s layered artist book departs from a singular work: Welcome Water, where Lichtenstein collaborated with J. Stoner Blackwell to make flatbed scans of the artist’s delicate sculptures derived from disposable carrier bags, which were then cut out and stitched into a sprawling sculptural floorpiece. Meditating on the waste and burdensome environmental significance of these single-use plastic objects, Lichtenstein accumulated and activated the detritus of Welcome Water, using the negative cutouts and test-prints of the work to recycle them into new photographic forms.

The results are three series that are both distinct and inseparably intertwined: Holes, a series of black-and-white images reworking Blackwell’s delicate laser-cut interventions to the carrier bags; Grounds, a physical layering of leftover cutout shapes, pinned and affixed, leaving a gaping void at the photographic centre; and finally, Untitled, Lichtenstein’s boldest foray into abstraction, where her source materials were repeatedly printed and scanned, sometimes up to thirty times, to create a giddying and vertiginous collaboration with the entropy of print technology. These works are layered with ink, program errors, exaggerations and obfuscations, eventually liberating her source material into pure free-form visual abstraction.

Lichtenstein creates images that are at once challenging and seductive, setting forth a chain reaction of feedback loops in which pictorial space is filled and mutated through collaboration with and against the limits of imaging technologies. Recorder contains profound depths and coalescent shapes that never fully resolve themselves, but within this profundity a clear thread can be drawn, connecting the push-and-pull of photography’s tendency to both record and obscure, with a meditation on waste, consumption, and the environmental changes set loose by the anthropocene. 

With limited 8×10" print (unsigned) of an exclusive unpublished work by the artist. Giclée print on Hahnemühle Rag.

Used copy - Book has light wear to edges/corners.

• Twin Palms 2024
• Softcover, 1st edition, 412p
• New

Mike Brodie’s first monograph, A Period of Juvenile Prosperity touched down more than a decade ago, depicting his fellow rail-riders and drifters in a rebellious and wildfire pursuit of adventure and freedom. “Brodie leapt into the life of picture-making as if he was the first to do it,” Danny Lyon wrote about the book in Aperture. Next came Tones of Dirt and Bone, a collection of earlier SX-70 pictures Brodie made when photography first led him to hopping freights, when he was known as “The Polaroid Kidd.” And then Brodie seemed to disappear from the art world as suddenly and mysteriously as he’d first appeared. Maybe his vanishing was another myth. Maybe it was just a necessary retreat. “I was divorcing myself from all that,” he says. “I was growing up. I was pursuing this other life.”

In Nashville he became a diesel mechanic. Fell in love. Moved across the country again. Got married. Bought land on the long dusty Winnemucca road Johnny Cash sang about. Started his own business. Built a house. Put down roots. And when that life exploded, the open road called again. Throughout almost all of it, his cameras were with him, and at last those pictures are coming to light.

If Michael Brodie’s first monograph was a cinematic dream, Failingis the awakening and the reckoning, a raw, wounded, and searingly honest photographic diary of a decade marked by love and heartbreak, loss and grief — biblical in its scope, and in its search for truth and meaning. Here is the flip side of the American dream, seen from within; here is bearing close witness to the brutal chaos of addiction and death; here are front-seat encounters with hitchhikers and kindred wanderers on society’s edges, sustained by the ragtag community of the road. Failing often exists in darkness but is tuned to grace. Brodie’s eye stays forever open to the strange and fleeting beauty that exists in forgotten places — the open country and the lost horizons that sweep past dust-spattered windows in a spectral blur.

"Looking back, it's as if it never really happened. I was never a photographer holding a camera but a vessel to tell a story. It's like it all existed within a dream, and this is just God's plan for my life."

• Twin Palms 2024
• Hardback, 2nd edition, 96p
• New

'pines grow pulling the old dreams through the soil pinesap climbing into its limbs lifting a ladder like solitude'

Inspired by the life and work of the poet and land surveyor, Frank Stanford, these photographs of hermetic homes and men living in solitude were taken in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas and Missouri

By capturing the foggy landscapes, cluttered interiors, and rugged men that are tucked away in the dark woods, Jasper explores a fascination with running away from the everyday. The work bounces between fact and fiction, exhibiting the reality and myth of what it means to be truly apart from society.

2024 2nd edition.  

• Stanley Barker 2024
• Hardback, 1st edition, 80p
• New

Pia-Paulina Guilmoth’s Flowers Drink the River reveals a dreamscape where mud, earth and stone envelop, and the forest floors are wet with glowing dew. Using a large format camera and careful analogue techniques, Pia finds an entrancing, mystical presence in her daily experiences amidst the forests, fields, and rivers of her home. Pia’s hazy images, filled with light aberrations and glowing spectres, leave us suspended mid-ritual. 

Flowers Drink the River spans the first two years of Pia’s gender transition, as she photographs her small community in rural Maine, and the beauty and terror of living as a trans woman in a small right-wing town. Scenes of moths and floating spider silk, mud-drenched bodies intertwining, a burning house, girlfriends pissing on each other from tree branches, nocturnal animals, and euphoric rituals adorn flash-soaked landscapes. Under the moon, the boundaries between people, animals, and the land soften and blur. Flowers Drink the River is an animistic search for beauty, resistance, safety, and magic in a world often devoid of these things. It’s a love note to rural working-class people, trans women, lesbians, queer people and the backwoods of central Maine. Pia finds beauty and belonging as she creates a utopia hidden just barely out of reach. 

Pia’s photographs begin with patient acts of co-creation. She stages delicate sculptures out of spider silk, flowers, and other natural materials, then she waits as the land and water, wind, light, or a stray moth, begin to interact with them in unpredictable ways. Sometimes the creation takes the form of building trust with animals, carefully, over many nights.

“each night for a week in august i would sit in the tall, tick-infested grass behind the orchard covered in Scent Killer Gold, wearing a ghillie suit, holding a tray full of crushed apples in one hand, and a 30 foot makeshift shutter release cable attached to my 4×5 camera in the other hand. the same family of deer would get more comfortable with my presence each night. eventually they were eating the ripe fruit from my hands. the following tuesday i would have my first hrt consultation. i was keeping it a secret, knowing there was no way i could safely transition in this place, but also no way i could hide my changing body over the following months and years.” - Pia-Paulina Guilmoth

Presented as large format 3/4 Swiss bound volume, Flowers Drink the River's cover is replete with reproductions of an aged pink craft paper that Pia found stashed in an abandoned house down the road from her home. She then covered a spider web found along the river in a powdered red pigment and adhered it to the paper. Over this a cloth nameplate has been added, while the inside cover features a tipped on facsimile 4x5" contact print that she made in her bathroom.

• GOST 2024
• Hardback, 1st edition, 144p
• New

The city of Atlanta in the US has endured constant change throughout its history. It has been destroyed and rebuilt several times over, survived slavery and racial segregation to become the cradle of the Civil Rights Movement, and recently recast the state of Georgia as a blue wave in a sea of neighbouring red states. The Makeshift City by Joshua Dudley Greer shows a contemporary Atlanta in a state of flux—both a unique city with a specific history and culture, and a generic American metropolis struggling to forge its identity.

The photographs in the book were made between 2020-2024—a period which encompassed the seismic events of the COVID-19 pandemic, the rise to prominence of Black Lives Matter, struggles for abortion rights, increased income inequality and the Stop Cop City movement. This backdrop provided the motivation for Greer to witness certain economic and political forces as they manifested themselves in the landscape, architecture and community in one of the largest and most progressive cities in the American South. Although the structure of the city changed dramatically during this period, the systems which governed it often remained immutable, constrained by capital interests and the two political parties see-sawing for power.

The images in The Makeshift City document Atlanta’s downtown street corners, suburbs, exurbs, film sets, cemeteries, rivers, and construction sites. They show landscapes ruptured by development and carved by highways, inhabitants improvising outdoor gyms, mosques and offices, sterile new-builds, empty lots and crumbling mansions. Greer weaves together all of these elements into a singular narrative that suggests the tensions of the past and the realities of the present.

‘I watched people go about their daily lives in spite of everything that might act against them. There were times of resilience, activism, selflessness, and joy. But there were also moments of banality, privilege and ignorance, even disdain. I’ve tried to make photographs that acknowledge the totality of experience that may beset one particular place during one particular time. Of course, I know I am unable to do this. There is so much about Atlanta that I don’t understand, and perhaps, probably, never will.’

The region where Atlanta stands today was originally Creek and Cherokee territory. The location was chosen to be a railroad terminus and the city was founded in 1837 as a transport centre. Atlanta was destroyed both in the Civil War by General William T. Sherman’s troops and again in a great fire of 1917—the mythical Phoenix rising from ashes adopted as the city’s official symbol. Throughout its history, Atlanta’s layout and growth was shaped and influenced by slavery, racial discrimination and segregation. And yet, Atlanta also became known as ‘The Black Mecca’ for its thriving Black businesses, political leadership, higher education and entertainment. Atlanta’s current population growth, real estate development and racialised gentrification set the stage for a new chapter, one that sits within an uneasy political era pointing toward an uncertain future.

Signed copy.

• 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 Eyes is 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.”

• 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.

• 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.

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

• 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.

• 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. 

• 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.“

• Trespasser 2024
  
• Hardback, 1st edition, 188p
  
• As new (see below)*

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.

* Please note there have been a few production issues with this books as follows:-

Due to the pages edges being painted black there is a possibility of a few stray paint marks/black dots on the uncoated paper pages.   The black linen cover also has a tendency mark very easily during handling of the book.  We are checking all copies of the book that we will send out, to ensure that customers receive copies without serious errors, but note that minor imperfections may well exist in the copy you receive, so please consider this before purchase.  This does not detract from the high quality of the production or enjoyment of this title, which in our opinion is without doubt the best photobook of the year.

Last copy.

• 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 copy.

Out of print.

• 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)

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

• 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.

• TBW 2023
• Softcover, 1st edition, 400p
• NEW

It was important to let my unconscious, rather than my intellect, dictate the progression. For reasons I don’t entirely understand, being nude became part of the project early on. And working against that white wall, near the two front windows in the so-called living room, became a central point.

—Melissa Shook

In December 1972, Melissa Shook (1939–2020) began a series of daily self-portraits in her Lower East Side apartment that she would continue until August 1973. Daily Self-Portraits 1972–1973 is the artist’s complete series of 192 photographs published together for the first time. With her medium format, black and white photographs, Shook captures herself in a variety of poses creating a more complete portrait than could be achieved with any one image. The photographs often include Shook’s daughter and the friends who populate her sphere. The viewer is introduced to the artist’s intimate domain and the mundanity of everyday existence comes to the forefront: nursing her ailing toe on the couch, sitting at the kitchen table with a friend, hair wrapped up in a towel post shower, dancing with her daughter. Rather than strictly embodying a typical vision of beauty, Shook’s poses are often imbued with irreverence and parody as a rejection of the tradition of female portraiture made from a male perspective. The book is astutely contextualized by Sally Stein's essay highlighting the artist’s purposeful dismissal of the idea of a single, revelatory moment, opting instead for the extended serial portrait, with all its contradictions and complexity.