The starting point of El recinto circular is my fascination with the ...

"Ánima" has something of magic but also of tragedy. The rhythm and ...

In The North Fork, Trent Davis Bailey looks to a remote river valley ...

How do we create safety and empathy through the act of portraiture? ...

Canadian artist Hudson Hayden's photographic practice crafts a ...

Indian artist Abhishek Khedekar's experimental docu-fiction follows a ...

Mountain of Salt is an expansive series of text-based collage works ...

Steve Harries explores the force and fragility of our environment. In ...

Standing on the property line between two apartment buildings with ...

'Hunting in Time'by Ronit Porat draws from a trilogy of exhibitions ...

In her work, which originates in her ever-growing archive, Ruth van ...

‘New York Memories’ is the first collaboration between American ...

Despite his art education, Czech painter and photographer Miroslav ...

‘Although the dream is a very strange phenomenon and an inexplicable ...

Albarrán Cabrera's poetic universe invites us to immerse ourselves in ...

On the occasion of the centenary of Saul Leiter's birth, a complete ...

Since the 1980s, Juan Travnik has been wandering at dawn through a ...

Akiko Kimura is part of a new generation of Japanese photographers ...

The starting point of El recinto circular is my fascination with the capacity of our mind to generate images without conscious or rational intervention, especially when we meditate, get distracted, become absorbed, or in a state of sleep; and the residual relationship that those images may have with reality.

I set out to represent the idiosyncrasies of these unconscious thoughts and visions through the use of the particular codes with which they operate: fragmentation, repetition, the loop, time jumps, images as echoes of other images, stairs that lead nowhere, landscapes as mental places and elements that disappear and appear transformed into something else. The resulting series - made up of photographs I took in Iceland, photographs I have taken in the last few years and images found in antique shops - shows how not only those visions or unconscious mental processes can alter the inherent meaning of an image or element through symbols, but also the photographic edition itself; that dialogue that is established between different images.

In a way, it is the purpose of translating a somewhat intangible experience into images, constantly keeping in mind that mental state in which seeing and not seeing or thinking and not thinking becomes uncontrollable; in which we want to see something, but it escapes us, or is blurred, or is hidden; or in which we want to stop seeing something, and it appears to us again and again.

The reference with which I articulate the project through the title is a story written by Jorge Luis Borges in 1940, The Circular Ruins, where a man arrives at some ruins in the jungle -the circular enclosure- with the supernatural purpose of creating another man in dreams. A magical project for which he only had to sleep and dream, and which concludes with the realization that he was also a man in the dream of another man who dreamed him.

As in Borges' story, this overlapping that speaks of reality within the dream and the dream within another dream is the sensation on which my work gravitates, a series of images where time has somehow been suspended. Without a possible narrative, what remains is the confusing sensation that what we see seems not to be real, but unconscious. The images thus function as sediments without a spatial or temporal connection that, dragged by a river, end up finding themselves in another place or accumulating in a crevice.


Recinto Circular . Laura San Segundo

Fotolibro40 Comunidad de Madrid 2023 award

Publication / Book
Project Coordination Photobook 40  Jesús Micó
Edición / Publisher Dirección General de Promoción Cultural / Dispara
Coordinación Comunidad de Madrid / Madrid Regional Government Coordination
Madrid Regional Government Coordination / Alicia Nieto Fernández
Texto / Text Thursday, the weather and the dream. / Eduardo Brito
Translation / Translations / Blanca Martín-Calero (PT/ES) Sara Veiga (PT/EN)
Design / Graphic Design / underbau
Preimpresion / Pre-press / Eduardo Nave
Printing / Printing / Artes Gráficas Palermo
Encuadernación / Binding / Méndez

The typography used in this book is
Simoncini Garamond and it has been printed on
Munken Pure and Wibalin Natural Ruby (endpapers).
The typeface used in this book are Simoncini
Garamod and it has been printed on
Munken Pure paper and Wibalin Natural Ruby (endpapers).


128 pages
16,5 X 22 CM
700 Copies
Cloth-covered hardcover + stamping
ISBN (Community of Madrid)
978-84-451-4077-2
ISBN (Dispara) 978-84-942245-6-0
DL PO 500-2023

"Ánima" has something of magic but also of tragedy. The rhythm and the narrative take us from the almost unknown to make death visible. It is a rounded work, very fine and that stirs us... (Semíramis González)

 This photobook is composed of two large photographic series made up of 41 images whose thematic axis is the analogy between the tradition of the pig slaughter and its parallelism with the magical belief of the "Santa Compaña". Through this work, the author proposes an encounter between some notions related to superstition and Galician customs in order to draw a new imaginary where a new relationship between our folklore and a non-anthropocentric humanism, respectful of the dignity and rights of animals, is possible. As in her previous publications (Bestiae and El 2%), the artistic practice of Ruth Montiel Arias goes hand in hand with activism in defense of animal rights and the environment. As in her previous works, Ánima combines a powerful visual poetics with a singular documentary vocation, in search of the interest and reflection of the audience through a very visually articulated exhortative discourse that seeks the transformation of any person who approaches its pages. As the artist herself explains when addressing her themes, she is interested in "our relationship with the natural space and its consequences, both those that affect individuals and the space itself from the political, social, symbolic and even generational spheres".

In this sense, Ánima deepens our relationship with animals and investigates visually how our beliefs are also an instrument of exploitation over them. This artistic work thus focuses on the notion of tradition and how it legitimizes questionable acts, not only on the part of a growing part of society, but also of some of the people directly involved in this activity, who are no longer resigned to maintaining the secular mandate of slaughter; as the author herself was able to verify during the realization of this photographic project.

Susana Monsó, philosopher and co-founder of the Asociación Filosofía de la Mente y el Comportamiento Animal and member of METIS and SWIP-Analytic Spain, collaborates in Ánima with a text as an epilogue where, together with Ruth Montiel Arias, she closes the circle of necessary questions raised by this publication.

Ánima . Ruth Montiel Arias

Print run of 250 copies.
Sizes: 270 mm x 200 mm.
80 pages photobook.
16 page text publication.
Natural Rough Sand Paper 120 gr.
Cover
80 gr. PopSet dust jacket.
Hardback binding sewn with visible thread.
Edition: X. Lois Gutiérrez Faílde and Ruth Montiel Arias
Texts: Susana Monsó and Ruth Montiel Arias
Translation: Carme García Conde and Annie Ornelles
Design: Ruth Montiel Arias.
Printing: Agencia Gráfica & Imprenta Galicia 1932.
Language: Galician, Spanish, English.
First edition published by Alauda Negra in Galicia, 2023.

In The North Fork, Trent Davis Bailey looks to a remote river valley in western Colorado. A Colorado native himself, the artist was drawn to the vastness of his home state, its rich agrarian history, and the assorted characters who inhabit the Western Slope. He was especially curious about his extended family who used to live there — an aunt, uncle, and cousins — who he hadn’t seen in nearly 20 years. Describing his childhood memories of them, he says: “They lived in a large tent at the base of a mountain. Their backyard had three ponds and a garden where they grew their own food. Beyond that was a dense forest of scrub oak and juniper trees where I imagined coyotes, black bears, and mountain lions lurked.”

Bailey marveled over his cousins’ world, but due to a falling out between his father and his uncle, he only visited the North Fork a few times as a child. In 2011, Bailey returned to the valley and for the next seven years he used photography to piece together his experience of the North Fork and its inhabitants.In due time, he not just found his extended family, but he rekindled ties with them while forging his own place within the local community. Then one fateful day, while foraging for mushrooms, he met his now wife with whom he has two children.

Collectively, the photographs in this book are informed by that backstory, but they also go well beyond it: conjuring up their own associations of place, food, kinship, and wonder.

The North Fork . Trent Davis Bailey

Signed

with an essay by Rebecca Solnit and a poem by David Mason

Edition of 750 copies. 12.5 x 10.2 inches. 96 pages. 48 color plates. Paper-over-board slipcase. Softcover with thread-stitched signatures and rough linen. Designed by Victor Balko.

How do we create safety and empathy through the act of portraiture? In Love Me Again, Danish photographer and filmmaker Michella Bredahl explores feminine energy through a decade of intimate portraits of friends and acquaintances, reclaiming through portraiture an empowering space for this energy to express itself entirely for its own needs and reasons, without shame.


Like the lineage of influential female photographic portraitists before her—Goldin, Day, Sarfati and Lawson, to name a few—Bredahl’s portraits arise from a place of introspection and self-scrutiny, finding the missing parts of herself in the arrested gazes, languid poses and intimate spaces of others. Raised in a turbulent home environment within the Høje Gladsaxe Vulnerable Residential Area outside of Copenhagen, the artist eventually found herself before the camera, scouted as a model at a tender age: objectified, gazed upon, subjected to the whims of men and power.


Love Me Again is an exercise in taking that power back, by locating the essence of femininity alongside sexuality, safety, and the plain unfiltered reality of her subjects. Bredahl burrows into the safety of the home, showing women and others at their most relaxed, their most languid, their most multi-dimensional and their most natural: texting on their messy beds, cuddling on a cold morning, searching through the medicine cabinet or waiting for the bathtub to fill. Bredahl’s self-chosen family are the people she photographs, seeking a recognition in them where she revisits the trauma of the domestic sphere, creating something beautiful and empowering through the camera, herself and the people she wants to advocate and perpetuate, beyond words and language.


With the arrival of a new voice in portraiture, Love Me Again does not attempt to flatten identity and experience to clichés of empowerment, emancipation or resistance, instead showing with grace and solidarity the quiet miracles of contemporary womanhood and the power of feminine joy.

Michella Bredahl . Love Me Again

120 pages, 290 × 270 mm, 56 colour plates

Section-sewn debossed landscape hardcover with tip-on
With an essay by Stephanie LaCava

Edited by Sarah Chaplin Espenon at Loose Joints Studio
Published by Loose Joints

LJ185, October 2023
ISBN 978-1-912719-44-0

Michella Bredahl (b. 1988 Denmark) is a photographer and filmmaker based in Paris whose photography and films are rooted in an auteur-driven documentary style. Bredahl’s intimate connection with her subjects and their stories allows her to capture elements of strength and vulnerability, creating cinematic narratives of empowerment, love, and beauty through her lens. Bredahl graduated from the International Danish Film School, with her graduation film Chassé selected for the International Rotterdam Film Festival. Bredahl is the recipient of grants from the New Carlsberg Foundation and Statens Kunstfond of Denmark, and her monograph with Loose Joints will be her first publication.

Canadian artist Hudson Hayden's photographic practice crafts a delicately articulated language that plucks and punctures photographic categories. From the romance of stillness and space to shaky articulations of capitalist experience, Notwithstanding articulates itself as a laconic series of speech acts, steeped in off- kilter humour, askew optimism, and a love for the visual medium.

This series of precisely-crafted images began in 2016, with Hayden's move to Europe. Photographing instinctively, Hayden touches the well-worn grooves of contemporary image culture: from the intersection of photography with semiotics, the inferred distortion of narrative through sequencing photographs together, and how everyday objects can become icons simply by being photographed. Hayden's visual lexicon is akin to one of design; forms and their thingness are collapsed in on the photographic plane, becoming shapes that dance, as much a game of memory and fun as a loftier space of visual poetry.

Hayden's title, Notwithstanding, also speaks to the indeterminate and the inarticulable within his photographs. Images that often describe something simple – a dog, a ball, a boat on a lake, or an orange in a bowl – can feel curiously other, despite themselves, or in spite of their clear referents. Hayden quotes photographic genres with a laconic wit: from the Ghirrian coolness of early postmodern colour photography, to the sanitised language of advertising and commercial image-making, and through compositions that harmonise in both their immediate accessibility and their inherent unknowability.

Hudson Hayden . Notwithstanding

96 pages, 165 × 230 mm
Section-sewn OTA-bound softcover with a grid delicately debossed and tip-on.

Edited by Sarah Chaplin Espenon at Loose Joints Studio
Designed & Published by Loose Joints

LJ186, September 2023
ISBN 978-1-912719-48-8

Hudson Hayden (b. 1986 Canada) is a Canadian photographer currently based in Berlin, Germany. His work is characterised by a detailed approach to photography, and a signature dry wit. His work has been published and exhibited internationally.

Indian artist Abhishek Khedekar's experimental docu-fiction follows a 100-person nomadic troupe of Dalit 'families' performing Tamasha: a travelling form of performance combining dance, music, and visual art dating back to the 1800s. As post-independence India moved away from rural dance and song forms, Tamasha became stigmatised, polarised and relegated in Indian society. Criss-crossing the state of Maharashtra, Khedekar's images dive into the complexity of this sociocultural fabric with a dizzying array of artistic techniques by utilising archival material, collage, documentary photography, performance, sound and video.

Khedekar's bricolage of experimental visual narratives elevates the make-do, unpretentious attitude of Tamasha performance into a unique aesthetic of song, community and expression: situating Tamasha's traditions in modern India.

Khedekar is the recipient of Publishing Performance 2022: an artist’s residency and publishing award focused on the intersections of photography and performance. Khedekar developed his work as artist-in-residence at Mahler & LeWitt Studios in Spoleto, Italy, for a book to be edited, designed and published by Loose Joints.

Abhishek Khedekar . Tamasha

88 pages, 220 × 260 mm, 75 colour plates
Cahier-bound debossed brochure

Edited by Sarah Chaplin Espenon at Loose Joints Studio
Designed & Published by Loose Joints

LJ180, July 2023
ISBN 978-1-912719-45-7

Abhishek Rajaram Khedekar (b. 1991) is a photographer based in New Delhi, India. His work revolves around documenting stories bordering between reality and fiction, creating narratives, and curating archival images.

Khedekar studied Masters in Photography Design at the National Institute of Design, India. He is currently working as a freelance photographer and designer, while also focusing on his long-term photo-based projects. Khedekar is the 2022 recipient of the Loose Joints/Mahler & Lewitt Studios Publishing Performance award.

Mountain of Salt is an expansive series of text-based collage works by Bindi Vora. Comprising found photographs and digital shape collages accompanied by phrases and statements taken from news articles, press conferences, and social media, it traces the interweaving social, political, and ideological arcs of the early phases of the pandemic, the post-Brexit era, and Black Lives Matter. At its core is the potency of language. Vora revels in the tension between the micro and macro, the individual and collective, and the personal and political, teasing out and making connections between the individual events and linguistic frameworks that build broader historical eras and movements.

Bindi Vora . Mountain of Salt

Publisher     Perimeter Editions
ISBN     9781922545190

448 p, ills colour, 15 x 19 cm, pb, English

Steve Harries explores the force and fragility of our environment. In his book Octopus, Harries has produced a corpus of photographs of mountains, inspired in particular by the geological processes behind their formation. His experience with still life photography has also inspired him to hone in on certain geological details. Recently, his discovery of Marianne Moore’s poem “An Octopus” changed how he views his own photographs, prompting him to organize them differently. He has therefore put together a more freely composed sequence, emulating Moore’s approach by overlaying images created in differing ways and instilling a bold formal dialogue that encourages a new appreciation of mountain landscapes.

Steve Harries . Octopus

Rvb Books
ISBN     9782492175251


74 p, ills colour & bw, 24 x 32 cm, pb, English

Standing on the property line between two apartment buildings with adjacent driveways, American photographer Thomas Locke Hobbs was reminded of a Renaissance painting, The Ideal City of Urbino, where the illusion of space is achieved when receding lines that establish spatial relationships converge at a central vanishing point. It inspired his book ‘L.A. Vedute’, a documentary study of domestic architecture in Los Angeles. The work presents the way shared spaces recede to a common vanishing point, largely unpopulated and deserted, akin to movie sets where the actors have disappeared. Through metaphors of alienation, Hobbs exposes a city in conflict and coexistence.

Thomas Locke Hobbs . L.A. Vedute

Seleccionado para el Paris Photo - Aperture First Photobook Award 2023

Thomas Locke Hobbs
Publisher     The Eriskay Connection
ISBN     9789492051868


272 p, ills bw, 16 x 24 cm, pb, English

'Hunting in Time'by Ronit Porat draws from a trilogy of exhibitions about a mysterious crime committed in Berlin at the turn of the century. In her work, Porat creates archives, telling historical stories with collage, altering and re-contextualising images. She is most interested in the Weimar period in Berlin, Germany, a period in which gender roles became more fluid, and that we currently view with the shadow of its future cast over it. Animals, particularly birds, are a recurring motif, echoing the shapes of the human body and adding a layer of mystery. In creating distance between the viewer and the characters, Porat respects the multiple viewpoints within each story. Mindful of the power of the medium, her work raises a question at its core: who owns a photograph – the photographer, the subject, the archivist, or the viewer?

Ronit Porat . Hunting In Time

Seleccionado para el Paris Photo - Aperture First Photobook Award 2023

Author     Ronit Porat
Publisher     Sternthal Books
ISBN     9781988689098


192 p, ills colour & bw, 17 x 24 cm, hb, English

In her work, which originates in her ever-growing archive, Ruth van Beek often uses the established visual codes of photography. The images, mainly from old books, become her tools, source material, and context. Van Beek physically intervenes in the pictures – folding, cutting, or adding pieces of painted paper – rearranging and manipulating the image long enough to reveal the universe that lies within. ‘The Oldest Thing’ features numerous collages, archival images, and paintings in a dazzling show of roughly 250 double spreads in which her mother’s cooking also plays a role. Seven poems by Van Beek’s long-time friend Basje Boer add nuance to the material.

Ruth van Beek . The Oldest Thing

Seleccionado para el Paris Photo - Aperture First Photobook Award 2023


Publisher     Van Zoetendaal Publishers
ISBN     9789072532565


512 p, ills colour, 16 x 12 cm, hb, English

‘New York Memories’ is the first collaboration between American writer Bob Colacello and Spanish photographer David Jiménez. The book expresses Colacello’s vision as a native New Yorker who has intensely experienced the city and how it has adapted to different circumstances over the past decades. His text is complemented by atemporal photographic impressions by Jiménez – black-and-white images combining street scenes, views of architecture in the city, and specific ambiences and situations. Concrete and more poetic shots together form a visually compelling journey in which we lose track of time and place. This is the fourth instalment of the Ivorypress Cities collection.

Bob Colacello | David Jiménez . New York Memories

Author     Bob Colacello; David Jiménez
Publisher     Ivorypress
ISBN     9788412279290


120 p, ills bw, 12 x 21 cm, hb, English