Greg Girard: Photographs 1972-2026 . The Polygon Gallery

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 Through a chronological journey, including many unpublished images, the photographer has conceived different chapters spanning her entire life.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

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

Taking its name from a line in Wallace Stevens’ short poem “The Gray Room,” Alec Soth’s latest book is a lyrical exploration of intimacy. While these large-format color photographs are made all over the world, they aren’t about any particular place or population. Whether made in Odessa or his hometown of Minneapolis, Soth’s new book is fundamentally about intimate encounters in private rooms.

“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 travelling 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

Limited edition of 300 copies, divided into 2 sets of 150, each comprising a signed first edition of the book housed in a slipcase with one of two c-type prints [signed and numbered 1/150 - 150/150].

I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating  . Alec Soth

MACK

Embossed linen hardback

30 x 33.5cm

Interview with Alec Soth by Hanya Yanagihara

Publication date: March 2019

ISBN: 978-1-912339-31-0

Like is a symptom, a disruption in the ecosystem of visual production. It reveals the existence of a deranged approach to pictorial representation in which more importance is attached to showing our place in the world than to showing the world itself. In a society imbued with the capitalism – the excess, total accessibility and asphyxia – of post-photographic era images, the question arises whether it is any longer possible to experience the excitement of discovery.

Like is a printed image of our age, of this global village in which we live and where the human figure melts into the background like some kind of diluted being: a sign floating on the surface with no order, coherence or identity. And that explains Nave’s determination to move to some new, uninhabited land, perhaps further away than ever and perhaps even outside this reality.

Eduardo Nave (Valencia, 1976). He studied photography in Escola d’Art i Superior de Disseny in Valencia. In 2005 he founded, with 13 photographers, the photography collective NOPHOTO. His works have been exhibited around the world and can be found in numerous private and public collections. His oeuvre is represented by Galeria Pilar Serra (Madrid).

This book has received backing of gallery Pilar Serra,  underbau, Control P and Palermo artes gráficas.

Like (2nd edition)

Eduardo Nave

Design: underbau

24 x 17 cm. 288 pages Softcover

isbn: 978–84-09-06510-3

Best Photography Book of the Year PhotoEspaña 2018 in the national category

I have had the opportunity to portray Gabriel's entire transition from 2012 to 2018. When I met him I had not yet been able to start the hormonation and although psychologically I had buried Isabel, physically there were still traces of her. A year later she got the psychological report authorizing her to start the treatment and began the first physical changes of her body and began to discover the meaning of the word happiness.

Mar Saez

I have had the opportunity to portray Gabriel's entire transition from 2012 to 2018. When I met him I had not yet been able to start the hormonation and although psychologically I had buried Isabel, physically there were still traces of her. A year later she got the psychological report authorizing her to start the treatment and began the first physical changes of her body and began to discover the meaning of the word happiness.

My photographic production, in which a physical transition from woman to man is observed, is complemented with archive images of his childhood and Gabriel's own photographic production, specifically some selfies that he has uploaded to social networks and that now appear in the book. The book also includes phrases taken from diaries and interviews I did with Gabriel that help to understand his psychological evolution during these years. Mar Saez

Stapled Binding

ISBN 979-10-92265-79-8

EAN 9791092265798

Pages 30

Year 2018

Language Spanish, French, English

Design underbau

Gabriel Texts

André Frère Éditions Publishing

Edition Laia Abril

Encarnados is a photographic project about the Galician carnival (Entroido) in which Tono Arias has been working for more than a decade.

This project has been formalized in three photobooks, posters and a collection of postcards. Encarnados, DesXeo and Preto, these are the titles of the three volumes. With a careful and original design and images, the author presents us an absurd, messy, ironic, anarchic and intuitive visual journey.

Tono Arias is a photographer since the 80s. He worked in various media and has published several books and participated in numerous exhibitions. From his studio in Galicia he works in the field of commercial photography, architecture and editorial.

In 2012 he starts the project “DISPARA”, a cultural space revolving around documentary and artistic photography: an art gallery, bookstore and publisher specialized in photobooks.

POSTCARDS ENCARNADOS

Box with 23 postcards

11x15 cm

A nocturnal journey through the city itself turned into an ode to the lonely.

Miércoles de Misericordia

Rafael Trapiello

MEASUREMENTS 160 x 220 mm

TYPE OF RUSTIC ENCOUNTERNATION

TYPE OF PRINTING Offset

NUMBER OF PAGES 64

AUTHOR OF THE TEXTS Elvira Lindo

Design Underbau

PHOTOMECANIC Eduardo Nave

PRINT AG Palermo

ENCUADERNACIÓN Méndez

YEAR 2018

ISBN 978-84-949261-2-9

NUMBER OF COPIES 500

COLLECTION away

Williamsburg, A Place I Once Called Home is Mara’s personal record of her life there between the years of 1994 and 1996. With a distinctive style, she beautifully weaves B&W urban landscapes, intimate portraits, and lyrical street scenes with stories, personal letters, and diary entries in both Spanish and English.

The book is at once a wonderful record of a particular epoch and a historical archive of many places in Williamsburg which have either radically changed or cease to exist. It’s a window into the life of a woman strongly connected to her changing and expanding world, and also very much tied to where she comes from. More than two decades later Mara continues to live in Williamsburg, a reluctant witness to the massive transformation and the disappearance of familiar places and faces. This book is her ode to what it once was, a place she once called home.

Williamsburg, A Place I Once Called Home

Photographs and text by Mara Catalán

Design by Bonnie Bryant

Red Hook Editions, 2018

Edition of 700 copies

Hardcover with dust jacket

156 pp., b/w and color illustrated throughout

210 x 297 mm

ISBN 9781941703076

Blue as Gold offers an artistic response to the issue of migration. Alternating gold and blue sheets of paper in between which float small-scale photographs of migrant boats crossing the sea, the volume prompts a reflection on the frailty of human life.

Found on the web rather than shot in the original, the images of migrants aboard boats directed towards the coasts of Europe emphasise the anonymity of the lives depicted. Being easily retrievable, however, these same images make it clear how easy it is to ignore what lies in the open.

In Blue as Gold, images of migrants hang loose in between its pages, conveying the same sense of precariousness that someone left ashore for days, sometimes weeks or months, experiences before reaching the coasts of Europe. Pictures may easily fall out of the book, forcing the reader to fish the sunken boat himself from atop its comfortable upper deck; a hook to force the gaze downwards.

BLUE AS GOLD . Nicolò Degiorgis

2017
Edition: 350
Format: softcover
Pages: 46
Size: 16 x 24 cm
ISBN: 978-88-94881-09-7

The images in Driftless were made by photographer Jason Vaughn during a period of life that found him wandering for a year in a region of Wisconsin known colloquially as the Driftless Area, named for the rugged terrain formed by a lack of pre-Illinoian continental glacial ice flow (“drift”). Vaughn’s temporary home seemingly describes the landscape as much as its human inhabitants.

While living in a rented apartment off the Mississippi River, awaiting the birth of his second child, and at the beginning of a second life chapter following a tenuous bout with cancer, Vaughn attempted to establish community despite his status as temporary visitor. During this in-between state his daily walks not only nurtured his art practice but also allowed for moments of clarity and belonging to seep into that practice.

Continuing in this spirit of a shared yet transient experience, the final image edit was given to author and journalist Brad Zellar, to lend his own verbal meanderings to the images, embedding a dueling but complementary narrative to the book.

An otherwise charged photograph of birds mid-flight, no doubt bound for a warmer and more hospitable climate is subdued and balanced by the caption “hey, options.”

Amongst his words, casual, yet world weary, we find a sense of sophisticated levity, fostering feelings of the hope over despair.

While creating the images for Driftless, Vaughn intimates that living next to the river allowed him to contemplate the human experience in a new way and to meditate on “the process by which people can drift through a space, sometimes becoming lodged, sometimes becoming permanent, and sometimes breaking free and moving to a new location.”

As a duo, Vaughn and Zellar assist one another in weaving a narrative until their voices seem one.  Each fleeting moment adds a layer of meaning, transforming, over time, from a conversation to a shared story.

DRIFTLESS . Jason Vaughn

Brad Zellar

Signed

Clothbound hardcover with tip-on image on verso 

92 pages 

50 color plates 

9 x 11.25" 

ISBN 978-1-942953-38-8