Stanley Barker

• Stanley Barker 2024
• Hardback, 1st edition. 88p
• Imperfect - see below

• Stanley Barker 2021
• Hardback, 2nd edition
• imperfect - see below

On a map of the south-eastern U.S., the 245-mile Ogeechee River cuts a diagonal path across Eastern Georgia before curling south of the city of Savannah and emptying into the Atlantic Ocean. It is known locally as Blackwater River for its slow moving waters that are like black glass, reflecting the sky and flora overhead and masking the tangle of life forces beneath.

In November 2017, Robbie Lawrence, accompanied by writer Sala Patterson, travelled to the Low Country, the coastal region straddling Georgia and South Carolina near where the Ogeechee River meets the ocean with the aim of documenting the nuances of issues driving news cycles and political divisions through the lens of one place in America.

Blackwater River captures, in image and spirit, Lawrences time in the Low Country – a series of profound encounters and abstract reflections, some inspiring, others harsh but all indelible. Each moment is individually significant while collectively hinting at larger, more elusive truths.

Out of print 2nd edition.

Rubbing to corners and spine ends - see photo.  Inside fine.

• Stanley Barker 2014/2024
• Hardback, 10 year edition, 120p
  
• New

Tod Papageorge's Studio 54 takes us inside New York's most infamous club. During the late 1970's 54 was the place to be seen, attracting thousands of people that regularly included models, actors, rock stars, artists, designers and politicians. Papageorge's exquisite photographs are filled with all the decadence and glamour that one would expect from 1970's New York.

While photographers were common, most were there to simply search out only the rich and famous, Papageorge's images transcend the obvious, transforming the glitter into something akin to poetry.

This new limited gold edition of Studio 54 celebrates 10 years since it's first publication in 2014.

“The 66 photographs in this book were made between 1978–80 in Studio 54, a New York discothèque that, through those years, was the place to be and be seen, as the celebrities, partygoers, and those crazy for dancing who filled it every night were happy to prove. Unsurprisingly, given its reputation (which quickly flamed into notoriety during a short, 33-month existence), it was difficult to get into: the imperturbable doormen who doled out access as if they were controlling passage into a fabulous kingdom made sure that it would be. Only the famous or socially connected could assume they’d find themselves shooed around the flock of hopeful celebrants milling on the street side of the velvet rope and guided through the door; otherwise, the thing most likely to help was to be beautiful. Once inside, though, everyone there seemed thrilled by the fact, no matter how they’d managed it, an excitement fed by the throbbing music and brilliantly designed interiors, which, on a party night, could suggest anything from Caliban’s cave to a harem.”

• Stanley Barker 2024
• Hardback, 1st edition. 88p
• NEW

• Stanley Barker 2024
• Hardback, 1st edition. 72p
  
• New

Larry Clark was 16 in 1962 when he and his friends started shooting Valo - a drug store nasal inhaler that contained a tremendous amount of amphetamine.

Clark returned to his hometown of Tulsa at 20 after two years serving in Vietnam. Here he graduated from amphetamines to heroin, and upended traditional documentary photography, by turning his camera on himself and his social circle, producing a ground-breaking series of raw and intimate photographs chronicling the disintegration of the American dream. 

Clark’s deeply intimate images exposed the previously unseen lives of suburban American teenagers, living a transgressive, outlaw lifestyle, hanging out in crash pads and committing burglaries and armed robberies to score dope. A small number of these photographs would come to form ‘Tulsa’, a cornerstone of contemporary photography. 

50 years on, Larry Clark has returned to his archive of vintage prints, crafting a powerful vision of his work from 1962-1973, to produce his new book ‘Return’, a meticulously printed, outsized monograph, which is as shocking today as it ever has been, even in a moment in which opioid addiction is more prevalent than ever before.

“I’ve always been interested in small groups of marginalized people who no one would know about otherwise.  I photographed my friends over a ten-year period in this secret world that nobody else could have possibly come in and done except someone from the inside like me. You see us from the time we were teenagers up until our twenties and how everything changed and how we changed. There weren’t supposed to be drugs back then. It was supposed to be mom’s apple pie and white picket fences. When I started making work, I said, “Why can’t you show everything?” - Larry Clark 

• Stanley Barker 2024
• Hardback, 1st edition, 104p
  
• New

In the Summer of 1980, Lisa Barlow was following the curve of Connecticut’s Route 69 in a beat-up rental car, when she came across a giant cross looming above the highway.

Barlow had heard about Holy Land U.S.A. but never encountered the painstaking replica in miniature of Jerusalem with illustrative scenes from the Bible, replete with precepts and biblical quotations engraved in cement. 

There was Pilate’s house, the Inn with a “No Vacancy” sign, a mummified lump spray painted white representing Lot’s wife turned to salt, and a repentant looking Lucifer locked in a small dog cage. Built 20 years earlier with concrete, plaster, wire and wood, the diorama had been sparingly repaired with modern materials such as plastic and aluminium siding. The Stairway to Heaven, cracked asphalt steps ascending the hill, had a cyclone fence along one side, and the Garden of Eden was completely obscured by thick vines under a tin sunshade. It was from there that Balow first saw the city of Waterbury spread beneath her, its church spires and factory smokestacks in odd juxtaposition with Holy Land’s little foot high buildings at her feet.

“Before long, it was more than a fascination with Holy Land that kept luring me back to Waterbury. It was the people who captured my attention, my imagination and eventually, my love. This is the story of that year in pictures.” Lisa Barlow 

Barlow’s images of Waterbury and its uniquely American idiosyncrasies are enthused with a rare empathy combined with a visual complexity that continues to unfold with each viewing. 

• Stanley Barker 2024
  
• Softcover, 1st edition, 120p
  
• New
  

The quiet images of a waning American landscape featured in Jason Lee’s new book TX | CA 19 were made in June and July 2019 on a drive to California from his adopted home state of Texas. This would be the last of such photo outings before he would relocate back to his native Southern California that September.

“Many of these color photographs were made along and surrounding Highways 287 and 40/66, from Decatur, TX to California—a stretch that I’ve travelled one direction or another many times now and have become extremely fond of, making it a point to revisit certain locations and produce current photographs (collecting time-span exposures of familiar sights is for both curiosity and pleasure and remains ongoing). And so you will find quite a few scenes repeated in this companion to TX I CA 17. 

"Here, however, when in California this time, despite having photographed in the desert east of Los Angeles between Highways 40 and 10 where I’d previously made a handful of the pictures seen in the California section of 17, I didn’t expose any color film. Instead, the California images in this offering were made northbound along Highways 14/395 and 6 after departing L.A. for the drive home. A route that I don’t take often enough and did not take two years prior. Beautiful country out that way. And coincidentally it was thereabouts that I made some of my first pictures from the road when I started photographing the American landscape in 2006.“

• Stanley Barker 2024
• Hardback, 1st edition, 184p
• New 

Sergio Purtell arrived in the USA in the early 1970s, having fled an imminent dictatorship in Chile, by General Augusto Pinochet. Here he glimpsed the American dream, and sought to unravel the nations mysteries as an outsider who had witnessed the capriciousness of power and the tenacity of the displaced.

Made between 1977 and the early-90s Sergio Purtell’s American photographs are imprints of life in a country fixated on its duelling myths of emancipation and conquest. From collective exuberance to rural serenity, Purtell’s images of fairs, parades and a life lived outside, display moments both commonplace and distinct. They search out under-swells of feelings that fleck public space with intimacy and interaction. They register the human tenderness that flows from rare moments of rest.

"The first thing I noticed was the lack of walls.  In Santiago, Chile, the houses were closed off and private. In Hamilton, Ohio–where I arrived in 1972 as a 17-year-old exchange student—the houses were separated by white picket fences. They were easy to leap over and neighbours were friendly. At home in Chile, I knew about America by its TV shows and films, its music and freedom and possibility. The prim white fences looked the part, a display of affluence within reach. But beyond them, I also glimpsed a sprawling, enigmatic landscape where the American dream awoke to reality. 

“Today, this country is not the same place I arrived in. A wall is being constructed along the southern border. As I made these pictures, a wall was coming down in East Berlin. Moral Minority is a meditation on this collapse of conscience. To assemble the fragments, it looks to the narratives of those pushed to the periphery, and to those who can testify to the intricate predicament between right and wrong.”

• Stanley Barker 2024
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New 

In the fall of 1977, Jack Lueders-Booth began teaching photography to the inmates of MCI Framingham, a women’s prison. 

During his decade at the facility, he would make a series of Polaroid images produced collaboratively with the women who lived in the prison. 32 of these images are presented in this new book alongside oral histories taken at the time by Booth. 

Founded in 1878, MCI Framingham was opened to house incarcerated women for the crime of giving birth out of wedlock i.e., begetting, (Hester Prynne’s crime in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel, The Scarlet Letter). Some few years later MCI Framingham began incarcerating women for shoplifting, organised prostitution, using and trafficking drugs, armed robbery, child abuse, and murder. Many women at Framingham were convicted for helping their husbands or boyfriends commit crimes. By the Mid-70s, the correctional facility was part of an ongoing normalisation experiment that sought to mitigate the psychological consequences of incarceration. In Booth’s images, neither inmates nor guards are uniformed, cells are made to look like dormitory rooms, and inmates can furnish and decorate them within the constraints of guidelines. Male inmates were introduced, constituting 20% of the communal population. Many of the inmates in Lueders-Booth’s images had dependent children who were placed in the care of relatives or court-appointed foster parents, they were allowed to visit with an adult.

“My time there was scheduled to end in 1979, but by then I had begun photographing these women, and what began at their request grew to occupy me personally, and fully. I wished to continue and did, remaining at MCI Framingham for another 7 years, photographing, while also tutoring inmates who had a continuing interest in photography.' Jack Luders-Booth 

Included alongside Luders-Booth's images, are a series of anonymized verbal accounts, and poems taken from female prisoners at MCI Framingham Prison

For all of my sisters who have felt the weight of
life’s cruelties as the knife of life’s coldness
pierced their hearts,
And all traces of warmth were drained away.
they vaguely remember something called love,
a distorted version of pimp,
as coat hangers, baseball bats, anything in
reach came at them through the air
And afterwards their pimp says, “It’s because
I love you baby.

-Tina Williams, 1980

Cover colour and image varies - assigned at random.

• Stanley Barker 2023/2024
• Flexibound, 1st edition/3rd printing, 296p
• New
  

Trent Parke’s landmark publication Monument is a portal through which we bear witness to the disintegration of the universe over 294 expertly printed pages.

The monolithic publication is bound in leather bearing totemic coordinates to the planet Earth, blind stamped end sheets, black sprayed edges, and a loose steel plaque, that once removed, leaves the volume without language.

When Trent Parke moved to Sydney from a small Australian country town, his first impression was of the sheer volume of people. He would grab his camera and go out exploring at every opportunity, fascinated by the endless processions. At rush hour, he watched as the city workers moved in a great mass, all walking the great conveyer belt of life. In a trance-like state, treading the same path day after day, week after week, year after year… clocking on, clocking off, all under the spell of the city. Parke would stand on the edge of the wave, on the outside of a new world, looking in. As if watching a newly discovered species. 
 
 “At night I would watch the eclipse of moths, millions of them constantly circling the lights of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. At the same time, on my balcony, a miniature performance played out around the light above my head. The moths inevitably and without resistance were drawn to their ultimate demise. Spiralling out of control, like small spaceships caught in a tractor beam. Lured and blinded by the bright white light, they were taken out by hundreds of birds swooping in to snatch them from the air… spiders sat waiting on their webs. Built with precise coordinates across the face of the lights, they captured the hapless tiny creatures that slipped through. If any miraculously managed to survive that onslaught, they continued on, driven towards the flame, intoxicated by those burning hot light globes. Then suddenly an electrical charge in the still air. A small puff of smoke. Gone. Instant disintegration of a life form. Another blip in the universe. Another small spacecraft colliding with the blazing sun.”

- Trent Parke

Flexibound with embossed leather cover,  blind stamped end sheets, sprayed edges with multiple paper weights and gatefolds.

3rd printing which  includes several newly added never-before-seen images

• Stanley Barker 2024
• Hardback, 1st edition. 104p
• New 

Chris Killip is widely regarded as one of the most influential British photographers. Skinningrove is the last publication Killip worked on before his passing in 2020. Known for his passion for photography books, he oversaw all elements of this book, which features many unseen images. We are very proud to now release this unique publication into the world.

Born in the Isle of Man in 1946, he began his career as a commercial photographer before turning to his own work in the late 1960s. His book, ‘In Flagrante’, a collection of photographs made in the North East of England during the 1970s and early 1980s, is now recognized as a landmark work of documentary photography. 

The village of Skinningrove lies on the North-East coast of England, hidden in a steep valley it veers away from the main road and faces out onto the North Sea. The photographs that Chris Killip made of its, fiercely independent hard working-class community, between 1982 and 1984 are possibly Killip’s most intimate work.

“Like a lot of tight-knit fishing communities, it could be hostile to strangers, especially one with a camera. “Now Then” is the standard greeting in Skinningrove; a challenging substitute for the more usual, “Hello.” The place had a definite edge, and it took time for this stranger to be tolerated. My greatest ally in gaining acceptance was Leso (Leslie Holliday), the most outgoing of the younger fishermen. Leso and I never talked about what I was doing there, but when someone questioned my presence, he would intercede and vouch for me with, “He’s OK.” This simple endorsement was enough.

“I last photographed in Skinningrove in 1984, and didn’t return for thirty years. When I did I was shocked by how it had changed, as only one boat was still fishing. For me, Skinningrove’s sense of purpose was bound up in its collective obsession with the sea. Skinningrove fishermen believed that the sea in front of them was their private territory, theirs alone. Without the competitive energy that came from fishing, the place seemed like a pale reflection of its former self.” - Chris Killip

Out of print, final copies.

• 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.

• 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

• Stanley Barker 2023
• Hardback, 1st edition, 120p
  
• New

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.

Out of print, final few copies.

• 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. 

• Stanley Barker 2023
• Softcover, 1st edition
• NEW
  

Thomas Boivin's photographic novella, takes us on an intimate, meandering journey through the coffee, shops and apartments of one of the most famous Parisian neighbourhoods., Ménilmontant

Nestled in the North-East of the city, between Belleville and the Père Lachaise Cemetery, Ménilmontant was once the city's industrial heart but is now known for its bohemian community. 

"In autumn 2009, I moved to Ménilmontant. I had recently discovered photography and when I arrived there, my life pivoted entirely. In a few short months, I had decided to become a photographer, found a night job as a commercial photographer and bought a few hundred rolls of film. I started working by night and walking by day and, for the next ten years, my life’s rhythm was set. 

Recently, looking through my archive, I found many images that I had until now left aside, often unconsidered. One by one, I rediscovered them. Still lifes, street life, friends and strangers alike are gathered here in what is a personal evocation of these years. Yet I hope that they convey a feeling that is not only mine, but distinctly Parisian, and might echo the memories of whoever lived the first years of his adult life in the North East of Paris." - Thomas Boivin 

Boivin's exquisite analogue black-and-white photographs, printed in a rich open tritone are presented in an elegant design inspired by the countless classic French novels, to be found for sale on the banks of the Seine.

• Stanley Barker 2023
• Softcover, 1st edition, 72p
• New

Christopher Anderson’s photographic fable Odyssey, takes us on a transcendental voyage, evoking a Homeric tale, that calls us from the sea to the rocks, into a dreamscape where light is sculpted across rock formations and figures.

Presented as an outsized limited edition Artists Book, Odyssey is a visual poem, expertly printed in a unique quad-elemental process, as an edition of 750 numbered copies.

“I didn’t set out to make this work, I was taken by the making of it. Perhaps there are themes that I was unconsciously juggling: the mystery of the unknown, fear of the adventure ahead, longing... As the images took form, I began to recognize some sort of fable. Not a story that I was telling, but one that was being told to me.”  - Christopher Anderson 

Signed and numbered edition of 750 copies only.  375 x275mm with french-fold jacket.

Final copies.

• Stanley Barker 2023
• Flexibound, 1st edition/2nd printing, 294p
• New
  

Trent Parke’s landmark publication Monument is a portal through which we bear witness to the disintegration of the universe over 294 expertly printed pages.

The monolithic publication is bound in leather bearing totemic coordinates to the planet Earth, blind stamped end sheets, black sprayed edges, and a loose steel plaque, that once removed, leaves the volume without language.

When Trent Parke moved to Sydney from a small Australian country town, his first impression was of the sheer volume of people. He would grab his camera and go out exploring at every opportunity, fascinated by the endless processions. At rush hour, he watched as the city workers moved in a great mass, all walking the great conveyer belt of life. In a trance-like state, treading the same path day after day, week after week, year after year… clocking on, clocking off, all under the spell of the city. Parke would stand on the edge of the wave, on the outside of a new world, looking in. As if watching a newly discovered species. 
 
 “At night I would watch the eclipse of moths, millions of them constantly circling the lights of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. At the same time, on my balcony, a miniature performance played out around the light above my head. The moths inevitably and without resistance were drawn to their ultimate demise. Spiralling out of control, like small spaceships caught in a tractor beam. Lured and blinded by the bright white light, they were taken out by hundreds of birds swooping in to snatch them from the air… spiders sat waiting on their webs. Built with precise coordinates across the face of the lights, they captured the hapless tiny creatures that slipped through. If any miraculously managed to survive that onslaught, they continued on, driven towards the flame, intoxicated by those burning hot light globes. Then suddenly an electrical charge in the still air. A small puff of smoke. Gone. Instant disintegration of a life form. Another blip in the universe. Another small spacecraft colliding with the blazing sun.”

- Trent Parke

Flexibound with embossed leather cover,  blind stamped end sheets, sprayed edges with multiple paper weights and gatefolds.

2nd printing. 

• Stanley Barker 2023
• Flexibound, 1st edition/1st printing, 294p
• New
  

Trent Parke’s landmark publication Monument is a portal through which we bear witness to the disintegration of the universe over 294 expertly printed pages.

The monolithic publication is bound in leather bearing totemic coordinates to the planet Earth, blind stamped end sheets, black sprayed edges, and a loose steel plaque, that once removed, leaves the volume without language.

When Trent Parke moved to Sydney from a small Australian country town, his first impression was of the sheer volume of people. He would grab his camera and go out exploring at every opportunity, fascinated by the endless processions. 
At rush hour, he watched as the city workers moved in a great mass, all walking the great conveyer belt of life. In a trance-like state, treading the same path day after day, week after week, year after year… clocking on, clocking off, all under the spell of the city. Parke would stand on the edge of the wave, on the outside of a new world, looking in. As if watching a newly discovered species. 
 
 “At night I would watch the eclipse of moths, millions of them constantly circling the lights of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. At the same time, on my balcony, a miniature performance played out around the light above my head. The moths inevitably and without resistance were drawn to their ultimate demise. Spiralling out of control, like small spaceships caught in a tractor beam. Lured and blinded by the bright white light, they were taken out by hundreds of birds swooping in to snatch them from the air… spiders sat waiting on their webs. Built with precise coordinates across the face of the lights, they captured the hapless tiny creatures that slipped through. If any miraculously managed to survive that onslaught, they continued on, driven towards the flame, intoxicated by those burning hot light globes. Then suddenly an electrical charge in the still air. A small puff of smoke. Gone. Instant disintegration of a life form. Another blip in the universe. Another small spacecraft colliding with the blazing sun.”

- Trent Parke

Flexibound with embossed leather cover,  blind stamped end sheets, sprayed edges with multiple paper weights and gatefolds.

1st printing.

• 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.

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

The pictures in Jason Lee’s forthcoming monograph were made in the summer of 2017 on a drive from his then adopted home state of Texas to Los Angeles, where he’d lived prior and from where he set out to start photographing from the road in 2006.
 
TX | CA 17 is the first time Lee has published images from a single outing. They are presented in geographical and (rough) chronological order—North Texas, NM, AZ, the California desert, and finally DTLA, where we see the gentleman awaiting his bus. The exposures were made primarily along and surrounding Highways 287, 40/66, 62, and 10.

“Many of these places I’ve come to know quite well, with some documented frequently before and since this particular drive. It’s always a pleasure revisiting the familiar—these somehow comforting landmarks; these reminders—and equally exciting to discover new sights, make new pictures, and collect new memories. So you keep going. After sixteen years of photographing outside, I remain fascinated by the American landscape and all its parts both beautiful and curious.” - Jason Lee

• Stanley Barker 2014
• Hardback, 2nd edition
• New

Studio 54 brings together a collection of photographs by renowned photographer, Tod Papageorge, taken in the late 1970s. They are a filled with all the decadency, vibrancy and glamour of New York’s most infamous club.

In Papageorge’s own words, “The 66 photographs in this book were made between 1978–80 in Studio 54, a New York discothèque that, through those years, was the place to be and be seen, as the celebrities, partygoers, and those crazy for dancing who filled it every night were happy to prove. Unsurprisingly, given its reputation (which quickly flamed into notoriety during a short, 33-month existence), it was difficult to get into: the imperturbable doormen who doled out access as if they were controlling passage into a fabulous kingdom made sure that it would be. Only the famous or socially connected could assume they’d find themselves shooed around the flock of hopeful celebrants milling on the street side of the velvet rope and guided through the door; otherwise, the thing most likely to help was to be beautiful. Once inside, though, everyone there seemed thrilled by the fact, no matter how they’d managed it, an excitement fed by the throbbing music and brilliantly designed interiors, which, on a party night, could suggest anything from Caliban’s cave to a harem.”

Second edition/printing (silver foil).  Sealed.

• Stanley Barker 2014
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

Studio 54 brings together a collection of photographs by renowned photographer, Tod Papageorge, taken in the late 1970s. They are a filled with all the decadency, vibrancy and glamour of New York’s most infamous club.

In Papageorge’s own words, “The 66 photographs in this book were made between 1978–80 in Studio 54, a New York discothèque that, through those years, was the place to be and be seen, as the celebrities, partygoers, and those crazy for dancing who filled it every night were happy to prove. Unsurprisingly, given its reputation (which quickly flamed into notoriety during a short, 33-month existence), it was difficult to get into: the imperturbable doormen who doled out access as if they were controlling passage into a fabulous kingdom made sure that it would be. Only the famous or socially connected could assume they’d find themselves shooed around the flock of hopeful celebrants milling on the street side of the velvet rope and guided through the door; otherwise, the thing most likely to help was to be beautiful. Once inside, though, everyone there seemed thrilled by the fact, no matter how they’d managed it, an excitement fed by the throbbing music and brilliantly designed interiors, which, on a party night, could suggest anything from Caliban’s cave to a harem.”

First edition/printing (gold foil).  Sealed.

• Stanley Barker 2023
• Flexibound, 1st edition
• Near fine

“It only took three ballerina-like leaps to cross the lawn and reach my grandfather’s screen door. He lived with my grandmother in a small house on property shared with my parents in New Jersey. Waiting at the door, he scooped me up like one of the squirming lambs he weighed in the barn. I was 8.

On most days, we sat at the kitchen table and spoke Ukrainian. My first request was always to see his famous scar, the one on the right side of his chest clinging to his ribs. After he lifted his shirt, he gently took my finger and traced the wound. The skin felt thick and stiff as we followed where the bullet had entered, along a ridge on his rib, and the indentation where it exited. Even though it was always the same 3 ½ inches, he liked when I measured it. And every time we took the measurement, he repeated the same story: I was a Sich Rifleman with my brother Teodor, fighting the Bolsheviks. Teodor got typhoid, and we buried him in the steppe. I had to leave Ukraine, my seven siblings, and my parents because I was a Ukrainian soldier.” - Katherine Turczan

Almost 20 years later, in the summer of 1991, the fragile bridge of memory between Turczan’s family and Ukraine was disintegrating. Her grandfather had died, and she had just learnt of her parents dementia. Scrambling to make sense of these losses, she set out with my 8x10 camera to find the place from where they came and the people they left behind. Her first trip to Ukraine coincided with the August coup in Moscow and Ukraine’s new independence. There, a rediscovered family welcomed Turczan: uncles, aunts, cousins, people she had only heard of. For months at a time, year after year, they gave Turczan places to stay, fed her, offered rides to locations, and often assisted her while she built my ongoing collection of portraits.

Sealed copy.