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 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. 

• Super Labo 2021
• Hardback, 1st edition
• Imperfect - see below

"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

A few marks to the cover, and a small bump to one corner - see photo.

• Roshin 2025
• Hardback, 1st edition, 120p
• New

Published by roshin books in 2017, Untitled was a culmination of Shin Yanagisawa’s travel photography. Now, Tracks of the City returns to print, his first and most iconic photobook, originally published in 1979 by Asahi Sonorama. It captures Tokyo in the 1960s, at the height of the country’s rapid economic growth.

The photographs in this book were taken between 1965 and 1970, during a time when Tokyo was engulfed in a wave of “scrap and build” redevelopment. As old neighborhoods disappeared and new structures rose in their place, Yanagisawa turned his lens toward this transitional moment. Through precise and composed framing, he revealed the evolving forms and atmosphere of the city, without relying on narrative or symbolism.

“Photographs don’t need words”, Yanagisawa remained unwavering in this belief throughout his career. His work was neither part of the Provoke movement nor the so-called Konpora trend. What emerges here is not a category, but a singular vision—one that could only belong to Shin Yanagisawa.

Edition of 900 copies, of which 50 are solely available from Photobookstore, with an exclusive cover image as shown.