Antonio M. Xoubanova
Casa de Campo

With a text by Luis Lopez

144 pages
72 colour plates
15 cm x 21 cm
Printed and embossed linen hardcover
Publication date: February 2013
ISBN 9781907946400

Publisher’s Description:

“Someone was here, somebody did this. Stuff happens here.”

Casa de Campo is a photographic fable rooted firmly in the realities of Madrid’s largest public park. Casa de Campo sprawls, five times the size of Central Park, to the west of Madrid. Between 2008 and 2012 Antonio M. Xoubanova wandered the paths of this urban woodland examining the people, animals and objects he saw as if he was on uncommon ground. Inadvertently he found himself transforming a given reality into narrative fiction.

Designed as an ancient fairy tale, the book is made up of five chapters referring respectively to love, death, fleeting moments, symbols and a lack of direction. It examines both the symbolic and the oneiric through the gathering together of people, animals, animate and inanimate beings within this single space. In his text Luis Lopez posits that for any researcher, archaeologist, intruder or anthropologist their findings will always be the same: someone was here, somebody did this. Stuff happens here.

These traces are what drew Xoubanova back into Casa de Campo over the years.

(via MACK - Antonio M. Xoubanova - Casa de Campo)

•  24 January 2013

•  24 January 2013

Looking back/ Looking forward Issue 1

This book is a a co-production between Impossible Colour Collective and Atem Books and is published under the imprint Emboscadura Ediciones (which has previously published books by Synchrodogsand Sasha Kurmaz, now sold out).

Looking back / looking forward Issue 1 has been curated by the guest curator Harold Diaz (photographer and collagist based in Brooklyn, New York). The coordinator and editor is Piotr Drewko (curator based in London), founder of Impossible Colour Collective. The book contains a selection of photographies of contemporary photographers, an interview with Harold Diaz and an essay by Ryan Whatley.

Looking back / looking forward project is a strictly photographic idea – it deals with current tendency in photography to produce more and more images and fill the world with them. Proposing a challenge to make a coherent conglomeration of the visual we can encounter every day became a base for the project.

(via Looking back / looking forward Issue 1 - Booklaunching at Kowasa bookshop | Atem Books | Editorial)

•  17 January 2013

David Schoerner 
All my photographs as of 7/11/2011 photocopied in the order they are listed on my website (Then I took them all down)

Edition of 20, signed & numbered
8.5 x 11 in.,
250 pages, stapled, b/w xerox

(via David Schoerner)

•  16 January 2013

ATLA S _ Israel Ariño

24 x 33 cm.
52 pages.
Ediciones anómalas, 2012

Publisher’s Description:

Israel Ariño is a creator of sensations and seeker of revelations who has discovered in black and white photography the ideal medium for expression. The resulting photographs are timeless, almost symbolic, they wring all possibilities from the gaze in order to bring it into reality, a parallel nature, unusual elements and unimagined connections. The photos make up an autobiographical album which the author has brought together in three separate yet complementary series: Obirar, Crónicas de un desembarco and that  which is presented here, Atlas, in Israel Ariño’s words a synthesis of his experiences, obsessions and discoveries.

Atlas is a personal response to the challenge of representing the nomadic nature of experience. Israel Ariño’s gaze glides through reality and is transformed in an extraordinary and timeless world, caught and invented at the same time. Objects emerge and sensations are evoked in his photographs which were not there at first glance, and which only appear when the image materialises and the viewer then looks at it. Only then can we see the poetry that was waiting, crouched in the treetops, or in a half-seen figure, the reflections in a river, in a ghostly jellyfish or in the joy of momentary abandon.

Israel Ariño plays around with similar experiences like obsessive ideas which end up as different photographs. It is the creative manifestation of a personal landscape, the mapping out of a fictional space created from an inner entity which, though it is intentional, is never fully specified or clearly defined, like an ancient map in which the edges and contours get lost in undiscovered lands, which in turn invite new explorations and creations.The continuously developing body of work by this fine-arts graduate photographer, born in Barcelona in 1974, has appeared in numerous collections, both public and private, particularly in France, the country where the artist has found the greatest affinities in the artistic and photography media.Israel Ariño, inspired by nineteenth century photography, is a founder-member of the Atelier Retaguardia group and personifies a creative process rooted in the tradition of photography. His work makes use of all the varied possibilities that photography has to offer: he has worked with camera obscura, with such techniques as collodion wet plate or photoengraving, and attempts to take them into terrains characteristic of their history. They are resources and tools which have allowed him to create photography with a large dose of realism yet with a deep allegorical strain. He finishes the work himself in the laboratory where he develops his prints, thus finalising the research process and always leaving room for an element of surprise. The same surprise which awaits all who admire his photographs.

www.israelarino.com

Atlas is made up of 3 different editions, all signed and numbered:

Standard edition of 300 copies.

Special edition of 75 copies including an original print 

Collector’s edition of 25 copies including 3 original prints and a photogravure by the author, delivered in a unique hand-made case created by Àngels Arroyo.

•  16 January 2013

Amy Stein &
Stacy Arezou Mehrfar
Tall Poppy Syndrome

8 x 9.75 inches
55 four-color plates
96 pages, hardcover

ISBN 978-0-9833942-2-8

Publisher’s Description:

In 2010, American photographers Amy Stein and Stacy Arezou Mehrfar embarked on a month-long road trip throughout New South Wales, Australia’s most populous state. They were interested in investigating the Australian social phenomenon of tall poppy syndrome, in which successful people, or the “tall poppies,” get “cut down to size” and are resented or ridiculed because their talents or achievements distinguish them from their peers. Is the syndrome real? Can it be documented or observed? Stein and Mehrfar set out to explore quintessential Australian life and find what evidence they could of the existence of this phenomenon. They spent their days meeting and photographing everyday Australians—from schoolchildren in their plaid uniforms to young surfers playing at the beach to grandmothers meeting at their social clubs—all the while learning about the relationship between the group and the individual within Australian society. The resulting photographs in Tall Poppy Syndrome present their investigation into and observations of daily Australian life.

Amy Stein’s work explores man’s evolving isolation from community, culture, and the environment. Her work has been the subject of numerous national and international exhibitions and is included in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, and the George Eastman House Photography Collection among many other public and private institutions. Her first monograph,Domesticated, was published by Photolucida in 2008.

Stacy Arezou Mehrfar is an American photo-based artist living in Sydney, Australia. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including the United States, Australia, and Europe and is included in several public and private collections. In May 2011 she had her curatorial debut with “No Direction Home,” an exhibition commissioned for the Head On Photo Festival in Sydney, Australia, which featured contemporary American photographers working within the tradition of road trip photography.

(via DECODE BOOKS | Tall Poppy Syndrome)

•  8 January 2013

Zwelethu Mthethwa.
Photographs by Zwelethu Mthethwa.
Revue Niore, 2012.
108 pp., 70 color illustrations,
5x7”.

Publisher’s Description:

Zwelethu Mthethwa graduated at Michaels School (Fine Arts) and an MFA in Art (Roshester Institute of Technology, United Kingdom). First painter and watercolorist, in 1980 he photographed the people living in slums and workers. ‘Most photographers use B&W photography when working in informal settlements to make a dark and gloomy atmosphere. I chose the color because emotionally there are more advantages. My goal is to show the pride of the people. I find rich and eclectic styles in cheap materials used for the decoration of houses ’

One can tell that Zwelethu Mthethwa is a painter and a photographer. Ever since he began to take his first photographs, his work has bespoken an inclination for careful compositions and colours which are always cleverly restrained, measured. Colour is an expression of intimacy with the soul. Colour represents light. His images also betrayed from the outset traits of a very sophisticated classicism. They are the kind of paintings that we have not seen produced for centuries, paintings which seem like they should adorn hypothetical family homes, stately mansions or manor houses; paintings which, just like those people who seem to live in a past which prolongs the memory, seem to project themselves into the future, in other words into immortality.
Simon Njami

(via photo-eye Bookstore | Zwelethu Mthethwa: Zwelethu Mthethwa | photobook)

•  7 January 2013

Diffusion: Unconventional Photography, Volume IV

Hardbound with foil & dust jacket

8.5”x11”

96 pages, full color, offset press

English language

Published 2012

limited edition of 100

Softbound

96 pages, full color, offset press, perfect bound

Cover: UV coated

8.25 in. × 10.75 in.

English language

Published 2012 


ISBN: 978-0-9844432-2-2 


limited edition of 1,000

FEATURED ARTISTS

Jennifer B Hudson

John Chervinsky

Leah McDonald

Jim Leisy

ARTICLES 


Exploring the Muse: Susan kae Grant, Ken Rosenthal and Polly Chandler by Susan Burnstine 


Transient Reflections and Fixed Impressions: Thoughts on the Physical Photograph in a Digital Age by Jeffrey Baker


Abstract Photography by Ryan Nabulsi

http://www.diffusionmag.com

purchase in the store

•  3 January 2013

Skogen. 
Photographs by Robert Adams. 
Yale University Press, New Haven,2012.
100 pp., 46 tritone illustrations,
9¾x11”.

Publisher’s Description:

Skogen is the Swedish word for forest, and while the dense woods featured in Robert Adams’s most recent series of photographs grow near his home in Oregon, the pictures evoke a wild utopia, and convey a hushed, primeval awe. In this volume, the latest to document Adams’s ongoing quest to find form amid the chaos of nature, shadows predominate, tempered by an ambiguous light that is unique to the Pacific Northwest. Skogen features forty-six previously unpublished images, a body of work that is among the most pictorially complex of Adams’s distinguished career. Also included are an introduction by the artist and a poem by the acclaimed poet Denise Levertov. This pairing is meaningful; as Michael Fried wrote in Bookforum, ‘Adams’s artistic ideal…has much in common with that of a certain sort of lyric poem, one that similarly has not the slightest room for carelessness of any sort.’

(via photo-eye Bookstore | Robert Adams: Skogen | photobooks)

•  31 December 2012

Mark Wyse: Seizure
Damiani Press 2011
8.25 x 10.5 inches,
96 pages,
hardcover 

Publisher’s Description:

This monograph by Mark Wyse is based upon a sequence of photographs (some by Wyse, some appropriated from other sources) juxtaposing disparate images as a means of exploring modes of photographic—and personal—meaning. Framing the book’s visual material, a dialogue of textual fragments introduces two voices that ruminate on the sense of seizure experienced while viewing a photograph.

Also see Hard Copy / Soft Image by Charlie White

(via Project Projects — Mark Wyse: Seizure)

•  27 December 2012

2 Solitudes 
by: Raymond Meeks
winter 2012
dumbsaint editions

“2 solitudes” w/gelatin silver print #1
Edition 1 of 40
re-appropriated cover 16x12 inches

Publisher’s Description:

“2 solitudes”  presents a landscape of hardwood forests and rock walls as photographed from my car, suggesting the compression of space, time and memory. even as “inner voice” has summoned stillness and silence, a dominant impulse signals toward a search beyond for level ground and a place of belonging;  a beauty which knows the horizon

from “a field guide to getting lost”, rebecca solnit writes: 
“how will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you? suspended in the beautiful solitude of an open road,when the blue is deepest on the horizon a joy close to pain. every love has its landscape, as a place possesses you in its absence, takes on another life as sense of place, a faraway deep inside”.

“2 solitudes” is intended as an expression of deep gratitude to my dear friend jemma craig and her husband and son; patrick and rowan driscoll. I wished to make for them, a gathering of pictures which might be  considered beautiful, generous and enduring;  a quiet offering in return for their gracious and expansive giving.  and, finally, to share it with you.

•  21 December 2012

ianvancoller:

This is my new artist book called Mali Monuments. 16.5”x10.5” (or 16.5”x21” when open) Limited edition of only 15 copies bound in the Drum Leaf form. Cover and endsheets are hand made papers by Mary Hark, and the book is expertly bound by Rory Sparks. The cover text, title page and colophon are all handset letterpress, also by Rory Sparks.

•  11 December 2012

eyecurious:

Gomma Books have just released Mono, Volume 1, a collection of black-and-white contemporary photography. The list of participating photographers is long (Anders Petersen, Andy Spyra, Antoine D’Agata, Chris Rain, Daisuke Yokota, Devin Yalkin, Francesco Merlini, Gabrielle Duplantier, Giancarlo Ceraudo, Hans-Christian Schink, Jacob Aue Sobol, Jan von Holleben, Jukka-pekka Jalovaara, Keizo Kitajima, Kim Thue, Maki, Marco Vernaschi, Margaret M. de Lange, Michael Ackerman, Olivier Pin Fat, Roger Ballen, Scot Sothern, Sebastian Liste, Sofia Lopez Mañan, Stephane C, Susu Laroche, Tomasz Lazar, Trent Parke and Tricia Lawless Murray) but there is a strong current of photography in the Anders Petersen vein here. Interestingly they crowd-sourced the text for the book, asking bloggers, critics and curators each to write a few words about a particular series (full disclosure: I was asked to write the text on Michael Ackerman). As the title suggests there are two more volumes of Mono to come and there is already a shortlist of photographers for Volume 2 on the Gomma Books website. This is the second of two exclusively black-and-white collections of contemporary photography released this year, the other being Nocturnes by AM Projects and both are worth checking out.

•  10 December 2012