Under The Radar

• Zen Foto 2019
  
• Softcover, new edition
  
• New
  

A new edition of Chinese artist Muge’s tranquil photobook “Ash”, released by Japanese publisher Zen Foto Gallery.

Based on Lao Tze’s “Theory of Nature,” Muge’s series approaches objects, sceneries and places from the perspective not of an intruder or observer but as an insider, as someone who belongs, giving his subjects the necessary space to weather, grow, decay, and simply exist. Divided into three parts (“Still Life,” Shan Shui,” and “Scenery”), Muge’s images draw on symbolism and metaphor to create larger connections between the pages of the book. The three parts of the book are stacked on top of each other, forming a staircase-like design, with each photo printed in black and gray and finished “with glossy varnish, matte varnish or special color varnish, depending on the delicate state of each object.”

When I used the large format camera to re-understand my hometown as it is now, I’ve discovered that all things in the real world derive from our internal desire: the Karma cycle of yearning for nature, destroying nature, and mending nature (...) These images are taken from the understandings gleaned from my daily life, conveying the traces of time and history in nature, and a person’s thoughts of the future when faced with reality. — Muge

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• 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.

• 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. 

• 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.

• Void 2021
• Softcover, 1st edition
• New

“My house looked like a maze, a tenebrous shelter where nobody could enter […]. I walked through its corridors and up and down the stairs, but I couldn’t reach the exit. Darkness everywhere.”

— Yurian Quintanas Nobel

‘Dreams Moons’ is a story in the first person. It mixes photography and text to tell on a journey through a bizarre dream. It takes place within the corridors and rooms of the artist's house.  

After a few years working on territories and outsiders, Yurian Quintanas Nobel set himself the challenge of photographing his closest environment.

To make this work he imposed a single rule: all the photographs had to be done within the limits of his house. From this single guideline, he began to photograph the spaces, domestic objects, and the inhabitants of this home. Though, he went further. To tell not only the concrete experience. But the transformation of all the palpable reality, into what we do not see.

The first images of this project are from 2015. And they are in total line with 2020’s new zeitgeist: the lockdowns. Produced 5 years before we started to think about how life is restricted within the space of our own homes, ‘Dream Moons’ gets a new and unexpected layer.

• Super Labo 2021
• Hardback, 1st edition
• Near fine

"The first picture, gas station through the car window, starts the trip off.I drove eight days, in July,1991, from Atlanta, Georgia to Memphis, Tennessee along small roads, and stopped along the way. When I got to the cities, like Jackson or Birmingham, or Montgomery, I stopped at parking meters and walked around blocks. My intention was not to make a book---only pictures.

After thirty years, and the exposure of extreme political incompetence with the recent past governments, I looked at this work again and thought it might be an accidental view of the South in three parts: Black people, white people, and the infrastructure at the time. Cotton was an early, fundamental, economic driver, with profit enhanced and insured by slaves. Cotton is a picture book, but with a political and social backstory. I stopped at a small black church and used two pictures to emphasize the hold of religion and strong women.Instead of square miles of cotton fields I saw its trace in small cardboard boxes.

The book’s last picture of the five boys on the bench seems emblematic of the region’s resulting, and often segregated leisure. The camera made an unconscious litmus test with black and white film exposed to the acid nature of racism."

_ Mark Cohen

Final copies with very faint surface wear/marking to cover.

• Mandarake 2020
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• New
  

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

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

Edition of 550 copies.  Unsigned.

• Chose Commune 2022
• Softcover, 1st edition
• Near fine - see below

In 1973, Seiichi Furuya left Japan for Europe on board of the Trans-Siberian train. He arrived in Austria where he first settled in Vienna, before moving to Graz where he met Christine Gössler in 1978. From this day forward, he started photographing her, in the intimacy of their home in Graz but also during their travels abroad — to Germany, England, Italy…and Japan, their most distant destination. Christine studied art history and worked for the radio, making documentary programs. After the birth of their son in 1981, she became increasingly involved in the world of theatre. As she was devoting herself to her acting lessons, she started to show signs of schizophrenia. Christine committed suicide in East Berlin in 1985.

Since Christine’s disappearance, Furuya has never stopped revisiting his archive. This initiative was presented in a series of five books entitled Mémoires, published between 1989 and 2010, and in Face to Face, published by Chose Commune in 2020. In 2018, Seiichi Furuya found super 8 film rolls in his attic. One of them was a recording of the very first trip he made with Christine, in Bologna in 1978 a few weeks after they had met. As an attempt to remember a trip he had completely forgotten about, Seiichi Furuya started extracting stills from the film, frame by frame. These images compose his new series First Trip to Bologna 1978. Together with this series, in the same book, we are releasing a newly edited version of Last Trip to Venice 1985, which was first self-published in 2002. This series presents photographs from Seiichi and Christine’s very last trip, before Christine took her own life.

Signed to a sticker.

Light damage to the cover - see photo example.  Otherwise fine.

• Ediciones Ánomalas 2022
• Softcover, 1st edition, 244pp
• New

“Marshy, rugged, winding, monumental.

The Danube Delta is the second greatest European river delta: a natural labyrinth of reeds and water that extends over more than 3500 square kilometres. It lies between Romania and Ukraine, on the geographical boundary of Europe, on the shores of the Black Sea. The delta region is sparsely populated and its few hamlets can only be reached by boat. It lacks basic infrastructure and its streets are plunged into the depths of darkness as soon as the sun sets.

Living on the delta means living in oblivion, amidst marshlands. Like Minotaurs, the inhabitants of the delta find themselves immersed in their own labyrinth, putting up with the emptiness it imposes on them. The circular rhythm of the seasons defines their rhythm of life; it affects their moods, conditions their desires and habits and sets up physical and mental barriers.

For four years I’ve submerged myself in the delta, striving to understand and document these profound connections. In the different seasons, I’ve beheld the landscape and its gradual changes almost obsessively, in order to record their physical and psychological upshots.

Throughout this long research process, the territory has assumed the psychological role of a true labyrinth.

In a language that hovers between anthropological observation and symbolic transfiguration, I’ve drawn my map of the territory, and my interpretation transcends the physical and geographical reality of the marshes, challenging the profound meaning of the act of inhabiting. Inhabiting a territory, inhabiting a labyrinth. Inhabiting oneself.”

Delta is divided into two sections, complementary to each other and equally relevant. The first one collects the photographic body of work, offering a purely visual narrative. The second consists of 30 field notes. Previous collaborations with anthropologists have influenced my methodology. 

Since my first trip to the Delta, I felt the need to conduct an investigation parallel to the photographic research, recording my daily observations in a notebook. The result is a diary of ethnographic inspiration made of descriptive notes, interview extracts, personal reflections and short fiction. A hybrid text that fits the photographic narrative filling the gaps generated by the image and expanding its narrative potential.

Text in English/ Spanish/ Catalan/ Italian

• Silas Finch 2014
  
• Softcover, 1st edition
  
• New
  

Includes 48 black and white and full color plates printed with UV inks on uncoated paper. Leporello binding with multiple panel widths and stiff front and back covers. Spine closure printed on synthetic paper with an essay by Mark Alice Durant.

With the spine detached from the front cover, the book becomes an installation piece approximately 34 feet in length.

• Origini Edizioni 2023
• Hardback, 1st edition in slipcase
• New

"If the demand of humanity’s physical and philosophical questions is that for humans to understand the Cosmos, art reverses this demand. The terrifying demand posed by art is humans’ need to be understood by the Cosmos."

     ​​​​                 -  George Chimonas (Greek author/ 1938 – 2000)

Forecast is body of work that Ilias has been developing for the last five years. Inspired by a physical journey of some swallows traveling from the earth’s south to the north -where a thunderstorm just above Greece literally immobilized them in the ground- it morphs into an anthropocentric and allegorical journey of poetic photography.

 A photographic corpus which includes sets of pictures that challenge and exceed linear photographic narratives by altering transformational elliptic patterns of image repetition and by conveying a story-telling that almost never ends. A concept heavily inspired by fugues in music and by the earth’s movement in space and the change of seasons.

A narration that highlights the minimal ambience of the universal drive of life itself, originating in (and surrounded by) the forces of nature, whilst having in its core; the abstract and the lyrical that give meaning to our existence and humanity.

TRADE EDITION of 120 copies numbered and signed. Handmade slipcase in washable paper (vegan leather) and hard cardboard; painted in indian ink on the back.

• Akina 2019
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• Near fine see below
  

THE GRAY LINE is Laura Rodari’s first book, ‘the work who came out of visceral feelings and melancholy’, as she would tell you. Laura whispers, sometimes. She does it to time, to thoughts, to the universe and to its inhabitants. The response is mutual, bodily gut-deep mutual. Landscapes bend under her eyes, faces crumble, time evolves in the opposite direction and its arrow moves continuously as the most unrest being. THE GRAY LINE is this place in between past present and future, barely visible, an acknowledgment of absolute solitude. Both the origin and the end, along with light, beauty, joy and death. Nowhere life is more viscerally needed.

the womb is frail, the distance ephemeral, the consumption of a latent promise, the fog, the sentimental no, the agreement of death, the key to the senses

the lack of language, hers, after her.

the womb is frail when empty, the presence ethereal, time produces quakes on the shroud of eternity, the thickness, the density, nearly here never again

men and women walking, the darkness they bear, beating the glimpsed years ahead until they are, you Mother, the dim and the faint, flowers in your garden smell, they died and they bloomed again, they die and they bloom always.


Slipcased edition of 300 handmade copies. 61 images of which 24 torn and tipped in.

Final few copies with faint bump to slipcase (see example image)

• Akina 2017
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• New
  

“Control deals with the dark side of the aftermath of the 2000s in Turkey, where instincts collided with modernism. The story of a night in Istanbul includes sex workers, dog fights, gun violence and political armed conflict. At first glance, these activities seem different, but once we delve deeper into these stories we can see that they are part of the same chain of motives.  Turkey entered a new political climate after the 2000s. The climate, which has become increasingly conservative, has given certain ideologies a platform and at the same time led people with opposing thoughts be vilified and pushed into the night. These include secret sex parties and dog fight competitions. Armed political conflicts that arise due to social issues and pressures in the country are also emerging at night.

I moved to the Gazi district of Istanbul in 2014 to complete the Night Blind project. I am currently photographing the armed political conflicts, dog fights and sex parties that take place in Gazi and other segregated neighborhoods in Istanbul. The common factor between the segregated neighborhoods is that the residents are mainly Kurds, Alevi’s and refugees. In recent times the government has increased the pressure, and are looking into different policies to wipe out these segregated neighborhoods.  The conflicts in the east of the country, often increase the severity of the pressures applied to these neighborhoods. Long term projects such as urban transformation are being introduced and dissembling the culture created in these neighborhoods. Problems within the education system also bring pressure and problems to the neighborhoods. There are simply not enough schools in these areas to cater to the population and there are also not enough teachers which results in most of the children leaving school without completing high school. This causes the children to carry out their potential in other areas. The children grow up trying to prove themselves from a very young age. Unfortunately this leads some to follow a path that leads to drug trafficking or taking part in illegal dog fights. After a while, this becomes a way of life. Sexual activities are one of the most secretive events that are pushed into the night. Those who cannot live out their different sexual orientations and preferences within society, live them secretly at night. People from different classes and professions come together to organize sex parties. Those who participate in these events are usually people who are forced to hide their sexual orientations and preferences from society. ”

- Çağdaş Erdoğan

Recommended.

• Fuego 2022
• Softcover, 1st edition
• New

"I received a phone call in December 2017 and was told my father had passed away. In Buenos Aires, during the days that followed, I looked very closely at the family albums in his house. I then felt the need to make a book to honor him, as this was the object through which he also expressed himself.

I hope the reader lives the book as an experience. Whoever has it in their hands is encouraged to look at it closely and far away, to touch it, to look for combinations and find relationships in it. It is a book that invites the viewer to play. And I think that this is the best possible tribute to my father, inventor of the madeleine game (el juego de la madalena) and many others."

- Julieta Averbuj

"El juego de la madalena" is Julieta Averbuj's first book. It talks about the construction of memories and of remembrance as a changing path full of detours.

Signed to the slipcase. 

• Journal 2021
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

“Bristningar (Rupture) is the middle part of Katinka Goldberg's trilogy of works, in which she is ‘exploring the tension between closeness and distance’, trying, no less, to locate herself both within herself and within the world. The trilogy began with her book Surfacing (2011) which examined the relationship between herself and her mother, in a complex and highly poetic way. In Bristningar, she is making collages, which, like Hans Bellmer's, deconstruct and reassemble the body, but do so with a very different aim, a healing rather than a destructive or pathological purpose. And also a process of add and subtracting, or rather, of adding in order to subtract. 

‘I am trying to answer the question; how much can you take away of yourself without disappearing? How close can you get before the closeness becomes a distance?’

Her intentions are both formal and psychological. On one level, she is pushing at the medium’s boundaries, pushing beyond the imperative of the camera and provoking a clash between photography, sculpture, and painting. On another, she is exploring different aspects of her psyche, using the same kind of allusive approach, but very different formal means to those deployed in her previous book. In Surfacing, it seemed to be a matter of trying to make peace with what seemed to be an obviously close and sometimes difficult relationship, a letting go perhaps. Bristningar seems more of a reaching toward, not to her mother but to herself. By making fragmented collages from the human body Goldberg would seem to be fashioning a visual metaphor, no less, for the process of psychoanalysis, tearing the soul apart, examining the pieces and the data, then reconstructing a more complete whole. In these fragmented and highly abstract collages, Goldberg is utilizing ‘the amputated and then reconstructed body as a way to visualize a fragmented identity that has been mended. Forming a reconstruction of oneself to be seen. Seeing as a way of belonging’.”

- Gerry Badger

Faint bumping to corners.  Otherwise sealed as new.

• Silas Finch 2015
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• NEW
  

As the sun fell in the west, Grímsey seemed to emit a vibration, a faint buzzing that can only be felt at certain times in that far-removed place. Its tune, persistent and dense, wove through living rooms and careened over the harbor like a slow pull on a cello. It’s a pulse that can only be sensed, if even for a fleeting moment, during periods of change. The first time, for a young boy, with his father on a fishing boat. Or the loss of a brother, his memory now living in photographs and within the folds of a sweater tucked away in a closet. Or, perhaps, the first sunset alone at the northernmost tip of the island, a place the locals call The Foot. A swooping hook of land that curves down to the water, revealing caves that always seem to be whispering—telling, with a slow exhale, the secrets of the island.

• VOID 2022
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

“Whether a photo was taken yesterday or two years ago is immaterial. Inspired by theories of non-linear time, astrophysics and quantum mechanics, Julie van der Vaart has begun experimenting in the darkroom. [...] A photo is prosaically a record of the past, but now it remains eternally afloat in imaginary time.” - Merel Bem

• 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

• Charcoal Press 2022
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New
  

From Where Loss Comes is an unblinking look at how sacrifice and belonging are deeply rooted in the human experience.

Sixty photographs and close to 9,000 words consider a pain and suffering that is private, sacrificial, and yet rattles against values that are thought of as being inalienable — our fundamental human rights.

It is a story of the root causes of female genital cutting and mutilation (FGM/C). The practice presents a tragic dialectic. By submitting to a personal loss, a woman may be assured of membership in a community. Her alternative is to remain intact and enter into exile. It is an impossible choice.

For this work, Pradip Malde (Tanzania, 1957) returned to his birth country after an absence of forty-six years. WITH Sarah Mwaga, founder of the Anti Female Genital Mutilation Network (AFNET), he traveled more than 3,000 miles over three years, visiting remote communities to converse with and to photograph activist women (victims of FGM/C), the sacred sites where these rituals take place, and the cutting tools used by ngariba (Swahilli for “circumcisers”) who have renounced the practice.

Malde received a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2018 to complete the project. This book is dedicated to the life and work of Sarah Mwaga, who passed away in 2021 just as the book was at its final stages of production.

14"x 10" beautifully printed Swiss-bound hardback.

• Nazraeli 2019
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• New
  

Nazraeli Press is thrilled to announce the publication of Kim Jungman’s Can You Hear the Wind Blow.  This gorgeous series of large format photographs illustrates the sound of wind, made visible by the subtlest movements of tree branches, leaves, and a seemingly endless number of birds in flight and at rest.

Comprising 62 photographs, Can You Hear the Wind Blow beckons the viewer into what appears to be a wide-open forest of single trees, each with enough space to move freely in the wind. The trees are portrayed as stoic individuals, at once deeply rooted and flexible, planted at an unknown time in an unknown paradise. In actual fact, all of the photographs in the book were made between 2008 and 2017, and simply depict a row of neglected street trees in an alley between the artist’s studio and home in Seoul.

One of his country’s most important contemporary artists, Kim Jungman was born in Cheolwon, South Korea in 1954. He moved as a teenager to Burkina Faso, Africa and then to Europe, studying painting École Nationale Supérieure d’Art at Villa Arson in Nice, France. It was there that he discovered his passion for photography. He moved back to Seoul and soon gained fame for his edgy, often controversial work as the country’s premier commercial and fashion photographer.

In 2006, Jungman Kim left his flourishing career as a commercial photographer to pursue his personal work, photographing the countryside of his native country. Can You Hear the Wind Blow was published to accompany a major exhibition of the work at The Hanmi Museum of Photography, Seoul and Three Shadows Gallery in Beijing.

• La Maison de Z 2018
  
• Softcover, 1st edition
  
• New
  

The boyfriend’s parents can’t accept her age after all, and their relationship ended there. That’s how Chinese photographer Yingguang Guo (b. 1983) became single at the age of 33, a “left-over woman”, considered by the eyes of contemporary Chinese society. Burdened by all of the questions she could not find answers to, Guo went to the People’s Park in Shanghai to perform as her own “matchmaker”, holding a sign with her own accomplishments, while the parents come sniffing around to assess her suitability for their children.

In addition to being a place of relaxation, Shanghai People’s Park is also a well-known market for matchmaking that has been in existence for ten years. Hundreds of parents gather there every weekend regardless of weather, clutching succinct summaries of their children on single information sheets that contain their age, height, education, job, salary etc. all in an effort to find an “acceptable” partner for their child to marry.

 By photographing daily scenes and details of personal adds at the matchmaking corner, Guo also uses photo-etching techniques to create a series of abstract images that reveal the turbulent truths of arranged marriages beneath the seemingly calm surface depicted by peaceful images of the park, such as traditional intergenerational relationships and views of marriage, as well as discrimination against the so-called “left-over women”.

• Akaaka 2019
  
• Softcover, 1st edition
  
• New

Emi Anrakuji’s “Balloon Position” is a stream-of-conscious-like unfolding of the artist’s conflicted soul. Taken twenty years ago, the soft, sensual black-and-white photos form a visual poem about loneliness and existential confusion.

“I cannot explain this photobook in words.”
– Emi Anrakuji

Edition of 500 copies. 

Shortlisted for Paris Photo Aperture Foundation Photobook of the Year 2019.

• RM 2016
• Softcover, 1st edition
• NEW

We are living in the midst of a photographic renaissance in which we have become accustomed to consuming imagery with the same greed and gusto that we consume fast food. In order to cope with the deluge of images being force fed into our retinas on a daily basis we now consume images with- out digesting them properly, or at all. People rarely stop to take a closer look; to read, appreciate or question an image. Image Tsunami is a sizeable overview of the enormous collection of images that Kessels lives with, remixes and edits. It s a representation of the overload of imagery that is (rapidly expanding) in his head. The book can inspire others to make their own remixes of these images and maybe stop to appreciate a few along the way.