Photobooks by Women

• Benrido 2023
• Set of 6 prints
• New

Chieko Shiraishi’s 'Shimakage' is literally translated as ‘Island Shadow’ and this work brings together varying images taken from Japan’s surrounding islands and coastal areas. These images are an old retouching technique known as ‘Zokin-gake’ which was previously popular amongst amateur photographers in Japan during the 1920s and 30s. As a result, the images beautifully evoke a faded memory, the landscapes appear and disappear within the image from the photographers own memory, standing as faint silhouettes against the backdrop of an obscured memory.

• Overlapse 2023
• Softcover, 1st edition
  
• New

An intimate story reflecting on Ukrainian and Odesan culture through the prism of food and family, that is intrinsically a self-portrait of someone wrecked by childhood traumas. Through a period spent in close quarters with her parents in Odesa, photography became a means for Alex to communicate and connect with her mum and dad during a difficult time in their lives. She took pictures day-to-day, at home and in the street markets, while also creating a utopian universe through her lens — where life is beautiful and her parents become their dream selves in front of the camera. Meat, Fish & Aubergine Caviar embraces the complexity of family dynamics through mutual experience and visceral revelations.

Alex’s mum Yevheniia shares three of her most infamously delicious recipes, in detail, and the book’s wire-bound format is inspired by community-made cookbooks that are meant to be shared amongst friends and neighbours.

• VOID 2023
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

Following the death of her grandmother, artist Elena Helfrecht embarked on a photographic journey through her family’s estate in Bavaria. Employing the interiors, objects and archives, she began to explore the ideas of inherited trauma and postmemory—the relationship following generations have to the traumas of those who came before.

In her black and white photographs, Helfrecht uses the house and its contents to stage an allegorical play. The interiors and still lifes, which at first glance appear to show mundane objects and scenes, become increasingly unsettling: stalactite-like deposits drip sideways from walls, dark chasms open up beneath the floor boards, a snake coils around a dolls’ house and chairs hang from the beams. As the narrative progresses, motifs of eggs, birds and fleshy growths (a nod to the title, ‘Plexus’—a network of nerves or vessels) are interwoven with archival family photographs, hinting at links and connections between inscrutable symbols, people and places.

Helfrecht’s images symbolically allude to the unreal and imaginary creeping into recollections of personal and cultural histories. Confronting a past spanning four generations, ‘Plexus’ represents through photographs the intersecting and reverberating echoes of mental health, war and history.

The book features a short story by Camilla Grudova, who was named on the Granta Best of Young British Novelists list 2023. Grudova’s piece ‘The House Surgeon’ revolves around a disturbing growth that silently develops under the floorboards of a family home, drawing further upon the themes of inherited trauma presented through Helfrecht’s photographs.

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

In anywhere but here, Alison McCauley expresses the restless feeling that has haunted her throughout her life: that the place she is in isn’t where she should be, and a conviction that the next place will be better. Taken from 2008-present, these images—taken in various locations around the world—are a deeply personal reflection of the artist’s emotions, photography being a cathartic means of coming to terms with her constant desire to move. As someone who has always led a semi-nomadic lifestyle, McCauley seeks to explore the idea of not belonging. Though she feels like she is supposed to belong somewhere, McCauley doesn't want to, as she recognises that it is the wonder of this belonging that is the impetus behind her work.   

Devoid of geographical and temporal reference points, the images are figuratively and literally blurred to emphasise that this is not about a location or time, but rather a state of mind. For the viewer the series takes on a narrative of its own, unfolding like a dream sequence: a body submerged in water, a flurry of balloons released into the open sky, city lights streaming through a hotel room, and fleeting scenes captured from a car window. Just as she is drawn to movement, it is these liminal spaces that the artist gravitates towards – the chaos, the stillness, and the magic in between. “The work comes from reality, but it’s a reality that’s distorted by subjectivity,” says McCauley. “It’s an expression of my state of mind during these restless off-moments.” 

Special edition of 25 signed copies, with a signed and numbered A4 print on Hahnemühle William Turner textured paper.  See the alternative special editions available here.

Extra special edition, print made in November 2023, books signed on press in 2021.

• Stanley Barker 2023
• Hardback, 1st edition, 104p
  
• New

In 1972, Melinda Blauvelt traveled to the small Acadian fishing village of Brantville, New Brunswick on Canada's Eastern coast. She lived with a fisherman and his family, ran a day camp, and made a series of remarkable, compassionate portraits of the Acadian community that summer and on three subsequent visits from 1972 to 1974. Her photographs are now published as a series for the first time.

Melinda Blauvelt was in the first class of women at Yale and then the first woman in Yale's MFA photography program where Walker Evans became her mentor. Blauvelt would later teach at Harvard and at the University of Virginia where she established the photography program. Her pictures are held by major museums throughout the United States. She lives today in a small village on the coast of Rhode Island.

“I bought a used Deardorff 4x5 camera and spent the summer making photographs in Brantville, where I lived with fisherman Ulysse Thibodeau, his wife Jeannette and their three young children. Weekdays were spent with the campers making puppets and performing “Le Corbeau et Le Renard”, playing Capture the Flag and Croquet. Weekends, Ulysse and Jeannette took us fishing for mackerel, to the beach and included us in family dinners, bingo, picnics, and birthday parties. Whenever I set up my Deardorff, the Thibodeaus, their extended family and other Brantville friends were my enthusiastic collaborators.”  - Melinda Blauvelt

• Thames & Hudson 2023
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

Hyperborea presents unforgettable visual tales of life in the Siberian Arctic that photographer Evgenia Arbugaeva knew when she was growing up in Tiksi, a town on the shore of the Laptev Sea in the Republic of Yakutia. Her work discloses both the fragility and beautiful desolation of the land and those who inhabit it, and her rigorously composed photographs glow with rich otherworldly colour, bristle with the raw vibrancy of the climate and exhibit the quiet intensity of lives borne out in seclusion and extremes.

• Chose Commune 2023
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New
  

In 2021, Irina Rozovsky and Mark Steinmetz were invited to take part in two photographic projects in Italy, one in Castelfranco Veneto (the Veneto region) and the other in Lecce (Puglia). The subject intended to drive the work was ‘nature’; a word with so many variations of meaning in the context of today’s diversified, fragmented landscape, which constantly reflects our lives as well as condition the way that we observe reality.

This book compiles a selection of the artists’ photographs of these two Italian regions so far apart from one another. These are places where nature reveals itself through different forms of expression and where the relationship between body and space, captured in a combination of light and shade, seems to take on an inconsistent and sometimes absolute value.

Insieme (together) tells of a photographic experience in Italy that was composed in the form of an intimate, personal diary. With the artists’ dual gaze gently organizing a narrative structure, Rozovsky and Steinmetz’s photographs sit alongside one another, alternating and rotating in harmony with a discontinuous, fluctuating rhythm, just as in life’s episodes. These pictures, which seem almost poised to capture unexpected events and unusual encounters but especially moments of a shared daily life, express a singular familiarity with the places being found, conveying the natural character of their authenticity.

• Charcoal Press 2023
• Hardback, 1st edition, 96p
• New

“If the Sea Islands belong to Carrie Mae Weems and rural Virginia to Sally Mann, this part of Wisconsin can now be said to belong to Erinn Springer.”
- Casey Cep, The New Yorker

Erinn Springer returned to rural Wisconsin after the loss of a close family member, hoping to reconnect with her memories of home. Created with her family and strangers, the resulting series depicts the contrasts of the modern midwest where everyday occurrences get caught between past and present. Her portrayals of  isolation and connection explore interior and exterior landscapes in a region that is mysterious yet familiar. A portrait of agrarian life,  Dormant Season is a tender document of the intergenerational bonds of rural America: a mental space and physical place at the heart of an old dream and at the edge of a transformation. 

Oversized hardback in a cardboard slipcase with tip-in.

Signed copy. 

Due in stock December, available for pre-order now.

• Setanta 2023
• Softcover, 1st edition
• New

• Tall Poppy 2023
• Softcover, 1st edition
• New

With And For (Tall Poppy Press, 2023) is a collaboration between Rochelle Marie Adam and Sophie Schwartz. Drawing on years of their back catalogues, this book was an opportunity to collaborate and make something new from exisiting photographs. The resulting book very much is more than the sum of its parts.

Equally warm and weird, the photos stray away from just romance, moving to a more nuanced and holistic view. Generous, present and vulnerable – the photographs in this book are about standing next to, not in front of, the people one photographs: something each artist does exceptionally well. 

Photographs are left unauthored, deliberately blurring the lines between two artists. A joint effort, the book is really about the similarities in approach of the photographers, and allowing the photographs to lead, not the artist.

24x30cm, singer-sewn softcover with a foil stamped cover.  Edition of 500 copies.

• Atelier EXB 2023
• hardback, 1st edition, 184p
• New

Albarrán Cabrera’s poetic universe invites us to immerse ourselves in nature, in the land of trees and on what trees can teach us about life.

The idea for the book comes from a text written by Hermann Hesse that can be described as one of the most beautiful love letters to trees. Hesse tells us that “when we listen to trees, we discover the meaning of life”, thus in this book Albarrán Cabrera explain that by shooting trees they have learnt not only how to listen to them but also to better understand themselves.

The images alternate between a palette of vivid colours, bordering on abstraction, and more monochrome tones, evoking a certain melancholy, plunging us into timeless landscapes. The result is a dreamlike, almost surreal world, unique to the Spanish duo. Far from idealizing nature, the photographers aim to magnify what already exists, quoting their words: “We believe that to be human is to understand nature not just as it really is, but also as we perceive it. If we are alert and observant, we will be able to understand it from these two standpoints. As if we are both seeing and been seen.”

Two texts by German novelist, poet and painter Hermann Hesse punctuate this visual corpus. A text by Yves Darricau, agricultural engineer and author, tells the story of the relationship between man and trees, from prehistoric times to the present day. It talks about how each has contributed to the development of the other in a relationship of interdependence that is now under threat, making us all aware of the importance of trees in the face of the challenges of our century.

English Edition.

• Kominek 2023
• Softcover, 1st edition
• New

From 18.10.23 to 11.02.24 Viviane Sassen will open her exhibition at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris tracing her photographic work over the years. This new publication features an inspired series of self-portraits from 1989-1999.

Signed copy

• Void 2023
• Hardback, 1st edition, 224p
• New

In 2011, Maria Sturm began to photograph the lives of young people from the Lumbee Tribe around Pembroke, Robeson County, North Carolina. Through the process of documenting their lives, Sturm began to question her own understanding of what it means to be Native American. Her new book ‘You Don’t Look Native to Me’ combines photographs with interviews and texts to preconceptions and show Native identity not as fixed, but evolving and redefining itself with each generation. 

Pembroke is the tribal seat of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, the largest state-recognised tribe east of the Mississippi River. Although the Lumbee Tribe is state-recognised, they are federally unrecognised and do not have a reservation nor receive financial benefits from the federal government. The Lumbee name was voted for in 1952 to unite all tribes in the area in an attempt to gain federal recognition. Their tribal status remains one of the most debated in the United States.

“My work engages an unfamiliar mix of concepts: a tribe whose members are ignored by the outside world, who do not wear their otherness on their physique, but who are firm in their identity… I am tracing their ways of self-representation, transformed through history, questions of identity with which they are confronted on a daily basis, and their reawakening pride in being Native. I hope to raise questions to the viewer regarding their own identity and membership to the unspecified mainstream.”

- Maria Sturm

• Eriskay 2023
• Softcover, 1st edition, 144p
• New

With the photographic project Vital Mud, Hiske Altena (NL) explores the theory that life on Earth once began in clay. In the 1980s, her uncle, a now-retired geologist, found an unusual rattle stone. In this stone, he discovered organic-looking structures that he could not explain with existing geological theories. However, the alternative so-called “clay hypothesis”, according to which clay helped the evolution of early life forms, seems to offer a better explanation.

What will these first life forms have looked like? As large slimy tree-shaped structures or perhaps as giant floating zeppelin-like gas bubbles? Rattle stones, clay crystals, the life cycle of bacteria, and large oval shapes in the American landscape are all possible evidence for the hypothesis that life once originated in clay. Perhaps this even explains the similar shapes and descriptions that keep recurring in old fairy tales, myths, and religious stories.

Vital Mud takes this theory as its starting point. It is the foundation on which Altena builds a collection of images that changes our perspective, makes us look again, and wonder about what humans are capable of. She reminds us that science is a continuous search for the unknown, and that perspective shifts, just as it does in art.

The book’s dummy was shown at exhibitions and festivals around the world, was shortlisted for several awards, including the Paris Photo/Aperture PhotoBook Award, and was selected as one of the Best Dutch Book Designs of 2021.

• VIKA Books 2023
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

• TBW 2023
• Softcover, 1st edition
• NEW

Men Untitled by Carolyn Drake, presents a new series of photographs exploring her relationship to myths of masculinity in American culture.

Following Knit Club (2012–2020), a subversive work about a community of women in rural Mississippi, Drake shifts her gaze in Men Untitled. In contrast to her previous work, her subjects are uprooted from their geographies. Erasing nearly all signs of place, Drake invites the viewer to look directly at the male bodies in front of her camera.

The subjects in Men Untitled appear nude or half-dressed, frozen in awkward poses, torsos twisted and bent, backward facing, wearing furniture, and even hung upside down. But they also appear to be at ease with—possibly even acting in collusion with—the artist.

Still-lives punctuate the portraits: an anatomical model of male genitalia perches on a velvet chair, a charred board of nails stands erect, and a formidable snake wraps itself around an empty window frame.

Playful on its surface, the work’s underlying levity is brought to the fore in Drake’s epilogue, which recounts a sequence of personal experiences that motivated the work.

Carolyn Drake was awarded the 2021 HCB Award by the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson to produce this series of photographs.

Printed in a limited edition of 1,500 copies. 

Signed copy.

• Benrido 2023
• Set of 6 colour collotype prints
• New

• Deadbeat Club 2023
  
• Softcover, 1st  edition
• New

Over her long and much-lauded career, Anne Rearick has made photographs in such far-flung places as Kazakhstan, South Africa, and the French Basque country. But in the summer of 1989, before all the grants and awards (including a Guggenheim in 2003), she was a grad school student who had never made pictures away from home. That changed when she was connected to the Riddle family of Perry County in Eastern Kentucky.

You Will Look To The Mountains, Rearick’s first monograph with Deadbeat Club, is the long-awaited result of her visits to Appalachia as a young and impressionable photographer more than 30 years ago. On the book’s cover, a likewise young and wide-eyed Amy Riddle peers out from behind a bouquet of flowers, as if greeting us with equal parts charm and curiosity. As soon as she met the Riddles, Rearick was readily welcomed into their day-to-day family life. From hog killing to hair braiding, a family graveyard and children playing, Rearick captured candid moments of unaffected revelry, fellowship and tradition. These images, however, are resolutely straightforward, never sentimentalized. In that sense, we see the emerging artist laying the foundation for the humanist vision that has animated her highly-regarded practice ever since.

Anne Rearick's vision is documentary in nature, but also uniquely personal. Rearick works slowly, often photographing over the course of years and in the process deepens her relationship to people and place.

Tritone offset printed, swiss-bound softcover, 70p.

Signed copy.

• Osiris 2023
  
• Hardback, 1st edition, 120p
• New

“Dawn in Spring” brings back the earliest works of Japanese photographer Asako Narahashi.　Originally shot in 1989, a decisive period not only for the then-unknown artist, Narahashi exhibited the images from her “Dawn in Spring” series four separate times throughout the year. Including previously unshown images, this book represents the first time her series is made available in print.

After taking part in Daido Moriyama’s “FotoSession” workshop in the mid-80s, 1989 was the year her time as a university student would end. With an undecided future ahead of her, Narahashi travelled through Japan – Kumamoto, Miyakejima, Hakata, Yokohama, Hachinohe, Yuzawa, Tokyo… – and inadvertently laid the foundation for her photographic career. Despite the long time between these photographs and her breakthrough in the latter half of the 90s, the black-and-white images in “Dawn of Spring” already reveal the acute sensibilities of this exceptional artist.

“Dawn in Spring. I can’t for the life of me remember how I arrived at this title. Perhaps because it happened to be spring; maybe the words were already resting at the tip of my tongue and just felt right to me. I had no real idea where to travel or what to photograph. I think I simply let the flow, the momentum, my encounters and my desire to escape decide it all … Having come face to face with my contact prints, negatives and 8x10s after all these years, I realized once again that this is where it all began for me.”
― from Asako Narahashi’s artist statement

• Nazraeli 2023
  
• Hardback, 1st Nazraeli edition, 120p
• New - see below

To distill a feeling
You must still your feelings.
But the mind is its own mirage,
The desert a looking-glass.

“Making pictures in Israel and Palestine was above all an emotional challenge. My photographs usually deal with something eternal in the landscape, but in this place the layers of history and conflict, fear and hostility, frustrated my camera. I happened to travel a lot in the West Bank, not for any political purpose, but because I liked the landscape between the cities. I tried to gaze at the land, without prejudice or judgment. I didn’t want to deal with the masks of the people and I didn’t want to put on my own mask. I wanted to see it as the olive tree sees it. But I felt overwhelmed by the realities around me. I felt sad and uncomfortable much of the time, and I found myself trying to make photographs in a place I didn’t want to be. It was difficult, but looking back, I can see that it forced me to change as an artist and I am grateful for that. On my final trip, I was able to see, not only the land, but my own mind, with its uneven terrain and movements, and to touch something elemental.” ― Jungjin Lee

This new, expanded edition of Unnamed Road was designed by Jungjin Lee, and published on the occasion of an exhibition at GoEun Museum of Photography in Buson, South Korea.

Hardcover, 10 x 11.5, 120 pages, 58 quadratone plates.

Note: Due to the nature of it's design, faint wear is possible to the edges and corners of the hardback cover despite the books being still sealed.

Final copies of this now out of print edition.

• Self 2020
  
• Softcover, 2nd edition
  
• New
  

No System is back!

Including over 200 of Vinca Petersen’s photographs, diary entries and ephemera, No System tells the story of a 10-year journey around Europe in the 1990’s putting on illegal free raves and festivals with other Techno Travellers.

“We are not rebelling against, so much as living outside the system. Free music to anyone that wants it is what we give and we need nothing back but space to roam.

Tribal beats have surrounded our planet for thousands of years. Technology is our addition to this continual rhythm. Age is no concern, background irrelevant. We exist now and in the future. Welcome to our way of living…”

Signed copy.

• the(M) éditions / IBASHO 2023
• Softcover, 3rd edition, 126pp
• New

'In so it goes, Miho Kajioka is presenting work which relates to the concept of time, memory and location. Like in her earlier works, the series consists of intuitive images of fragments of her daily life, from various periods and against changing backdrops. Miho Kajioka regards herself more as a painter/drawer than as a photographer. She feels that photographic techniques help her to create works that fully express her artistic vision.'

The original limited edition received the prestigious 'Prix Nadar' award in 2019. 
this third edition, 'so it goes, so it goes, so it goes' stands apart from its two predecessors, with not only a unique new cover but also some fresh content, including Kajioka's new colour images.

Last few copies.

• the(M) éditions / IBASHO 2023
• Softcover, 2nd 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

2nd edition with cover as shown.

• Mack 2023
• Hardback, 2nd edition
  
• New

Alessandra Sanguinetti’s On the Sixth Day offers us a glimpse of life on a small Argentine farm from the perspective of its animals. Often photographed close to the earth, the images render the courage, struggles, and adventures of chickens, pigs, horses, and cows. We see them newly born, at play, vying with each other for food, their fate always uncertain as human presences inevitably loom above. With their rich, almost surreal colour, these photographs evoke traditional fables or classic children’s books in which animals enact human behaviours to teach moral lessons. Yet Sanguinetti portrays these animals as individuals in their own right, each with their own mysterious spirit, relating their lives from birth to death with an unsentimental and direct gaze.

First published in 2005 and now out of print, this new and expanded edition of On the Sixth Day includes additional unseen images.

Hand signed copy.

• Stanley Barker 2023
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

Mimi Plumb's breathtaking new monograph Megalith-Still is a meditation on the sublime within the untamed American landscape.

Each summer from the late 1990s to the early 2000s, the acclaimed photographer travelled from her home in San Francisco to Kings Canyon, a wilderness where she communed with a band of horses. Plumb would come to produce Megalith-Still, a series of portraits of the herd, imbued with a deep tenderness, and powerful physic weight.

“The horses sleep lying down, legs twitching, mouths wrapped around blades of grass. The flies are attracted to their moist, flickering eyes. I’m as close as I can focus, examining their faces, tails, hooves and bellies, bewitched by the sensuality of horse and place.

“I am in a meadow high in the Sierra Nevada. Channels of the San Joaquin River braid through the thick, lush grass. I take off my shoes and socks, roll up my pants and wade through the shallow water to where the horses are now eating. They trace a pattern, mysterious to me, around and around the meadow, eating, drinking, and sleeping.

“Late in the afternoon, the horses abruptly leave the meadow in a single line. I race after them through a swamp of thick mud and dead trees and branches which scratch my arms. They trot and canter, moving faster than they’ve moved all day. I can’t catch up to them. When I reach the edge of the main riverbank, I see the last of the horses cautiously step into the deep, swift-moving water, and slowly float to the other side.” - Mimi Plumb

Three-quarter bound in a uniquely tactile fibrous wool paper (produced using surplus from the fashion industry) and printed in tritone.