Landscape and Nature

• Ediciones Ánomalas 2022
• Softcover, 1st edition, 244pp
• New

“Marshy, rugged, winding, monumental.

The Danube Delta is the second greatest European river delta: a natural labyrinth of reeds and water that extends over more than 3500 square kilometres. It lies between Romania and Ukraine, on the geographical boundary of Europe, on the shores of the Black Sea. The delta region is sparsely populated and its few hamlets can only be reached by boat. It lacks basic infrastructure and its streets are plunged into the depths of darkness as soon as the sun sets.

Living on the delta means living in oblivion, amidst marshlands. Like Minotaurs, the inhabitants of the delta find themselves immersed in their own labyrinth, putting up with the emptiness it imposes on them. The circular rhythm of the seasons defines their rhythm of life; it affects their moods, conditions their desires and habits and sets up physical and mental barriers.

For four years I’ve submerged myself in the delta, striving to understand and document these profound connections. In the different seasons, I’ve beheld the landscape and its gradual changes almost obsessively, in order to record their physical and psychological upshots.

Throughout this long research process, the territory has assumed the psychological role of a true labyrinth.

In a language that hovers between anthropological observation and symbolic transfiguration, I’ve drawn my map of the territory, and my interpretation transcends the physical and geographical reality of the marshes, challenging the profound meaning of the act of inhabiting. Inhabiting a territory, inhabiting a labyrinth. Inhabiting oneself.”

Delta is divided into two sections, complementary to each other and equally relevant. The first one collects the photographic body of work, offering a purely visual narrative. The second consists of 30 field notes. Previous collaborations with anthropologists have influenced my methodology. 

Since my first trip to the Delta, I felt the need to conduct an investigation parallel to the photographic research, recording my daily observations in a notebook. The result is a diary of ethnographic inspiration made of descriptive notes, interview extracts, personal reflections and short fiction. A hybrid text that fits the photographic narrative filling the gaps generated by the image and expanding its narrative potential.

Text in English/ Spanish/ Catalan/ Italian

• the(M) éditions / IBASHO 2022
• Softcover, 1st edition, 192p
• New

"Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present."

-René Magritte

Photography duo Albarrán Cabrera uses photography as a tool to investigate reality. The images that make up their latest book ‘Photography Syntax’, function as the notebooks of their philosophical research. Together with the texts, the photographs testify to the use of photographic processes as a means of going deeper into the reasons and thoughts behind the images.

Texts in English by Albarrán Cabrera

First edition with cover as shown.

• Another Place Press 2022
• Softcover, 1st edition with print
• New

"The island is a living organism.
Something eternally alive.
Even in the most impenetrable darkness."

Dennis Gade Kofod

These photographs were captured on the Danish island of Bornholm in the winters of 2020-2021, where Anne Lass resides. With the project, she aims to put more focus on life out of the high season and explore what happens after dark - both inside homes and outside. The works include staged portraits of friends and neighbors, still images of nature and details of towns. The project has a documentary starting point and describes life on Bornholm in our specific time - two winters characterized by pandemic.

The images are also a visual study of artificial light situations, how light and shadows shapes people and nature and what mood the light conveys. Only present light sources have been used throughout. The combination of artificial light and the settings gives the feeling of film-stills with references to Twin Peaks, a series from the nineties which triggered Anne's own imagination about life and people in rural areas.

The narrative is kept very open and invites the viewer to use the works as a projection surface for their own memories and imagination.

Special Edition, limited to 30 copies - each with an A4 limited edition inkjet print signed and numbered by Anne (see image)

• Deadbeat Club 2022
• Softcover, 1st edition
• New

In Snow, Vanessa Winship’s latest monograph, we see that what’s not entirely comprehended is far more compelling than what is well understood. Perhaps that’s a truism, but it’s one that is rejuvenated and refreshed by each new and peculiar telling. This book is just such a revelation.

The origins of Snow lie in a commission (this from an artist who very rarely works on assignment, although Winship says she often approaches things “as if I have somehow been sent by someone”), but the photographer’s interest in what she found soon eclipsed anything that could properly be thought of as a “story.” So she made repeated trips to a particular landscape – and, notably, a particular season – in order to fathom what it was that had disconcerted her in the initial making of these photographs.

Winship is well known and highly regarded for her intimate portraits, but in Snow we experience a noticeable physical distance between the photographer and her subjects. What little the viewer can possibly grasp onto is the subtle repetition of the humblest elements of the earth. Collectively, the pictures come to embody the artist’s struggle to connect and to make sense of this place while ultimately acknowledging that she, like us all, is nothing but a stranger in this world.

This estrangement is echoed in a piece of fiction – by the poet and novelist Jem Poster – that’s woven through Snow. It tells of a female portrait photographer and her recalcitrant subject. But this character is not Winship, and the sitter is not someone in a Winship photograph. Poster’s is a fiction based on an imagistic construct – another beguiling layer in a complicated book that seeks always to expose the slipperiness of narrative and to destabilize easy readings. 

Hand-signed to the title page.

• Deadbeat Club 2022
• Softcover, 1st edition
• New

In Snow, Vanessa Winship’s latest monograph, we see that what’s not entirely comprehended is far more compelling than what is well understood. Perhaps that’s a truism, but it’s one that is rejuvenated and refreshed by each new and peculiar telling. This book is just such a revelation.

The origins of Snow lie in a commission (this from an artist who very rarely works on assignment, although Winship says she often approaches things “as if I have somehow been sent by someone”), but the photographer’s interest in what she found soon eclipsed anything that could properly be thought of as a “story.” So she made repeated trips to a particular landscape – and, notably, a particular season – in order to fathom what it was that had disconcerted her in the initial making of these photographs.

Winship is well known and highly regarded for her intimate portraits, but in Snow we experience a noticeable physical distance between the photographer and her subjects. What little the viewer can possibly grasp onto is the subtle repetition of the humblest elements of the earth. Collectively, the pictures come to embody the artist’s struggle to connect and to make sense of this place while ultimately acknowledging that she, like us all, is nothing but a stranger in this world.

This estrangement is echoed in a piece of fiction – by the poet and novelist Jem Poster – that’s woven through Snow. It tells of a female portrait photographer and her recalcitrant subject. But this character is not Winship, and the sitter is not someone in a Winship photograph. Poster’s is a fiction based on an imagistic construct – another beguiling layer in a complicated book that seeks always to expose the slipperiness of narrative and to destabilize easy readings. 

Unsigned.

• Benrido, Inc 2020
• Set of 6 multi colour collotype prints
  
• New

'The aesthetic power of the pictures of Yamamoto Masao (Japan, b. 1957) is unique. Refined, subtle and powerful at the same time. He succeeds to unfold the photographic medium into his own world, far off leading standards. The photo prints are small, sometimes even minuscule, and require a profound observation. The manual modifications by the artist provide an experimental look, with frayed edges and colour additions. His photographs seem to be marked by time, but that impression is the result of a balanced and accurate intervention by the artist. The technique of mixed media and the exceptional prints generate a close connection with the object. Yamamoto narrates no prefabricated story. He offers a glimpse into a harmonious world that is visible for everyone, but not perceived by everybody. For Yamamoto, harmony is the constant interaction between man and nature. Yamamoto’s work is anchored in that direct relationship with his environment.'
- Galley Fifty One

As part of Benrido’s mini-portfolio series, Yamamoto Masao mini-portfolio brings together a selection of well-known works focusing on his imagery of birds. Within a selection of six previously published images have been selected by the artist and printed in colour by the collotype printers at Benrido studio.

Set of 6 multi colour collotype prints printed by Benrido, Inc.

Print Size: 25.4 x 20.3cm. Case Size: 20.6 x 25.8 x 0.8cm


In the 1880s, the collotype printing process was introduced to Kyoto and in 1905 Benrido began producing collotypes. Collotype is one of the earliest forms of printing techniques and was invented in France in 1855 by Alphonse Poitevin as a method for photographic fine art printing.  Due to the high level of print and archival quality, it has since been used primarily as a way to reproduce and preserve Japan’s National Treasures and cultural properties. Today Benrido Collotype Atelier remains as one of only a few studios left in the world capable of producing fine colour collotype prints.

• Mack Books 2022
• Hardback, 1st edition, 320pp
• New

Embossed linen hardcover with front and back tip-in, 17 x 24 cm

The signed edition includes a slip signed by the artist and bound into the inside back cover.

• IBASHO & the (M)éditions 2021
• Softcover, 1st edition
• New

Yoshinori Saito lives in the most northern part of Japan, Hokkaido. Winter there is long and the snow falls intermittently for about four months. The long stretches of snow are tedious, however after the snowstorm when all the snow has settled, there is this endless expanse of white: pure, calm and silent.

 “When I walk on the fluffy virgin snow, in the distance I notice unusual forms. On closer examination they are only some weeds, with their stalks broken and leaves fallen, leaving only a skeletal form. Against the white snow these forms appear black and form sharp markings, as if drawn. This moment also gives me a deep connection to the indigenous Ainu people of Hokkaido. They believe that when their time on earth is over, they return to God’s world, and in due course will reappear. To reflect this sentiment, each work is titled to reflect their world. It is as if the forms are whispering to me, through the tranquility, giving me hope and gently supporting me through to spring.” - Yoshinori Saito

Elegant softcover with Japanese folds. Limited edition of 500 numbered copies.

Text by Yoshinori Saito in Japanese and English

• Ira Stehmann / the(M) éditions / IBASHO 2021
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

“Photography is not the thing. It is the thing that gets us to the thing.
Atkins used photography to illustrate nature and its structure. In a similar way, we use photography to illustrate reality and its structure. The possibility of having a tool to investigate reality is what first drew us to photography. We discovered that by using this medium we can nurture our interest and have a better understanding not only of perceived reality, but of the ‘structure of reality’, ‘the why of things’. Photography is, for us, the perfect philosophical tool to learn more about the universe as a logical and architectural conception: the recognition of an order among individual pieces in which each piece is also illuminated by the arrangement of the whole.”
- Albarrán Cabrera

Edition of 1000 copies.  (3 different covers assigned randomly)

• Trespasser 2021
• Softcover, 2nd edition
• New

Mark Mahaney’s Polar Night is a passage through a rapidly changing landscape in Alaska’s northernmost town of Utqiagvik. It’s an exploration of prolonged darkness, told through the strange beauty of a snowscape cast in a two month shadow. The unnatural lights that flare in the sun’s absence and the shapes that emerge from the landscape are unexpectedly beautiful in their softness and harshness. It’s hard to see past the heavy gaze of climate change in an arctic town, though Polar Night is a visual poem about endurance, isolation and survival.

2nd edition. 

• EXB 2021
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

This new series by Paolo Pellegrin celebrates the eleventh title of the collection Des oiseaux (On birds). Magnum photographer best known for his works testifying to political, economic or even ecological upheavals, his curious mind leads him to focus on subjects that are sometimes more contemplative, where nature holds a major place. Thus, during a stay in Japan in 2019, Paolo Pellegrin, who left to witness the blooming of the cherry trees, is more struck by the majesty and the aerial ballet of a colony of black kites flying over the temple of Shimogamo, Shinto shrine of the 7th century, in the heart of a primary forest.

English Edition.


Video courtesy EXB

• TIS 2021
• Hardback, 1st edition, 110pp
• New

In her first monograph with TIS books, the much-heralded photographer Barbara Bosworth has interwoven the visceral and ethereal to visually build a sense of the delicate and fragile nature of life, at a place where the edges of heaven and earth blur.

These pictures, made with Bosworth’s customary 8x10 camera, speak to our connections with nature: bear paws hauntingly human, roses cut to bring beauty indoors, names carved into a tree trunk declaring one’s love forever.

In One Star and a Dark Voyage, we are brought into intimate communion with such things as a wound on a sun-freckled shin, a worm as stigmata in a child’s hand, a bird lying in a cupped hand, a body hovering in the darkness, the spot where an elk slept – all evoking the ephemeral nature of life.

“This work began as a way for me to think about life and death and about our ties with nature and our utter dependence on earth, and later, after the death of a loved one, blurred into images about the exquisite fragility of life, about loss and longing,” as Bosworth explains. “I began looking for light in the darkness. Fireflies as I try to hold onto the light. The simple beauty of light falling on leaves. A rainbow, the sunset, the Milky Way.” 

The result: a book as journey, where weight becomes light. The beautiful and the terrible, all interconnected, all the same. Always seeking home.

Signed copy.

• Chose Commune 2021
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

“Sub Sole (in Latin, beneath the sun), an ensemble of photographs made between 2017 and 2020, in the region of the Mediterranean Sea, follows the mythological itinerary of the voyage of Ulysses: Ceuta, Naples, Athens, Palermo, Istanbul, Tunis and Lampedusa. Crossroads of cultures, cradle of foundation myths, the Mediterranean is, today more than ever, marked by migrations, exile and displacement. Over the course of seven voyages and numerous chance encounters, Mascaro goes in search of the young people who inhabit and traverse this region. The literary narratives which the artist drew upon for his work are like the invisible companions of these photographs. They imbue the contemporary images with an ancient substance. Beneath the sun, political, economic, existential, and poetic implications intersect, beneath the harsh, hot Mediterranean light whose rhythm shapes human life.” Sonia Voss

Signed copy.

• T&M 2021
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

Yamamoto Masao lives in Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan, in a house surrounded by forests over three thousand feet above sea level. His lifestyle matches his art, entirely devoted to capturing the “small things in silence” that life and nature offer his gaze.

When in 2013 we took Masao and his wife Reiko for the first time to the Ardèche, on the invitation of Annie and Bernard Mirabel, affinities became evident immediately.

The same love for nature and the ties with the mountain, not that far different from their life in Yamanashi: the same wooded hills on the horizon, the same lights in space in the evening garden. Since then there have been various visits, simply for the pleasure of it, but also to fill up this silent contract between the hosts and the guest: bringing a stone to the edifice that the Fabrique du pont d’Aleyrac has been building for years, inviting artists to work on the Ardèche.

Yamamoto wanted to meet people here and photograph them. Using small settings he depicted imaginatively what seemed important in their lives: the animals they raise, the countryside they live in.

ーー Didier Brouse

This book includes an unpublished text by Marie-Hélène Lafon, who was awarded the Renaudot Prize in 2020.

Text in English with a booklet in Japanese.

Beautifully signed copy.

• Mack 2021
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

‘Like that of all serious artists, [Schulz-Dornburg's] work [is] more than how it can be described: a keen political intelligence combined with a poet’s feeling for light, stone, form and shimmering horizons.’ – The New York Times

In 1983, Ursula Schulz-Dornburg accompanied two ethnologists and an architect on a research trip to Tana Toraja on the central Indonesian island of Sulawesi. Initiated by the Royal Tropical Institute of Amsterdam, the trip was intended to “explore the changing patterns in architecture and symbolism among the Sa‘dan Toraja”. On the way back from Rantepao to Ujung Pandang airport, Schulz-Dornburg passed the distinctive houses of the Bugis or To-Ugiq people, perched on the yellow paddy fields. Fascinated by their complex, expressive architectures, she began to photograph the houses in the short time she had before leaving, realising that the structures would likely not exist in their traditional form for much longer. The result is a body of work that not only surveys the houses’ physical forms but also considers wide-ranging ideas of physical and emotional homebuilding and the precarious place of tradition in the present day.

Poised between heaven and earth and standing above the water when the rice fields are flooded, the Bugis houses reflect the creation myth of their people, in which the gods of the upper and lower worlds came together to create man to populate the uninhabited middle world. The farmers depicted by Schulz-Dornburg are likewise suspended between historic tradition and the impending pressures of the contemporary world. As they go about their work or greet her camera, they and their homes are held in the balance between past and future, mythology and everyday reality.

With these shrewd and sensitive images, Schulz-Dornburg captures life as it is built and lived within a particular culture and landscape, offering a searching reflection on the places we call home.

The signed edition includes a slip signed by the artist and bound into the inside back cover.

• Nazraeli 2021
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

“This book is an early vignette from Michael Kenna’s far-reaching photographic odyssey. Some of these photographs, made almost forty years ago, are familiar, even famous, but many have never been seen before. They have been lying in wait, stored in a series of negative files. Normally, Kenna travels extensively and is not able to keep up with printing his extensive collection of negatives. It took the Covid pandemic and lockdown for him to search through his archives, rediscover these long-forgotten images, and print them in his darkroom. These photographs reveal a Northern England from Kenna’s youth that, for the most part, no longer exists.” — From the Introduction

Michael Kenna was born in the small industrial town of Widnes in northwest England. The youngest of six children, Kenna grew up in a poor, working-class, Irish-Catholic family. He attended a seminary school for seven years with the intention of becoming a priest, after which he studied at the Banbury School of Art and later at the London College of Printing, before moving to the USA in the late seventies.

The adjoining counties of Lancashire and Yorkshire, where Kenna photographed in the early eighties, have much in common regarding their industrial development. Fiercely competitive, they share a border, a spine of mountains known locally as the Pennines, which helps to produce rain. The rise of a powerful cotton and wool industry, and the building of innumerable mills, canals, railways, chimneys and terraced worker houses, have been attributed in part to these high levels of precipitation. The local textile industry proliferated until the second half of the twentieth century, when there was a sudden, rapid decline and eventual decimation. It was during this precise time period that Kenna returned to the area to photograph, during the day and also at night.

Kenna’s early photographs of England launched his career and brought him international acclaim; yet it wasn’t until last year, 2020, that he revisited this particular body of work to find many unprinted images. These discoveries are exquisitely presented in this important new Nazraeli Press monograph, Northern England 1983–1986.

Beautifully printed on a natural textured art paper, accompanied by an introductory text by Dr. Ian B Glover, the seventy-five plates are reproduced in quadratone and bound into cotton cloth-covered boards reminiscent of the era.

• Mack Books 2021
• Hardback, 1st edition
• Near fine

‘We live our lives in widening circles, rarely appreciating their nature and how they bring us back. In a year, my daughter will be leaving home and is no stranger to a similar wanderlust I once knew. As a father, I always felt it was important to instill a profound sense of place, to identify with a certain place as home, even as these ideals have, over recent years, taken on relative meaning. I photograph close to home as memory loses structure, its architecture, trying to make light speak from the fixed edges of rooms long vanished.’ - Raymond Meeks

Inspired by his daughter’s entrance into adulthood and her imminent departure from home, Raymond Meeks studies the centrifugal forces of the places we live – how they anchor us, repel us, and return to us – through scenes that appear both fragile and immovable. In these photographs, gardens give way to thicket, houses are suspended on stacked railroad ties, and telephone wires and train lines suggest the networks we build to find our way through the world’s wilderness.

Among these domestic landscapes are portraits of Meeks’ daughter, which capture the introspection and inquisitiveness of early adulthood while paying tribute to the ultimate mystery of their subject’s consciousness. Following the success of Meeks’ previous book, ciprian honey cathedral, Somersault is a concise, poetic reflection on home and the ties that bind us to it — all the stronger as they fade into the half-light.

The signed edition includes a slip signed by the artist and bound into the inside back cover.

Faint surface wear to the white cover.  Inside as new.

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

“The sheep stopped in their eating and looked timidly at us;
and the cattle, their heads turned from the wind and sleet,
stared angrily as if they held us responsible for both annoyances;
but, except these things, and the shudder of the dying day in every blade of grass, there was no break in the bleak stillness of the marshes.”

- Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

Situated on the Thames Estuary in southeast England, the North Kent Marshes are an overlooked but vital swathe of land. For centuries, trade has flowed in through the estuary and the surrounding wilderness harbours a rich history. In the 18th century, plague outbreaks ravaged Europe and ships were quarantined in the nearby Medway. The low-lying terrain provided the ideal conditions for smugglers, as small vessels would target ships transporting goods to the capital, allegedly sneaking the contraband down underground tunnel networks once ashore. It was against this illicit backdrop that Charles Dickens set the early parts of Great Expectations (1861), where the escaped convict Magwitch takes refuge in the marshes. 

Since 2011, Martin Amis has been photographing in the same marshland near his home, finding solace in the landscape through walking. This Land is the result of many walks over the past decade – much in the period from March 2020, coinciding with the UK’s first coronavirus lockdown. Devoid of people, Amis’ images invite a reconnection with nature: derelict industry reclaimed by the wild, grazing sheep and lone birds drifting across a monotone sky. Despite an undertone of loss and absence, Amis portrays a land that is continually being shaped by the elements and the civilisations that pass through it. If we listen closely, we might almost hear the shouts of the night watch over the gulf of time and the creaking prison hulks that once inspired Dickens.

Double hit silver wraparound softcover
24 x 30cm, 76pp
Tritone offset printed on Munken Lynx Rough

A Special Edition is also available here.


For trade enquiries, please get in touch here

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

“The sheep stopped in their eating and looked timidly at us;
and the cattle, their heads turned from the wind and sleet,
stared angrily as if they held us responsible for both annoyances;
but, except these things, and the shudder of the dying day in every blade of grass, there was no break in the bleak stillness of the marshes.”

- Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

Situated on the Thames Estuary in southeast England, the North Kent Marshes are an overlooked but vital swathe of land. For centuries, trade has flowed in through the estuary and the surrounding wilderness harbours a rich history. In the 18th century, plague outbreaks ravaged Europe and ships were quarantined in the nearby Medway. The low-lying terrain provided the ideal conditions for smugglers, as small vessels would target ships transporting goods to the capital, allegedly sneaking the contraband down underground tunnel networks once ashore. It was against this illicit backdrop that Charles Dickens set the early parts of Great Expectations (1861), where the escaped convict Magwitch takes refuge in the marshes. 

Since 2011, Martin Amis has been photographing in the same marshland near his home, finding solace in the landscape through walking. This Land is the result of many walks over the past decade – much in the period from March 2020, coinciding with the UK’s first coronavirus lockdown. Devoid of people, Amis’ images invite a reconnection with nature: derelict industry reclaimed by the wild, grazing sheep and lone birds drifting across a monotone sky. Despite an undertone of loss and absence, Amis portrays a land that is continually being shaped by the elements and the civilisations that pass through it. If we listen closely, we might almost hear the shouts of the night watch over the gulf of time and the creaking prison hulks that once inspired Dickens.

Double hit-silver wraparound softcover
24 x 30cm, 76pp
Tritone offset printed on Munken Lynx Rough

Special edition of 25 copies, with a signed 10x8" archival pigment print on Hahnemule Photorag.  See the alternative special edition available here.


The regular edition of This Land is available here.

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

“The sheep stopped in their eating and looked timidly at us;
and the cattle, their heads turned from the wind and sleet,
stared angrily as if they held us responsible for both annoyances;
but, except these things, and the shudder of the dying day in every blade of grass, there was no break in the bleak stillness of the marshes.”

- Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

Situated on the Thames Estuary in southeast England, the North Kent Marshes are an overlooked but vital swathe of land. For centuries, trade has flowed in through the estuary and the surrounding wilderness harbours a rich history. In the 18th century, plague outbreaks ravaged Europe and ships were quarantined in the nearby Medway. The low-lying terrain provided the ideal conditions for smugglers, as small vessels would target ships transporting goods to the capital, allegedly sneaking the contraband down underground tunnel networks once ashore. It was against this illicit backdrop that Charles Dickens set the early parts of Great Expectations (1861), where the escaped convict Magwitch takes refuge in the marshes. 

Since 2011, Martin Amis has been photographing in the same marshland near his home, finding solace in the landscape through walking. This Land is the result of many walks over the past decade – much in the period from March 2020, coinciding with the UK’s first coronavirus lockdown. Devoid of people, Amis’ images invite a reconnection with nature: derelict industry reclaimed by the wild, grazing sheep and lone birds drifting across a monotone sky. Despite an undertone of loss and absence, Amis portrays a land that is continually being shaped by the elements and the civilisations that pass through it. If we listen closely, we might almost hear the shouts of the night watch over the gulf of time and the creaking prison hulks that once inspired Dickens.

Double hit-silver wraparound softcover
24 x 30cm, 76pp
Tritone offset printed on Munken Lynx Rough

Special edition of 25 copies, with a signed 10x8" archival pigment print on Hahnemule Photorag.  See the alternative special edition available here.


The regular edition of This Land is available here.

• Mack Books 2021
  
• Softcover, 1st edition
  
• New
  

On the islands in the Strait of Hormuz, off the southern coast of Iran, there is a common belief that the winds can possess a person, bringing illness and disease. The existence of similar convictions in some African countries suggests that the cult may have been brought to Iran from southeast Africa through the Arab slave trade. This history is rarely spoken about but these winds and the traces they have left on the islands and their inhabitants are the touchstone for Hoda Afshar's Speak The Wind. Through her subtle and perceptive images of the extraordinary landscapes, the people and their rituals, Afshar's beautiful and complex book attempts to picture the wind and its psychic entanglements, to form a visible record of the invisible.

The signed edition includes a slip signed by the artist and glued into the inside back cover.

• Xavier Barral 2021
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• New
  

To celebrate the 10th title of the collection, we are publishing a new series of photographer Rinko Kawauchi. Last spring, she turned her lenses on swallows at the the birth season, and more particularly, on small nests the birds build away from prying eyes, made of ground, clay, water and dry herbs to protect their clutches. With all the poetry and sense of detail that characterize her work, Rinko Kawauchi reveals the magic of our daily life and the ephemeral beauty of suspended moments. The swallows, thanks to their sharp wings, perch everywhere with great ease and elegance, filled with an opalescent light.

This publication is part of the Des oiseaux (On birds) collection celebrating, through the vision of different artists, their immense presence in a world where they are now vulnerable. 

English edition.

• the(M) éditions 2021
• Softcover, 1st edition
• New

Limited edition of 545 numbered copies.

• Loose Joints 2021
• Softcover, 1st edition, 44pp
• New

• Ampigt Förlag 2021
• Softcover, 1st edition with polaroid
• New

"Made over the last year, this series of Polaroid chemigrams is a celebration of nature and that despite the darkness of the past year hope is growing and peeking up thought the soil to bring us joy and solace.

My garden, as well as the plants that I grow outside and inside our home, have always given me comfort. Something that calms my mind, quiets the noise when nothing else can, in this past year even more so. Lockdown gave me the time to work on these images of flowers. Allowing me to push my process, seek new textures and visual landscapes, and create vibrant daydreams that I could lose myself in.

These experiments were made from:
Flowers grown 
Flowers received
Flowers I have seen. 
Each flower carries with it the memory of a moment, place or person."

- Zara Carpenter.

Special edition of 26 copies including a unique Polaroid chemigram of a flower and an obi on the cover. Signed and numbered alphabetically from A-Z. 

Note: Polaroids shown are for example purposes, each is unique and assigned at random.

• Stanley/Barker 2020
• Hardback, 2nd edition
• New
  

Born in the Australian steel city of Newcastle, one of TRENT PARKE’S only early childhood memories is accompanying his mother to pick his dad up from work, travelling through a landscape dominated by ship yards, chimneys, and the BHP steelworks. 

Throughout his career PARKE has always been interested in the transformative powers of light, but it was the ephemeral changing colours of dawn and dusk, the multitude or different reds that made him curious about the colour crimson. He discovered the colour that is used in commercial products is harvested from the crushed and boiled bodies of the female scale insect, the Cochineal. A tiny minute insect who inhabits the pads of the prickly pear cactus and who are farmed for their crimson dye. A dye now used primarily in cosmetics and food colouring. 

Scarlet, magenta, orange, and crimson, are the coloured dyes produced by the Cochineal and also seem to feature spectacularly in the colours of creation, as seen in an Eagle Nebula during the birth of a new star and recorded by the Hubble space telescope. These colours of birth and blood Parke also remembers from the bath water, the umbilical cord and placenta, at the birth of his sons. 

‘As soon as the female insect is delivered of its new numerous progeny, it becomes a meer husk and dies; so that great care is taken in Mexico, where it is principally collected, to kill the old ones while big with young, to prevent the young ones escaping into life, and depriving them of that beautiful scarlet dye, so much esteemed by all the world.’ - John Ellis, Esq; 1762.

After the first edition sold out in just five days this new evolved edition brings subtle changes to the mesmeric series. 

• Mack 2021
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

In Plain Air is a lyrical portrait of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park as seen through Rozovsky’s studies of its visitors, each seeking escape from the din of the city beyond. The seed of the idea for the work was planted ten years ago when Rozovsky took a small motorboat around the park’s southern lake. Floating by the tree-lined shore, she saw what first felt like a mirage — families, lovers, friends, a multitude of cultures and ethnicities, all sharing the same land and moment. The quintessential American melting pot that stretched like a panorama in this equalising space was a visible reality.

Rozovsky’s colour photographs capture the interplay between city and nature, creating a vision of the park as a democratic and nurturing public space, one where the landscape and seasons form a protean backdrop to a complex social reality.

Signed to an extra image plate.

• Stanley Barker 2020
• Softcover, 1st printing
• New
  

In 2016 Robbie Lawrence first travelled to a remote stretch of coastline in the west coast of Scotland, to Linn Gardens, which lies at the head of Cove Bay on the west side of Rosneath peninsula. The gardens had been run for fifty years by Jim Taggart, an avid botanist and gardener. 

Jim discovered that the region’s subtropical climate allowed him to grow plants and flowers from all over the world. His endeavours led to the estate being covered in an intricately plotted web of ferns, bamboos, Magnolias and Rhododendrons. As Jim got older, his son Jamie took over the more physical elements of maintaining the garden, including traveling abroad to research and gather new plants. On one such journey, to the northern mountainous region of Vietnam, Jamie disappeared. His body was found years later, he had evidently fallen in one of the mountain’s higher passes.  

“When I first met Jim, who by this point was well into his 80s, he told me that he decided to keep the garden going as a memorial to his son. Over the past few years I went back to the visit Jim and document the garden as it passed through the seasons. Despite his age, Jim would bound around the garden, occasionally stopping the provide a lengthy anecdote about a particular fern or tree. Last summer, Jim passed away at the age of 84.” - Robbie Lawrence 

In ‘A Voice Above The LInn’ Lawrence collaborated with the renowned poet John Burnside, who contributed four beautiful new poems to segment its chapters. 

1st printing.

• Nobody 2020
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• New
  

It was in 2017 that I began to have an inkling that a single fish might contain a universe of infinite proportions and how amazing a journey within its body could be. So I started to research everything I would need to embark on such an expedition. By January 2020 I had built a work top, obtained a microscope, a camera, optics, lights and fridge. Mentally, though, I was far from ready. I was lacking the courage, time, energy and mental strength to set out on this unknown voyage. 

By February, the world exposed and in the unimaginable grasp of the pandemic. Time moved in entirely new ways as so many were affected, taken ill and had their lives claimed. 

This void in time, with all movements restricted, somehow presented a platform from which I could finally launch my inwards fish journey. I was prepared to explore for an unknown period but first of all I had, of course, to catch a fish. Being really unskilled at fishing this took a total of nine trips and thirty hours. 

On the 10^th April 2020, at around 15.30, equipped with sleeping bags and instant noodles, my children and I arrived at a spot where flat rock, grass and shrubs meet the sea. I had almost got into the idea of never catching a fish by this point, so it was a sudden shock when a jolt was sent through the rod to my hands followed by a silver splash that appeared on the waveless water. My daughter Ada shouted, “Get the net dad!” and she saw the slight panic in my face as I had failed to remember the next thing required to land the fish. 

Knowing it would be a time-sensitive journey as decay commenced the following day, I started what was eventually a ten-week voyage. Nothing could have prepared me for what I was going to encounter along the way or how sick I was to become during the making of this work. 

- Stephen Gill

Signed copy.

• Studiofaganel 2020
• Softcover, 1st edition
• New
  

• Mack 2020
  
• Hardback, special edition
  
• New
  

• EXB 2020
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New
  

Making visible the silence, the simplicity of nature and a sense of passing time. The photographs of Korean Byung-Hun Min, made between 1998 and 2020 throughout he world, take on the evanescence of a pencil sketch. With their subtle contrasts, their play of silky tones, they seem to show a fleeting instant between clarity and dissolution.

Min’s birds live in an ethereal space. They seem enveloped in a white veil, in a silvery light. The virtual monochromy of the image, the uniformity of the tones, oscillating between white and gray, the absence of perspectives and contrasts, the simplicity of the construction and the minimalism of the forms reproduce a reality that has become fantastical. The photographer’s painstaking work printing each negative allows him to reproduce not only what he saw, but also what he perceived. Min’s birds are an invitation to contemplation.

English edition.

• Stanley/Barker 2020
• Hardback, 1st edition/1st printing
• New
  

Born in the Australian steel city of Newcastle, one of TRENT PARKE’S only early childhood memories is accompanying his mother to pick his dad up from work, travelling through a landscape dominated by ship yards, chimneys, and the BHP steelworks. 

Throughout his career PARKE has always been interested in the transformative powers of light, but it was the ephemeral changing colours of dawn and dusk, the multitude or different reds that made him curious about the colour crimson. He discovered the colour that is used in commercial products is harvested from the crushed and boiled bodies of the female scale insect, the Cochineal. A tiny minute insect who inhabits the pads of the prickly pear cactus and who are farmed for their crimson dye. A dye now used primarily in cosmetics and food colouring. 

Scarlet, magenta, orange, and crimson, are the coloured dyes produced by the Cochineal and also seem to feature spectacularly in the colours of creation, as seen in an Eagle Nebula during the birth of a new star and recorded by the Hubble space telescope. These colours of birth and blood Parke also remembers from the bath water, the umbilical cord and placenta, at the birth of his sons. 

‘As soon as the female insect is delivered of its new numerous progeny, it becomes a meer husk and dies; so that great care is taken in Mexico, where it is principally collected, to kill the old ones while big with young, to prevent the young ones escaping into life, and depriving them of that beautiful scarlet dye, so much esteemed by all the world.’ - John Ellis, Esq; 1762.

Out of print, final copies of the first printing.

• FW 2020
  
• Softcover, 1st edition
  
• New
  

This is the third publication in which Awoiska probes deeply into the essence of the remote unspoiled natural worlds where her images are created. The book is published alongside the music composition ‘The Living Mountain’ written by Thomas Larcher as composer-in-residence at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam (2019-2020). The music piece draws inspiration from photographs that Awoiska made for Larcher in the mountains of his native Tirol (Austria). The monochrome landscapes are combined with reproductions of Larcher’s scores and remnants. The title for both the composition and this book is taken from Nan Shepherd’s book of poetic prose on the Cairngorms mountains that she wrote in 1942 and which was first published in 1977. 

‘Regardless of how personal the starting point of my work may be, in the end I hope my images touch the strings of a universal knowledge, something lodged in our bodies, our guts, an intuition that reminds us of where we came from ages ago. A memory of our core existence, our bedrock, unyielding certainty in a very precarious world’.

- Awoiska van der Molen

Signed copy.

• Stanley/Barker 2020
• Softcover, 1st edition
• New
  

The call of the ocean has long been a focus of Narelle Autio’s work. Spending her childhood growing up in sun-soaked Australia she has had a lifetime relationship with the beach and is fascinated by the need for many of us to return to water. A primeval need connecting us to our ancient ancestors, pulling us back to where we came. The images dive into our collective memories and speak too many of their own personal experiences.

 Cinematic in nature and using the play of light and colour familiar to all her work, she captures the complex relationship and drama of our love for the sea and our willingness to risk our lives to enjoy it. 

“The water at the end of the jetty is dark. It is deep. I dive, down into the quiet and cold. I breathe out the remaining life I have left in me and sink further into the darkness. Looking up I watch the bubbles of air flee towards the light. Surrounded by things unknown, unseen, I wait. Wait and wait for the jumpers to disturb the stillness. My heart is beating, get out, get out, get out of here.”

“The water above me explodes in shock. I love that moment of immersion when the sea first grabs hold of us. Cocooned in a shroud of bubbles and light, suffocated by a cold, insisting watery embrace. There is a sublime moment of suspension, of complete isolation in a place between two worlds. We can live here but not for very long. The sea lets us enter but it might not let us leave.” - NARELLE AUTIO 

Out of print, final copies.

• Charcoal Press 2020
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• New
  

The Locusts is the first monograph by photographer and publisher Jesse Lenz. His images transport the reader to rural Ohio where his children run wild in the fields, build forts in the attic, and fall asleep surrounded by lightsabers and superheroes. The microcosmic worlds of plants, insects, animals, and children create a brooding landscape where dichotomies of nature play out in front of his growing family. The backyard becomes a labyrinth of passages as the children experience the cycles of birth and death in the changing seasons. The Locusts depicts a world in which beautiful and terrible things will happen, but offers grace and healing within the brokenness and imperfection of life.

Signed copy.

• Xavier Barral 2019
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• New
  

A major figure of Latin-American photography, Graciela Iturbide’s approach combines the documentary and the lyrical. Off-center compositions, graphic effects, and heavy shadows create a poetic universe where a feeling of strangeness is combined with one of harsh reality. The powerful equilibrium of her compositions produces skies filled with birds, comical, unexpected situations where chickens are pictured sitting wisely on market stalls, while elsewhere chirping flocks appear to invade the scene in agile, flowing movements. For Iturbide, living birds represent freedom. But death is never far away in her work, nor indeed is a certain sense of the surreal. 

An organic dimension, linked to blood, flesh, mud, sweat, and the earth also permeates most of Graciela Iturbide’s images, for she has a special relationship with reality, choosing to capture unique moments with her lens. Birds and men cohabit and rub up against each other. From India to Mexico, gulls, eagles, pigeons, herons, and ravens invade man’s space or insinuate their way into it in a serendipitous, solitary fashion.

This publication is part of the Des oiseaux (On birds) collection celebrating, through the vision of different artists, their immense presence in a world where they are now vulnerable. Accompanying these photographs, the ornithologist Guilhem Lesaffre writes a special essay. For this title, Lesaffre focuses on the different environments birds live in and their unbelievable capacity to adapt themselves whether it is in the sky, water or at the highest summits. 

English edition.

• Xavier Barral 2020
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• New

The poetic universe of Spanish photographers duo Albarrán Cabrera is presented here through a dreamscape journey in the land of birds. Between reality and illusion, their photographs questions our relationship to the tangible world and vibrate gently through a wide palette and different photographic techniques: platinum and palladium prints, cyanotypes, gelatin prints, and pigmented printing.

Each photograph is like a story that seems to have been paused. The birds seem to be straight out of fantastical fairy tales; they merge into space, are revealed on reflective surfaces, and slip into the undergrowth whereas sometimes their physical presence is underlined by a tight framing. The birds are revealed through abstracting shapes sometimes simple dots and shadows. Albarrán Cabrera leave the interpretation of their images to the memory of the viewer and let our imagination fly.

This publication is part of the Des oiseaux (On birds) collection celebrating, through the vision of different artists, their immense presence in a world where they are now vulnerable. Accompanying these photographs, the ornithologist Guilhem Lesaffre writes a special essay. For this title, Lesaffre focuses on the different environments birds live in and their unbelievable capacity to adapt themselves whether it is in the sky, water or at the highest summits. 

English edition.

Sealed copy.  

• Xavier Barral 2022
  
• Hardback, English edition
  
• New
  

Traveller-photographer Pentti Sammallahti captures the myste­ries of nature on his travels and among these, the world of birds. Coastlines, swamps, parks, endless plains, forest clearings, snowy landscapes… In these isolated areas, birds slyly reveal their pres­ence. 

Like visual tales, his B&W photographs attest to his extraordinary eye for detail, to light that sculpts spaces, to silent expanses in which a human or animal presence suddenly appears. The experience of the image is twofold: beyond its narrative virtuosity, his use of a two-colour process, with immaculate whites (as in the plumage of his swans or pink flamingos) confronted with deep blacks, creates a play of textures and powerfully renders a world in which birds play a unique role.

This book constitutes one of the two first titles of Des oiseaux (On birds) collection celebrating, through the vision of different artists, their immense presence in a world where they are now vulnerable. Accompanying these photographs, the ornithologist Guilhem Lesaffre showcases the relationship to the seasons that is a fundamental aspect of the life of birds. Where it exists, winter is a major constraint that birds must grapple with and that notably leads to strategies in their search for food and energy economy, or socialising. The author here associates the life of birds in winter with Pentti Sammallahti’s photographs.

English edition.

Sealed.

• Mack 2020
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• New
  

What is there between the branch and apple when it falls?
We have seen it—we would recognize it anywhere.  Yet of an evening we are told
nothing is there.                                
                                - Wright Morris

Raymond Meeks is renowned for his use of photography and the book form to poetically distill the liminal junctures of vision, consciousness and comprehension. In ciprian honey cathedral, he brings this scrutiny close to home, delicately probing at the legibility of our material surroundings and the people closest to us. 

Meeks has long been fascinated by the way we construct the world around us; how we carry our possessions, these accumulated comforts, inheritances, markers of material success; how we adorn homes with trees and shrubs, a mantle clock to count the hours. Stumbling across an abandoned house or unkempt lawn becomes a search for common clues to tiny hidden transgressions. 

This question of knowledge and understanding is perhaps most drastic in our solipsistic reality. Meeks also photographed his partner, Adrianna Ault, in the early mornings before she awoke, on the threshold at which daily domestic life converges with the deepest state of sleep. This plight of supine trance is a place of reprieve beneath the surface of consciousness, free from the chaos and uncertainty of the sentient world above, and alludes to the veiled threat that, ultimately, we are utterly unknowable to one another.

The signed edition includes a slip signed by the artist and bound into the inside back cover.

.

• Zen Foto 2019
  
• Softcover, new edition
  
• New
  

A new edition of Chinese artist Muge’s tranquil photobook “Ash”, released by Japanese publisher Zen Foto Gallery.

Based on Lao Tze’s “Theory of Nature,” Muge’s series approaches objects, sceneries and places from the perspective not of an intruder or observer but as an insider, as someone who belongs, giving his subjects the necessary space to weather, grow, decay, and simply exist. Divided into three parts (“Still Life,” Shan Shui,” and “Scenery”), Muge’s images draw on symbolism and metaphor to create larger connections between the pages of the book. The three parts of the book are stacked on top of each other, forming a staircase-like design, with each photo printed in black and gray and finished “with glossy varnish, matte varnish or special color varnish, depending on the delicate state of each object.”

When I used the large format camera to re-understand my hometown as it is now, I’ve discovered that all things in the real world derive from our internal desire: the Karma cycle of yearning for nature, destroying nature, and mending nature (...) These images are taken from the understandings gleaned from my daily life, conveying the traces of time and history in nature, and a person’s thoughts of the future when faced with reality. — Muge

.

• Xavier Barral 2019
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• New
  

A figure of the young Japanese photography scene, Yoshinori Mizutani revisits the urban space of his city, Tokyo. Steeped in the Japanese pictorial tradition, the photographer explores Tokyo’s daily life and captures scenes that verge on the fantastic. His framings and bright colours confer an element of otherness to his images. Forms, textures, colourful hues, and depth of field develop a visual vocabulary that is both poetic and pop. Visions from dreams or nightmares, through their presence, Yoshinori Mizutani’s birds saturate the world of the city and restore its mystery. 

English Edition.

• VOID 2019
  
• Softcover, 1st edition
  
• New
  

‘Sleep Creek’ is a landscape filled with trauma and beauty. It’s a place where animals are only seen when they’re being hunted and humans balance between an unapologetic existence and an abyss of secrecy. These images manipulate a landscape that is simultaneously autobiographical, documentary, and fictional: a weaving of myth and symbol in order to be confronted with the experiential. Following the rituals of those within it, ‘Sleep Creek’ is an obsession between the subject and the photographer — a compulsion to reveal its shrouded Nature.”

• Self 2017
• Softcover, 3rd edition
  
• New
  

Ricardo Cases’ third photobook deals with an unusual subject: a unique form of pigeon racing practised in the Spanish regions of Valencia and Murcia. Known as colombiculture, it is a sport with rules and referees. It consists of releasing one female pigeon and dozens of males. Painted in combinations of primary colours, reminiscent of flags or football kits, these pigeons chase the female to get her attention. None ever manage to get too intimate, and consequently the winner is the one that spends the most time close to her. The winner is not necessarily the most athletic, the toughest or the purest in breed but the most courteous, the one that shows most constancy and has the strongest reproductive instinct. This is the one that is seen by aficionados of the sport as the true embodiment of ‘macho’. The pigeon handler invests time, money and hope in his young pigeons. He raises them, gives them names, trains them and has faith in them. When competition day arrives he is full of childlike illusion and uncertainty. The price for young pigeons can reach thousands of euros and betting involves large amounts of money. The male pigeon becomes almost a projection of the pigeon-keeper himself, who embodies its sporting, economic and sexual success or failure in the community. Raising a male champion can bring both prestige and profit. Far from the harsh reality of his daily life, the colombaire has a second life where all is possible – he can reach the top. He just needs a champion pigeon.

In Paloma al Aire, Ricardo Cases explores the sport as a symbolic act, a projection and a way of relating to the world. It is an ethnographic documentation as groups of men run through the countryside behind their male pigeons, observing their mating performances, discussing the rules and the decisions. It could almost be a study of the rituals of a remote tribe or of a group of children who, in the process of discovering the world, invent a new game.

3rd edition,  signed copy.

• Nazraeli 2019
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• New
  

Nazraeli Press is thrilled to announce the publication of Kim Jungman’s Can You Hear the Wind Blow.  This gorgeous series of large format photographs illustrates the sound of wind, made visible by the subtlest movements of tree branches, leaves, and a seemingly endless number of birds in flight and at rest.

Comprising 62 photographs, Can You Hear the Wind Blow beckons the viewer into what appears to be a wide-open forest of single trees, each with enough space to move freely in the wind. The trees are portrayed as stoic individuals, at once deeply rooted and flexible, planted at an unknown time in an unknown paradise. In actual fact, all of the photographs in the book were made between 2008 and 2017, and simply depict a row of neglected street trees in an alley between the artist’s studio and home in Seoul.

One of his country’s most important contemporary artists, Kim Jungman was born in Cheolwon, South Korea in 1954. He moved as a teenager to Burkina Faso, Africa and then to Europe, studying painting École Nationale Supérieure d’Art at Villa Arson in Nice, France. It was there that he discovered his passion for photography. He moved back to Seoul and soon gained fame for his edgy, often controversial work as the country’s premier commercial and fashion photographer.

In 2006, Jungman Kim left his flourishing career as a commercial photographer to pursue his personal work, photographing the countryside of his native country. Can You Hear the Wind Blow was published to accompany a major exhibition of the work at The Hanmi Museum of Photography, Seoul and Three Shadows Gallery in Beijing.

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

In this dark and beautiful book, Takashi Homma traces the blood trails of deers killed in Shiretoko National Park on the Japanese island of Hokkaido. Like ritualistic stains or calligraphic compositions, the photographs, which Homma made in the winters of 2009 to 2018, are at once abstract and symbolic. Considered by some to be sacred, deers in Japan have controversially faced culls due to growing populations, which upset agricultural communities struggling to protect their crops. To aid their mission in reducing numbers, the government encourages local hunters to take matters into their own hands. Homma photographs the effects – the red vestiges of wild life in the snow.

Out of print, final copies.

• Chose Commune 2018
  
• Softcover, 1st edition
  
• Used: near fine

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.

Final copy with some very faint wear to a few page edges, mostly very fine.

• Nobody 2017
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• New
  

In March 2014, my family and I moved from east London to rural south Sweden where my partner Lena is from. I understood that these new surroundings would inform my work in very different ways and that nature would play a key role. I was looking forward to making work that did not feel restricted and suffocated by modern photographic technology nor would make an inaccurate projected impression of the natural landscape we had become part of. 

On my many walks, I soon came to realise that this new, apparently bleak, flat and open landscape was in fact teeming with intense life. Small clues appeared during daylight hours that helped me understand the extent of activity during the night. Clusters of feathers, animal footprints of all sizes showing regular overlapping routes, gnawed branches, eggshells, ant hills, nibbled mushrooms and busy snails and slugs working through the feast provided from the previous night

I started to imagine the creatures in absolute darkness on the forest floor driven by instincts and their will to survive. I imagined them encountering each other. I thought of their eyes – near redundant in the thick of the night – and their sense of smell and hearing finely tuned and heightened. 

Envisaging where this activity might unfold, coupled with a hopeful foresight, I placed cameras equipped with motion sensors, to trees, mostly at a low level, so that any movement triggered the camera shutter and an infra-red flash (which was outside the animals’ visual spectrum). 

The first results filled me with fascination and joy as they presented what felt like stepping off into another parallel and unearthly world.  The silent photographs also seemed to invent sounds. This frame of mind and way of working took me back to my first ever photo project at the age of 13, sitting in the bathroom window of my parents’ house in Bristol with a 10-metre cable release, attached to the camera, attempting to photograph garden birds.

As time went on I started to think, if I were a deer where would I drink from, or if an owl where would I prefer to perch, and positioned cameras in such places. I was already composing the rectangular view in my mind’s eye – even though the nocturnal animals were absent – imagining they were there.  Nature itself helped to decide the palette and the feel of the images as plant pigments were incorporated from the surrounding areas to make the final master prints.

I had grappled for many years with this idea of stepping back as the author of images to give space for chance and to encourage the subject to step forward. I had attempted this in various ways; for example, in 2005, by burying colour prints close to where they were made, as a collaboration, to entice the place itself to leave its physical mark on the images once they had been unearthed. Or, between 2009 - 2013, in the series Talking to Ants, I placed objects such as plant life, insects, seeds and dust from the place I was photographing inside the film chamber to create in-camera photograms creating a confusion of scale. Or, in 2012, in Best Before End, as a photographic response to the rise of high-energy drinks, I used the drinks themselves to part-process the film as they ate into the emulsion. These approaches added an element of uncertainty, without knowing exactly where the images would land, and relied on a point where intentions met chance with the hope that the subject itself could play a part, lead the way or become embedded in the finished images.

This time, though, it felt as if I was stepping out altogether, so that the subjects would orchestrate and perform and take on the role of author while at that moment I was likely to be sleeping. This was nature’s time to speak and let itself be felt and known. 

Stephen Gill


Signed copy.

• Mack 2018
• Softcover, 1st edition
• NEW
  

And Time Folds accompanies a retrospective exhibition of the British photographer Vanessa Winship at the Barbican Art Gallery, London. At once intimate and epic, Winship’s black-and-white photographs explore notions of borders, land, memory, desire and history. This volume comprises photographs from seven series, including projects made during a decade living in the region of the Balkans, Turkey and the Caucasus; as well as work made in Georgia, America and the U.K. Winship has long been concerned with the elusive nature of transience in our landscape and society, and her oeuvre moves sure-footedly between genres – reportage, documentary, portraiture and landscape. Alongside her luminous photographs, And Time Folds brings together personal archival material that reveals Winship's thought process, working methods, and the importance of the written word, as well as an extensive essay by the renowned photography historian David Chandler, proffering a multi-faceted view of her work and artistic trajectory.

Out of print.

Sealed.