Bystander: a history of street photography

Marcelo Brodsky is an Argentine artist and human rights activist who works with images and documents from specific events to investigate broader social, political and historical issues. His understanding of image editing and the particular intervention to which he subjects it, manages to change the viewer's perspective and thus reveal new levels of meaning. In 1968, The Fire of Ideas, Brodsky presents archival images of student and worker demonstrations around the world, carefully hand-checked to deconstruct what underlies the global social turbulence of the late 1960s.

1968. THE FIRE OF IDEAS . MARCELO BRODSKY

No. of pages: 64 p.

Publishing House: RM VERLAG 2017

Language: ENGLISH

ISBN: 9788417047320

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator

Concrete Octopus takes off where Kanemura´s 2002 acclaimed Spider's Strategy left.  For the first time, Osiris and Pierre von Kleist team up to show Kanemura´s new work done between 2011 and 2013. The cult Japanese photographer proves to be in great shape.  With a text by Chris Fujiwara, a film critic living in Tokyo.

It would be strange and misleading, though obviously not wholly inaccurate, to call these photographs “images of the Japan of the present time.” Though they might perhaps have much to say to the social historian, their documentary function is circumscribed by the interest in exploring a visual universe too disunited and incomplete to be recognizable as a cultural or historical form. In these images, the world presents itself with great purity and without provocation or seduction, as though poised in the interval before the repetition of an already forgotten catastrophe.

Chris Fujiwara

Osamu Kanemura (b.1964) is a photographer born and based in Tokyo. He has been photographing the city-scapes in his solid monochromes. Since 1992, he has had more than twenty solo exhibitions in Tokyo, New York and other cities. His works have been featured in many exhibitions, including the 1996 'New Photography 12,' The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the 1997 'Absolute Landscape,' Yokohama Museum of Art, the 2004 Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie d’Arles, and the 2006 Venice Architecture Biennale. His 2002 photobook, "Spider's Strategy" is widely known as his major publication.

His photographs are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, and Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, as well as in other public and private collections. He received the New Photographer Prize from the Photographic Society of Japan in 1997, the Ken Domon Prize in 2000, and the Ina Nobuo prize in 2014.

Concrete Octopus by Osamu Kanemura

Pierre von Kleist editions, Lisbon and Osiris, Tokyo

Japan / English

Edited by José Pedro Cortes, André Príncipe and Yoko Sawada

Hardcover, 88 pages, 30x18,9 cm, B/W

ISBN 978-989-99445-7-2

"This enigmatic book is both a puzzle and a delight at the same time. As the photos show anything from a Spanish social event, to a weird woman with a rabbit and a dead rat floating upside down in a green pool. Although difficult to quite see what is going on, we are constantly drawn back in to try and understand the narrative and we are wanting to come back for another view. It gets under our skin, and that is a rare attribute."

Martin Parr

Hugo Alcol . Archipiélago

Language englisch

ISBN 978-3-86206-674-2

Pages 84 S.

Format 22 × 30 cm

Cover flexibler Einband

Published in October 2017

My neighbour Kid was 42 when he died. He regularly swept our shared porch, put out the rubbish and kept an eye on things when I was away. As Kid couldn’t read well, I helped him with his post. He borrowed my phone whenever he didn’t have any credit on his own. Kid had a turbulent life: he was banned from seeing his son and struggled with alcohol and drug addiction. In the last year of his life, he spent more and more time with drifters and junkies, begging on the street for change.

Man Next Door examines the stigmatisation of the working class while offering a rare insight into the life of a working-class Utrecht boy. What emerges is a bewildering picture of Kid’s many personalities, inevitably raising the question: how well do you know the person who lives next door?

Man Next Door . Rob Hornstra

Publisher: Self-published, 2017

Hardcover: 96 pp

Dimensions: 242 x 291 mm (9 1/2 x 11 1/2 in.)

Language: English

Print run: 800 copies

We give light to the images that Anders highlighted and marked on the period contact sheets, with signs, signals and colors. They have lost that primary intention of standing out and status, their Morse language, their meaning, but they have won the gesture. The print. The arrogance of naivety. His power. Graphic and plastic.

Café Lehmitz, Anders Petersen's debut feature, has magic. He's been catching us since we walked through the door. It hypnotizes us. The atmosphere is sovereign. Anders takes over the air. It immerses us in life. Anthropologist's look and heartbeat, naturalist. He doesn't judge. Neither does he put pretentiousness nor artifice in his gaze. The night and its journey. Like Céline's, with the difference that in Anders' eyes there is no room for such pessimism. It's more forgiving. He's not a cynic. She loves them, she's an accomplice. Toast and dance with them. He's dragging us to follow them. We ended up meeting them. Their photography encourages them to be. He loves those who never show themselves. The invisible ones. We see Escar, a shirtless sword swallow in the trance of getting into trouble. In the background, a jukebox and music machine. Vices of love. We're getting voices. Ramona gives, seduces; Gretel asks... Tenderness pushes. Understanding. The equals share night and temple. They are penitents. Those of scourge and joy. Loneliness and failure. Sublimidad…

Café Lehmitz is a generous work of shared humanity. An unforgettable job. Tears even. I'm a witness.

Alberto García-Alix

Color Lehmitz . Anders Petersen

Author: Anders Petersen

Year: 2017

Type: Catalogue

Binding: Hardback paperback with black edges

Size: 26 x 20 cm

Pages: 160

Language: Spanish-English

ISBN: 978-84-939682-7-4-4

Publisher: Cabeza de Chorlito

Lehmitz Color

"Txema Salvans’s previous series was also about life in the gaps and at the edges. It showed lone women, probably prostitutes, sitting or standing in very similar landscapes to the ones you see here.

In this book the figures are by water. In the previous book, they are by roads. All are waiting and, in a sense, all are fishing. (It is no coincidence that a slang term for a prostitute is a ‘hooker’).

Photography may be a matter of cold optics and geometry, but it is also invites connection and empathy. Finding the balance is not easy. It is tempting to use the camera merely to objectify and beautify. It is also tempting to use it in a way that pretends to reveal the inner lives of those who are photographed. Salvans resists both. He places himself, and us, on the cusp of beauty and ugliness, knowledge and ignorance, waiting for something else."

The waiting game II

Hardcover, 88 pages.

Dimensions: 33.5cm X 25cm

Text from David Campany, Gabi Martínez

In December 1975 Dutch photographer Bertien van Manen made a series of black-and-white photographs capturing daily life in metropolitan Hungary. I will be Wolf brings together many of these beautiful and never-before-seen images with the editorial direction of renowned British photographer Stephen Gill. Her snapshots of commuters, grocers, chemists, café workers, and street vendors contain all the hallmarks of a bygone era, before the grip of globalisation was able to make its mark on the country. Imbued with an air of ambivalent nostalgia, the book takes its title from the poem Grief by the 20th century Hungarian poet József Attila. Bertien van Manen . I will be Wolf Hardback bound with Japanese paper, foil embossed text and tipped-in image Edited by Stephen Gill 112 pages 65 tritone plates 23.8 cm x 21.5 cm Publication date: November 2017 ISBN 978-1-910164-91-4

Nothing but Clouds were the words used by the research commission in Andrey Tarkovsky’s 1972 film Solaris to deny video evidence suggesting traces of alien life on the planet. Taking this disclaimer as its title, this meditative book by Kristina Jurotschkin brings together images from her photographic archive made in various places across Europe over numerous years. Jurotschkin’s alienating views of everyday spaces examine the fabric of our social reality and propose an archaeological survey of our future

Kristina Jurotschkin . Nothing But Clouds

Silkscreen printed paperback

232 pages

232 black & white plates

22.6 cm x 34 cm

Publication date: November 2017

ISBN 978-1-910164-98-3

In The Model, Torbjørn Rødland examines one of the defining principles of his approach to photography: that the notion and meaning of ‘the model’ is open-ended. Hyper-aware that we view the world through endless filters that arbitrate our relationship with people, objects and images, from the mid 1990s Rødland’s photography has sought to penetrate postmodern surfaces in order to redefine the possibilities of psychological, erotic and spiritual subjectivity and interconnectivity. He attempts to tap into subliminal thoughts and feelings through images that are both sensual and cerebral.

Synthesizing an array of photographic genres and approaches The Model comprises elements of critical appropriation, diaristic snapshot, reportage, commercial and staged photography – all strung together by the iconic face of Polish actress and fashion model Malgosia Bela. The book brings together pictures of Malgosia made over a ten-year period in Los Angeles, New York, Paris, London, Warsaw, Oslo and Lofoten. In Rødland’s words, “We see her interacting with pictures, becoming pictures, being pictures.” Serving as an experiment in photographic language and code, each image elicits a response that equivocates between alienation and intimacy. With this in mind, The Model can also be seen as a love letter to both a medium and to a mediated woman.

Torbjørn Rødland . The Model

128 pages

75 colour plates

8 duotone plates

18.5 cm x 22.8 cm

Publication date: October 2017

ISBN 978-1-910164-94-5

Rowing a Tetrapod brings together a fluctuating array of black and white photographs made in multiple locations in the United States and Japan, between which countries emerging artist Fumi Ishino has resided. The work channels his nomadic experience of moving back and forth between two distinct cultures, with divergent social norms and values. Following an aleatoric structure, the book presents images as diverse as Japanese school children, American astronauts, vernacular architecture, laboratory scenes, local cuisines, animals and studio still-lifes. Blurring distinctions between the local and the foreign, the domestic and the cosmic, Rowing a Tetrapod delights in confusing cultural conceptions, fabricating an imaginary space that is bent towards misinterpretation.

Fumi Ishino

Rowing a Tetrapod

OTA bound with flaps using Japanese paper and raised embossed text

176 pages

95 tritone plates

23 cm x 28.5 cm

Publication date: September 2017

ISBN 978-1-910164-92-1

What the Living Carry unveils a small town named Hoy’s Fork, situated in the American South. Drawing on memories of the rural setting in which he grew up, Virginian photographer Morgan Ashcom brings together photographs, type-written letters and a hand-drawn map to build a fictional narrative of a foreboding place.

Leading us on a trail through the town and its surrounding forest, Ashcom presents scenes that point to a mysterious history, and people whose familial connections remain unknown: a forlorn old man, with champagne to hand, reclines on the corroding steps of a once grand home; a bloodied mattress is carried through an overgrown field; a solitary child burrows into a meadow, while on the streets, a man dutifully cleans a white picket fence – a vision that belies a local mural of a distant, ancient land.

Interspersing this fragmented narrative is a set of texts – four letters responding to ‘Morgan’s’ request for DNA analysis – written by ‘Eugene’ of the ‘Center for Epigenetics and Wellness of the Spirit’. If What the Living Carry provides a set of clues to unravel the enigma behind this strange world, it is through a visual record that is simultaneously autobiographical and imagined, and inclined to elude

Morgan Ashcom . What the Living Carry

Linen hardcover with tipped-in image

144 pages

48 colour plates

37 duotone plates

21.6 cm x 29.2 cm

Publication date: September 2017

ISBN 978-1-910164-93-8

For over twenty years, Krass Clement’s book Drum, photographed in a single evening, has long been regarded as one of the most iconic photobooks ever made. RRB are pleased to be able to now publish Dublin. The images in Dublin retain some of the style of Drum, an almost autobiographical account of the three journeys that Clement made into and out of Dublin while staying in Monaghan in March 1991.

“So great to see this work nally get published. At a time when most international photographers were focused on the troubles in Northern Ireland, it’s exciting to know that one of my favourite photographers was shooting here in Dublin on my own doorstep. Fantastic work, as you’d expect from Krass, made even more poignant with the passing of nearly 3 decades.” - Eamonn Doyle

The Dublin photobook is the rst of Clement’s work to be published by RRB Publishing, and the rst time any of his work has been published with an accompanying special edition print. The book will also coincide with an exhibition of the work at the Gallery of Photography, Ireland.

Krass Clement - Dublin

RRB Publishing, 30th November 2017

Sewn Quarter-bound Hardcover

205 x 265 mm

136 pages

Edition of 1000, including 100 copies with 1 signed print

Asger Carlsen and Roger Ballen exchanged ideas, sketches and works and reworked them manually and digitally, blurring the lines of authorship and process.

Both artists are known for their blurring of the line between the real world and the fictional.

In NO JOKE they lead each other into what eventually becomes something larger then expected.

ASGER CARLSEN / ROGER BALLEN

Limited Edition of 1000

72 pages

22.5 X 33 cm

750g

ISBN 978-1-907071-56-0

NO JOKE

Asger Carlsen / Roger Ballen

The “Río” Project emerges from the need to record the landscape from a reflexive and an anthropologic point of view. It means a personal search, trying to ascertain in the idea of travelling and the very act of walking. The landscape featured by a river, in which becomes a universal theme. Along a series of hikes, I have been doing in the last four years, always wandering close to rivers, I have been trying to elude myself from reality and think over in this spaces.

I have discovered a space in which man and nature mingle in a very deep, though sometimes not clear, way.

My aim is to observe and deepen my wandering through landscape. This process is a slow one, exploring familiar and passing places I enjoy revisiting. These are visual echoes I wanted to keep in my memory by means of photographing them.

This work refers to the reading of essays and writings by Matsuo Bashõ, William Hazlitt or Robert L. Stevenson. Their thoughts and ideas rose in me the energy to deal with this photographic issue from a contemplative gaze, that helped me to focus and develop this project.

Río

1st Edition, 2017

150 copies (hand-numbered)

20 x 31,5 cm

48 pages

Softcover package (Sewn Singer binding)

English