Siân Davey, Matthew Finn
Nik Roche, Alex Schneideman
Jem Southam, Alys Tomlinson
Vanessa Winship
Pictures from the Garden is a collection of powerful photographic essays made by seven leading UK photographers in response to Paddy Summerfield’s influential book, Mother and Father.
Summerfield’s 2014 publication, set mainly in his parents’ north Oxford house and garden, is a poignant and durational examination of his relationship with his parents as their lives together faded. On publication Summerfield received wide praise with the Guardian’s Sean O’Hagan describing Mother and Father as “a profoundly sad and beautiful book”.
In Pictures from the Garden the photographers, each of whom has drawn inspiration from Mother and Father, travelled to Summerfield’s house in Oxford to discover a personal route to explore the emotions and themes that were evoked in the book. By photographing in the same space that set the scene for Summerfield’s original work about his parents, the photographers imbued themselves in the physical and psychological world depicted in its pages.
The relationship that connects us with those that brought us into the world is universal and yet unique in every instance. Pictures from the Garden represents seven independent journeys taken to discover the nature of the most complex relationship that is common to us all.
THE SPECIAL EDITION
A special edition is available at a pre-launch price of £85.00 (increasing to £95.00 from March 31st). Limited to 25 copies per photographer, this comprises the book and a signed and numbered 10 x 8 giclée print by your selected photographer. The selection of photographs available from each photographer is shown on the wbsite.
A special portfolio edition including the book and signed and numbered prints from all seven of the photographers is also available. This portfolio set is limited to 5 sets (plus 2 presentation sets) and is available at a launch price of £480.
An exhibition of the work from Pictures from the Garden will be shown at the North Wall Gallery, Oxford, between 19th April and 10th May 2023. The exhibition is supported by The Photographers Gallery and Photo Oxford 23.
Within the vast expanse of the Brazilian Amazon forest thrives a community known as the Ribeirinhos or river dwellers. Among them live the traditional midwives who welcome life and share stories as they travel through the rivers that crisscross the landscape. The Enchanted Ones by Stephanie Pommez is a tribute to their legends and myths. These tales are intricately woven into the fabric of the Ribeirinho culture, enriching our understanding of the Amazon forest and the river dwellers’ profound connection with their environment. Stephanie Pommez is a photographer and filmmaker based in New York. Her images have been published and exhibited in various countries and her documentary broadcasted on channels such as National Geographic, Arte, TV Cultura, TV5 among others.
The life’s work of one of the most important photojournalists of our time, covering major events in American history from the 1960s to present
Stephen Shames is an American photojournalist for more than five decades. In his award-winning photo essays, he draws attention to social issues such as child poverty and racism. During his career Shames authored numerous books, among others Power to the People: The World of the Black Panthers and Outside the Dream: Child Poverty in America. Kehrer Verlag is now publishing a comprehensive book containing many unpublished photos. Although Shames photographed many diverse subjects including presidents from Kennedy to Obama, activists and visionaries like Martin Luther King or Stephen Hawking, and people from countless cultures, there is a thread connecting his pictures: Shames’ photos of children and families focus on what tears us apart and binds us together: violence and abuse, but also love, hope, and transcendence. The images come from his heart and soul.
Travelling widely, Ralph Gibson works primarily in inspired series, associated image reveries in both monochrome and colour, whose titles―The Somnambulist, Déjà-Vu, Days at Sea, and Chiaroscuro―underline the particular poetic sensibility that informs his work. Starting out in 1960 with Dorothea Lange, he made his way to New York in 1967 and was soon considered in the same light as the likes of Larry Clark and Diane Arbus. The photographs and series can of course speak for themselves. But for Gibson there is a philosophy at play behind the image, and in the included short texts he proposes his thesis. Nudes, portraits, still lives, narratives―loyal to his Leica, Gibson ranges between genres and creates new categories of vision. He gets closer to things and meditates on them in a way that only the silence of the image can attempt.Produced in close collaboration with the artist, this book offers the fruit of more than six decades of image-making. From Gibson’s first photographs in San Francisco, Hollywood, and New York in the 1960s right up to the present day, this is the most comprehensive collection of this highly acclaimed photographer.
An unflinching exploration of aging from one of the twentieth century’s most influential photographers
For more than half a century, Richard Avedon sought to represent advancing age in the faces of the people he photographed. From his earliest years at Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue through to the twenty-first century, Avedon routinely and audaciously broke the rule of flattering public personalities in his portraits. Instead, he chose to highlight the onslaught of what he called the “avalanche of age,” dramatizing the universal experience of getting older.
Accompanying a groundbreaking exhibition at The Image Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University and The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Immortal is the first book to delve into Avedon’s unflinching representation of aging throughout his career.
This elegant hardcover volume features nearly 100 portraits of cultural luminaries, each printed in striking tritone, such as Michelangelo Antonioni, Truman Capote, Marcel Duchamp, Duke Ellington, Toni Morrison, Patti Smith, and Stephen Sondheim, as well as one of Avedon’s last self-portraits. Texts by a star-studded cohort of authors, including Vince Aletti, Adam Gopnik, Paul Roth, and Gaëlle Morel, shed new light on an under-represented element of Avedon’s practice.
Thoughtfully edited and beautifully produced, Immortal testifies emphatically to the determination with which people confront the relentless advance of mortality.
