Atlas photographique de la Lune
Maurice Lœwy & Pierre Puiseux
MAPP Editions
EPUB3 for iPad

Publisher’s Descrption:

Atlas photographique de la Lune, considered the ultimate achievement of nineteenth century astronomical photography, is digitally showcased for the first time. The atlas is comprised of 71 photographs that together map the moon’s surface, and it took 14 years to complete from 1896–1910. Issued in 12 booklets, which are prized by collectors, complete sets are extremely rare.

In this digital rendering of all 12 booklets, each photograph is accompanied by a semi-transparent overlay on which Lœwy and Puiseux mapped the craters and rocky peaks that mark the moon’s surface, and these are now available at the tap of a finger.

Accompanying the digital edition is an introduction by Quentin Bajac, Chief Curator of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

(via Atlas photographique de la Lune | MAPP)

•  28 February 2013

Tags | mapp editions | mack books | 2013 | ebook |

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

Tags | Mack Books | photobook | 2013 |

War Primer 2
E-book optimised for iPad

Publisher’s Description:

War Primer 2 originated as a book published by MACK in 2011 and sold out immediately. It is a sequel to Bertolt Brecht’s War Primer (1955), which was concerned with images of the Second World War, whereas War Primer 2 updates Brecht’s piece with images of conflict generated by both sides of the so-called “War on Terror”.

War Primer 2 was produced in the artists’ studio in a limited edition of 100 copies, applying silkscreen and offset printed images to 100 copies of a 1998 edition (Libris, London) of Bertolt Brecht’s 1955 War Primer. This digital version combines critical and academic essays about War Primer with a screen based rendition of the artist’s book.

(via War Primer 2)

•  27 November 2012

Tags | ebook | mapp editions | mack books | 2012 | 2011 |

Jem Southam
The River Winter

Text by Richard Hamblyn

96 pages
40 colour plates
33 cm x 27.7 cm
Embossed hardcover

Publication date: November 2012

ISBN 9781907946288

Publisher’s Description:

“Winters, like ice ages, are Janus faced, for after the freeze comes thaw and flood, as water is returned to life and movement. Freeze, thaw, flood: the great climatic cycles that created the topography of the northern hemisphere, and which continue to shape the idea of winter that lies deep in our cultural imagination.”
Richard Hamblyn

In November 2010, after a photographic lull of half a year, Jem Southam took a photograph which became the first in this series, The River Winter and which spurred him to make one of the most concentrated bodies of work in his career. From late autumn through to the earliest signs of spring, along the banks of the river Exe in Devon, Southam chose locations and took photographs, returning at regular intervals. This pattern continued for the next five months with Southam documenting the subtle agencies of change transforming the landscape. By the end of January 2011 he realized this had become a new work, one that caught the effects of the Earth’s turn on film, one which followed the passage of a single winter.

The shift in seasons is presented through a sequence of ten by eight colour contact prints, with which an essay by Richard Hamblyn explores how, since the last ice-age, winter has embedded itself into our cultural psyche.

(via MACK - Jem Southam - The River  Winter)

•  11 November 2012

Tags | Mack Books | Jem Southam | 2012 | photobook |

Publisher’s Description:

A physical delineation of nature terminates at the point where the sphere of intellect begins, and a new world of mind is opened to our view. It marks the limit, but does not pass it.
Alexander von Humboldt (1845)

The aesthetics of science, nature and the materiality of things are recurring themes in Mårten Lange’s work and in Another Language, his first major publication, Lange delves even deeper with this fascination for the natural world.

Combining images of flora, fauna and natural phenomena in an intimate and beautifully crafted book, Lange teases out a subtle narrative - a meteor crashes, a landmass is visible and a distant planet occupies the final page - but the book is more akin to the workings of a scientist collecting specimens. Together the photographs create a cryptic and heterogeneous index of nature, with recurring shapes, patterns and texture, where the clarity and simplicity of the individual photographs contrasts with the enigmatic whole.

Shot in his signature black and white style, his subjects are isolated from their environments, taking on sculptural qualities. Ranging from the sublime (lightning, mountains, a star) to the commonplace (ducks, rocks, a fish), these phenomena all attain equal importance through the democracy of Lange’s photographic treatment.

(via MACK - Mårten Lange - Another Language)

•  11 October 2012

Tags | mack books | 2012 | marten lange | photobook |

School of Visual Arts  > Photography, Narrative and the Book

OVERVIEW:

In 2011 artist Christian Patterson’s monograph Redheaded Peckerwood was published by MACK to great critical acclaim, being named one of the best books of the year by Art in America, The New York Times, TIME and The Guardianand selling out the first print run. In this talk, Christian Patterson is joined by writer Luc Sante and publisher Michael Mack to discuss photography, narrative and the book. Presented by the BFA Photography Department andDear Dave, magazine.

More information can be found on facebook :
https://www.facebook.com/events/106781052811449/ 

•  24 September 2012

Tags | Mack Books | Events | SVA | Christian Patterson |

Gerry Johansson 
Deutschland

352 pages
176 duotone plates
17 cm x 24 cm
Cloth cover with two tipped-in prints
Publication date: October 2012
ISBN 978-1-907946-35-6

Publisher’s Description:

Following the phenomenal success of Gerry Johansson’s 2011 publication Pontiac, this October MACK will release Deutschland.Deutschland completes an eighteen-year series of books for which Johansson travelled through America, Sweden, Germany and Mongolia.

In Deutschland, Johansson has produced a visual encyclopedia, cataloging the rural and urban landscapes of Germany. Presented in alphabetical order, the book is devoid of human presence. Johansson’s images traditionally lack a human element but here it is reduced. Discouraging the speculation reserved for reading photography books, the wonder if the order follows a geographical path, is it telling a story? Johansson’s regimentation of the works asks us to look, very simply, at their content.

In carefully structured greyscale images, Johansson sensitively explores German history through its landscape, picking out the industrial scenes, industrial buildings, residential roads and shop fronts. Johansson’s quiet photographs are carefully constructed, grid patterns recur constantly and each frame is packed with information.

(via MACK - Gerry Johansson - Deutschland)

•  23 September 2012

Tags | Mack Books | Photobook | 2012 | Gerry Johansson |

J Carrier 
Elementary Calculus

128 pages
74 colour plates
23.5 cm x 19.5 cm
Embossed hardcover

Publication date: September 2012

ISBN 978-1-907946-23-3

Publisher’s Description:

“And your visions 
are your exile in a world where a shadow has no identity, no gravity. 
You walk as if you were someone else.”
Mahmoud Darwish

J Carrier has had a nomadic lifestyle, moving from Washington D.C. to Ecuador, and then to Africa and the Middle East, every move taking him further from his friends and family. During his time in Israel, Carrier began to feel an affinity with the migrants who had landed in the dusty city of Tel Aviv, relating to their experience as an outsider, someone far from home.

Elementary Calculus, through a series of portraits, landscapes and still life photographs, observes the publicly private moments of these peregrine foreigners as they attempt to connect back to their homes. In his documentation of migrants and refugees in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, Carrier explores the distance between reality and desire – the want for what was and the hope for what will be – and traces the manner in which we navigate the points between the unknowns. His photographs resonate with the sense that in a foreign country geographical distance loses its physical measure and home feels like a hazy memory, a half-remembered dream.

Carrier’s subtle yet striking images of Israel and the West Bank throw up more questions than they answer. What does this influx of foreigners mean in a nation that is defined by ethnicity and competing claims of ownership?  And how does this complex situation affect these new varieties of refugees?  Is there promise in this land for them?

After graduating with a degree in biological sciences, J. Carrier became a drummer in a punk-rock band. He spent most of the past decade living and working in Africa and Israel and now lives in Brooklyn, NY with his wife. He won the fine art award in the New York Photo Awards in 2010, was the Grand Prize Winner at the National Geographic Traveller / PDN “World in Focus” awards in 2010, and was nominated for the Santa Fe Prize for Photography in 2011.

(via MACK - J Carrier - Elementary Calculus)

•  2 September 2012

Tags | Mack Books | photobook | 2012 | J Carrier |

Anne Sophie Merryman 
Mrs. Merryman’s Collection

112 pages
86 colour plates
24.5 cm x 27 cm
Hardback

Publication date: June 2012

ISBN 978-1-907946-25-7

Publisher’s Description: 

Anne-Marie Merryman collected postcards between 1937 and 1980, a collection inherited by her granddaughter, Anne Sophie Merryman.

The book, Mrs. Merryman’s Collection, presents the postcards which together form the story of two intertwined lives - one life lived travelling the world through the postcard images, the other a child and then adult whose life and relationship to her own history and her future were influenced by the collection.

While Anne-Marie and Anne Sophie never met, both their lives were inspired by the postcard collection - a relationship that was born, and continues to flourish, in the realms of the imagination.

Mrs. Merryman’s Collection is the winner of the First Book Award 2012, an award by the National Media Museum and MACK to support the publication of a book by a previously unpublished photographer.

(via MACK - Anne Sophie Merryman - Mrs. Merryman’s Collection)

•  18 June 2012

Tags | mack books | photobook | 2012 | anne sophie merryman |

The Soho described by Robert Louis Stevenson in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde as ‘a district of some city in a nightmare’ is dramatically different to the one discovered in 2011 by renowned Swedish photographer Anders Petersen. As part of a series of off-site artist commissions supported by Bloomberg, Petersen was invited by The Photographers’ Gallery to undertake a four-week residency in the bubbling creative underbelly of London. Turning his direct and unflinching gaze to the streets of Soho, Petersen produced a series which is both penetrating and sensitive to his subjects. His intimate, diaristic style of coarse black and white photography captures the essence of today’s Soho while drawing you back into the depths of its history.

For a month Petersen immersed himself in the life of the famous London district, documenting the streets, pubs, cafes and private homes of the residents. This latest installment of his series City Diaries is a testament to the dynamism and diversity of the area and the people who frequent and live in it.

(via MACK - Anders Petersen - SOHO)

•  20 May 2012

Tags | Mack Books | Anders Petersen | Photobook |

Paul Graham 
The Present

114 pages, including 13 gatefolds

24.5 cm x 30.5 cm
Hardback with embossed cover

Publication date: April 2012

ISBN 978-1-907946-18-9

Publisher’s Description:

Street photography is perhaps the defining genre of photographic art. Seminal works by Walker Evans, Harry Callahan, Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand display photography’s astonishing dance with life, and its unique role in forming our perceptions of the modern world.

The Present is Paul Graham’s contribution to this legacy. The images in this book come unbidden from the streets of New York, but are not quite what we might expect, for each moment is brought to us with its double – two images taken from the same location, separated only by the briefest fraction of time. We find ourselves in sibling worlds, where a businessman with an eye patch becomes, an instant later, a man with an exaggerated wink; a woman eating a banana walks towards us, and a small focus shift reveals the blind man right behind her.

Although there are flashes of surprise – a woman walks confidently down the street one moment, only to tumble to the ground a second later – for the most part there is little of the drama street photography is addicted to. People arrive and depart this quiet stage, with the smallest shift of time and attention revealing the thread between them. A suited young businessman crosses the road, only to be replaced by his homeless alternate; a woman in a pink t-shirt is engulfed with tears, but seconds later there is a content shopper in her place.

The Present gives us an impression quite different to most street photography where life is frozen rigid. Here we glimpse the continuum: before/after, coming/going, either/or. A ‘present’ that is a fleeting and provisional alignment, with no singularity or definitiveness; a world of shifting awareness and alternate realities, where life twists and spirals in a fraction of a second to another moment, another world, another consciousness.

The Present is the third in Paul Graham’s trilogy of projects on America which began with American Night in 2003 and was followed in 2007 by a shimmer of possibility (winner of the Paris Photo Book Prize 2011 for the most significant photo book of the past 15 years). The Present takes Graham’s reputation as a master of the book form to new heights, employing multiple gatefolds to convey passages of time and the unfolding of urban life.

(via MACK - Paul Graham - The Present)

•  27 April 2012

Tags | Mack Books | photobook | Paul Graham |

Thomas Demand 
The Dailies

64 pages
16 colour plates
37 cm x 34 cm
Large format leporello bound book with magnetic closing system in faux leather
Hardback embossed

Publication date: April 2012

ISBN 978-1-907946-19-6

Publisher’s Description:

“Existing in a state of continual motion, from the hotel room to the road, the life of the travelling salesman, the commercial traveller, is experienced as a perpetual passenger, punctuated by both the shifting of place and the marking of time.”

In the mid 1970s, architect Harry Seidler designed a space for the historic Commercial Travellers’ Association in Sydney, Australia. In collaboration with Pier Luigi Nervi, he created a circular building that sprouts up from the street like a radiating flower.

For the 25th Kaldor Public Art Project, Thomas Demand’s series The Dailies occupies an entire floor of Seidler’s structure. The floor of sixteen bedrooms, which house The Dailies, extend off a circular corridor creating a labyrinthine effect. Demand’s images sit above the beds in each room, the transient scenes capturing everyday moments and objects, suspended in time like the environment around them.

Working within the parameters of his now well-known technique, Demand created carefully formed paper and card sculptures, photographed and then destroyed them. His creations are based on things he saw and photographs he took while travelling and walking the street. Demand describes the series as like Haiku poetry, simple fragments strung together to inspire reflection.

The Dailies includes contributions by designer Miuccia Prada and US author Louis Begley.

The book, a work of art in itself, expands to a 16-pointed star, its concertina pages unfurling to echo the shape of the CTA building.

(via MACK - Thomas Demand - The Dailies)

•  22 March 2012

Tags | Mack Books | Thomas Demand | photobook |

 

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.”
Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)

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.

(via MACK BOOKS)

•  2 October 2011

Tags | Taryn Simon | Mack Books | photobook |