Top Sellers

• IBASHO & the (M)éditions 2021
• Softcover, 1st edition
• New

Yoshinori Saito lives in the most northern part of Japan, Hokkaido. Winter there is long and the snow falls intermittently for about four months. The long stretches of snow are tedious, however after the snowstorm when all the snow has settled, there is this endless expanse of white: pure, calm and silent.

 “When I walk on the fluffy virgin snow, in the distance I notice unusual forms. On closer examination they are only some weeds, with their stalks broken and leaves fallen, leaving only a skeletal form. Against the white snow these forms appear black and form sharp markings, as if drawn. This moment also gives me a deep connection to the indigenous Ainu people of Hokkaido. They believe that when their time on earth is over, they return to God’s world, and in due course will reappear. To reflect this sentiment, each work is titled to reflect their world. It is as if the forms are whispering to me, through the tranquility, giving me hope and gently supporting me through to spring.” - Yoshinori Saito

Elegant softcover with Japanese folds. Limited edition of 500 numbered copies.

Text by Yoshinori Saito in Japanese and English

• Mack Books 2022
• Hardback, 2nd edition
• New
  

• Setanta 2020
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New
  

“If you were to dive clean into its centre at the hour when the water’s blackness is not separate from the earth’s night, you could disappear 70 metres beneath gentle waves and still be above sea level, still be touching the root of a full-grown tree… What you see is snapshots of what might be paradise: silhouettes of earth, flesh and wood framed eternally in the psyche. This multiplicity of modes is the beauty and terror of Ghana’s queer-shaped, ephemeral jewel, Lake Volta.”

– An extract from Capturing Volta by Nii Ayikwei Parkes

The Boys of Volta series by Jeremy Snell is a sensitive portrayal of the people and environment surrounding Lake Volta, Ghana. This enormous man-made lake is the largest in the world. Spanning half of Ghana its surface is scattered with eerie tree trunks where once you would find dense forests. Fishing is now one of the main industries for the people here. Demanding long hours in often challenging conditions. Jeremy’s series follows the story of the fisher boys he encountered here.

Amidst all the magic and beauty of the lake, there remains a starker reality. Thousands of children work in its massive fishing industry—and many of these children are trafficked into labour.

10% of this book’s profits will be donated to the NGO, International Justice Mission, who work with partners to help create better circumstances for these boys.

• 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.

• Roshin Books 2024
  
• Hardback, 1st edition, 80p
  
• New
  

Born in Aomori in 1924, Ichiro Kojima depicted the lives of people living in the harsh environment of Japan’s Tohoku region. Under the vast sky, he faced the landscapes spread before him with his camera in hand.
 
His career as a photographer lasted only about ten years. Kojima, who passed away suddenly at the age of 39, left behind a dramatic world that still resonates with us today. Despite his attempts to distance himself from the images of Tsugaru, Kojima could never escape the persistent imagery of the Tohoku region that followed him everywhere.
 
This book offers a new perspective on Kojima’s journey, appealing both to those already familiar with his work and those discovering it for the first time.

Text in English and Japanese.  Edition of 1000 copies.

• TBW 2022
• Hardback, 1st edition 1st printing
• New

TBW Books is pleased to present River’s Dream, the latest monograph by Curran Hatleberg and a complete realization of the series exhibited at the 2019 Whitney Biennial. 

Hatleberg is known for traveling America, guided by intuition, to create scenes of American life and landscape. Working collaboratively with the people he meets, he recounts intimate stories of family and community. Here, in the follow-up to his first monograph Lost Coast (TBW Books, 2016), Hatleberg centers his narrative on the dog days of summer. Sweltering heat, dripping humidity, lush vegetation, and screaming insects– River’s Dream is a pulsing and episodic hallucination of life lived outdoors. In these sixty-five photographs, we move through swamps and groves, front yards and junkyards, encountering moments of haunting mystery and beautiful impermanence. Heightened by formal repetition, echo, and refrain, everyday scenes take on surreal, allegorical qualities. In the end, Hatleberg leaves us with the impression of memory, where the past is never gone, but appears and reappears endlessly, as in the flickering of a dream.

This book includes new texts by Natasaha Trethewey and Joy Williams commissioned for the publication. 

1st printing (red paper edges), limited to 1000 copies, out of print upon publication.

Signed copy.

• Walter Koenig 2018
  
• Softcover, 2nd edition
  
• New
  

Waffenruhe, a now classic photobook by Michael Schmidt (1945-2014), was first published in 1987 by the Berlin-based Dirk Nishen Verlag. It quickly sold out and continues to fetch high prices on the antiquarian book market; it is reprinted here for the first time. The book is Schmidt's portrait of a still-divided Berlin: it brings together surprising combinations of high-contrast, black-and-white images to express a generation's dystopian sense of life shortly before the fall of the Wall. Schmidt evokes a world of ruptures and absences that eschews any comprehensive perspective.

The images combine with a text by author and director Einar Schleef to create a brusque, entirely individual vision of the fragility of human existence--a book that is regularly included among the most influential photographic books of the 20th century.

Out of print 2018 reprinted English edition. 

• Mack 2020
  
• Softcover, revised edition, 2nd printing
  
• New

When Wendy Ewald arrived in the heart of the Appalachian Mountains in 1975, she began a project that aimed to reveal the lives, intimate dreams and fears of local schoolchildren. Tasked with finding authentic ways of representing the lives of these children, she gave each of them a camera and interviewed them about their childhood in the mountains. Through these intriguing transcripts and photographs, we discover the lives of families as seen through the eyes of their children: where domestic, rural life is understood with startling openness and depth. In Portraits and Dreams, life’s most mysterious realities – love, loss, violence, death, new life – are given voice through an altogether novel discovery: the camera. We learn the eloquence and originality with which children see the world and we see a generous new way of engaging children in the possibilities of the photographic medium. 

This revised and expanded edition of Ewald’s now-rare book, first published in 1985, and called “An American masterpiece,” offers access to a different and broadened view of the rural south over the span of 35 years, and includes contemporary pictures and stories by eight of the students from the original publication.

• Ugly Dog 2020
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• New
  

'‘Be careful’, my father had written to me, ‘It’s supposed to be unsafe out there’, words interspersed with photographs from the cargo ship that he was working on as he made his way up the Mississippi river to the port right outside New Orleans. The immigration rules did not allow him to step on American soil and he had no choice but to remain on his ship. His short-lived glimpse of the country had remained only within those raised embankments on either side of the river. The America that lay on the other side was something he could only make sense of through a trickle of news and opinions that he had been heard from a distance. Guns, Violence, Racism, Trump, A certain loss of Tenderness...

A couple of months later I made the journey on road down the delta from the confluence of Ohio and Mississippi rivers outside Cairo (Illinois), to Pilot Town, off Highway 23 that went further down from New Orleans. It was near here that the river opened into the sea and was the entry point into this part of the country for all ships including my father’s.

As it had been for sailors searching for land, birds now became my guides as I looked for the beginnings of water, leading me through the blues of the wetness of the land. The America I found on the way was not quite the same as the one that my father had imagined.

Just as it had been with my father, there was always a levee between the river and me as well. My father had been on water but had not been able to touch land. I was on land but had barely been able to touch water. Together we got a glimpse of the delta from our own sides of the levee.'

— Sohrab Hura

Edition of 600 copies.  Signed copy.

• Gallery 51,  2019
  
• Softcover, 1st edition
  
• New
  

A gem of anti-prudishness in our complicated times: 'East 10th Street' by Saul Leiter. This series of extremely touching, candid, sensual and delicate nudes of Leiter’s friends and lovers – Jay, Fay, Barbara and his great love, Soames – show us how the artist succeeded in balancing between eroticism and something close to the distinct dreamy atmosphere that characterizes his colour work.

• Nazraeli Press 2024
• Hardback, 1st edition, 104p
• New

“Over these last several years, even in the darkest days of the pandemic, my time in nature has been a constant source of solace and wonder. My days out photographing and exploring usually start very early, in the hours prior to sunrise, when the birds are still sleeping and the quality of quiet is extraordinary. I think of this time of day as “the shadow’s veil”, when the first delicate veil of light slowly becomes evident and the depth of earth’s shadow gradually lightens in the slow progression of night to day.

When observing the transitioning day, I find there is a therapeutic element to the patterns and surprises. For myself, this awareness leads to an insightful perspective on life’s usual challenges. A sense of humility emerges in consideration of the enormous scale, complexity, and sheer power of nature; our problems don’t register in significance.

This book is a collection of observations about the unfolding of days. These photographs were made either in the hours before sunrise or very early in the day when the light is new, shadows are long, and hope is eternal.” — from the Introduction by Jeffrey Conley

Jeffrey Conley’s fourth title with Nazraeli Press is an artist’s book of the first order. Limited to just 1,000 copies, each presented in a custom slipcase of wood veneer over boards, The Shadow’s Veil presents 64 of the artist’s most powerful images, many published here for the first time. Beautifully printed in duotone with two distinct varnishes on natural Korean art paper, the exposed sides of the book block are painted charcoal gray and bound in unbleached linen fabric.

• Iikki 2022
  
• Hardback, 2nd edition
  
• New
  

Sasanami is the result of a dialog between the photographer Masao Yamamoto and the musician and composer Akira Uchida initiated by IIKKI between October 2019 and August 2020. 

''Sasanami: Sound becomes waves and creates space, where a story is spun that transcends time and space, just like Noh. Something gentle in that space. Its presence is not definite, it simply exists there. I want to share with you the scene of how the individual and the space are connected.''

Hand-numbered 2nd edition of 1000 copies, with a digital download code for the music.  

• Deadbeat Club Press 2021
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

As the title of Kovi Konowiecki’s debut monograph – and in its place, another – reminds us, we are always and forever subject to the twin certitudes of transience and change. As is the artist, who has moved back and forth between California, Mexico, Europe, and the Middle East, all of which places are part of the fabric of this sprawling, unscripted book. 

Here we are confronted with the geographical and emotional margins of society and the mind: the external and internal boundaries that inhibit both human movement and human potential. The photographs portray individuals and communities that exist in a liminal space between belonging and abandonment, many of which exert feelings of desolation.

But what might seem on the surface political is made intensely personal through Konowiecki’s purposeful reliance on emotional connections in the pictures rather than specific relationships of place or subject. As he says, this work comes as a “happy accident, inspired by the frequent travels that nourished a sharp eye for the liminal types of communities to which I am drawn: people I have met in my wanderings, passersby in the street, a horse trained in a small Arab village, and untended gardens.”

The “unscripted” nature of the work has an impact on the form of the book, in particular in the variety of genres and colors, from landscape photography to portraiture and from black and white to color. The various forms of expression serve as ways to materialize the ideas at the core of the project and to break down barriers or restrictions within the photographic medium.

Signed copy.

• Stanley Barker 2021
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

In October 1979, Pope John Paul II came to the Boston Common. Susan Kandel was there taking pictures of families who’d come to see him, carrying on with work she had started months earlier photographing families at Revere Beach.  Among the people she photographed that day on the Common were two women and the five children they’d brought with them. They told Kandel that she should come take pictures at their homes, since they had younger kids who hadn’t come that day.  She eagerly took them up on their offer. 

“These two families lived around the corner from each other in Everett, Mass., and I returned to their homes many times over the next ten years or so.  And I sought out other families who might let me come photograph them at home as well.  I approached folks in grocery stores and bowling alleys, Woolworth’s and corner stores, telling them that I’d give them some pictures in exchange for allowing me to come photograph them at home.  Although I got a lot of quick refusals and looks of suspicion, I also managed to get invited to many homes.  And sometimes there were repeat invitations.” - Susan Kandel

Through her work Kandel discovered that each home she entered was a distinct world unto itself, and each home offered up stories. 

• RRB 2019
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• New
  

RRB Photobooks are pleased to present a series of photographs made by Czech photographer Markéta Luskačová taken in the late 1970s on the North East Coast of Britain. The book is produced to coincide with an exhibition of the same name at the Martin Parr Foundation, Bristol

Czech-born Luskačová has lived in the UK since 1975 and first went to North East England in 1976 when visiting photographer Chris Killip, who at that time lived there.  She fell in love with Whitley Bay, and with the people there who, in spite of the harsh weather, enjoyed their time at the seaside. When Amber, a film and photography collective, invited her in 1978 to photograph the North East of England alongside Martine Franck, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Paul Caponigro, she was drawn back to photograph the seaside.

“I was very touched by it all: the families with children, old women in their best hats, elderly couples with grandchildren, teenagers courting shyly or boisterously, the ponies and donkeys walking patiently to and fro on the beach.  The dogs and children were everywhere, dogs enjoying themselves as much as the children did. The fairground and the omnipresent tents, fortresses against the wind and rain, the seaside cafes selling sandwiches, apple pies, custard pies, ice creams and teas, of course. But they also sold boiling water to women who brought with them from their homes their teapots and teabags, because to buy tea for the whole family would be too expensive.”

Although well known in photographic circles, Luskačová’s work in recent years has lacked the exposure of some of her contemporaries. This exhibition and new book aim to contribute to a recent resurgence of interest in Luskačová’s work and to introduce it to new audiences.

Out of print, final copies.

• EXB 2021
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

This new series by Paolo Pellegrin celebrates the eleventh title of the collection Des oiseaux (On birds). Magnum photographer best known for his works testifying to political, economic or even ecological upheavals, his curious mind leads him to focus on subjects that are sometimes more contemplative, where nature holds a major place. Thus, during a stay in Japan in 2019, Paolo Pellegrin, who left to witness the blooming of the cherry trees, is more struck by the majesty and the aerial ballet of a colony of black kites flying over the temple of Shimogamo, Shinto shrine of the 7th century, in the heart of a primary forest.

English Edition.


Video courtesy EXB

• Kominek 2020
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

From 2012 to 2019 Mark Steinmetz took photos on the streets of Berlin. This work now comes together in the book Berlin Pictures.

Steinmetz visited Berlin between 2012 and 2019, each time photographing its streets and citizens with the care and compassion that he reserves for all of his subjects. Within his images of Berlin, we find the closeness of couples and strangers that we find in many of his works and yet, Mark adds a new layer to the work by investigating details of the city itselfits architecture and its streets align in Mark’s viewfinder and he renders each frame, inhabited or not, with an eye for the details of the moment. Berlin is a unique city and Mark adds a new layer, one less marginalized by the weight of history, but rather by the acceptance of its condition of present being in his Berlin Pictures.' - Brad Feuerhelm

• Akio Nagasawa 2023
• Softcover, 1st edition
• New
  

Yesterday, my daughter drove me and my wife to Kami-Ooka, a town south of Yokohama. We had already been there two weeks earlier, and as I had no business accompanying the ladies on their shopping spree, I spent a little over an hour walking around with my camera, in the area around the station that is crowded with people and tall buildings. Quite naturally, the tour also led me to a place that I always visit, and that I have decided to refer to as my “oasis number three.” On one side of a 50-meter stretch of a narrow alley between the back of a store and the Keihin Kyuko line, there are several juice stands, and sandwiched between them, a number of ashtrays are admirably standing and waiting for smokers like myself. There’s always a bunch of folks, guys and ladies alike, puffing away on their cigarettes as if there was no tomorrow. One of the bars has some concrete steps in front of it that are just right for sitting on, and in that “oasis,” I like to spend some quality time smoking while observing the neighborhood through my pocket camera, and taking the occasional snapshot. There are quite a lot of ladies, and also many blue-collar type guys, and they all come together here for a chat and a puff.

Back home, I found myself alone in the kitchen at night, and while having another cigarette or two, I reviewed the results of my own shooting spree in the alleys of Kami-Ooka. “I guess two or three of them will be alright for Record,” I concluded while thinking about the next issue. I remembered also photographing a long line of people and wondered what they were queueing up for, while lighting another cigarette. Another day in the life of the photographer that I am was casually drawing to an end. And tomorrow, I thought, I’m going to take a stroll around Ofuna.

(Number one and two of my own private oases are places that I carry in my heart, and I won’t tell anyone about them, unless they’re heavy smokers just like me!)

– from the afterword by Daido Moriyama

Signed copy.

• Xavier Barral 2019
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• New
  

A major figure of Latin-American photography, Graciela Iturbide’s approach combines the documentary and the lyrical. Off-center compositions, graphic effects, and heavy shadows create a poetic universe where a feeling of strangeness is combined with one of harsh reality. The powerful equilibrium of her compositions produces skies filled with birds, comical, unexpected situations where chickens are pictured sitting wisely on market stalls, while elsewhere chirping flocks appear to invade the scene in agile, flowing movements. For Iturbide, living birds represent freedom. But death is never far away in her work, nor indeed is a certain sense of the surreal. 

An organic dimension, linked to blood, flesh, mud, sweat, and the earth also permeates most of Graciela Iturbide’s images, for she has a special relationship with reality, choosing to capture unique moments with her lens. Birds and men cohabit and rub up against each other. From India to Mexico, gulls, eagles, pigeons, herons, and ravens invade man’s space or insinuate their way into it in a serendipitous, solitary fashion.

This publication is part of the Des oiseaux (On birds) collection celebrating, through the vision of different artists, their immense presence in a world where they are now vulnerable. Accompanying these photographs, the ornithologist Guilhem Lesaffre writes a special essay. For this title, Lesaffre focuses on the different environments birds live in and their unbelievable capacity to adapt themselves whether it is in the sky, water or at the highest summits. 

English edition.

• Stanley Barker 2021
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

“This is how I remember New York City in 2002. I was 19 years old and had just moved to Manhattan from my family’s small farm on Long Island. It was the first summer after the September 11 attacks. Workers were removing the last of the debris from the collapsed Twin Towers. The city felt both immense and fragile compared to the groundedness of my childhood home.”

“On weekdays, I worked in Arnold Newman’s photography studio. After hours and on weekends, I walked through the city’s five boroughs with my camera. When someone made eye contact with me, I asked if I could make a portrait of them. At first, I assumed people would respond with caution. I was a stranger. The city was recovering from an event that shook its sense of security. Yet, most people said yes and looked straight into my camera lens. I am grateful they chose to trust me.” - Lucas Foglia

Published on the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, Lucas Foglia’s portraits show the tremendous diversity of New York City. Everyone is portrayed with dignity, regardless of age, gender, sexual orientation, or ethnicity. Today, as the world begins to heal from the coronavirus pandemic, the photographs remind us to approach strangers with compassion, across social distances.

• Loose Joints 2021
• Softcover, 1st edition, 44pp
• New

• 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.

• Gallery 51, 2019
  
• Softcover, 1st edition
  
• Near fine
  

In this new book and exhibition, 'cheveux longs… cheveux courts'  Katrien De Blauwer revisits herself as a young woman by creating personae and telling their stories as if they were her own. Additionally, a new set of her more erotic 'Dirty Scenes' is presented.

For the public, De Blauwer has become known as the "photographer without a camera", compulsively seeking out magazines from the 1920s through the 1960s, cutting them up and reassembling fragments into frugal yet powerful compositions. But already in her first solo show, 'Double', it had become apparent that the artist strove to transcend the limitations of the collage medium. The transformation De Blauwer had set in motion then, has now come full circle. She has been progressively shifting shapes; e.g. experimenting with more slender works, stressing their horizontality or verticality.

Her typical confrontation between two images, or two parts of one cut-up image, is gradually replaced by a deeper tension. Ever more frequently, just one image joins together – or is trapped by – monotone surfaces, which are black as ink or bright with colour. Furthermore, De Blauwer explicitly intervenes, leaving physical traces on her material. The wrinkling, tearing or folding makes the materials look old and used; the intuitive drawing (in pencil) and painting (in acryl) on the other hand, make the works look spontaneous and spirited, like childhood creations.

Only recently, the artist started work on something new: her so-called 'Dirty Scenes'. These erotic images come alive with indistinct movements. The tenderness of bodily interaction and contact between woman and man is central here, and it is underlined by much softer pastel colours. Could these gentle scenes be the phantasies of De Blauwer’s feminine protagonists?

One element that always remains unchanged in De Blauwer’s itinerary, is the omnipresent reference to film noir and European avant-garde cinema. This not only comes about through the filmic images she uses, but also through the way they are treated. De Blauwer 'edits' her fragments with scissors, pencil and brush, before throwing these scenes into a sequence that tells the story of a woman. These imaginative sequences – beginning and ending with a 'still' image – come into motion the moment we start walking through the exhibition or start leafing through the new book that accompanies this exhibition.

Faint shelfwear, final copies.

• Ceiba 2018
• Softcover, 1st trade edition
  
• New
  

"I am often attracted by what repulses or scares the others. I like misfits, outcasts, eccentrics, those who don’t fit in the norms. Although I look quite normal and common, I identify in a way with those who do not fit in society. For this reason, I followed the Black Label Bike Club for about 3 years when I was living in NY.
The Black Label Bike Club is known as the first “outlaw bicycle club.” It was created in 1992 by Jacob Houle and Per Hanson in Minneapolis, Minnesota and has chapters nationwide. They are one of the main contributors to the rise of tall bike culture and organize jousting competitions. It is interesting to see this destructive, rebel culture revolving around such a non-threatening object: the bicycle.

I consider them as a blend of punk, grunge and hippie culture. They are an independent community rebelling against the system. In a society that pushes us to consume, focus on money and overly use technology, it is interesting to see a group of young people resisting and fighting against it. Their community is mainly based on the bike culture, art and on the real value of relationships; these basic, simple values that seem to have disappeared. This particularly affected me when I was in NYC and everyone seemed to be living virtually on social networks and obsessed by success. These “kids” felt real: they speak frankly and are not afraid to take risks and hurt themselves (physically or life decisions). They are living in the moment, in a risk-less society yearning for security. They are passionate, well-read, talented young people with real discussions.

When I find subcultures like the Black Label Bike Club, a creative group, using very little technology, interested in defending causes and resisting the main stream, it gives me hope, and I think it could be very encouraging for today’s youth." 

_ Julie Glassberg

 Trade edition (untitled) of 400 copies, of this acclaimed book originally created during the Reminders Photography Stronghold Photobook workshop.

Recommended.

• Bluecoat 2024
• Hardback, 1st edition. 160p
• New 

This Was Then is the first career-spanning book by one of the UK’s most significant documentary photographers. Shot across Britain over three decades, in the years before and after Margaret Thatcher’s time in government, This Was Then brilliantly captures seemingly small moments of everyday life that tell a far bigger story of Britain during this time. Abrahams’ photographs demonstrate his unerring ability to capture “ordinary people living extraordinary lives”.

Mike Abrahams became a photographer after working for the ambulance service in Liverpool. Entering some of the last occupied homes in condemned streets proved a revelation and he returned with his camera, and some of these first images appear in This Was Then. Asked once why he takes photographs in black and white, Mike Abrahams explained: “I grew up in Liverpool in the 1950s and 60s, a city in which to my eyes, colour was absent.”

Abrahams started his career as a freelance photographer in 1975 and has worked regularly on assignments for many British, European and American magazines. In 1981 he was a co-founder of Network Photographers, the Internationally renowned picture agency and his work has taken him all around the world. Mike received a World Press Photo Award for Daily Life 2000 and has produced major bodies of work all around the world. Previously he has published three monographs and he has been exhibited internationally.

Still War, his collection of photographs from Northern Ireland was described by Colin Jacobson of The Independent Magazine as “documentary photography at its best – imaginative, comprehensive, confident and concerned.” These are qualities true of all his work in This Was Then. From children playing in front of armed soldiers in Belfast to daily life continuing amid the tenements of Glasgow and the demolished terraces of Liverpool to a chuckling policeman leading a racist march through the streets of south London, This Was Then delivers an unmissable, alternative vision of British life in the late 20th century.

As he writes in his introduction to This Was Then: “I was not interested in the fact that people threw stones, only in why they threw them.”

Taken between 1973 and 2001 his photographs are of ordinary lives lived, not newsworthy moments or depictions of celebrity and fashion. Resilience is a recurring theme in his work, people surviving, playing and laughing. Despite being taken decades ago, what we see is still common in Britain today – struggling communities marginalised by authority. There is little nostalgia or sentimentality about these photographs – they feel as potent and vital today as they did when taken.

As Mike says, “This was then, but it is also now.”

Signed copy.

• Session Press 2024
• Softcover, 1st edition. 184p
  
• New

Session Press is pleased to present Solace, the first U.S. monograph by acclaimed Hong Kong based photographer and film director, Wing Shya. Early in his career, Shya was invited by Wong Kar-wai to serve as an on-set stills photographer for films including Happy Together and In the Mood for Love. Granted rare access to the renowned director’s inner circle, over the years Shya captured poignant behind-the-scenes portraits of iconic actors such as Tony Leung, Leslie Cheung, Maggie Cheung, and Gong Li in unguarded moments between takes. These intimate images form the heart of Solace, interspersed with the best of Shya’s commercial shoots, as well as private snapshots of nature and cityscapes encountered on his travels. The resulting collection is a true testament to Shya’s ability as an eloquent storyteller and deeply introspective observer.

Hong Kong has long captured the West’s imagination as an enigmatic Other with dazzling neon lights and a chaotic electric pulse. However, in Solace, Shya reveals a more personal and meditative Hong Kong. Time slows, inviting the viewer to explore the subtleties of interpersonal chemistries from a distance in ephemeral, quiet moments that showcase Shya’s sensitive and intuitive approach toward his subjects. A nostalgic, dreamlike atmosphere emerges in his expired and exposed film, punctuated by flashes of vibrant color. In the words of William Chang, one of Wong Kar-wai’s most important collaborators, Solace is a “moving achievement that deftly captures ephemeral postures and fleeting snippets in time.”

We hope Solace will introduce an international audience to the sublime nuance of Wing Shya’s work, as well as the rich history and culture of Hong Kong as seen through his eyes.

• Mack Books 2022
• Softcover, 1st edition
• New

Following on from the bestselling box set Gathered Leaves, published to accompany Alec Soth’s touring exhibition which opened in London in 2015, this unique publication brings together five of Soth’s major books in their entirety in a single, compact, and densely detailed volume. Across more than 700 pages of newsprint, Soth updates and reimagines the original version of Gathered Leaves by reproducing every spread from these five books with detailed annotations in the form of notes, text extracts, and additional photographs. This new roadmap through Soth’s oeuvre also includes a new introduction by the artist.

Soth’s meteoric rise to international acclaim began with his first book, Sleeping by the Mississippi (2004), an elegiac road trip down the ‘third coast’ of the United States, which has since has sold through numerous print runs and is widely acknowledged as a classic. The success of his subsequent volumes Niagara (2006), Broken Manual (2010), and Songbook (2015) elaborated Soth’s lyrical but unflinching approach and reinforced his position as a master of the book form. His most recent work, A Pound of Pictures (2022), brings a new, poetic perspective to the idiosyncrasies of American life and the practice of image-making, broached once again through Soth’s now-distinctive road trip format.

• 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.