Hard Copy is an innovative research and publishing platform that aims to reflect on artist books and printmaking, central to emerging artistic and design practices. Initiated in 2010 by artist, curator and tutor Delphine Bedel, this three-year project is conceived for the Master of Fine Arts WORK.MASTER at the Geneva University of Art and Design.
Hard Copy explore the space of a book and formats of display, editorial concepts, extended printing techniques, graphic design and typographic researches. By publishing artist books and multiples and curating exhibitions, workshops and lectures series with keynote speakers (Seth Siegelaub, Daniel McClean, Dexter Sinister, etc), Hard Copy aims to contextualize and expand this research historically and theoretically.
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11.5 in. x 13.25 in. / 68 pages / 27 full color plates / Casebound in Japanese saifu cloth with French fold dustjacket / Edition of 500 / ISBN 978-0-9818770-3-7 Publisher’s Description: While Ian van Coller was growing up in the 1970s, the black women working in his parents’ upper class home in a whites-only suburb of Johannesburg were valued as members of the family. Nannies and maids who helped raise the children and run the household, they were ever-present confidants and friends. And yet they were conspicuously absent from family vacations and photo albums. Apartheid, though it has been officially consigned to history, continues to live on in nearly a million South African homes where blacks still serve the needs of the white minority. Ian van Coller’s first monograph, Interior Relations, deftly probes this enduring racial fault line with a simple yet elegant premise: he has asked black housekeepers, nannies and maids to wear their finest clothes, and to sit for formal portraits in the homes they care for. Though the subjects’ white employers are never shown, evidence of their privilege crowds around the women, forever out of reach: every portrait a cameo of apartheid in redux. For Sindiwe Magona, one of South Africa’s most celebrated black writers, working as a domestic in her youth provided a desperately needed but meager income that she was forced to supplement by selling sheep heads on the street. Serving white families represented a constriction of the soul that was broken only by the force of her will to become a writer. Magona’s introduction channels the voices of van Coller’s subjects through her own years as a domestic worker. Ian van Coller’s delicate and reverential portraits, coupled with Sindiwe Magona’s searing essay, offer a starkly original view of the intersection of race and class in post-apartheid South Africa.Interior Relations
Photographs by Ian van Coller
Essay by Sindiwe Magona
(via Charles Lane Press | Interior Relations)
Tags | Ian van Coller | Interior Relations | South Africa | Charles Lane Press | photobook | New york Art Book Fair |
Taryn Simon
A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters
With numerous gatefolds, 3 different paper stocks and over 1000 full colour images Texts by Homi K. Bhabha and Geoffrey Batchen 864 pages, 25 cm x 34 cm, Hardcover Publication date: May 2011 ISBN 978-1-907946-05-9 Publisher’s Description: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters is a significant and extensive book of a major new body of work by the American artist Taryn Simon with texts by Homi K. Bhabha and Geoffrey Batchen, to accompany an exhibition at Tate Modern, London in May 2011 and Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin in September 2011. Over a four-year period, Simon traveled around the world recording bloodlines and their related stories. In each chapter, the external forces of territory, power, circumstance or religion collide with the internal forces of psychological and physical inheritance. The subjects Simon documents include feuding families in Brazil, victims of genocide in Bosnia, the body double of Saddam Hussein’s son, Uday, and the living dead in India. Her collection is at once cohesive and arbitrary, mapping the relationships among chance, blood and other components of fate. A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters is divided into eighteen chapters. Each chapter is comprised of three segments: an annotation, a large portrait series depicting bloodline members and a second series containing photographic evidence. 817 portraits are systematically arranged within their chapters. Simon includes empty portraits, representing living members of a bloodline who could not be photographed. The reasons for these absences are provided in the captions and include imprisonment, military service, dengue fever and women not granted permission to be photographed. Simon’s presentation explores the struggle to determine codes and patterns embedded in the narratives she documents. These narratives are recognisable as variants (versions, renderings, adaptations) of historical or future episodes. In contrast to the systematic ordering of a bloodline, the seductive elements of these stories - violence, resilience, corruption and survival - disorient the work’s highly structured appearance.
Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)
(via MACK BOOKS)
Tags | Taryn Simon | Mack Books | photobook |
“In quiet rooms young girls are writing poetry”
David Rathman
12.75” x 17.25”
case bound archival pigment ink prints
20 pages
Publisher’s Description:
“In quiet rooms young girls are writing poetry” is an artist’s book that reproduces David Rathman’s recent war-themed watercolors. The paintings depict tanks, planes, warships and helicopters. As with Rathman’s cowboy and car pieces, the imagery is paired with hand-written texts and legends.
Using “language in a paradoxical way to confront the imagery,” Rathman avoids a head-on collision with the “heaviness” of his subject. According to the artist, “There’s a lot of indirection and evasion going on; to see these aggressive menacing subjects twisting with uncertainty struck me as humorous and—in a sideways, minor way—profound.”
Like a series of memento mori greeting cards, Rathman’s book is sometimes morose, sometimes playful, with the artist addressing “serious and ordinary issues: death, fracture, joy, compulsion, testosterone and deliverance.”
signed edition of 200
(via Location Books In quiet rooms young girls are writing poetry)
Tags | Location Books | artist book | David Rathman |
Currently in transit from the printer to my house: The first book of what is going to be a series, Conversations with Photographers. Each book is based on interviews/conversations that were published on Conscientious before. But there is more: There are exclusive follow-up interviews, which will only appear in the book.
This first book features the 2006 conversation with Brian Ulrich, plus an extended, new interview with him, talking about the upcoming release of his book. Hellen van Meene has a brand-new body of work coming out, a deviation from the portraits of adolescents she is well known for. The (new) interview in the book delves into all the details. Lastly, in addition to the 2009 interview with Chris Anderson you also get a new, follow-up one.
The book is a small paperback, printed locally (Massachusetts). You can fit it into your pocket and take it anywhere.
Conversations with Photographers will be sold online, with sales starting around August 15th (I’ll be busy teaching at the MFA program I’m part of until then). I’ll announce all the details on Conscientious - so stay tuned.
Pontiac by Gerry Johansson
Clothbound hardcover with tipped-in photo
17.5 x 24.5 cm portrait
160 pages, 111 plates
ISBN 978-1-907946-09-7
Publishers Description:
Sensitive and subtle, Johansson hints at town life through the occasional car or lone figure but for the most part draws the reader’s eye to the simplistic architecture of a small American town. In singling out Pontiac, Johansson offers comment on more than the landscape, photographing a microcosm of the effects of the decline in the auto industry in Michigan. His images offer us the opportunity to analyze the landscape with a characteristic Swedish melancholy, echoing the new topographical photographers of the 1970s.
Pontiac marks the end of an eighteen year project by Gerry Johansson. In 1993 Johansson visited America, taking photographs on his travels from one small town to the next. He traveled through the states again in 1994 and 1996, repeating this photographic process. This work was compiled in Amerika, published in 1998. It was followed by a collection of photographs from his homeland, Sverige in 2005. Critical response led Johansson to narrow his camera’s eye to a single town, Kvidinge, a portrait of a Swedish town, published in 2007. Johansson revisited America in 2010, traveling to Pontiac, Michigan, and this became the basis for his final piece in this series.
(via MACK BOOKS)
Tags | Gerry Johansson | Pontiac | Mack | MACK BOOKS | Photobook |
Sun Feels Honest Todae
Terence Koh (New York, USA)
40 Pages, Soft Cover, 22.5 x 30.5 cm, b/w Offset, First Edition, 2011
Issue #8 of THE international with Terence Koh features deep monochrome prints of his haunting photography layered with drawings that form collages evoking avant-garde Japanese underground scenes from the ’70s.
co-published with Radical Silence Production
see also THE international #7
www.asianpunkboy.com
(via Terence Koh)
Hardcover, 20.3 x 23 cm portrait, 416 pp, 212 platesAdam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin
People In Trouble Laughing Pushed To The Ground
Publisher’s Description:
People in trouble laughing pushed to the ground. Soldiers leaning, pointing, reaching. Woman sweeping. Balloons escaping. Coffin descending. Boys standing. Grieving. Chair balancing. Children smoking. Embracing. Creatures barking. Cars burning. Helicopters hovering. Faces. Human figures. Shapes. Birds. Structures left standing and falling… The Belfast Exposed Archive occupies a small room on the first floor at 23 Donegal Street and contains over 14,000 black-and-white contact sheets, documenting the Troubles in Northern Ireland. These are photographs taken by professional photo-journalists and ‘civilian’ photographers, chronicling protests, funerals and acts of terrorism as well as the more ordinary stuff of life: drinking tea; kissing girls; watching trains. Belfast Exposed was founded in 1983 as a response to concern over the careful control of images depicting British military activity during the Troubles. Whenever an image in this archive was chosen, approved or selected, a blue, red or yellow dot was placed on the surface of the contact sheet as a marker. The position of the dots provided us with a code; a set of instructions for how to frame the photographs in this book. Each of the circular photographs shown on the previous pages reveals the area beneath these circular stickers; the part of each image that has been obscured from view the moment it was selected. Each of these fragments – composed by the random gesture of the archivist - offers up a self-contained universe all of its own; a small moment of desire or frustration or thwarted communication that is re-animated here after many years in darkness. The marks on the surface of the contact strips – across the image itself – allude to the presence of many visitors. These include successive archivists, who have ordered, catalogued and re-catalogued this jumble of images. For many years the archive was also made available to members of the public, and sometimes they would deface their own image with a marker pen, ink or scissors. So, in addition to the marks made by generations of archivists, photo editors, legal aides and activists, the traces of these very personal obliterations are also visible. They are the gestures of those who wished to remain anonymous.Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin
People In Trouble Laughing Pushed To The Ground
(via MACK BOOKS)
Tags | Photobook | Mack | Mack Books | Adam Broomberg | Oliver Chanarin |Visible Library by Sam Falls 32 pages, saddle stitched, softcover 9.5 x 7.75 in. / 24.13 x 19.69 cm. ISBN 978-0-9842973-3-7 Published June 2011 Edition of 750
Individually spray painted by the artist with hand-written poem. Limited to 20, signed and numbered.
Description
In a departure from the colorful still life photographs he is known for, artist Sam Falls brings together a series of black and white images for the first time in his limited-edition artist book Visible Library. With a large format camera and a few boxes of expired film, Falls spent a day making these beautiful and haunting pictures in the stacks above the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Like “walking alone in the woods,” as he refers to it, Falls created what can easily be considered his most intimate body of work, a personal meditation on art, history, preservation and the photographic medium.
Artist Bio
Sam Falls (b. 1984, San Diego, CA) spent his formative years in Vermont and now resides in Brooklyn, NY. He received his BA from Reed College in 2007 and his MFA from ICP-Bard in 2010. He has self-published over ten books in addition to titles Color Dying Light (Hassla, 2009), Dans la Chambre Verte (JSBJ, 2010), Light Work (Gottlund Verlag, 2010) and Visible Library (Lay Flat, 2011). Falls’ work has been included in group shows at the International Center of Photography, OHWOW, Blackston Gallery, Bodega, Center for Photography at Woodstock, as well as solo exhibitions at Fotografiska, Capricious Space and Higher Pictures.
Published by: Lay Flat Filed under: Artist Books, Special Editions © 2011 Lay Flat.
Towards a Warm Math Lucas Blalock 8 x 10 in., saddle-stitched, 32 pages, self cover, color offset Essay by John Houck Edition of 500 ISBN 978-0-9825471-7-5 Publication date: April 2011
Towards a Warm Math & I Believe You, Liar
I Believe You, Liar is Blalock’s first artists book
Published by iceberg, iceberg, iceberg 8 x 8 in., perfect bound, 36 pages, color offset Publication date: 2009
