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.
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
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.’
Mark Wyse: Seizure Damiani Press2011 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.
“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.
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.
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.
“Kazan”, is the first publication of japanese photographer Mayumi Hosokura. In her work, she creates dreamlike juxtapositions of the human form with natural and organic shapes and textures.
“Kazan” was published by artbeat publishers, where you still get a copy.
2012.
208 pp., color illustraitons throughout,
8½x10¼”.
Publisher’s Description:
Beauty stalks us with a condescending eye. From television screens to magazines, shop windows to billboards, there is hardly a face or figure that hasn’t been trimmed, polished, or reinvented to beleaguer us with an increasingly unattainable paradigm of physical beauty. Here Cara Phillips explores the reassuring environments and ominous implements of cosmetic surgery. The book provides a voyeuristic view into the pristine temples of physical transformation while simultaneously offering an insightful critique of our culture of narcissism.
Title: Leer Author: Nico Baumgarten Language: german / english Number of pages: 220 Size: 15 cm x 20 cm Edition size: 150 Printing: digital offset Binding: handsewed french link stitch, naked spine Cover: hardcover made of recycled corrugated cardboard Price: 36 € + shipping
ISBN: ISBN-free book
Leer is an ordinary town somewhere in Germany. You can find ordinary people here, just like everywhere else. From the ex-junkie to the conservative head of a family everybody strives to pursue his own life according to his agenda. But the predominant normality in Leer makes one question how much room there really is for individuality. For one’s own dreams, hopes and expectations.
20 pages / 23 x 34 cm / full color offset / 2012 / first edition of 500 copies / handnumbered / soft cover Available in the store
Publisher’s Description:
“These girls? Their curves sketch infinity; their hollows end in, wisps of flesh, dark at times; their eyes pierce the image when they reach you. Waxy bodies drawing the image towards a less synthetic century. Artificial?
Bodies are framed, embedded and enclosed in a photograph. Caught in between limited spaces: in the depths of a boulder, on a rocky edge, on the top of a shelf. Impossible to escape. Bodies and curios end their way here: still lives aiming at anthropomorphic shapes. In a haze of orange, green, yellow or blue—everything surfaces and evokes the colors of ancient masters.
Another fact: these images are noisy. Noise, a misguiding word that silences light, and nourishes black and white for a richer silver print. These selfish pictures, pose, freeze out of a storyline. But they take everything they can from the present: urban oddities, the wanderings of a contempary eye, and fragments of a no longer ostentatious luxury. These images, they steal everything: remnants of forgotten French films, some Garrel, some Rivette—but there is no Amour Fou, only an imposed distance. Are they found images? They don’t care about their times, because they curl up—in the city, in wilderness, in a studio or in a forsaken interior. They become a new kind of daguerreotype. It takes us the past to progress. Light as feathers, round as breasts, these images are voluptuous, straightforward, they swallow everything. A sentence by Henry Michaux fits them well: “In the warm mist of a young girl’s breath I found a place…”.
