Stanley Barker

• Stanley Barker 2024
  
• Hardback and softcover in slipcase, 1st edition, 168p
  
• New
  

For the past five years, Robbie Lawrence has travelled throughout Scotland and the United States photographing the Highland Games. His highly anticipated new book Long Walk Home examines the cultural significance of the traditional community tournament and questions the very notion of what it is to be from a place.

“The Games have always interested me, not just visually, but also as a vehicle for considering how we as Scots allow history to inform our modern identity. At first, I struggled to look past the myth-making and nationalism often espoused in the Games. I was trying to document these events objectively, without clarifying  how I felt about them. What you see in the pages of these two volumes is an attempt to engage with the myriad of fabricated ideas surrounding the modern Highland Games. Whether on a dusty sports field in Denver or at the local park at Burntisland, the Games is at its core a coming together of friends and family to enjoy sports, dance and music.” - Robbie Lawrence

Presented as a limited edition double-volume publication, including a hardback book of candid images of the Games, and a second Singer-sewn volume of portraits of the Games participants, alongside an extended text by award-winning poet John Burnside, which teases apart the threads of how Scots and the Scottish diaspora have remoulded the form of the Games to suit their cultural needs. Burnside passed away shortly after completing his beautiful text.

“We do not need to be born in a place – we do not even need to have seen it – to enter into its mythology, because myths are not historical. Myths are elective – not at the level of consciousness, not as an informed, self-aware choice, but as the expression of something more fundamental and, at the same time, more lyrical. History is what sets us in our place, binding us to social norms and conventions and limits; myths let us roam, they make space for the imagination, for re-invention, for a sense of belonging that is not conferred by a clan name, or a verified birth certificate – and by now, in much of the world, including Scotland, Scottishness is as much myth as it is history, which means that we must guard it carefully, retell it beautifully and, more than anything else, love it wisely.” - John Burnside 

One hardback book and one singer-sewn book, both housed in a silk-screened slipcase .

• 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 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
• New

“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.

• Stanley Barker 2022
• Flexibound, 1st edition
• New

Christopher Anderson began photographing his family in a completely organic way. His images were simply the natural action of a partner trying to stop time, and not let one moment of his relationships slip by.

As a photographer, he had never thought of his personal photographs as ‘work’ until photographer Tim Hetherington saw a photograph Anderson had made of his wife Marion and said, “this is about the passing of time”. Anderson began to see his personal images in a new light, and over time, would come to feel that these photographs were, in fact, his life’s work. Anderson's new book, Marion, marks the closing chapter of a trilogy of books that chronicles their lives, and loves in beautiful depth over the course of their partnership.

"It was never some sort of creative exercise. The photographs are expressions of love…a record of that expression. They are more than memories." - Christopher Anderson

• Stanley Barker 2022
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New
  

“In the middle of a December night a few years ago I was woken by the phone ringing downstairs. Nothing ever good comes of such a call and this time it was news that my younger brother had been admitted to hospital, and the doctor caring for him had rung to say he thought it unlikely he would live through the night. I drove to see him and sat with him through the early hours, in the eerie quiet of the emergency ward, until late in the morning when it appeared he would pull through.”

“When I got home that afternoon I decided to go for a walk by the river. As the dark of the dusk gradually gathered I sat on a log to sift through the thoughts and emotions of the day. Gradually I became absorbed in what was in front of me; the turbulence of the streams surface as the water raced around the bend, the waving of the reeds and the branches of the overhanging tree, and the pink of the clouds being pushed across the sky by a south-westerly breeze. When mallard ducks pushed out from the bank to swim across the river in search of a safe haven for the night, I picked up the small digital camera I had just started to use and quickly took a picture.”

"In the middle of another night, a couple of years after the first call, the phone rang again, with the same message. I went off to the hospital once more to sit by Andy’s side, however that time he did not make it through. As I write this on the cusp of the Spring Equinox in 2021, I have just come to the end of another season by the river – The Fifth Winter. It is hard to stop, such are the profound pleasures of witnessing and sharing the quiet wonders of a winter’s morning, on a bend in the river. ”

- Jem Southam

 For the past four winters the English artist Jem Southam has repeatedly visited a short stretch of riverbank along the floodplain of the River Exe. He stands and watches, as the dusk fades into darkness or as the light of dawn gathers, witnessing the different passage of each winter. In the evenings, long past sunset, swans, geese and ducks arrive on the river to spend the night in safety. In the mornings the birds wake, preen, feed and socialise as they prepare for the new day.

These periods of subtle drama have played out continuously for millennia, as the world spins and each new day dawns the spectacle repeats itself. However, it is endlessly varied, and in the photographs in this book, Jem Southam notates and narrates the subtle shifts and dramas of the theatrical space around him.  

• Stanley Barker 2022
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New
  

“In the middle of a December night a few years ago I was woken by the phone ringing downstairs. Nothing ever good comes of such a call and this time it was news that my younger brother had been admitted to hospital, and the doctor caring for him had rung to say he thought it unlikely he would live through the night. I drove to see him and sat with him through the early hours, in the eerie quiet of the emergency ward, until late in the morning when it appeared he would pull through.”

“When I got home that afternoon I decided to go for a walk by the river. As the dark of the dusk gradually gathered I sat on a log to sift through the thoughts and emotions of the day. Gradually I became absorbed in what was in front of me; the turbulence of the streams surface as the water raced around the bend, the waving of the reeds and the branches of the overhanging tree, and the pink of the clouds being pushed across the sky by a south-westerly breeze. When mallard ducks pushed out from the bank to swim across the river in search of a safe haven for the night, I picked up the small digital camera I had just started to use and quickly took a picture.”

"In the middle of another night, a couple of years after the first call, the phone rang again, with the same message. I went off to the hospital once more to sit by Andy’s side, however that time he did not make it through. As I write this on the cusp of the Spring Equinox in 2021, I have just come to the end of another season by the river – The Fifth Winter. It is hard to stop, such are the profound pleasures of witnessing and sharing the quiet wonders of a winter’s morning, on a bend in the river. ”

- Jem Southam

 For the past four winters the English artist Jem Southam has repeatedly visited a short stretch of riverbank along the floodplain of the River Exe. He stands and watches, as the dusk fades into darkness or as the light of dawn gathers, witnessing the different passage of each winter. In the evenings, long past sunset, swans, geese and ducks arrive on the river to spend the night in safety. In the mornings the birds wake, preen, feed and socialise as they prepare for the new day.

These periods of subtle drama have played out continuously for millennia, as the world spins and each new day dawns the spectacle repeats itself. However, it is endlessly varied, and in the photographs in this book, Jem Southam notates and narrates the subtle shifts and dramas of the theatrical space around him.  

• Stanley Barker 2022
• Hardback, 1st edition
• Near fine - see below

“Local fairs and carnivals have a long history in America. Even as we lose our connection to our agricultural past, there is something timeless about gathering at the fair.” - Anthony Blasko

Since 2013 the American artist Anthony Blasko has been attending The Plant City Strawberry Festival, an 11-day community event celebrating the annual strawberry harvest in Florida, USA. 

Blasko’s beautifully rich images are produced at dusk, when the light starts to drop and the fair lights come on, bathing the attractions, vendors, and visitors, in the late afternoon light. 

Wrapping has been opened to check book condition.  Near fine.

• Stanley Barker 2022
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

A week before the global COVID-19 pandemic took hold in 2020 the Australian artist Trent Parke found himself on a whirlwind road trip across India. 

The frenetic photographs in Parke's new book Cue the Sun were all produced from fast moving vehicles, of the outside world as it rushed by, almost as if in a dream. 

The people rendered at 1000th of a second, are working through the night, pushing towards a smartphone driven modernity. 

“I kept feeling as though I could have been in any number of other countries at a given time. Though the windows I felt the past and future collide. The contradiction, beauty, chaos and hope. Humanity on the move.” Trent Parke

This unique artist book is contracted as a unique, 20 meter long, double printed concertina, taking you on a fantastical journey through the kinetic Indian night to the breath-taking dawn. 

Out of print, final few sealed copies.

• 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 2022
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

Mimi Plumb used to live on the edges of the city where the rents were cheap. Nearby, on the summit of the hill, were folded layers of radiolarian chert, the fossilized remains of microscopic creatures called radiolaria. A large crevice in the hillside was a reminder of the ever-present threat of an earthquake. 

Warm Water Cove, along the bay, was a spectacle of tires and abandoned cars. One day Plumb photographed the chimney of the power station above the fiery destruction of the 25th Street Pier. She watched planes flying over the city dump of cardboard hillsides. 

“Downtown buildings on the far-off horizon reminded me of Oz. My cat, Pearl, kept watch on the rooftop of my flat.” - Mimi Plumb 

Plumb’s life was marked by nights out dancing at the Crystal Pistol in the Mission, or listening to a punk polka band at the Oasis. Neil, the clarinet player, wore faux leather naugahosen, with spikes protruding from his head. Sometimes they played pool at Palace Billiards. At the Exotic/Erotic Ball, a bird man and a nurse hid in the corners. A steely-eyed silver man in his tuxedo stared back at Plumb from behind his mask, the camera flash shining a light on him.

Plumb’s days were spent visiting abandoned schools and derelict gas stations, a billboard claiming ‘dangerously close to homemade.’ 

To Plumb the magical clanging of the San Francisco cable cars was a world away, and the idealism of the 1960s seemed long gone. The Golden City of San Francisco, fraying at its edges, showed the growing chasm between the rich and poor. 

The pictures in The Golden City were made between 1984 and 2020. 

Out of print, rare title.