AMERICA

• 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.

Shipping from 12th December.

• 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 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.”

• 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.

• 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.

• 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. 

• 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.

• 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.

FINAL FEW COPIES.

• 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 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.

• 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.

• 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

• 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.

• 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.

• Underlife Editions 2024
• Softcover, 1st edition
• New

These photographs were accumilated over the span of a few summers in East Tennessee and the surrounding region of the Appalachian Mountains. This collection is about the brevity of light between hills, where we live, and where distant horizons are few. The work was made out of love for people and the landscape in which we are confined.

11in x 17in (27.94cm x 43.18cm)

46 pages, 26 tri-tone plates

70gsm uncoated paper.

Stab-bound with hand-cut poplar shims. Grain color will vary with each book.

First Edition of 200 copies

• GOST Books 2024
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New
  

Since 2012 photographer Mark Power has travelled across the US to create a complex visual narrative of the cultural and physical landscape of the US—a country in the midst of change. Good Morning, America (Volume IV) is the penultimate in an ongoing series of five books.

‘I left the United States as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed the country’s first cases of Covid-19. That was in February 2020 and not long afterwards we published Good Morning, America (Volume III), which obliquely referred to the events as they unfolded, albeit from a distance. Almost two years passed before I was able to take my first post-pandemic flight back. By then my lust for travel seemed to have deserted me, but after landing in Denver I went back to work with a vengeance… ‘I knew a post-Covid landscape wouldn’t look any different; it certainly didn’t in Britain, and the US was likely to be much the same. The world had moved on and it was remarkable how soon I’d forgotten about life during the pandemic.’

Power moved slowly through Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska and Wyoming before heading back to Colorado. In a later trip he travelled to Alaska and then another lengthy trip to Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey and upstate New York. This new book includes some of these new images alongside those taken on previous trips. Power has described the process to be like ‘assembling a large and complicated jigsaw puzzle with little idea of what the final picture will be.’

Each book in the series has represented a shift in mood or tone. This latest book has seen the human presence subtly move from the peripheries or the incidental in the landscape to being a more integral part of some images. The tone of the book is more optimistic than previously, and the human presence diminishes a sense of isolation so often present in the vast landscape.

 In the background on his recent trips the political landscape had shifted with the election of Joe Biden as 46th President. Power was aware that although domestic US politics seemed less dramatic and eventful under the new president, that the country remained divided with the next election around the corner.

Signed copy.

• Kehrer 2020
• Hardback, 2nd edition
• New

As a passionate observer and chronicler of everyday street life in New York, she spent decades documenting residents of the city's poorer neighbourhoods such as Lower East Side and Harlem. Levitt's oeuvre stands out for her sense of dynamics and surrealistic sense of humour, and her employment of colour photography was revolutionary: Levitt numbers among those photographers who pioneered and established colour as a means of artistic expression.

The book accompanying the retrospective of the Albertina Museum features around 130 of her iconic works. These range from her early, surrealism-influenced photographs of chalk drawings to her 1941 photos from Mexico and the clandestinely shot portraits of New York subway passengers that Walker Evans encouraged her to do in 1938. Many of these photos come from Helen Levitt's personal estate, and this exhibition represents their first-ever public showing.

English edition.

• Nazraeli Press 2024
• Hardback, 1st edition, 104p
• New

“Over these last several years, even in the darkest days of the pandemic, my time in nature has been a constant source of solace and wonder. My days out photographing and exploring usually start very early, in the hours prior to sunrise, when the birds are still sleeping and the quality of quiet is extraordinary. I think of this time of day as “the shadow’s veil”, when the first delicate veil of light slowly becomes evident and the depth of earth’s shadow gradually lightens in the slow progression of night to day.

When observing the transitioning day, I find there is a therapeutic element to the patterns and surprises. For myself, this awareness leads to an insightful perspective on life’s usual challenges. A sense of humility emerges in consideration of the enormous scale, complexity, and sheer power of nature; our problems don’t register in significance.

This book is a collection of observations about the unfolding of days. These photographs were made either in the hours before sunrise or very early in the day when the light is new, shadows are long, and hope is eternal.” — from the Introduction by Jeffrey Conley

Jeffrey Conley’s fourth title with Nazraeli Press is an artist’s book of the first order. Limited to just 1,000 copies, each presented in a custom slipcase of wood veneer over boards, The Shadow’s Veil presents 64 of the artist’s most powerful images, many published here for the first time. Beautifully printed in duotone with two distinct varnishes on natural Korean art paper, the exposed sides of the book block are painted charcoal gray and bound in unbleached linen fabric.

• Powerhouse 2008
• Hardback, 1st edition
• Fine
  

Helen Levitt, the visual poet laureate of New York City, published her magnum opus Crosstown in 2001 to great acclaim. Since then Levitt has authored two smaller volumes, Here and There and Slideshow, her first monograph featuring her little known colour work which has garnered her accolades from around the globe. Here is a collection of her most iconic works, intermixed with never-before-seen photographs, combining seven decades of New York City street life with Levitt's seminal work in Mexico City.

Sealed 2008 first edition.