Photography August 2014

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Eve Fowler – Hustlers Capricious 2014 ISBN 9780989865623 Acqn 23643 Hb 21x26cm 130pp col ills £25 Hustlers gathers a photographic series taken by Los Angeles-based artist Eve Fowler (born 1964) on the streets of the West Village in New York and Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles between 1993 and 1998. Drawing on her background in both journalism and photography, Fowler explores queerness and social "otherness." Here, her untitled, intimate images lay bare the ambiguities of identity, class, sexuality and gender--all of which combine to lend the figure of the hustler a semi-dangerous allure, and the ambiguous attractions of the social outlaw. Stark and unencumbered by typical compositional elements or dramatic lighting, Fowler's subjects demand direct consideration, forcing the viewer to confront in a single face both masculine vulnerability and intrepidity. Accompanying this collection is an essay by Kevin Killian, an award-winning American poet, author and playwright well known for his contributions to LGBT literature.

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Julie Blackmon – Homegrown Radius Books 2014 ISBN 9781934435793 Acqn 23878 Hb 29x34cm 108pp 45col ills £38.50 Julie Blackmon has transfixed the contemporary art world with images of her children, nieces, nephews and friends (and their children). As the oldest of nine children herself, Blackmon has always been fascinated by family life, and her photographs are crammed with children and adults, everyday objects, toys and playthings. The subjects in the distance are often as fascinating as those highlighted in the foreground, and even the figures barely visible, hidden behind doors or windows, add a sometimes sinister, always intriguing element to the scene. Following the success of the best-selling volume Domestic Variations (2009), Homegrown shows how Blackmon's style has evolved, as she continues to capture the tensions between the harmony and disarray of domestic life. Though her photographs continue to be undeniably contemporary, references to classic painting and portraiture can be detected: the influence of seventeenth-century Dutch painter Jan Steen mixes with more contemporary figures, such as Balthus, Edward Gorey, Tim Burton and Federico Fellini. Included in this new volume are 45 works made from 2009-2014, along with an introduction by renowned poet Billy Collins and an interview by the actress Reese Witherspoon.

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Michael Light - Lake Las Vegas/Black Mountain Radius Books 2014 ISBN 9781934435854 Acqn 23903 Hb 27x41cm 128pp 73ills 52col £42 Until 2008, Nevada was the fastest-growing state in America. But the recession stopped this urbanizing gallop, and Las Vegas froze at exactly the point where its aspirational excesses were most baroque and unfettered. In this third instalment of Michael Light's aerial survey of the inhabited West, the photographer hovers intimately over the topography of America's most fevered residential dream, capturing castles on the cheap--some half-built, some foreclosed, some still waiting to spring from empty cul-de-sacs. Throughout, Light finds beauty and empathy amid a visual vertigo of speculation, overreach and environmental delusion. Janus-faced in design, one side of the book plumbs the surrealities of "Lake Las Vegas," a lifestyle resort comprised of 21 Mediterranean-themed communities. The other side dissects nearby Black Mountain and the city's most exclusive--and empty--future community, where a quarter billion dollars was spent on moving earth that has lain dormant for the past six years.

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Hiroshi Watanabe - The Day The Dam Collapses Daylight 2014 ISBN 9780989798112 Acqn 23909 Hb 19x24cm 88pp 66col ills £31.50 The latest body of work from California-based Japanese photographer Hiroshi Watanabe (born 1951), The Day the Dam Collapses consists (unusually for this artist) of digital pictures taken over the past five years (since his son was born). Ranging from seemingly ordinary details of quotidian life to poetic visual metaphors, the The Day the Dam Collapses paints the cycles of life as fleeting, fragile and devastatingly ephemeral. In his introduction to the book, Watanabe writes: "the truth is, we are all living like the characters in a disaster movie. We know we may someday face a disaster or a terrible event, but we keep living calmly as we do not know what and when that might occur. But a disaster will surely come to us. And the largest disaster must be our death that we all have to face sometime in the future." Despite these looming intimations of mortality, Watanabe persists in recording and sharing a life fully felt.

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Renate Aller - Ocean And Desert Radius Books 2014 ISBN 9781934435816 Acqn 23877 Hb 43x29cm 136pp 104col ills £52.50 This new project by German-born photographer Renate Aller is an extension of the ongoing series and book Oceanscapes (2010). Aller has continued to make images of the ocean from a single vantage point--for which she is internationally known--but for the last several years, she has also photographed sand dunes in New Mexico and Colorado. She has now paired the resulting images in a fascinating new series that continues her investigation into the relationship between romanticism, memory and landscape in the context of our current sociopolitical awareness. There is both a visual and visceral relationship between the two bodies of work. The desert images also capture visitors to the dunes, who engage in beach activities far away from any large body of water. And while these parallel realities are from completely different locations, the simultaneous, multiple activities on the sloping sand hills appears as if layers of different people and activities were choreographed next to rolling waves of the sea. Aller's first combination of these images was in book form, for a mammoth handmade book that was 36 inches wide. The overwhelming success of that publication has inspired this new trade edition, which features the largest binding that can be mechanically bound, and includes an expanded selection of the work. Born in Germany, Renate Aller lives and works in New York. Ocean and Desert is her third monograph published with Radius Books, following Dicotyledon and the long-term project Oceanscapes-One View-Ten Years. Pieces from that series and other site-specific artworks are in the collections of corporate institutions, private collectors and museums, including the Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Yale University Art Gallery, Conneticut; the George Eastman House, Rochester; New Britain Museum of American Art; Hamburger Kunsthalle; and the Chazen Museum of Art, Madison.

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Fiasco - A Photo Essay By Janet Riedel And Katja Pratschke. Based On The Novel By Imre Kertesz Revolver Publishing by VVV 2014 ISBN 9783957631022 Acqn 23838 Hb 17x24cm 144pp 349col ills £22.50 Fiasco describes the attempt of a new beginning, to Auschwitz, Buchenwald, in an inhumane totalitarian system, the Stalinist Budapest, as the author Imre Kertész himself has experienced. The photo essay is about the visual adaptation of Kertész's own literary method: the attempt to put together fragmentary evidence, fragments of the present age and Déjà vus into a complete picture. From the assembly of excerpts from the novel and photographic image sequences results a superposition of time, an exciting ambiguity, a picture puzzle. The photonovel transforms Imre Kertész’ literary method into a visual language: by joining fragmentary elements from the past and the present, by finding traces that link experience and remembering. The book with its filmic images moves the “reader” to think movement; by flicking through the book, the editing, the montage is effected through the reader’s exploration of it.

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An-my Le - Small Wars Ludion 2014 ISBN 9789491819124 Acqn 23848 Pb 21x26cm 52pp 27ills 6col £22.50 Published on the occasion of the solo exhibition at MAS by photographer An-My Lê, whose work examines the sites and rituals of war and the military, this book presents three series of her large-format images, which draw upon the language of documentary photography and its perceived intentions of objectivity. Her work interweaves ideas of landscape and our relationship to it, as it is transformed into a site of conflict, conjuring a sense of clarity in the midst of chaotic and polarising subjects. Included are Vietnam War re-enactments by amateur enthusiasts in North Carolina, desert war training in California, and the humanitarian and scientific missions of the US military.

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Patricia De Ruijter – Beings Lecturis 2014 ISBN 9789462260634 Acqn 23741 Hb 27x21cm 72pp 62ills 60col £31 Patricia de Ruijter has been intensively photographing her own habitat, 'De Oeverlanden' in Amsterdam, since 2009. 'De Oeverlanden' is a green strip of land along the New Lake, sandwiched between motorway and Schiphol. This is where she zooms in on nature. She studies and photographs in a poetic way, and continues where words are not enough. Whoever sees it will understand: wild and edible plants co-exist with condoms, discarded plastic packaging, car lights and indefinable debris. From a distance no more than spots on a road, but from close up, the wild manifestations of today.

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Anja Ligtenberg - Pongezi. Alternative Rites Of Passage For Masai Girls Lecturis 2014 ISBN 9789462260610 Acqn 23802 Hb 21x27cm 112pp 68col ills £30 'Pongezi' is the story of the alternative rites of passage for Maasai girls in Kenya. Nice Nailantei plays a central role in the book. She is a young Maasai girl who grew up to become a leader and worldwide advocate of the alternative ritual. She was able to escape the Maasai circumcision and now stands up for the other girls in her community. Anja Ligtenberg photographed Nice Nailantei last September in New York, where she spoke at the Clinton Global Initiative in order to raise awareness for her case. In December she photographed her life in Kenya, in her own traditional community.

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Olaf Nicolai - Hotel Nacional Rio Rollo Press 2014 ISBN 9783906213071 Acqn 24042 Pb 20x29cm 300pp 300ills 290col £20 Hotel Nacional in Rio with its trademark cylindrical tower, constructed between 1968-1972, is one of the highlights of architect Oscar Niemeyer’s later work, yet has been abandoned and left to deteriorate for some time. German artist and photographer Olaf Nicolai visited the site in September 2011 to exhaustively document its state of disrepair through hundreds of images. From elevator shafts plunging into darkness, stairways covered in guano and empty swimming pools, to rotting ceilings and wide interior spaces stripped bare, the collection of photos of this once shining jewel of architecture and luxury is as haunting as it is regrettable.

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Danila Tkachenko – Escape Peperoni Books 2014 ISBN 9783941825635 Acqn 24051 Hb 30x24cm 120pp 43col ills £42.95 “Man does not need society at all, it’s the society that needs man. Society is a forced measure of protection and survival. Unlike a gregarious animal, man must live alone - in nature among animals, plants and in contact with them.” - Andrey Tarkovsky. Strong words that the young Russian photographer Danila Tkachenko uses to start his book 'Escape'. No matter how overused the term of the dropout is, Danila Tkachenko in this series portrayed the most radical of their kind and calls them "Escapers". Men who have turned their backs on society to live alone as hermits in the wilderness of Russian and Ukrainian forests. Confronted with this disturbing work the questions regarding our own personal freedom and the consequences arise anew.

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Vintage Alpen - When We Were Young Metro Verlag 2014 ISBN 9783993001704 Acqn 24091 Hb 17x25cm 160pp 180ills 80col £22.50 Brimming with treasured pictures from personal photo albums, ‘Vintage Alps’ depicts views of alpine recreation through the years. Available in book form for the first time, the project by Michael Martinek and Daniela Horvath used social networks to make private contemporary documents of amateur photography accessible to the broader public. From family picnics and summer getaways at the lake to rugged hiking, mountain cottages and the early days of recreational skiing, the collection will awake old memories and inspire new appreciation for the history and enjoyment of the Alps.

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Stephan Keppel - Entre Entrée Fw 2014 ISBN 9789490119256 Acqn 24092 Pb 21x30cm 208pp 193ills 3col £31.50 Stephan Keppel’s photographic work originates from marginal phenomena related to architecture, interiors and suburbs. He collects and arranges images and objects in order to engage them in a long-term relationship, resulting in a process which engages photography, reproduction and other supporting media. ‘Entre Entree’ is a project about the Parisian suburbs and the city’s ring road, the Boulevard Périphérique, wherein Keppel conceives a fragmented and claustrophobic urban landscape, manifested through numerous black-and-white images of concrete facades, vegetation and the textures, shapes and materials that together form the entity of the city.

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Anjes Gesink - Vogels Huilen Niet Lecturis 2014 ISBN 9789462260627 Acqn 24096 Pb 20x28cm 144pp 55col ills £26.50 Portraying birds in need at the Vogelklas Karel Schot bird sanctuary in Rotterdam, this book depicts a motley collection of all types, from starlings to swans. A blue-gloved hand, present in almost every picture, both symbolizes the care the birds get and refers to the human impact on their lives in the city. Directly or indirectly, each was put in a difficult situation by people, and now people are helping their recovery. Since 2012, photographer Anjès Gesink has volunteered at the sanctuary. Collaborating with André de Baerdemaeker, urban ecologist and sanctuary chairman, she tells a story of resilience and hope. With texts by Baerdemaeker, Ernest van der Kwast and Kees Moeliker.

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Mika Kiritani - Mind's eye Heibonsha Ltd. 2014 ISBN 9784582278095 Acqn 24102 Hb 23x30cm 98pp 43col ills £34.95 Artist Mika Kiritani has extensively studied the tatehana and rikka disciplines of flower arrangement, which originated in 16th-century Japan during the Muromachi and Momoyama periods. Seeking the root of these two floral art styles in pre-Buddhist Japanese antiquity, she began her own creative activities in 2007, themed around the continuation and passing on of life. Kiritani creates contemporary “flowers of prayer” in her photographs and three-dimensional works, which depart from more commonly seen decorative forms. Serene, meditative and astonishingly beautiful, the works presented in this collection find place in both minimal interiors and natural settings.

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Tables To Meet - Erik Kessels, Erik Steinbrecher, Erik Van Der Weijde 4478Zine 2014 ISBN 9789491047053 Acqn 23815 Hb 16x22cm 330pp 200ills £27.50 Three photographers who share the same name have planned to meet each other in person for a long time. The only obstacle to this is that one lives in the Netherlands, one in Germany and the third in Brazil. In the meantime, they began exchanging pictures of tables, each one a possible table at which to hold their prospective meeting. Those many pictures of tables are now assembled in this unusual book, printed in greyscale on bright blue paper with an orange cover. Every kind of table imaginable is here, along with some objects not intended to be tables but which could function that way if needed. Still, the Eriks have yet to actually meet…

Documents

Photography August 2014