Featured Books
All the books are interesting, here is our selection of the month
GOST
Every day on the news we are shown images of war and destruction. ...
Stanley Barker
The images in Bill Henson’s cinematic new book The Liquid Night, ...
Steidl
Joel Sternfeld entwines two personal stories in this book that ...
Charcoal
The Seraphim is the second volume of the The Seven Seals septology by ...
Tracing a career of more than thirty years, this celebration of the ...
Twin palms
“We have not loved life.” Winogrand made the photographs in this book ...
MACK
‘Committing to paper the movements, postures, and words of the people ...
SPBH
A book of text and image, My Birth interweaves photographs of the ...
SPBH
American critic and curator Vince Aletti has been collecting ...
PREORDER
Nick Waplington’s first book was published in 1991, and was an ...
Self-published
These photographs were accumilated over the span of a few summers in ...
Loose Joints
The birdsong of everyday life interacts with cycles of darkroom ...
Loose Joints
Sam Youkilis's immediate and generous indexing of everyday life ...
Loose Joints
Acclaimed still-life photographer Doherty pushes his precise visual ...
Twin palms
In the middle of the night, I woke up to a loud noise. Grammy and I ...
TBW books
In December 1972, Melissa Shook (1939–2020) began a series of daily ...
TBW books
Using the title of her 2004 photograph, My Mother, My Son, as an ...
TBW books
In this digital world the tactility of the printed past becomes ever ...
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GOST
Every day on the news we are shown images of war and destruction. This coincides with global expenditure on arms increasing year after year. However, we are rarely afforded a glimpse behind the curtains of the global arms business. Photographer Nikita Teryoshin travelled to 16 arms fairs between 2016 and 2023 to investigate what happens before wars take place. His aim was to take photographs at exclusive so-called defence expositions— which are closed to the public—on every continent to highlight the global nature of the industry.
Teryoshin deliberately obscures the faces of the business men and women present as it is not his intention to fix blame on individuals. Thea nonymised arms dealers can be seen as a metaphor for a business operating in the shadows and under the radar of the media. His photographs are playful and often focus on bold graphic angles and visual humour such as drinks put down alongside machine guns and geopolitics tote bags. The casual nature of his observations combined with the bright innocent colour palette which runs throughout the imagery is a sinister contrast to the goods on sale. Teryoshin’s use of flash helps him to highlight certain elements and is reminiscent crime scene photography.
Teryoshin first began photographing all types of fairs—agriculture, pets, funerals—because his photography school in Dortmund, Germany was next door to a giant expo hall. In 2016 he ended up at a hunting fair—Hunt and dog—and was surprised how guns, in this instance hunting rifles, attracted old and young visitors. After publishing his series Sons and guns, he became curious to find out what happens at professional arms fairs. He first gained media access to Eastern Europe’s biggest arms fair MSPO in Kielce, Poland in September 2016 due to his work for VICE Germany and the project began. Over a period of years he visited expositions in Poland, Belarus, South Korea, France, Germany, South Africa, China, UAE, Peru, Russia, Vietnam, USA and India.
Nothing Personal - The Back Office of War . Nikita Teryoshin
Published February 2024
Essay by Linda Åkerström
210 x 285 mm
182pp, 100 images
Hardback
ISBN 978-1-915423-22-1
Stanley Barker
The images in Bill Henson’s cinematic new book The Liquid Night, derive from work the highly acclaimed artist shot on 35mm colour negative film in New York City in 1989. They present a kaleidoscopic, nocturnal journey through the frenetic, neon-lit streets of a long-lost America.
"They were shot as formal 35mm frames and served as images in quest of an artistic resolution which Bill Henson became besotted with and which he has now resolved in digital terms creating a compendium of new art which is a recapitulation of a world that has vanished like an all but forgotten dream that tugs at the mind as a set of animated emblems that no longer exist in contemporary reality.
"They revisit in the artist’s memory –– and as strange images in the spectator’s –– a world that is the instantiation of time lost and only to be recaptured by the restored function of memory.
"Think of a hypnotic time. A jazz bar near Washington Square. The gin and tonic they would bring you like a ritual, the sacrament of an old-time religion, and the way they would shift you so that Tony Bennett could be closer to the piano which he was obsessed by. And then you would make your way back to the Algonquin and at midnight (because they closed the doors then) you would have to be let in by the bellhop whose hair turned grey, then white and Matilda the cat who endured everlastingly, through the autumn of an age into the winter of senescence.
"Originally there had been the idea of a collage work but now in The Liquid Night there are the pages with the images that have their own bygone intelligibility. Sometimes they are composed by a principle of magnification. But it was only in the last few years that Bill Henson realised how they could be exhibited. He came to love the detail, the iconoclasm of these images and the way they converged on each other. At first, nothing came into his head. But it gradually became clear that he had to show the negatives for the imprint of the life that once was. He moved around images, sometimes in extreme closeup and discovered, one more time, that it was the unbelievable beauty of film that he set out to reproduce. It included a version of the familiar Francis Bacon epiphany: the finding of the artist’s own characteristic and self-defining shape. And the form that familiar apparition took was a wild extremity of nostalgia, the kind of nostalgia that haunts Tarkovsky and is intensely and fathomlessly serious. Bradley’s jazz bar is no more and only the ghostly outline is left and is forever inseparable from the sense of loss.
"It’s many years now since the art critic the late Peter Schjeldahl (who wrote so eloquently of Bill Henson’s work) began a lecture by announcing that Eric Fischl might just be the first great painter of the decline of American civilization. And that wry, all but whimsical pessimism, that bleak joke speaks to Bill Henson with the extraordinary uncanny sense of loss these images disclose. Where are the snows of yesteryear, where is anything, where is everything? It’s all gone, and the technology is gone. The very idiom of the world recollected in The Liquid Nighthas disappeared. The ads shown here are for cassette tapes.
The Liquid Night . Bill Henson
Pages 120
Details Embossed Hard Back
Size 295x295mm
Charcoal
The Seraphim is the second volume of the The Seven Seals septology by photographer Jesse Lenz. Delving deeper into the vision that started with The Locusts, the reader explores a realm of childhood enchantment where nature insists upon sets of fledgling counterparts. His children experience the joys, curiosity, and vulnerability of childhood alongside other creatures that seem to either be standing vigil over them, or stalking them from the shadows. The backyard becomes a labyrinth of passages as the children experience the cycles of birth and death in the changing seasons. The Seraphim depicts a brooding landscape where nature and grace can be witnessed through the prism of small, infinitesimal lives.
Jesse Lenz (1988, Montana) is a self-taught photographer and multidisciplinary artist. He is the author of The Locusts (Charcoal Press, 2020), and he is the founder and director of Charcoal Book Club and the Chico Review. As an illustrator he has created images for publications including TIME, The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, and many others. From 2011-2018 he also co-founded and published The Collective Quarterly and The Coyote Journal. He lives on a farm in rural Ohio.
The Seraphim . Jesse Lenz
Embossed linen with tip-in image
9.75 x 12.25
144 pages
978-1-7362345-3-2
Tracing a career of more than thirty years, this celebration of the prodigiously talented Dutch photographer includes vibrantly colored portraiture, landscapes, still lifes, abstract compositions and fashion editorials. From her early African-inspired work to her more recent experiments in interventionist techniques, Viviane Sassen has gained international acclaim for her striking, dynamic images that explore a range of themes and subjects-from identity, gender, and the body, to race, fashion, and the environment. This retrospective book brings together both well- and lesser-known works and includes pieces from her recent series, "Paint Studies," in which early photographs are reimagined with ink and painterly marks, and "Venus and Mercury", a collection of exquisite photomontages based on the history of the Palace of Versailles.
An introductory essay and interview with the artist combine with additional illuminating texts to make this the definitive overview of an important and ever-evolving photographer.
Viviane Sassen . Mirrors and Portals
Hardback 256 pages
Publisher: Prestel
ISBN: 9783791389783
Published: 3 Oct 2023
Dimensions:320 x 240 x 40 (mm)
Steidl
Joel Sternfeld entwines two personal stories in this book that together reveal the roots and evolution of color theory in his work over the past five decades. In the summer of 1975, facing surgery with a risk of paralysis, Sternfeld went in search of a last idyll—and found it in Nags Head on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. From June to August he photographed the seaside town floating in time, capturing a dreamlike sense of solace. Sternfeld’s images show beachgoers of all ages in various scenes of leisure and recreation in this, his first body of work addressing a season. At the time, Sternfeld was already committed to color as the basis of photographic expression and fascinated by Josef Albers’ Interaction of Color: “Any time that I saw a color phenomenon in the landscape that somehow coincided with an Albers-type exercise in the perceptual properties of color, I made a photograph.”
Yet this summer sojourn was tragically broken by the death of Sternfeld’s brother; the photographer returned to New York, never to go back to Nags Head. Eventually Sternfeld resumed working and one day headed to Rockaway Beach, Queens. Here he took a picture in which “All at once the ugly scene appeared beautiful to me”—the hues of sand, apartments and sky fused into a cohesive whole: finally, content had been transcended through color. This photo, made in despair and with its perceptual foundation in the Nags Head series, would lead, a few years later, to the color structures of Sternfeld’s magnum opus American Prospects, his ambitious realization of what he had always wanted to do: follow the seasons across America.
Joel Sternfeld . Nags Head
96 pages, 71 images
Hardback
30.5 x 25.3 cm
English
ISBN 978-3-96999-318-7
1. Edition 02/2024
Twin palms
“We have not loved life.” Winogrand made the photographs in this book in defiance of this self-appraisal. A loving spirit charges and elevates picture after picture, riding an emotional circuit that sweeps from empathy to affection to outright elation, extending across two decades of work made mostly in broad daylight, on the street, on the road, at the beach, in color.
Garry Winogrand is known primarily for his spontaneous and energetic street photography in black-and-white. What is lesser known is that Winogrand also shot more than 45,000 color slides between the early 1950s and late 1960s. These photographs were often taken between assignments, when the photographer, working on his own, developed and refined an approach to his medium that was increasingly open, independent, and radical. He routinely photographed with two cameras strapped around his neck, one loaded with color film, the other with black and white.
Winogrand Color presents 150 photographs selected from the archives at the Center for Creative Photography by the American film director, Michael Almereyda and former Museum of Modern Art curator, Susan Kismaric. It is the first monograph dedicated to the artist's rarely seen color work.
Garry Winogrand . Winogrand Color
Edited by Michael Almereyda and Susan Kismaric
twin palms publishers
november 2023
12 x 12 inches
176 pages
150 four color plates
isbn: 978-1-936611-18-8
MACK
‘Committing to paper the movements, postures, and words of the people I meet gives me the illusion that I am close to them. I don’t speak to them, I only watch them and listen to them. Yet the emotions they arouse in me are real. I may also be trying to discover something about myself through them, their attitudes or their conversations. (Sitting opposite someone in the Métro, I often ask myself, “Why am I not that woman?”)’ Annie Ernaux
Exteriors: Annie Ernaux and Photography brings together the celebrated writing of Annie Ernaux, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, with photographs from Maison Européenne de la Photographie’s collection by photographers including Harry Callahan, Claude Dityvon, Dolorès Marat, Daidō Moriyama, Janine Niépce, Issei Suda, Henry Wessel, and Bernard Pierre Wolff.
Taking Ernaux’s unique artistic endeavour to ‘describe reality as through the eyes of a photographer and to preserve the mystery and opacity of the lives I encountered’, this project by writer and curator Lou Stoppard uncovers the profound ways the written and visual image can inform and inflect on one another. In doing so, it proposes a new way of thinking about literature and photography, and the ways in which shared themes – such as class, travel, social stereotypes, and individual identity within the modern urban environment – might be explored between these two forms.
Exteriors . Annie Ernaux and Photography Lou Stoppard (ed.)
Accompanies an exhibition at MEP, Paris, opening on 28 February 2024
Silkscreened hardcover with tipped-in image
15 x 21cm, 144 pages
SPBH
A book of text and image, My Birth interweaves photographs of the artist Carmen Winant’s mother giving birth to her three children with found images of other, anonymous women undergoing the same bodily experience. As the pictorial narrative progresses, from labour through delivery, the women’s postures increasingly blend into one another, creating a collective body that strains and releases in unison.
In addition to the photographic sequence, My Birth includes an original text by the artist exploring the shared, yet solitary, ownership of the experience of birth. A facsimile of Winant’s own journal, this book asks: What if birth, long shrouded and parodied by popular culture, was made visible? What if a comfortable and dynamic language existed to describe it? What if, in picturing the process so many times over and insisting on its very subjectivity, we understood childbirth, and its representation, to be a political act?
The first edition of this publication coincided with Winant’s on-site installation at the Museum of Modern Art’s ‘Being: New Photography 2018’, with both projects conceived of together directly following the birth of the artist’s first child and while she was pregnant with her second.
My Birth . Carmen Winant
(SPBH Editions)
Paperback with poster jacket
22 x 30.5 cm, 120 pages
ISBN 978-1-999814-44-1
March 2024
SPBH
American critic and curator Vince Aletti has been collecting photographs printed on the pages of magazines and books since the 1970s. For the very first time the hundreds of tearsheets, newspaper clippings, gallery announcements, and other ephemera stacked in a drawer of an antique flat file in his East Village apartment have been documented in the new book The Drawer. The seventy-five multi-layered compositions created by Aletti are a celebration of the beauty of photography and the printed page, as well as testimony of the author's unique ability to voice the complexity and variety of desire, personal and collective histories, and the power of art to reflect and shape who we are.
The Drawer . Vince Aletti
(SPBH Editions)
Winner of the Paris Photo PhotoBook of the Year Award, 2023
Perfect bound softcover with dust jacket
28 x 37.7cm, 144 pages
ISBN 978-1-916041-27-1
PREORDER
Nick Waplington’s first book was published in 1991, and was an instant sensation within the photography world and beyond. The 59 photographs in the original edition of Living Room documented the lives of friends, families, and neighbours on the Broxtowe housing estate in Nottingham, England, where Waplington spent years making thousands of images. This extensive archive of unseen photographs forms the basis of this new conceptual remake of the 1991 monograph, one that revisits and refashions Waplington’s iconic work from a contemporary vantage point. This new work follows the same sequencing of landscape and portrait images as the original edition - replacing each of the 59 photographs with an as-yet-unseen work from the Living Room archive, often from the same roll of film as the original image. The result is both familiar and uncanny, a vivid journey back to Thatcher’s Britain and a testament to the decades of art and life that have elapsed between then and now.
Nick Waplington . Living Room
Second Edition / Signed
Shipped end of March
Self-published
These photographs were accumilated over the span of a few summers in East Tennessee and the surrounding region of the Appalachian Mountains. This collection is about the brevity of light between hills, where we live, and where distant horizons are few. The work was made out of love for people and the landscape in which we are confined.
Valleys . Harrison Miller
Published January, 2024
11in x 17in (27.94cm x 43.18cm)
46 pages, 26 tri-tone plates
70gsm uncoated paper, self cover
Stab-bound with hand-cut poplar shims. Grain color will vary with each book.
First Edition of 200 copies
ISBN: 978-1-7356724-2-7
*Imperfections may be present as all books are handmade.
Loose Joints
The birdsong of everyday life interacts with cycles of darkroom creation and destruction in Gustafsson's expressive monograph.
In A House of Clay, Gustafsson places his conceptual and contextual photographic process in dialogue with a simple premise, a truism of photography: to elevate the everyday, to find meaning and take seriously the smallest of occurrences in ordinary life, and to invoke a sense of gratitude and wonder toward consciousness, sensing and feeling. Sometimes excessively normal, elsewhere tender and intimate, later dense and complex, Gustafsson's warm slices of life are digested in the darkroom, where the technical processes of photography fall in on themselves, becoming embedded in the image: cycles of photographing, printing, failing, dodging rules, repeating and scanning.
Balancing consciousness and coincidence, Gustafsson's moments of magical realism speak of a permanence, a perpetual present, where the continually unfinished image can always be, at a later stage, altered, manipulated — and rewritten. In A House of Clay, even the finality of the printed page is punctured; images flip and rotate across the page, sequences accumulate and stack up heady with visual (dis)association, only to dissolve and fold, the print submerged again in the chemicals, the house of clay reshaped again.
Erik Gustafsson . A House of Clay
152 pages, 288 × 208 mm, 161 colour plates
Swiss-bound debossed landscape softcover
With texts by Elisa Medde and Louis Nitze
Edited by Loose Joints & Erik Gustafsson
Designed & Published by Loose Joints
LJ197, February 2024
978-1-912719-54-9