Why Exhibit? vol. 2 . On Curating Photography

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

This new book from RRB Photobooks and the Martin Parr Foundation will mark the important contribution that Tony Ray-Jones (1941 – 1972) and his legacy, have made to British documentary photography.

The exhibition and book will focus on photographs taken between 1966 – 1969 as Ray-Jones, driven by curiosity, travelled across the country to document English social customs and what he saw as a disappearing way of life. This small but distinctive body of photographs was part of an evolutionary shift in British photography, placing artistic vision above commercial success. In this short period of time, Ray-Jones managed to establish an individual personal style. He constructed complex images against a uniquely English backdrop, where the spaces between the components of the image were as important as the main subject matter itself.

 ‘I have tried to show the sadness and humour in a gentle madness that prevails in people. The situations are sometimes ambiguous and unreal, and the juxtapositions of elements seemingly unrelated, and yet the people are real. This, I hope, helps to create a feeling of fantasy. Photography can be a mirror and reflect life as it is, but I also think that perhaps it is possible to walk, like Alice, through the looking glass, and find another kind of world with the camera.’

Ray-Jones’ skills were gleaned from a generation of street photographers he encountered whilst living in New York in the mid-1960s. These photographers included Garry Winogrand, Joel Meyerowitz and others associated with the circle of legendary Harpers Bazaar art director Alexey Brodovitch. Their pictures defined the era as they used the street as a framework. Ray-Jones applied this new way of seeing to his native England and photographed his observations as they had never been seen before.

In 2012, Martin Parr alongside curator Greg Hobson, revisited Ray-Jones' contact sheets from this period and found previously unseen images. These new discoveries will be exhibited and published alongside iconic early images, including vintage prints from the Martin Parr Foundation collection.

Tony Ray-Jones (1941 – 1971) was born in Wells, Somerset and studied graphic design at the London School of Printing. In 1960, aged just 19, Ray-Jones won a two-year scholarship to Yale in the Untied States. Following a chance meeting with Alexey Brodovitch, he attended his classes at the Design Laboratory in New York alongside fellow students including Robert Frank, Irving Penn and Garry Winogrand. He returned to England in 1966 and whilst supporting himself through photographic assignments, he travelled around the country in a VW camper van. His work was exhibited at the ICA, London in 1969 alongside that of Dorothy Bohm, Don McCullin and Enzo Ragazzini. In 1971 he returned to the United States to take up a teaching post at the San Francisco Art Institute and began planning future projects before being diagnosed with Leukemia in 1972. He returned to the UK for treatment and died aged just 31. The first monograph of his work, A Day Off (1974) was published posthumously and a retrospective of his work was held at the National Media Museum in 2004. In 2013, Media Space at the Science Museum, London displayed his work alongside that of Martin Parr in the touring exhibition Only in England.

Tony Ray-Jones

RRB Photobooks / Martin Parr Foundation
16th October 2019
Hardcover
Red Cloth
30 x 25 cm
128 pages
Essay by Liz Jobey
Introduction by Martin Parr

Czesław Siegieda, born the son of Polish immigrants to England in Leicestershire in 1954, showed an interest in photography from an early age. From his teens he photographed the Polish community he grew up in, moving through fêtes and funerals with an ease only available to an insider.

The images in the book, taken between 1974 and 1981, show the staunchly Catholic traditions and national customs so faithfully maintained by the community as they rebuilt their lives following the trauma suffered during and after the Second World War. Whilst many of Siegieda’s images display a sharp eye for the absurd and all are marked by a visible affection for his subjects, his photographs of his close family are notable for their intimacy. His mother Helena, though physically robust, looks careworn and vulnerable, clutching a bucket of vegetable peelings or a picture of the Virgin Mary like a life raft whilst her husband (Czesław’s stepfather) hovers in the background, as if ready to lend a hand if needed but not wishing to intrude.

For many years the archive remained private, initially out of respect for the sensitivities of his parents’ generation: nervous of their position as ‘guests’ in a foreign land, they were determined not to draw attention to themselves. This initial impulse of discretion soon gave way to the more prosaic demands of life and work. For decades the negatives sat unheeded in a drawer until, in 2018, two years after his mother’s death, Siegieda decided that it was time to bring them out into the world. The process of digitising the archive went hand in hand with the creation of a website and the release of images on social media, posting photographs on Instagram in the expectation that they might be of niche interest to a small number of followers. The response was as overwhelming as it was unexpected; the photographs attracted the attention of many notable photographers, including Martin Parr, who encouraged Siegieda to publicise the work more widely.

The book contains over 80 images from this archive, with an essay by author and historian Jane Rogoyska as well as a foreword by Martin Parr. The book is available in an edition of 600, including 30 copies with a signed and limited pigment print.
Special thanks to the Polish Cultural Institute in London for their support in producing this title.

Czesław Siegieda - Polska Britannica


November, 2019
RRB Photobooks / IC-Visual Lab
Binding Softover
Size 23.4 x 15.6 cm
Pages 148
Edition 800 copies

“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

In 2015, Ljubisa Danilovic published The Russian Desert with Lamaindonne. The book, acclaimed by the public and critics, is now out of print. Three years later, Payne's Moon, his new publication, shows a radically different side of the photographer's work.


Ljubisa Danilovic has made several trips to the Danube Delta in recent years and in this book he offers us a surprising and delicate portrait of this place. A land of sky and water where time seems to slow down, where the heart begins to beat more quietly and the mind calms down. Photographs that are as close as possible to the subject, without any frills, that go to the essential. The wide palette of greys in the photographs gives them a softness and a certain melancholy. A series with a beautiful artistic mastery...

La Lune de Payne . Ljubisa Danilovic

size 22 x 26,5 cm

100 pages       
50 two-colour photographs + endpapers     
cloth cover
with images on the back (2 different versions)
and hot stamping
printed on 150 g gardapat
isbn : 978-295604-882-4

RRB Photobooks & the Martin Parr Foundation are delighted to present Martin Parr - Early Works.

The book covers the early part of Parr’s career, comprised of images shot between 1970 and 1984, mainly in the north of England and Ireland. The book contains many of Parr’s iconic early images, as seen in earlier publications such as Bad Weather and A Fair Day.

The work weaves Parr’s better known black and white work with over 20 previously unpublished images, adding new breadth and perspective to Parr’s prolific body of work.

The book is published to coincide with a retrospective of the work of Tony Ray-Jones, who was himself a huge influence on Martin Parr, RRB & MPF hope to add new context to Parr’s earliest photographs in publishing the two works concurrently.

Martin Parr - Early Works


RRB Photobooks / Martin Parr Foundation
16th October 2019
Hardcover, Blue Cloth
30 x 25 cm
144 pages
Introductory text by Jeff Ladd

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

Taking its name from a line in the Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Gray Room,” Alec Soth’s latest book is a lyrical exploration of the limitations of photographic representation. While these large-format color photographs are made all over the world, they aren’t about any particular place or population. By a process of intimate and often extended engagement, Soth’s portraits and images of his subject’s surroundings involve an enquiry into the extent to which a photographic likeness can depict more than the outer surface of an individual, and perhaps even plumb the depths of something unknowable about both the sitter and the photographer.

“After the publication of my last book about social life in America, Songbook, and a retrospective of my four, large scale American projects, Gathered Leaves, I went through a long period of rethinking my creative process. For over a year I stopped traveling and photographing people. I barely took any pictures at all.

When I returned to photography, I wanted to strip the medium down to its primary elements. Rather than trying to make some sort of epic narrative about America, I wanted to simply spend time looking at other people and, hopefully, briefly glimpse their interior life.

In order to try and access these lives, I made all of the photographs in interior spaces. While these rooms often exist in far-flung places, it’s only to emphasize that these pictures aren’t about any place in particular. Whether a picture is made in Odessa or Minneapolis, my goal was the same: to simply spend time in the presence of another beating heart.” – Alec Soth

 

Includes interview with Alec Soth by Hanya Yanagihara.

I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating (Second Printing) . Alec Soth

Embossed linen hardback

30 x 33.5cm, 84 pages

ISBN: 978-1-912339-31-0

May 2022


Copper Geographies explores the global own of mined copper. It presents a series of legwork explorations of geographically disparate landscapes historically connected by copper. It maps sites of transformation along the production network and commodity chain, documenting the mutation and transformation of copper from raw material to capital; through ore, smelted commodity, stock market exchanged value, assembled material and waste.

It discloses the uneven spatial conditions in which the material circulates by connecting the ecologies of resource exploitation in the Atacama Desert with the global centers of consumption and trade in Britain, and by making visible its return, hidden in manufactured goods, to the territories it originated from.

Copper Geographies . Ignacio Acosta

Texts

Ignacio Acosta, Andrés Anwandter, Termina

Goskar, Frank Vicencio López, Tony Lopez,

Louise Purbrick, Marta Dahó

RM

Softcover

192 pages

146 images

9 x 11 in

Design

Grégoire Pujade-Lauraine, José Luis Lugo

Bilingual edition (Spanish-English)

ISBN RM Verlag 978-84-17047-56-6

The photobook Silent Songs starts from the formal and conceptual intervention that Claudia Hans makes from the book Songs for my Grandmother, written by Agnes Louise Dean in 1945, transforming the book into a current piece that simultaneously narrates part of the grandmother's life, what happened during the Holocaust and the history of the emigration of grandparents to Mexico, where it is possible to observe the parallelism of the history of Mexico with that of their countries of origin.

Claudia Hans holds a bachelor's degree in psychology from the Anahuac University and a master's degree in clinical psychology from Columbia University, New York, United States. She has studied photography in the Laboratorio Mexicano de Imágenes and the Gimnasio de Arte y Cultura. In the same way, she attended the Contemporary Photography Seminar of the Centro de la Imagen and the Photobook Incubator program of Hydra + Fotografía.

She has had several individual exhibitions, among which are “Morido”, Museo de la Ciudad de Querétaro (2015); “Cuando la gente muere”, Galería de Arte Joven, Centro Cultural Genaro Estrada (ISIC) and in Galería Antonio López Sáenz (GAALS), Sinaloa, Culiacán (2014); “Morido”, Centro Fotográfico Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Oaxaca; “Cuando la gente muere”, Centro Cultural de Tijuana CECUT (2013); “Morido”, Espacio Cultural Metropolitano de Tampico;”The End”, Galería Patricia Conde, Mexico City (2013), among others. She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions in Mexico, Spain, France and the United States.

Silent Songs, by Claudia Hans

Cristina de Middel and Kalev Erickson use a set of anonymous images of the Mexican jungle of Tulum, discolored by the passage of time, to play with its reconstruction and re-interpretation, enriching them with probable narratives and visual games that place archival photography and its potential as the starting point of a story and not as the final destination of photography.

Jungle Check, Cristina de Middel, Kalev Erickson

Editorial RM Verlag

120 pages

Binding: soft cover

ENGLISH

ISBN: 9788417047719

2018

Giacomo Brunelli stalks the streets of New York with his old film camera, often for ten hours a day, looking for characters and details that are adrift in time.
His work has an air of nostalgia to it, and a film noir sensibility. The images are dark, shadowy, moody and a bit menacing — as if we’re looking through the eyes of a night detective, a voyeur or a stalker.
They provoke an unspoken narrative, offering up clues to an unknown mystery.
True to his love of old things and old ways, Brunelli shoots with a 1962 Miranda camera and prints in his darkroom.

NEW YORK . Giacomo Brunelli


February 2020
Edition of 500
Hardcover on leather
16,5x24cm
64 pages
ISBN 978-88-94895-31-5
–
Designed by Milo Montelli