Rare Books

• Stanley Barker 2014
• Softcover, 1st edition
• NEW

At the age of 33, one of Australia’s foremost artists, Bill Henson, produced some of the most evocative portraits and powerful dreamscapes of his career. 

Shot at dawn or dusk, in the suburbs of Melbourne, Australia, and in the deserts of Egypt, 1985 with its glimpses of faces, figures and places marks the moment when Bill Henson’s long-held desire to find a form for ‘the dream of suburbia’ was realised. Describing this process, Henson says, “I began to realise that these places could be understood as a dreamscape because they affect us so powerfully and with such immediacy as a memento mori. The light, smell, even temperature, as well as the look of these places, animates our memory and gently sharpens our sense of the passage to time.”

Combining photographs of ancient Egypt, with Suburban Melbourne, Henson creates an imaginary world, that shows “the suburban landscape as an interior world that each of us carries around inside us, like childhood, for the rest of our lives.” The photographs in this series are imbued with a sense of unreality. As night falls and we begin to rely upon the heightening sensitivity of our other senses, and as we navigate the darkness, through touch, smell, temperature and sound, and the projections of our imagination into this ambiguous space in which we find ourselves. Just occasionally, this might reintroduce us to the deep mystery of the world.

Sealed.

• Powerhouse 2005
• Hardback, 1st edition
• Used: Very good

New York City, the unique metropolis that Le Corbusier has called 'a beautiful catastrophe', is a natural home to Bruce Gilden. Since 1981, Gilden has been roaming the streets of the city, capturing its characters and eccentricities with his confrontational, highly energetic style and exuberant vision. In his new opus, A Beautiful Catastrophe, Magnum photographer Bruce Gilden celebrates a trademark style with abandon, firmly ensconcing him in the pantheon of New York City street poets.

Used copy with some light wear to the cover, overall very good.

• 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.

• Morel Books 2009
• Softcover, facsimile edition
• Near fine

A facsimile of Arthur Rimbaud’s 1873 self published book Une Saison En Enfer, the Mörel edition contains Patti Smith's illustrations of Rimbaud, as well as a selection of photographs from the illustrious late Robert Mapplethorpe, selected by Patti Smith.
In both French and English (translations by the late/great Oliver Bernard) 

Near fine used copy.

• Chose Commune 2020
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• Fine
  

Afterlife is the sixth chapter of Vasantha Yogananthan’s long-term project A Myth of Two Souls inspired by the epic tale The Ramayana. Drawing inspiration from the imagery associated with this myth and its pervasiveness in everyday Indian life, Vasantha Yogananthan has retraced the legendary route from north to south India. A Myth of Two Souls is informed by the notion of a journey in time and space and offers a modern retelling of the tale.

Afterlife is centered around the bloody war between the army of Ravana and the army of Rama. As its title suggests, the chapter deals with death and reincarnation. With Rama’s cruelty finally revealed, the series can be read as a visual exploration of one man’s descent into the darkness of the soul. Although the pictures were shot in Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu over two editions of Dussehra — the Indian festival celebrating the victory of good over evil — they do not document the festivities. They focus on the trance people try to reach night after night, as if during one week they were allowed to escape their bodies to become somebody else.

Back to his studio, Yogananthan did collages by mixing several pictures together to put the viewer in a state of disorientation. The Ramayana has been continuously rewritten and reinterpreted through time, and for Yogananthan’s Afterlife has been retold by Indian writer Meena Kandasamy. Amma — the seventh and last chapter of A Myth of Two Souls — will be published next year and will mark the end of the project (2013-2021).

Signed to a sticker - see photo.

• IBASHO & the(M) éditions 2022
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New
  

Right after the accident, I found a blog about peacocks that were left in the evacuation zone, within the 20km limit. I then started imagining  those peacocks, walking around the empty town with their beautiful wings spread.'

This text is from my previous book "And, where did the peacocks go?". My newest book is the new version of the series about what I have experienced and digested from the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident in 2011. That incident pushed me to return to art, which I had stopped for more than 10 years. In this book, I also used the text above but I added this line in the end:

'I still wonder where they went...'

- Miho Kajioka 

We are happy to announce that the artist Miho Kajioka has asked the (M)éditions & IBASHO to publish a book based on her self-published and handmade book  'And, can you still hear the peacocks?'. 

Edition of 500 numbered copies.    Signed copy.

• Nazraeli 2019
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• Fine

“I am now the same age that Garry Winogrand had been when I knew him – 56. I was just 22 then and now wonder why he had be willing to spend some time with someone so young. I must have come across as OK and probably mentioned some of the right names: Friedlander, Wessel, Zulpo-Dane. Once he called me up (the first time was startling to me as he must have looked up my name in the phone book) to see what I was up to the next day. I said, “If it’s sunny, I’m going to photograph; if it’s rainy, I’m going to print.” “Likewise,” he said. Maybe in some ways we were similar.

One day I asked Garry to go with me to photograph at the LA Zoo and he agreed. We had a full day and shot until the light faded. As we were nearing the exit, Garry spotted Bernadette Peters, the famous movie and Broadway actress, who was visiting the zoo with her boyfriend. Garry photographed her before on the set of John Huston’s movie, Annie. She and her boyfriend were dressed in identical jeans and jackets. Strikingly, they both had the same drooping, poodle-like hairstyle. Surprised, she threw her head back and shrieked with delight when Garry swooped in to take their picture. Out in the parking lot he sank into the passenger seat and said, “Boy, you don’t know how tired you are till you sit down.” 

In February of 1984, I called him up to say I had decided to leave town and move back east. His voice on the other end of the phone sounded terrible, very weak. I had no idea what was going on with him – it was shocking. He wished me “the best of luck.” The following month, a couple weeks before my 23rd birthday, I was at my parents’ house in Hartford and my mother brought me the New York Times. Without saying a word, she pointed to Garry’s obituary. During the time we spent together, there had been a cancer growing inside of him but he didn’t know it. Garry was always looking outward, beyond himself.

We are pleased to announce the publication of Volume 3 in Mark Steinmetz’s trilogy Angel City West. Building upon the narrative he began with Volumes 1 & 2, Steinmetz presents 54 previously unpublished photographs made during his stay in Los Angeles in 1981–84. 

Edition of 350 signed and numbered copies. 

Book in as new condition, some possible light indentations to the slipcase (common).

• Nazraeli 2017
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• New
  

“Mark Steinmetz makes photographs of ordinary people in the ordinary landscapes they inhabit. His frames document those fluid moments of real, lived life, moments not just grabbled or stolen, but ones where he says, ‘It’s important to take an internal pause.’ An element of the seeming offhand magic in his photographs is how his sense of this “internal pause,” of a near cinematic freeze frame, only enhances his images’ apparent spontaneity. The best art often hides its technique . . . Steinmetz is, in fact, is a “street” photographer: a 21st century embodiment of the 19th century flâneur, a man in the world, sensitive to ephemeral moments as photographic capsules of our larger lives. This will come as no surprise to anyone who knows Steinmetz’s artistic history as a mentee of Garry Winogrand. 

You don’t have to be a creature of the urban streetscapes that Steinmetz so closely observes in this book in order to “get” his work. From his books of photographs of Greater Atlanta, to the small world of a children’s baseball diamond in The Players, Mark Steinmetz’s camera focuses closely on these ordinary, even banal, moments of people’s daily lives, even when in some images, the people themselves are absent at the instant of the camera exposure. Like the more formal compositions of Cartier-Bresson, Steinmetz’s photographs capture their own “decisive moment,” less stylized for sure, but often more animated: simply the images of an “American” photographer.” — From the Introduction by John Bailey

• Stanley Barker 2018
• Hardback, 1st edition/1st printing
  
• New
  

Christopher Anderson’s photographs of the citizens of of Shenzhen, China, describe a megacity that didn’t exist thirty years ago, but today has some twenty million inhabitants. Working almost invisibly and bringing the viewer in close, into tightly cropped images that exclude all context except the ghostly light that illuminates the faces of his subjects. Anderson’s etherial portraits ask “Who are these individual people? What do they dream about?”

“I have seen the future and it is now and it is China. There is no need for the past. It can be erased. A new happiness is being constructed, an approximation of joy, better than the real thing.”  -  Christopher Anderson

Christopher Anderson first gained recognition in 1999 when his poignant images of the rescue of Haitian refugees taken onboard a sinking wooden boat named the “Believe in God” won him the Robert Capa Gold Medal.  In 2005 he joined the renowned photo agency, Magnum. In addition to regular personal and editorial assignments Anderson is currently the first ever “Photographer in Residence” at New York Magazine.

Sealed 1st printing.

• Stanley Barker
• Softcover, 1st edition x 2 in box
• New

To celebrate the release of the reimagined edition of Christopher Anderson's Son, an archive of Anderson's Family work was published. Each copy includes a first edition of Pia as well as Son, housed in an archival box.  

This edition is strictly limited to 150 copies. 

• Cafe Royal 2017
• Softcover, 1st edition, 36p
• New

First printing of this rare zine.

• L'Artiere 2019
  
• Softcover, 1st edition
  
• New
  

I photographed August Song during summers 2013- 1018 in rural parts of Sweden; venues hidden in the woods on the outskirts of the villages. A winding road leading into the forest, hidden away on its own and divided by a fence from the world out there / the outside world.

At the back, a stage with an orchestra playing patiently through the night. Two slow dances and then two quick –  song after song; all of them about love, while the crowd move slowly around the floor.

Surrounding it all a fence, and on the outside a parking lot hidden secretly underneath the pines. A place to get dressed,  putting make- up on, fight, drink and make love. Above, a dull summer night wich never completely hides the going on in the hollow.”

- Martin Bogren

Edition of 1000 copies.    Signed.

• Peperoni 2017
  
• Hardback, 2nd edition
  
• New
  

Thomas Hoepker, a member of Magnum Photos, had the opportunity to spend time with Cassius Clay aka Muhammad Ali and take photographs – in 1960, when he won the a gold medal at the Rome Olympics, in 1966, when Ali was world heavyweight champion already, in 1970, when he restarted his career and prepared himself for the "Fight of the Century" against Joe Frazier and years later, already weakened by Parkinson´s disease. Many of these pictures have become photographic icons. But many photographs in this book are lesser known or have been unpublished until now. They show Ali in private moments and public appearances outside of the ring.

Expanded 2nd edition.

Signed by Thomas Hoepker.

• 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.

• Session Press 2017
• Softcover, 1st edition 216p
• NEW

One of the most influential photographers of our time, Nobuyoshi Araki is known for his diaristic style or “shi-shashin” (I-photographs) in the publication of over 500 books throughout his career. His work has become practically synonymous with Japanese photography; closely associated with bondage, sex, his late wife, Yoko, as well as still lifes and nudes. It is, however, less known that Araki had explored experimental film projects since the mid 1980s.

In 1986 at Cinema Rise in Tokyo, Araki staged a live performance entitled Tokyo Monogatari (Tokyo Story). Using two projectors, Araki and his assistants, Nobuhiko Ansai and Shiro Tamiya, selected and sequenced slides to create a succession of overlapping images fading into one another, accompanied by a musical soundtrack. Tokyo Monogatari became the first in a series of live performances entitled Arakinema, which he staged until the mid-2000s in museums and art institutions around the world.
Blue Period and Last Summer are made up primarily of nudes and portraits alternating with street scenes and images of flowers. The majority of the work is derived from Shashin Jidai, the important underground sub culture magazine of the 1980s in Japan. Our publication singles out these two projects as they are essential to an understanding of his film work. As Araki explained at his initial meeting with Session Press publisher Miwa Susuda in Shinjuku in 2016, “The two films should be seen as a set, since Blue Period is about the past and Last Summer is about the future. By removing color using a chemical solution, Blue Period is about an act of subtraction, whereas adding color to the images in Last Summer is about an act of addition. This project is just like life itself.”

Working directly from the 140 original slides used for both projections, the book successfully offers a fresh review of the photographer’s hidden oeuvre and regains the true spirit and atmosphere of the original Arakinema performances.

Sealed.

• Stanley Barker 2019
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• New

From 1982-2001 the American photographer Mark Steinmetz travelled to country fairs, urban street fairs, and small circuses across the United States, to make photographs of the families, teens and carnies that contain all the warmth and frenetic energy of a day at the Carnival. 

“People from all walks of life go to the fair seeking something to transport them from the everyday. Amid the excitement and sounds of the rides and games, I could slip by largely unnoticed and capture gestures and faces.” - Mark Steinmetz

Out of print, rare title.

• Mack 2021
• Set of 2 Hardbacks, 1st Mack edition
• New

Kawada’s The Map / Chizu is the most famous and sought after book in the history of Japanese photography. Designed with the noted graphic designer Kohei Sugiura, Chizu has seen numerous editions since its original publication in August 1965. In November 2001, New York Public Library acquired the rarest version of the book, Kikuji Kawada’s unique, handmade maquette. The maquette presents a notably different physicality than that of the published edition—many of the pictures are the same but with variant croppings, tonalities, orientations, and a markedly dissimilar configuration with a pair of jacketed volumes—each nearly twice as large in format as the published version—separated by a black-and-white divider. With its pages made of thin, silvery darkroom prints, folded in half and pasted back-to-back, there are no folios to unfurl, only a progression of intense, full-bleed images. This MACK version is an exquisite facsimile of the two-volume maquette, and includes an accompanying bilingual booklet featuring new scholarship by Joshua Chuang and Miyuki Hinton, together with an extended interview with the artist, detailing the evolution of one of the greatest photobooks ever made.  

Two hardback books, each with a jacket, plus one paperback booklet with leporello fold. Housed in a buckram bound hardback slipcase, protected in a printed cardboard mailer.  Text in English and Japanese.

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

• Stanley Barker 2018
  
• hardback, 1st edition
  
• New
  

While studying at the New School, New York, under the legendary Lisette Model Sunil Gupta would spend his weekends cruising on Christopher Street with his camera. It was the heady days after Stonewall and before AIDS when Gupta and his peers were young and busy creating a gay public space that hadn’t been seen before.

“I came to photography in the early 1970s. What was initially just a hobby quickly found a purpose in the fledgling gay liberation movement, documenting gay rights marches as well as the burgeoning gay scene. In retrospect these pictures have become both nostalgic and iconic for a very important moment in my personal history.” - Sunil Gupta

Born in New Delhi and now living in London, Sunil Gupta is an artist, writer and activist. He has a MA in Photography from the Royal College of Art, and is currently studying towards a doctorate at the University of Westminster. Gupta’s work has been seen in over 90 international solo and group exhibitions.

Christopher Street, 1976 was nominated for The Aperture Paris Photo book award, the Lucie Photo book Prize and Les Rencontres d'Arles book Award.

Sealed.

• Mack 2020
  
• Hardback, special edition
  
• New
  

• 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.

.

• Mack Books 2017
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• Fine
  

The images in Sam Contis's Deep Springs were made in a remote desert valley east of the Sierra Nevada. The work centres on a small, all-male liberal arts college, founded in 1917 by the educational pioneer L. L. Nunn. 

The college and its surroundings provide a stage on which Contis explores the construction of myth, place, and masculine identity. Bringing together new photographs with pictures made by the first students at the college a century ago, Deep Springs engages with the enduring image of the American West––one that Hollywood, mass media, and the history of American photography have imprinted into the collective psyche. 

Sam Contis lives and works in California. Her work is represented in the collections of LACMA, the Yale University Art Gallery, and the Whitney Museum of American Art and has recently been exhibited in solo shows at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery in New York. In 2018, her work will be on view in “Being: New Photography” at the Museum of Modern Art. Deep Springs is her first book.

Signed copy.  Fine copy with very faint wear to edges of cover.

• 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.

Final copy.  Unsigned.

• RRB 2020
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• New
  

Peter Mitchell’s Early Sunday Morning is made up of over 90 previously unpublished images, each one selected from a cache of five hundred negatives which have sat undeveloped for over 30 years.

Early Sunday Morning, edited and sequenced by John Myers, shows a different Leeds to Mitchell’s earlier publications. It is neither the sombre look at destruction seen in Memento Mori, nor the detached view of ‘the man from mars’ of A New Refutation of the Viking 4 Space Mission, but a more intimate document of Mitchell’s own Leeds.

The book reveals the layers of the city’s history, exposed by the changes to the urban landscape that epitomised the 1970s and 80s. Hundred-year-old terraces and cobbled streets sit flanked by concrete flats, with newly cleared ground to either side are presented with Mitchell’s typical graphic framing.

“It is as if Peter Mitchell has taken the atmosphere and mood of Edward Hopper’s famous painting and established it as a matter of documentary fact in the north of England at a moment when collapse can lead to further desolation or possible renewal. So these beautiful pictures are drily drenched in history – social, economic and photographic.”  - Geoff Dyer

Early Sunday Morning is available in an edition of 1500 copies.

• Stanley Barker 2016
• Softcover, 1st edition
• New
  

Mark Steinmetz ‘15 Miles to K-Ville’ is a poetic journey around the outskirts of K-Ville: a fictional town somewhere between Knoxville, Tennessee and Athens, Georgia, where graves dot the terrain and a sense of forbidding hangs heavy in the air.

This collection of darkly humorous and melancholy portraits and landscapes date from the early 1990s when the American photographer was moving between these two cities.

I love the South for its warmth and chaos. The vegetation down here grows rampant; the light is softened by humid air. The people are for the most part friendly and they are comfortable in their bodies. They tend to be more open to being photographed by a stranger. The unexpected happens here a lot. — Mark Steinmetz

Sealed copy.

• Walker Art Center 2010
• Hardback, 1st edition
• Used: Near fine

From Here to There: Alec Soth’s America is the first exhibition catalogue to feature the full spectrum of the work of Alec Soth, one of the most interesting voices in contemporary photography. Featuring more than 100 of the artist’s photographs made over the past 15 years, the book includes new critical essays by exhibition curator Siri Engberg, curator and art historian Britt Salvesen and critic Barry Schwabsky, which offer context on the artist’s working process, the photo-historical tradition behind his practice and reflections on his latest series of works.

Geoff Dyer’s “Riverrun”- a meditation on Soth’s series Sleeping by the Mississippi – and August Kleinzahler’s poem “Sleeping It Off in Rapid City” contribute to the thoughtful exploration of this body of work.

Also included in the publication is a 48-page artist’s book by Soth titled The Loneliest Man in Missouri, a photographic essay with short, diaristic texts capturing the banality and ennui of middle America’s suburban fringes, with their corporate office parks, strip clubs and chain restaurants.

Signed by Alec Soth.

Used copy in excellent near fine condition with some light marking to the rear of the linen cover.

• Origini Edizioni 2022
• Softcover, 1st edition
• New

In Geography of Abandonment, Raymond Meeks explores the elastic nature and meaning of home and place. Place to become, dwell within, leave and return to. “Place” imbued with memory, present reality, as well as the unknowns posed by the future. Meeks reveals his fascination with the ritualistic processes that inform notions of transcendence and grief. Our departures from home as a necessary abandoning while finding our way in the world, being returned to the emptiness of pure existence.

Meeks’ work is informed by a constant recalibration between inner and outer world, the canny and the uncanny, the particular and the universal. In his hands, the camera is an instrument that dissects ritual and renders form, briefly making the world around us comprehensible, and rendering us comprehensible to ourselves. His personal and professional relationship with the photographer Adrianna Ault has been a primary source of inspiration and collaboration for Meeks over the years. Both artists struggle with the notion of personal meaning, especially as the years pass, children leave, and their own relationship with each other shifts and evolves. Meeks watches his partner, and poetically observes:

She seems to be expecting something, some form she could take possession of.

A borrowed form, perhaps, one that could express the real pain inside.
An absolute breaking and repurposing of truth.
A place where truth could be gotten at, but also where truth could be defended.

A burning experience of molding herself.
A sudden glimpse of her own being.

His photographs of Ault, and the photographs they have made together, convey a restlessness astir within the quotidian, a condition manifest in his work, and the experimental nature of his photographic approach and processes.

Edition of 250 copies.  Signed and numbered.

1 copy only per customer.

Video courtesy the publisher.

• Zen Foto 2017
• Softcover, 1st edition
  
• Used: near fine to fine
  

Masaki Yamamoto’s highly anticipated first photobook presents one of the most daring family portraits in Japanese photography.

Shot entirely in his family’s tiny apartment, with walls yellowed from cigarette smoke, broken doors and trash covering the ground, Yamamoto’s unashamed, uncompromising black-and-white photos nonetheless depict a strong and rare sense of familial intimacy and affection. Not quite dysfunctional, but decidedly atypical.

“As we grew up, we had different experiences of being bullied, socially withdrawn, sick, badly behaved and so on. These experiences intertwined with the Yamamoto family’s history and are what makes up our lives as well as the family’s bonds today”

Fine condition, signed by the photographer.

• Nobody 2007
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• New
  

In Hackney Flowers Stephen Gill has again used his east London surroundings as the inspiration for his work. This time he has collected flowers, seeds, berries and other objects from various locations in Hackney, pressed them in his studio and photographed them alongside his own photographs and found ephemera. Some of the base photographs were also buried in Hackney Wick, and the consequent staining and decay has left its imprint upon the images, stressing the collaboration with place. A parallel series within the book shows members of the Hackney public with floral details imposed upon their person.

• Chose Commune 2018
  
• Softcover, 1st edition
  
• Used: good to very good

Over the course of multiple summers, Raymond Meeks has ventured the few miles from his rural home in the Catskill Mountain region of New York, to a single-lane bridge spanning the tributaries of Bowery and Catskill Creeks. Beneath the bridge, a waterfall drops sixty-feet over moss-covered limestone toward a forbidding pond. The local youth have come here from time immemorial, congregating near outcroppings and around a concrete altar – a remnant of an earlier stone bridge. Most allow themselves a brief running start before launching their pale bodies into the void, where tentative suggestions of flight mark the response to gravity. Taken collectively, their gestures allude to ritual, a prayerful response to the exigencies of budding sexuality and a future rife with uncertainty. Halfstory Halflife is a distillation of the photographs made in the shadows of these falls, marked each summer by the emergence of young adults perched at a precipice both in space and in their lives.

Recommended.

Signed copy with some wear to one edge and mark to page edges.  Faint bump to rear corner.  See photos.

Signed in pencil by Raymond Meeks.

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

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

2023 edition.  Signed to the title page.

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

Taking its name from a line in Wallace Stevens’ short poem “The Gray Room,” Alec Soth’s latest book is a lyrical exploration of intimacy. While these large-format color photographs are made all over the world, they aren’t about any particular place or population. Whether made in Odessa or his hometown of Minneapolis, Soth’s new book is fundamentally about intimate encounters in private rooms.

“After the publication of my last book about social life in America, Songbook, and a retrospective of my four, large-scale American projects, Gathered Leaves, I went through a long period of rethinking my creative process. For over a year I stopped travelling and photographing people. I barely took any pictures at all.

When I returned to photography, I wanted to strip the medium down to its primary elements. Rather than trying to make some sort of epic narrative about America, I wanted to simply spend time looking at other people and, hopefully, briefly glimpse their interior life.

In order to try and access these lives, I made all of the photographs in interior spaces. While these rooms often exist in far-flung places, it’s only to emphasize that these pictures aren’t about any place in particular. Whether a picture is made in Odessa or Minneapolis, my goal was the same: to simply spend time in the presence of another beating heart.” - Alec Soth

1st edition / 1st printing.  

Signed by Alec Soth to the title page whilst on press 2019.

• Mack Books 2019
  
• Hardback, 1st edition with print
  
• New
  

Taking its name from a line in Wallace Stevens’ short poem “The Gray Room,” Alec Soth’s latest book is a lyrical exploration of intimacy. While these large-format color photographs are made all over the world, they aren’t about any particular place or population. Whether made in Odessa or his hometown of Minneapolis, Soth’s new book is fundamentally about intimate encounters in private rooms.

“After the publication of my last book about social life in America, Songbook, and a retrospective of my four, large-scale American projects, Gathered Leaves, I went through a long period of rethinking my creative process. For over a year I stopped travelling and photographing people. I barely took any pictures at all.

When I returned to photography, I wanted to strip the medium down to its primary elements. Rather than trying to make some sort of epic narrative about America, I wanted to simply spend time looking at other people and, hopefully, briefly glimpse their interior life.

In order to try and access these lives, I made all of the photographs in interior spaces. While these rooms often exist in far-flung places, it’s only to emphasize that these pictures aren’t about any place in particular. Whether a picture is made in Odessa or Minneapolis, my goal was the same: to simply spend time in the presence of another beating heart.” - Alec Soth

Limited edition of 150 copies with a signed first edition of the book housed in a slipcase with a c-type print (see image).

• Steidl 2017
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

Fed by thrilling recent discoveries from Saul Leiter’s vast archive, In My Room provides an in-depth study of the nude, through intimate photographs of the women Leiter knew. Showing deeply personal interior spaces, often illuminated by the lush natural light of the artist’s studio in New York City’s East Village, these black-and-white images reveal the unique collaboration between Leiter and his subjects.

In the 1970s, Leiter planned to make a book of his nudes, but never realized the project in his lifetime. Now we are granted a first-time look at this body of work, which Leiter began on his arrival in New York in 1946 and chipped away at over the next two decades. Leiter, who was also a painter, incorporates abstract elements into these photographs and often shows the influence of his favorite artists, including Bonnard, Vuillard and Matisse.

The prolific Leiter, who painted and took pictures fervently up to his death, worked in relative obscurity well into his eighties. Leiter preferred solitude in life, and resisted any type of explanation or analysis of his work. With In My Room, Leiter ushers viewers into his private world while retaining his strong sense of mystery.

1st edition/1st printing

• Aperture 2016
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• Used: Fine

Intimate Distance is the first comprehensive monograph charting the career of acclaimed American photographer Todd Hido. Though he has published many smaller monographs of individual bodies of work, this gathers his most iconic images for the first time and brings a fresh perspective to his oeuvre with the inclusion of many unpublished photographs.

Well-known for his photographs of landscapes and suburban housing across the United States, and for his use of luminous color, Hido casts a distinctly cinematic eye across all that he photographs, digging deep into his memory and imagination for inspiration. David Campany introduces the work and looks specifically at Hido's cinematic influences and the kind of spectatorship the work demands. The book is organized chronologically, showing how his series overlap in exciting, new ways. Also featured are short interviews with Hido about the making of each of his monographs. From exterior to interior, surface observations to subconscious investigations, landscapes to nudes, this mid-career survey reveals insight into Hido's practice and illustrates how his unique focus has developed and shifted over time.

1st edition / 1st printing.

Faintest of shelfwear to the dustjacket, a fine copy.

• Mandarake 2020
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• Fine
  

Momo Okabe's first domestic photo book is now published six years since Dildo (2013) and Bible (2014), both published by Session Press in New York. With no advertising or publicity, her works have become highly acclaimed and have won various national and international awards.

After that, Momo Okabe kept her distance from the contemporary photographic scene and continued to take photographs in her own way, and her pregnancy and birth became an opportunity to announce this work. This book contains photographs taken in Japan between 2014 and 2019. This great experiment includes friends, regular landscapes, and her pregnancy and birth as an asexual. Red, blue, yellow, purple ... these photographs of various colors are her very personal record, and at the same time they appear to us as a special story revealing emotions.

Edition of 550 copies.  Signed copy.

Final copy with a few small indentations to the rear of the cover, otherwise very fine.

• Self 2017
• hardback 1st edition
  
• Used: Near Fine
  

"J.B. about men floating in the air" was inspired by the story of two Lithuanian-American pilots who tried to set a new world record by flying over the Atlantic into Eastern Europe in the early 1930s. I found a reference to the attempt in a Joseph Brodsky poem and decided to create my own ‘parallel world’ in black-and-white images.

My story is about the dream of every person to break out from the vice of all kinds of prohibitions and fly away to a distant unknown in search of unlimited freedom and find there his true motherland and real home.

Also it is a story about a personal attempt doomed to fail to find a way to himself through time and space, breaking the invisible boundary between himself and his mirror twin, the mortal Castor and immortal Pollux.

At first I made a series of mockumentary photographs to get the effect of stopped time, but then decided that it was necessary to increase a gap between the documentary and imaginary world, therefore I added a few collages and drawings.

In the result the book was made in Leporello format, which allows the viewers to choose how to browse the images and find their own ending in this story.

2nd edition of 300 numbered copies.  Signed.   Faint shelfwear to white cover.

• TBW 2020
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

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

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

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

• Aperture 2020
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• New
  

In Let the Sun Beheaded Be, photographer Gregory Halpern focuses on the French Caribbean archipelago of Guadeloupe, a French overseas region with a complicated and violent colonial history. 

Renowned for his photographic meditations on place, Halpern presents a compelling portrait of Guadeloupe and its inhabits, focusing on local histories and experiences.  Let the Sun Beheaded Be commingles life and death, nature and culture, and beauty and decay in enigmatic color images of the archipelago’s residents and lush landscape, as well as monuments related to the brutality of its past.

The project is part of Immersion, a program of the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès, in partnership with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson.

• Stanley Barker 2023
• Hardback, 1st edition, 120p
  
• Imperfect - see below
  

The images in Bill Henson’s cinematic new book The Liquid Night, derive from work the highly acclaimed artist shot on 35mm colour negative film in New York City in 1989. They present a kaleidoscopic, nocturnal journey through the frenetic, neon-lit streets of a long-lost America.

Display copy with faint wear to edges,  inside as new.  Final copy.

• Editorial RM 2016
• Hardback, 1st edition, 164p
• Imperfect - see below 

Lobismuller tells the story of Manuel Blanco Romasanta, Spain’s bloodiest and most enigmatic serial killer, from a female perspective. Manuel was born Manuela and originally believed to be a woman: according to modern forensic theories, he (or she) may have lived with a rare syndrome of intersexuality.

Blanco Romasanta was dubbed the “Soapmaker,” owing to his habit of using the fat of victims to produce high-quality soap. Although confessing to nine of the seventeen murders now attributed to him, Blanco Romasanta pleaded not guilty, declaring himself the victim of a curse that had transformed him into a wolf…

Out of print.

Imperfect copy with bumped corner - see photos.

• Taka Ishii /Case 2017
• Softcover, 1st edition
• New
  

This catalogue accompanies Luigi Ghirri’s solo exhibition “Works from the 1970s” at Taka Ishii Gallery and is centered around photographs created during the 1970s, arguably Ghirri’s most important creative period. By redefining photography as a concept and as an act, Ghirri’s work has played an important role in expanding the possibilities of visual art. The photographs chosen for the catalogue, created and published by Taka Ishii Gallery and Case Publishing, capture and represent Ghirri’s views at the outer and inner world, the relationship between reality and metaphysical duality and the distance between reality and representation expressed in Ghirri’s works.

Ghirri spent his youth in the 1950s and 1960s, during a time of economic growth and cultural transition. He familiarized himself with art at this time, and through conceptual art, one of the most popular movements of the era, he began making photographs collaboratively with other artists pursuing photographic images that were not merely documentary recordings. Founded on experimentalism, Ghirri’s photographic practice is neither characterized by the professionalism of the studio photographer nor the amateurism of the photo fan. Through photography, he aimed to address the complexity and incomprehensibleness of the relation between the self and outside world. He trained his gaze at his subjects to acknowledge his positioning between the known and unknown.

The themes and concepts addressed in Ghirri’s works are exceptionally diverse, but his photographs constitute a series of dialectical explorations focused on “the gaze.” Through his practice, he ceaselessly, intensively, and gracefully explored the relation between reality and image. His photographs demonstrate that images, such as ads and posters in public spaces, can be analytically categorized into “images turned into reality” and “reality turned into images.” They also show that the partial extraction and erasure of the world through framing exposes the ambiguous boundaries of reality and the changing form of the landscape, and that images projected by the viewer both produce and erase the actual and fantastic. Ghirri’s photographs are products of a search for harmony and diversity carried out by examining metaphysical binaries, such as reality and appearance (or mimicry), actuality and representation, presence and absence, and inner and outer worlds, at the same level. They indicate that photographs are not faithful reproductions of the world, but rather an assemblage of fragments of the “seen” world. His works thus suggest that all photographs are testimonies of the gaze and pose an infinite number of questions about how we might think through the image.

• Nazraeli 2014
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• New

As one of the most celebrated and influential artists of his generation, Daido Moriyama has been the subject of dozens of books and films, and literally hundreds of exhibitions mounted around the world during the past three decades. His subjects are often sprawling, both geographically and metaphorically, with one influencing the next. In Mantis, however, the act of photographing becomes the subject of the book, decades after the fact. 

In this beautifully produced artist’s book, Moriyama presents 21 frames printed as full-bleed enlargements, all from one contact sheet with an imprinted date of 1987. The book is divided into three unintended chapters, the result of Daido having photographed one subject until his was satisfied, moving on to the next, and then repeating this once more.

The book opens, fantastically, with a close-up of the hand of Masahisa Fukase, the artist’s friend and contemporary, holding a praying mantis which has caught the attention of them both; after several frames, Moriyama abruptly stops and then continues the roll of film inside of a studio apartment elsewhere. A female subject unwittingly and slowly becomes mantis-like in her poses, and gradually she merges into yet another subject, a mysterious set of portraits whose timelessness is given away only by the frames that preceded it. 

Oversized slipcased edition of 350 signed and numbered copies. 

• the(M) Editions 2020
• Softcover, 1st edition
• Fine

"An empty room will be filled with light by its emptiness ”. This is how the concept of Mukayu is defined by the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi, which is the inspiration behind artist Paul Cupido's Mukayu series which he photographed in Japan.

Through his images, Paul Cupido explores the themes of emptiness, metamorphosis, the transitory, the ephemeral, in connection with our emotional experiences. His images, true visual poems, sometimes melancholy and surrealist, question our relationship to reality and our capacity to dream.

Edition of 500 numbered copies.  A fine copy with faint wear to the slipcase.

• Dewi Lewis 1995
  
• Hardback, english edition. 256p
  
• Used: good - see below
  

In 1956, William Klein's NEW YORK, one of the most important books in the history of photography, was published. The work created a veritable revolution. Breaking with the medium's taboos and traditions, Klein developed a radically new way of taking pictures, inventing a violent, graphic style combining black humour, social criticism, satire, and poetry.

The book whose original title was NEW YORK IS GOOD & GOOD FOR YOU became a legend, an entry in rare book catalogues... and impossible to find. Therefore, a group of six European publishers, with Japanese and American partners, planned a re-edition. The design and content of this new version are considerably changed - almost a hundred more pages and dozens of never before published pictures. Painter, photographer, movie maker, American in Paris, William Klein escapes pigeonholes, categories, movements.

Born in New York in 1928, Klein grew up on the mean streets of Manhattan, shuttling between blackboard jungles, experimental schools, pool halls and the Museum of Modern Art. At eighteen, he graduated from New York's City college and, at twenty, after serving for two years in the US Army in Europe (of which one was at the Sorbonne!), he settled in Paris to become a painter. He worked briefly with Fernand Leger and in the early fifties did kinetic murals for Italian architects, absorbing along the way European visual history from Masaccio to the Bauhaus.

In 1954, after six years of experimenting in painting, graphic design, and abstract photography, he returned to New York, where he embarked on a complicated love-hate affair with his native city that became an unique photographic adventure. Half amazed foreigner, half streetwise New Yorker, he set out to record on film his vision in a photographic diary.

UK edition of the 1995 reprint.

Large format hardback in very good condition.  Light wear to dustjacket, spine slightly askew (common) and some binding visible (common).  Overall excellent copy.

• 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.

• Steidl 2014
  
• Hardback, 1st edition / 1st printing
  
• Fine
  

Twenty-five years after the printing of his seminal 1988 book, Invisible City, Ken Schles revisits his archive and fashions a narrative of lost youth: a delirious, peripatetic walk in the evening air of an irretrievable Downtown New York as he saw and experienced it. Night Walk is a substantive and intimate chronicle of New York’s last pre-Internet bohemian outpost, a stream of consciousness portrayal that peels back layers of petulance and squalor to find the frisson and striving of a life lived amongst the rubble. Here, Schles embodies the flâneur as Sontag defines it, as a “connoisseur of empathy,” “cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes.” We see in Night Walk a new and revelatory Ulysses for the 21st century: a searching tale of wonder and desire, life and love in the dying hulk of a ruined American city.

Recommended.  1st printing.

• Stanley Barker 2022
• Set of 12 cards in folder, 1st edition
• New

This new limited edition object, includes twelve photographs produced by photographer Robbie Lawrence in his home nation of Scotland over the past five years. Together they form a meditation on the relationship between people and place, and create an affirmation of life north of the border against an increasingly fraught political landscape across the UK.

Released to coincide with an exhibition at Stills Gallery, Northern Diary draws inspiration from classic Valentine’s sets that in years gone by, one would purchase while away from a loved one to attempt to share an experience of their travels.

“I have never thought of myself as a Scottish photographer. But a growing interest in my cultural heritage led me to begin documenting my trips home to see my family. The phrase Northern Diary appeared several times in my notebooks over the years and became a kind of totem for the work.” - Robbie Lawrence

Embossed case containing 12 heavy weighted cards, size 200x150mm.

Out of print, now rare set.

• Stanley Barker 2016
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• New
  

During the 1980s by the Siberian artist Nikolay Bakharev worked as a mechanic and communal services factory photographer in the USSR. To supplement his income he would solicit work as a black market portrait photographer on the public beaches of Eastern Russia. If the shoot went well, he would invite his subjects to make further images in a more intimate setting, compelling his subjects over several hours into contorted, erotically charged poses, which at the time was highly illegal.

After the the fall of the Iron Curtain, Bakharev began to work more openly as an artist, although often being admonished as a pornographer. His photographs from this time reveal more than just the bodies of his subjects, but the longing and dampened dreams of the inhabitants of an industrial town and the desires of an unrelenting artist.

"It would be easy to misinterpret these images as simply the pornographic imaginings of a manipulative and dirty old man, yet there is something else within them — in the subjects’ eyes, in their frankness, in their curiosity and collusion, as well as in their surroundings – that suggests that much more is going on here, and that what is both at stake and in evidence stretches far beyond the realms of explicit sexuality, voyeurism and mere titillation." — Aaron Schuman

• Stanley Barker
  
• Softcover, 1st edition
  
• New
  

• Dewi Lewis 2011
  
• Softcover, 1st UK edition
  
• Used: Near Fine
  

• Stanley Barker 2018
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• Fine
  

Mark Steinmetz’s new book Past K-Ville is a poetic collection of photographs dating from the mid-1990s, that were made on road trips throughout the American South: Memphis, Atlanta, New Orleans, Chattanooga, and Athens, Georgia. Spray-painted rumours of romance punctuate a world comprised largely of teenagers and young couples.

"I love the South for its warmth and chaos. The vegetation down here grows rampant; the light is softened by humid air. The people are for the most part friendly and they are comfortable in their bodies. They tend to be more open to being photographed by a stranger. The unexpected happens here a lot." - Mark Steinmetz

Recommended.

• Stanley Barker 2019
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• New
  

Peuple de la Nuit is a tribute to the people who posed with cheery abandon, for the lens of Sanlé Sory from 1960-83.

'Life was cheap and everyone could have a ball. You could always go out and have some fun.’ - Sanlé Sory

While Sory spent days at his Volta Photo studio in southern Burkina Faso, his nights were spent capturing a flourishing music scene, youth culture, dance parties, weddings and portraits of his home city.

When he wasn’t out looking for customers at venues such as Volta Dancing, Calebasse d’Or, Normandie or Dafra Bar, Sory would set off towards the remote villages along the Kou Valley, north West of Bobo, in his Volta Photo 2CV van, with a few lights and a homemade sound system, to set up his own Bals Poussière (dustball parties). The parties lasted until well after the sunrise, at which point the farmers and herders would head straight back to tend their fields and cattle.

Sealed.  Out of print rare title.

• Mack Books 2024
• Softcover, 1st edition
• New
  

‘I am writing this note while you’re still asleep. It’s still early enough that I can open the windows in my room. By the time you read this, I’ll be at work. Please pardon the strange formality of writing to you when I could just have said to you in person what I want to say. But since I have failed to say it, it is reasonable to conclude that I am having some difficulty speaking.’

Bringing together a sequence of subtle and disquieting photographs with a dozen compact short stories, Pharmakon is a surprising new work from the singular mind of Teju Cole. The photographs were taken across the globe and extend the oblique point of view he developed in Fernweh (2020). Interspersed among the images are texts that emerge like intimate signals from our age of crisis, mining further the exquisite linguistic control that characterizes Cole’s novels Open City (2011) and Tremor (2023). The result is a work of strange beauty that startles and consoles in equal measure.

Unsigned.

• Aperture 2022
• Hardback, 1st edition, 312p
• New

Judith Joy Ross: Photographs 1978–2015 is an illuminating retrospective that explores the life and career of a revered American photographer, illustrated by two hundred of her images, many never before seen or published.

The work of Judith Joy Ross marks a watershed in the lineage of the photographic portrait. Her pictures—unpretentious, quietly penetrating, startling in their transparency—consistently achieve the capacity to glimpse the past, present, and perhaps even the future of the individuals who stand before her lens. Adolescents swim at a local municipal park, ordinary people are at work and play. From immigrants and refugees, to tech workers and students, military reservists and civilians—all are incisively rendered with equal tenderness in Ross’s black-and-white, large-format portraits.

Published alongside the largest exhibition to feature Ross’s work to date, and drawn from her extensive archive of photographs made over the span of more than thirty-five years, Judith Joy Ross: Photographs 1978–2015 encompasses the best work of this influential photographer.

Sealed copy.  English edition.

• Stanley Barker 2020
  
• Flexicover, 1st edition
  
• Near fine
  

Christopher Anderson’s first child, Atlas, was born in 2008. He began photographing that experience in a completely organic and naive way. It was the natural action of a new father trying to stop time and not let one drop of the experience slip through. As a photographer, he had never photographed his own personal life. It never occurred to him that these photographs would be part of his “work”. They were external from what he considered his Photography. He was about two years into making those photographs when it dawned on Anderson that these photographs were, in fact, his life’s work and that everything he had done up to that point was a preparation for making those pictures.  

They became the book, SON, published in 2012 which portrayed a moment in time in Williamsburg Brooklyn, post 911 and the 2008 economic crash when artist lofts still made up the community before the luxury condos squashed the landscape. 

Pia could be called the spiritual sequel to that book. But this time, it marks a new era and search for hope in the Trump/ COVID19 reality. This time, Anderson’s daughter, Pia, is the protagonist and muse, and the backdrop is his French family’s return to Paris (Anderson became a naturalized French citizen in 2018). 

“The images portray a father-daughter relationship as well as a photographer-subject collaboration as the Pia’s takes control of her character. The passage of time comes with a certain melancholy, but also a declaration of hope that guides the photographs.” - Christopher Anderson 

1st printing.  Signed and dated 2020 by Christopher Anderson.

Faint corner wear (common to all copies), otherwise very fine.

• Stanley Barker 2020
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• Used: see below
  

When Judith Black moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1979 with her four children, a friend asked her if they were going to be all right there. Frankly, she didn’t know.

They had just moved into a dilapidated apartment in a neighborhood that the real estate lady admitted was as good as they were going to find. The small convenience store down the block had “fuck you” fiercely spray painted on the clapboard - a less than encouraging welcome for a family that had grown up in the bucolic hippie house they shared with Black’s siblings in New Hampshire. Things didn’t seem very promising for a single mother with little income and a houseful of young children.

Over the the next two decades, Black would make a series of images that chronicled the lives of her young children, and her relationship with them.

“I quickly realized that I was not going to be able to roam the streets to make photographs. I had limited time between working at MIT as an assistant, attending classes, and being a mother. Our apartment was dark, but it became my studio.” - Judith Black

Signed copy.

Used copy with some faint wear to edges.  Inside very fine.

• Mack Books 2024
• Hardback, 1st Mack edition, 320p
• Imperfect see below