Japan, A Photo Theater . Daido MORIYAMA

Ouarzazate is a small city in the Moroccan desert famous for its movie studios and filming locations, an industry which began with David Lean and Lawrence of Arabia.

Invited by the American Friends of the Marrakech Museum for Photography and the Visual Arts to propose a project for his artist residency there, Ruwedel photographed the movie sets in 2014 and 2016.

Much of the filming activity in Ouarzazate has been for costume and Biblical epics. Cleopatra, The Garden of Eden, The Mummy, The Last Temptation of Christ; but also The Sheltering Sky and The Hills Have Eyes. Many of the sets appear to have been abandoned while others are constantly repurposed.

An Egyptian portal leads to a medieval village. An authentic Kasbah in ruins is actually a ruined replica of a “real” Kasbah elsewhere. Shepherds drive their flocks past “ancient” siege machines and Roman columns. “I was reminded of certain passages in Nathaniel West’s Day of the Locust.”

Far from the American deserts where he has produced much of his work of the past thirty years, in Morocco Ruwedel continues his long term interest in contemporary ruins and the histories of both landscape and landscape photography. The photographs are eerily reminiscent of 19th century European photography of ancient Egypt and the Middle East.

Mark Ruwedel  Ouarzazate

Limited edition 

Signed by the artist

136 pages

Publication date: October 2018

ISBN 978-1-912339-26-6

There are occasions when you have no time to “see” good images — you have to feel them. Once an image has been consciously “seen”, the brain has processed the elements that shape it and very often the image has already vanished; it’s too late. I’m talking about reportage and documentary photography, which is the kind of photography I practice.

We need to develop the automatisms or reflexes that may enable us to capture images on the fly, just as we are able to catch objects that slip through our fingers before they reach the ground. These reactions, that after an intense learning process we have transformed into automatisms, are also the reactions that lead us to lift our cameras up to take horizontal or vertical pictures without having had time to consciously decide which is the best option. Insofar as this process has to do with practicing automatisms and the emptying of intention, it is related to the Zen archer described by Henri Cartier-Bresson.

The exercises help us truly notice things and automate reactions. I began by taking the photographs for this essay as a conceptual exercise, to see what happened when I photographed ‘what was behind’, a variation on the kind of images in BANAL 2,  Hide-and-Seek. I soon realised, however, that the main advantage was that it helped me notice the parallaxes and vanishing points, in this case those of the structures of the gratings. The parallaxes and vanishing points determine the perspectives, and it is important to develop the instincts that enable us choose the ideal perspective for each situation. This is even more important when we are looking for images that are constructed in a non-conventional way, because it implies taking an additional step and taking it instinctively and automatically. As is often the case, even in formal exercises on pure images, literature paves its way and insists on taking centre stage. Despite the fact that this is an exercise and not a story, I’ve followed literary as well as purely formal criteria to page and title this essay.

Cristóbal Hara

which side are you on?/ The trivial essays 6

Cristóbal Hara

Design: Roberto Turégano and Cristóbal Hara

24×17 cm. 32 pages. Softcover.

ISBN: 978-84-09-04940-0

Beware Of The Dog is the journey that means to mature, the transit where the feeling of desire appears together with the idea of death, and the scars that time leaves behind, replacing the space we give to fiction as children, with "the real" and the conscience of the adult world.

BEWARE OF THE DOG . Alex LLovet 

Awards: Voies Off Award Arles, 2018 - finalist / PHOTO IS:RAEL, 2018 - finalist /VI AFTM Photographic Scholarship, 2017 - winner

Binding Hardcover covered with dry blow

Pages 116 +1 detachable

Editorial Ediciones Posibles

Year 2018

Language Spanish, English

New Zealand’s Whanganui River is the lifeblood of the Māori. The tribes of Whanganui take their name, their spirit and their strength from this great river, which flows from the mountains of central North Island through to the Tasman Sea.

In Te Ahi Kā: The Fires of Occupation, photographer Martin Toft explores the deep physical and metaphysical relationships between the river and the Māori. In 1996 Toft spent six months in the middle and upper reaches of the Whanganui River in an area known as the King Country. Here he met Māori who were in the process of reversing the colonisation of their people and returning to their ancestral land, Mangapapapa which is on the steep banks of the river inside Whanganui National Park. At the end of his journey Toft was given the Māori name Pouma Pokai-Whenua.

Returning twenty years later to rekindle the spiritual kinship he had experienced, Toft began to work on this book. Its narrative is situated within the context of the current Whanganui River Deed of Settlement, Ruruku Whakatupua and the projects led by local Māori to settle historical grievances with the government dating back to the 1870s. At the heart of it is the Whanganui tribes’ claim to the river, which is seen by them as both as an ancestor and as a source of both material and spiritual sustenance.

Born in Denmark, Martin Toft is a photographer and educator who works on commissions and long-term independent and collaborative projects. He combines elements of documentary and fine art to explore social, anthropological and cultural themes, often immersing himself in communities for long periods of time. His work is underpinned by archival, historical and conceptual discourse and incorporates photography, video, sound and text. Te Ahi Kā – The Fires of Occupation is edited by Rafal Milach and designed by leading book designer Ania Nałęcka-Milach. The book was shortlisted for the prestigious Kassel Dummy Award 2018.

Published with financial support from Creative New Zealand, Lottery Environment and Heritage Fund and Te Mana o Te Awa grant administered by Ngā Tāngata Tiaki o Whanganui.

TE AHI KĀ: THE FIRES OF OCCUPATION

Martin Toft

Clothbound hardback

200 pages, 205 x 165mm 

89 colour / b&w photographs 

ISBN: 978-1-911306-38-2 (Green / female cover)

ISBN: 978-1-911306-39-9 (Orange / male cover)

1+1=1 is a mathematical mistake but not necessarily an error of logic: if you add a drop of water to another drop of water, how many drops will you have? In a world where mathematics and economics are now more revered than logic and reasoning, this work tries to be a collection of  silent poems on the everyday of anyone anywhere. Poetry as a mean of survival, when all one hears is screams, noises and music you have not chosen. Silence is a blessing and if you add a photograph to another photograph and maybe yet another, how many photographs are you then looking at?

After the highly successful This Business of Living,  Blaufuks' 1+1=1 continues his exploration on the experience of time and memory.

1+1=1 by DANIEL BLAUFUKS

1+1=1 by Daniel Blaufuks

Pierre von Kleist editions

Hardcover, 20.5x25cm, 68 pages, edition of 600 books

ISBN: 978-989-54245

A deep global investigation that tries to answer as difficult questions as: Do people who are condemned to death really deserve to die? or Does any government believe that it can determine whether a human being deserves to live or die?

Seabird is a book of moments observed by American photographer Bobby Doherty between 2014 and 2018. Doherty makes photographs that get to the point. At first glance, some of the photographs inSeabirdfeel gloriously oversimplified, objects and situations simmered down to their bare constituent elements; the clearest glass on the reddest tablecloth, the wettest dew on the softest leaf. Doherty is quick to embrace both the meaningful and meaningless of everyday life with equal measure: emotive, bucolic landscapes and portraits sit alongside city trash, animals, food and flowers. What comes out in the end feels like a photographic egalitarianism, where the tiny and the huge, the mundane and the sublime, shake hands across pages. Despite his acclaim as a still-life photographer, Doherty is keen to avoid categorisation or to overanalyse his images, placing himself in a lineage of those with a powerful urge to make photographs, consistently and extensively, without concern for cohesion or retrospection. Within this openness,Seabird becomes an identifiably human tapestry of images, suggesting the changing of moods, or the shifting of emotions. In the blink of an eye, the work jumps from Hallmark-greeting-card kitsch to wry juxtaposition, from the stereotypical to the absurd.

Seabird . Bobby Doherty

Published by Loose Joints, 224 pgs, 16 × 24 cm, hardcover, 2018, 978-1-912719-02-0

Higher by John Edmonds is a monograph spanning the first decade of his photographic practice and includes texts by Dr. Aaron Rosen, Durga Chew-Bose, and conversation with Mickalene Thomas.

Shortlisted "Photobook Of the Year" Aperture Paris Photo Book Awards 2018

Higher . John Edmonds

Published by Capricious, 100 pgs, 31 × 22 cm, Hardcover, 2018, 978-0-9974446-8-1

“The Mechanical Retina on My Fingertips” is how Suda named his Minox Camera that held him in thrall from 1991 to 1992. The Minox camera is popularly known as a spy camera - It fits in the pocket with a shutter release as light as the blink of an eye. The resulting images developed from 8x11mm negatives are grainy and have a flat perspective. Suda comments that “no other camera ever accompanied my activities so closely.”

In addition to the Minox works which Suda published in his exhibitions during the 90s - “Trance”, “Keelung”, “Family Diary”, “Naked City”, “1987 Taipei City View” and “Before Night Falls”, this book includes more than 400 works selected from over 600 unpublished images which had long been stored in “A Box of Lingering”, as Suda called it.

“The moment” has finally been released.

The Mechanical Retina on My Fingertips

Issei SUDA

Publisher: Zen Foto Gallery

Book Size183 × 128 × 20 mmPages438 pages, 430 imagesBindingSoftcoverPublication Date2018LanguageEnglish, Japanese, ChineseLimited Edition700

30 years have passed since world’s worst nuclear accident happened at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant (ChNPP) in the former Soviet Union (currently, Ukraine). Photojournalist Kazuma Obara explored Ukraine from February 2015 to April 2016.

Project “30” aims to depict people in Ukraine who have a connection to the explosion; whose lives were altered by the sudden release of atomic energy and subsequent political strife. To depict this, Obara challenged traditional visual representation by creating 3 different types of object: two photobooks and a replica of newspaper. The photobook “Exposure” depicts the first 30 years of life of an invisible girl who suffers ongoing medical problems as a result of the disaster. The images were created by using old Ukrainian colour negative film which was found in the abandoned city of Pripyat. Another photobook, “Everlasting,” captured the commute of the ChNPP’s workers between their hometown and the plant as a metaphor for the cycle of repetition. Decontamination work has been handed down from generation to generation since the accident.

Given the difficulty of dealing with radioactive waste it seems as though this process could go on for ever. Supporting those two photobooks, Obara make the replica of an old newspaper which was found in Pripyat from the time helps to feel the passing of time.

Selfpublish, Edition 86, 2016(sold out)

Editorial RM, Edition 1900,2017/2018

//Awards, Nominations//

World Press Photo Award 2016, People, 1st Prize

Magnum Graduates Photography Award, Winner

WIRED Audi INNOVATION AWARD, Winner

Photo-eye Best photobooks 2017 selected by Todd Hido

Athens Photo Festival Portfolio Review2015, Winner

Hariban Award, Finalist

Magnum Lens Culture Award 2016, Finalist

What was once called fashion photography finds itself nowadays positioned along a much broader spectrum of intentions and visual cues. Photographers are borrowing from the aesthetics of fashion, moving away from creating glamorous ideals towards telling stories of social and political inclusivity, diversity, identity, everyday life and an ever changing panorama of lifestyles.

In this issue of Foam Magazine, we present the portfolios of 16 photographers, artists and collectives, each adopting distinct and empowering approaches to contemporary fashion photography. We’ve also had the chance to include a number of insightful and inspiring interviews with people from the fashion photography field. Alongside this, we feature a long form interview between curator Zoé Whitley and fashion designer Grace Wales Bonner, discussing fashion and identity. Furthermore, we are pleased to share an interview between Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director of the Serpentine Galleries, and Tyler Mitchell. They covered optimism, utopias, and how photography can be a way of achieving the impossible. Running throughout are interventions by invited fashion magazines sharing their editorial visions.

Foam Magazine #53: Adorned, The Fashionable Issue

EAN 8710966455234-00053

ISSN 1570-4874

288 pages

Printed on selected specialised paper 

300x230x23 mm

1118 g

Provoke was first published in November 1968 as a dojin-shi, or self-published magazine. It was originally conceived by art critic Koji Taki (1928-2011) and photographer Takuma Nakahira (1938-2015), with poet Takahiko Okada (1939-1997) and photographer Yutaka Takanashi as dojin members. The subtitle for the magazine was “Provocative Materials for Thought”, and each issue was composed of photographs, essays and poems. After releasing the second and third issue with Daido Moriyama as a subsequent member, the group broke up with their last publication First, Abandon the World of Pseudo-Certainty - an overview edition of the three issues. Provoke’s grainy, blurry, and out-of-focus photographs were initially ridiculed as are-bure-boke and stirred a great deal of controversy, yet it had created a strong impact inside and outside of the photography world during that time. However, today, Provoke has become an extremely rare book and very few people have seen the original.

Published as part of The Japanese Box: Facsimile Reprint of Six Rare Photographic Publications of the Provoke Era*, Provoke's facsimile reprint has its photographic images cropped approximately 3 mm from the edges for bookbinding purposes. The reprint also does not include texts by Takahiko Okada due to copyright reasons. Provoke Complete Reprint by NITESHA maintains the original size of the images and includes all original texts, along with the ones by Takahiko Okada. In addition, the volumes will be accompanied by complete English and Chinese translations of the original Japanese texts as a booklet.

PROVOKE Complete Reprint of 3 Volumes

Photograhs by Koji Taki, Takuma Nakahira, Yutaka Takanashi, Takahiko Okada, Daido Moriyama

Text in Japanese with English and Chinese translations printed separately to accompany the volumes as a supplement

Nitesha, 2018

First edition

3 softcovers in slipcase

Half traveler and half migratory photographer, as he likes to introduce himself, Bernard Plossu strides along the world since many years. He captures through his lens furtive moments, where birds are flying in huge swarms or caught alone, standing proudly in the middle of a puddle, or gliding high up in the sky, among the peaks. The photographer looks at birds with tenderness and curiosity, a gaze which underlines fantasy and a “surrealistic” approach, as explains the critic Francesco Zanot about his images.

The flight fascinates the photographer, obsessed with the euphoric speed of swallows as well as the hypnotic inertness of large raptors drifting through the wind at high altitude. Plossu’s photographs allow us to see fragments of the world, a world in which birds have reinvested our environment. 

The essay by ornithologist Guilhem Lesaffre underlines a fundamental aspect of bird life: migration as brought by Plossu’s photographs to light. 

This book, along with the one of Pentti Sammallahti, launch our collection Des oiseaux (On birds) celebrating, through the vision of different artists, their immense presence in a world where they are now vulnerable.

DES OISEAUX . BERNARD PLOSSU

Xavier Barral

Hardcover, 20,5 x 26 cm

108 pages, 54 B&W photographs

Text (in French): Guilhem Lesaffre

 ISBN : 978-2-36511- 189-8

The photographic oeuvre by Martine Franck (1938–2012) has finally been assembled in this comprehensive monograph, the most exhaustive to date, edited by Agnès Sire, artistic director of the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson. The work on this book has been undertaken in 2011 with Martine Franck. Through a chronological journey, including many unpublished images, the photographer has conceived different chapters spanning her entire life. 

Feminism, social deprivation, the elderly, and Buddhism join artists, writers and landscapes as subjects that are visited and revisited over the years and through various travels to the United States, United Kingdom, Ireland or Asia, scrutinized through the lens of her selfless sensitivity, an eye for form and composition for the woman who wished to “greet the unexpected”. Her celebration of life, the joy of her knowing eye, and her commitment to different causes made Martine Franck a major figure on the international photographic scene. 

MARTINE FRANCK

Xavier Barral

Two versions : English and French

Hardcover, 23 x 29 cm, 328 pages

300 B&W photographs and documents

Texts

Agnès Sire, Anne Lacoste

Interview between Martine Franck and Dominique Eddé

Illustrated biography drawn up by Cécile Gaillard with Aude Raimbault

ISBN FR : 978-2-36511-125-6 

ISBN ENG : 978-2-36511-211-6

Copublished with the Fondation HCB