Japan, A Photo Theater . Daido MORIYAMA

In the winter of 2015, Ben Lerner wrote a short story, The Polish Rider, incorporating fictionalized elements of the life and work of the artist, Anna Ostoya, who had recently lost two of her canvases in the back of an Uber. As the narrator of the story helps the artist search for the missing canvases, he fantasizes about “recuperating the lost paintings through prose,” about how the verbal might take the place of the visual. After the story was published in The New Yorker, Ostoya painted the painting Lerner had invented based on her earlier work, transforming the fiction without changing any of the words. Ostoya went on to produce a series of compositions that respond to the story she’d helped inspire.

The Polish Rider is the result of this ongoing conversation across media and genres. In addition to the story, this volume includes an essay by Lerner that describes how Ostoya’s actual body of work catalyzed the fiction, as well as the contingencies and uncanny correspondences that have shaped their exchange. Ostoya’s compositions — both those that prompted Lerner’s writing and those that take it up — are never merely illustrative. Instead, they keep literature from having the last word. In this unclassifiable volume, the boundaries between fact and fiction, original and reproduction, text and image, flicker as you read and look.

Anna Ostoya & Ben Lerner  . The Polish Rider

80 pages

23 cm x 31 cm

Printed paper bound hardback

Publication date: September 2018

ISBN 978-1-912339-01-3

Memories are always blurry, imprecise, evanescent… Perhaps photography is a good way to fix them, to retain some moments to be able to contemplate, to look…

– Vari Caramés

Ferrol (A Coruña, Spain), 1953

“Each look chooses its landscape”

– Mario Benedetti

When he was nine, he moved to A Coruña. When he was fifteen, his father, an amateur artist, gave him a totally manual Voiglander camera to photograph his paintings, drawings and iron pieces. Later he uses photography as a crib in his studies of Technical Architecture (which he never finished). He never pretended to make a living from photography but now he cannot live without it, he is interested in turning the ordinary into extraordinary.

He seeks to evoke, suggest and make the spectator dream. A lover of the timeless and the undefined, he learns to achieve effects from defects. He is not interested in fashions and trends. He uses B&W and color indistinctly. He believes that today’s world lacks poetry and that technology should not surpass emotions. He is more intuitive than “intellectual”, and believes that chance is more exciting than certainty.

Lugares  (Places) . Vari Caramés

Publicado:08/10/2018

Tirada:500

Fotografías:Vari Caramés

Textos:Miguel Ángel Fernández Cid / Vari Caramés

Edición:Cibrán Rico López / Suso Vázquez Gómez

Deseño:desescribir

Páxinas:80

Tamaño:220 x 296

Idioma:Galego / Inglés

Impresión:Offset

Encadernación:Cosido Singer

Tipografía:Chronicle Display

Papeis:Munken Print 2.0 90 g / Papel seda 17 g

Cuberta:Pergamenata Bianco 110 g

Imprenta:Agencia Gráfica

Filmación:Masplanchas

Encadernadora:Legatoria

ISBN:978-84-940115-7-3

Bushes & Succulents is Mona Kuhn’s celebration of the female essence - confident, raw and elegant, yet confrontational and unapologetic.

Reminiscent of Georgia O’Keefe’s floral paintings, your eyes wander around the graceful lines, not knowing exactly what you are looking at.  The solarisation process reveals human imperfections, not only in the metallic brilliance of the skin, but also brings to the surface a woman’s struggles, strengths, and power. 

“The frame reminded me of early childhood, at age eight or so, when I would jump in the shower with my mother. It resonates an adoration and child-like curiosity for what it is to be a woman. My intention is not to objectify the body, but to celebrate the female body and its essence.” - Mona Kuhn

Born in Brazil, Mona Kuhn currently resides in Los Angeles. Through intimacy with her subjects, knowledge of traditional iconography, and technical mastery, Kuhn portrays the complexities of human nature, both tempting and provoking our imagination.

 BUSHES & SUCCULENTS  . Mona Kuhn

ISBN — 978-1-9164106-1-9

Pages — 128

Images — 60 

Cover — Hardback, tip on, wrapped with embossed paper

Design — The Entente

Size — 290x255mm

For Ustedes, los vivos [You the Living] photographer David Hornillos once again worked in the vicinity of a train station in Madrid; this time on a vacant lot adjacent to Chamartín, the city’s North station. In a similar vein to his previous project Mediodía, this book follows a constant stream of characters as they traipse across a desert landscape that might once have been a graveyard. The work is threaded together by a fine horizon line that traces the path trodden by these humans.

Atocha and Chamartín are Madrid’s only two active railway stations – reverse sides of the coin, of the city and of David Hornillo’s photographic work. The suffocating orange that confines the characters in Mediodía is now a counterpoint to the blue fluidity of Ustedes, los vivos, where we gaze upon a metaphysical procession; the framed transit, naked and clean, of a cast of characters who are going nowhere because they are merely passing by.

Beings thrust into the world. Ustedes, los vivos frames a philosophical space and invites us to let our thoughts ramble on our condition as temporary entities and on existence itself.

Ustedes, los vivos . David Hornillos 

ISBN 978-84-608-8928-1

Dalpine, 2018

Softcover with dust jacket (4 different designs)

Design: Antonio M. Xoubanova

Prepress: La Troupe

Printed by Artes Gráficas Palermo

872 pages

436 images

11,2 x 14,9 cm

"Pines grow pulling the old dreams through the soil pinesap climbing into its limbs lifting a ladder like solitude"

Inspired by the life and work of the poet and land surveyor, Frank Stanford, these photographs of hermetic homes and men living in solitude were taken in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas and Missouri.

By capturing the foggy landscapes, cluttered interiors, and rugged men that are tucked away in the dark woods, Jasper explores a fascination with running away from the everyday. The work bounces between fact and fiction, exhibiting the reality and myth of what it means to be truly apart from society.

Matthew Genitempo is an American photographer and book publisher currently living and making work in Marfa, Texas. He received his MFA in photography from the University of Hartford. Matthew was recently selected as one of PDN’s 30 Emerging Photographers and received the LensCulture Emerging Photographer Award.

 Jasper . MATTHEW GENITEMPO

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

september 2018

10.5 x 13 inches

51 tritone plates

96 pages

isbn: 978-1-936611-13-3

There is no dignity in war, no modesty either. Erik Kessels exposes a particularly shitty aspect of war, one that is usually left out of the history books. Despite the horror and chaos of conflict some aspects of daily life continue, even on the battlefield. 

Shit is a pictorial history of German soldiers doing their business in battle during WWII. 

Il n’y a ni dignité ni pudeur en  temps de guerre. Erik Kessels révèle une facette pour le moins  inhabituelle du conflit, un aspect sur lequel les livres d’histoire ne s’attardent généralement pas. Malgré l’horreur et le chaos qu’engendrent les hostilités, certains moments de la vie quotidienne demeurent inéluctables, même sur les champs de bataille.

Le livre Shit est le récit illustré de soldats allemands déféquant au combat pendant la seconde guerre mondiale.

SHIT . Erik Kessels

RVB books

16.5x23 cm

Linen bound hardback

100 pages 

46 b&w photographs

ISBN 979-10-90306-80-6

In an old joke from the defunct German Democratic Republic, a German worker gets a job in Siberia; aware of how all mail will be read by the censors, he tells his friends: ‘Let’s establish a code: if a letter you get from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it's true; if it's written in red ink, it's false.’ After a month, his friends get the first letter, written in blue ink: ‘Everything is wonderful here: the shops are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, cinemas show films from the West, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair — the only thing you can’t get is red ink.’ – Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, Verso Books, 2013

In August 2017, at the height of tensions and the looming possibility of a nuclear war between the U.S. and North Korea, Max Pinckers traveled to Pyongyang on an assignment for The New Yorker together with his assistant Victoria Gonzalez-Figueras and American journalist Evan Osnos. During the four-day trip, they were strictly monitored and guided by government officials at all times, with every location diligently prepared before their arrival.

Knowing that it would be impossible to reveal the reality behind the regime’s facade, Pinckers applied an aesthetic that refers to state propaganda and advertising, by using bold artificial lighting. This subversive approach reveals that these images are conscious of their own deceptive nature – lies that make us understand the truth – that we are looking at a manufactured version of reality according to the Kim regime.

RED INK  . Max Pinckers

Self-published by Max Pinckers, 2018

Softcover with PVC dust-jacket 

201 x 150 mm, 180 pages

Edition of 850

ISBN 9789082465556

Design by Rudy Latoir and Max Pinckers

Texts:

Evan Osnos, Pyongyang’s Anaconda in the Chandelier, 2018

Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, 

excerpt, Verso Books, 2013

Printed by Stockmans, Belgium

The Moth derives from one black-and-white picture that Jem Southam made in about 1983: a solitary man standing on Gwithian beach in St Ives, Cornwall. From this singular, meditative moment, the book of otherwise unpeopled, colour photographs unravels like a succession of memories, drifting back and forth through time. Over the course of 30 years, Southam intermittently returned to the west of Cornwall to explore a place steeped in marine and mining history, and in the mythology of Celtic saints who exiled to Cornish shores. His poetic sequence of images, inspired by the alliterative verse of the old English poems The Wanderer and The Seafarer, moves from vistas of meadows to water streams, forgotten homes and farm dogs awaiting their food. Now and then, Southam’s fluctuating current of pictures is punctuated by a sublime moment in the rural landscape, only to be eclipsed by the hazy memory of The Moth.

Jem Southam . The Moth

Embossed hardback with 

tipped-in image

72 pages

Publication date: October 2018

ISBN 978-1-912339-16-7

Richard Mosse has spent the past few years documenting the ongoing refugee and migration crisis, repurposing military-grade camera technology to confront how governments and societies perceive refugees. His latest book The Castle is a meticulous record of refugee camps located across mass migration routes from the Middle East and Central Asia into the European Union via Turkey. Using a thermal video camera intended for long-range border enforcement, Mosse films the camps from high elevations to draw attention to the ways in which each interrelates with, or is divorced from, adjacent citizen infrastructure. His source footage is then broken down into hundreds of individual frames, which are digitally overlapped in a grid formation to create composite heat maps.

Truncating time and space, Mosse’s images speak to the lived experience of refugees indefinitely awaiting asylum and trapped in a Byzantine state of limbo. The book is divided into 28 sites, each presenting an annotated sequence of close-up images that fold out into a panoramic heat map. Within this format, Mosse underscores the provisional architecture of the camps and the ways in which each camp is variously marginalised, concealed, regulated, militarized, integrated, and/or dispersed. His images point to the glaring disconnect between the brisk free trade of globalized capitalism and the dehumanizing erosion of international refugee law in European nation states. Named after Kafka’s 1926 novel, The Castle prompts questions about the ‘visibility’ of refugees and the erosion of their human rights.

The book comes with a separate book of texts, including a poem by Behrouz Boochani, the journalist, novelist and Iranian refugee currently held by the Australian government in confinement on Manus island, an essay by Paul K. Saint-Amour, associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, an essay by philosopher Judith Butler, and a text by Richard Mosse.

Richard Mosse . The Castle

Books are a bit damaged

232 pages

24.5 cm x 32 cm

Hardback with 28 double gatefolds, printed with silver inks on black paper. Texts in a booklet by Judith Butler, Paul K Saint Amour, Behrouz Boochani and Richard Mosse.

Publication date: November 2018

ISBN 978-1-912339-18-1

In the city there are ways to escape the grid and walk along lines unseen. The city parks of New York offer this escape, eliciting both alienation and intoxication. They allow citizens and nature both a space for growth, a second city away from eyes on the street. Adam Pape’s photographs utilize the city parks in Washington Heights and Inwood as the backdrop for a narrative that unfolds in between day and night. Like a church or temple, parks are transformative. Here, young people have a public stage where they can try on different roles in the dark. Other citizens wander, fish, smoke, and pass time while animals lurk in the urban fringes, a reminder of nature’s promises and perils. These monochromatic images, directed by Pape and artificially lit, depict an ongoing exchange between humans, animals, and the landscape. In the furthest reach of Manhattan, sectioned off from further development, history and myth are at play.

Adam Pape  Dyckman Haze

112 pages

21 cm x 26 cm

OTA bound paperback

Publication date: November 2018

ISBN 978-1-912339-21-1

Since the mid-1990s, the Northern Irish photographer Hannah Starkey has dedicated her work to women and the ways in which photography has shaped ideas about what it means to be female. Known for her cinematic mise-en-scenes, Starkey constructs portraits of women of different generations, often situated in everyday urban contexts. Proffering the view of the flâneuse – a female counterpoint to the artistic tradition of the male flâneur – Starkey’s images reveal moments of private reflection, alienation, or social interaction that might otherwise go unseen: a woman fleetingly fascinated by another woman’s reflection, or the attentive gaze of a mother carrying her child. 

Like modern-day genre paintings, Starkey’s images are driven by familiar narratives, but ones that play on the visual languages of diverse photographic genres – including diaristic, street, documentary, cinematic, fine art, and fashion – to subtly probe the ways that women are represented in popular culture. As Starkey has said, “I really think that visual culture is the last battleground for women’s equality and freedom”. From her early staged photographs made in Belfast to her recent documentation of the 2017 Women’s March in London, this catalogue raisonné charts two decades of Starkey’s influential image-making, and serves as a significant touchstone for discussions on the female gaze. The book includes a biographical essay by the curator and writer Charlotte Cotton and a candid conversation between the artist and the editor and writer Liz Jobey.

Hannah Starkey  . Photographs 1997–2017

184 pages

25.5 cm x 27.5 cm

Embossed linen bound hardback with tipped-in image on reverse

Publication date: November 2018

ISBN 978-1-912339-19-8

The Complete Papers is an extensive volume encompassing all of Thomas Demand’s work over the past 28 years, together with the primary texts written about his practice. The book includes previously unseen early works from 1990, together with reference reproductions on every one of his pieces. A newly commissioned interview with Russell Ferguson, new texts by Jeff Wall and Alexander Kluge, contributions by Parveen Adams, Francesco Bonami, Teju Cole, Beatriz Colomina, Jeffrey Eugenides, Julia Franck, Hal Foster, Rachel Kushner, Ben Lerner, Jacques Rancière, Gary Shteyngart, Neville Wakefield, to name a few, is concluded by a complete exhibition listing and bibliography.

This hardback volume, housed in a printed and embossed slipcase, which also includes a Demand work printed on the interior lining, is the primary authority on the work of one of the most important artists of the 21st century. 

Thomas Demand . The Complete Papers

Printed hardcover with tipped-in embossed plate, three different paper stocks and twenty-five loose Japanese paper inserts,

all housed in an embossed 4-colour printed slipcase

Edited by Christy Lange

Design by Naomi Mizusaki

560 pages

740 colour plates

24 cm x 29 cm

Publication date: November 2018

ISBN 978-1-910164-90-

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