Landscape and Nature

• 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.

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• Jiazazhi 2020
• Hardback, 3rd edition, 2nd printing.
  
• NEW

"Carrying out this photograph project is because of the inspiration after reading the novel River of the North written by Zhang Chengzhi. Attracted by the powerful words in this novel, I decided to take a walk along the Yellow River to experience and feel the father-like broad and wide brought from this river, so that I could find the root of my soul .while along the way, the river from my mind was inundated by the stream of reality. The river, which once was full of legends, had gone and disappeared. That is kind of my profound pessimism. Nevertheless, as a vast country with a long history, its future is always bright. There is a descent in the matrix; there is her own nutrition to feed her babies; there is the power of creation to cultivate them strongly. The weak moaning finally will be drowned by the shout for joy. From this point of view, it seems, all shall be optimistic."

• 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.

• 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.

• FW 2017
  
• Softcover, 1st edition
  
• Fine

“Spending long periods of time in solitude in remote landscapes, Awoiska van der Molen slowly uncovers the identity of the place, allowing it to impress upon her its specific emotional and physical qualities. Using her personal experience within the landscape for her creative process, she instinctively searches for a state of being in which the boundary between herself and her surroundings blur”. —  Anna Dannemann, The Photographers’ Gallery | Deutsche Borse Photography Foundation Prize 2017. ‘Blanco’ is Awoiska’s second publication, following the much celebrated Sequester.

Signed copy.

• Silas Finch 2014
  
• Softcover, 1st edition
  
• New
  

Includes 48 black and white and full color plates printed with UV inks on uncoated paper. Leporello binding with multiple panel widths and stiff front and back covers. Spine closure printed on synthetic paper with an essay by Mark Alice Durant.

With the spine detached from the front cover, the book becomes an installation piece approximately 34 feet in length.

• Nobody/AMC 2014
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• New
  

Stephen Gill's photographs are devoid of sentiment or affectation – rather than showing the pigeon in our world, they take us into theirs. The lens noses in under bridges, squeezes through cracks and scopes out crannies. These are images that bestow on the despised flying rats that oft-trumpeted but seldom realised attribution: their dignity. Here are pigeons making their lives in a natural landscape, for whatever else humans may be, we are animals too, and as such our buildings are analogous to the earthworks of termites, and our bridges to the dams of beavers.

It's this inversion of the anthropocentric view that makes Gill's images so compelling. That, and another revelation – for fluffed-up and blinking in the dust and the grime and the rust and rime, we see those mythical beings: the young pigeons. I suspect it's because we've entered this otherworldly realm that we find these juveniles to be arousing not of pity, but a grudging respect. Far from being scroungers or undeserving poor, these doughty birds survive and even thrive despite barbs and more barbs of outrageous human fortune. They are, like the urban foxes, the economic migrants of the animal world – forced into the cities to scratch a living as best they may – and before we condemn them, we would do well to ask ourselves this question: would we do as well were the tables to be turned?

- Will Self

Clothbound hardback with silkscreen printed cover.