VU Collection

"Schapiro and Baldwin showed the possibility of what strong writing and photography could achieve in their time. In ours, we'd do well to look to them." - The Guardian, London

First published in 1963, James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time stabbed at the heart of America's so-called "Negro problem." As remarkable for its masterful prose as for its frank and personal account of the black experience in the United States, it is considered one of the most passionate and influential explorations of 1960s race relations, weaving thematic threads of love, faith, and family into a candid assault on the hypocrisy of the "land of the free."

Now, James Baldwin's rich, raw, and ever relevant prose is reprinted with more than 100 photographs from Steve Schapiro, who traveled the American South with Baldwin for Life magazine. The encounter thrust Schapiro into the thick of the movement, allowing for vital, often iconic, images both of civil rights leaders-including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Fred Shuttlesworth, and Jerome Smith-and such landmark events as the March on Washington and the Selma March.

Rounding out the edition are Schapiro's stories from the field, an original introduction by civil rights legend and U.S. Congressman John Lewis, captions by Marcia Davis of The Washington Post, and an essay by Gloria Baldwin Karefa-Smart, who was with her brother James in Sierra Leone when he started to work on the story. The result is a remarkable visual and textual record of one of the most important and enduring struggles of the American experience.

The US American photographer Jamie Johnson has been traveling around the world for twenty years and is best known for her touching portraits of children. When she came to Ireland for the first time in 2014, she immediately felt connected to the cosmos of the Irish Travellers and would visit and photograph them time and again for five years. The encounter with the children of this extremely poor and socially discriminated population group fascinated her and even changed her views as a mother. Fascinated by the resilience and optimism of the children, who are proud of the culture and traditions of the Irish Travellers, Johnson’s portraits aim to promote the perception and respect of children as such, far removed from the common prejudices of society.

Swahili is Gilles Nicolet first book, a personal, melancholic, sometimes contemplative vision of a world which is dear to him but disappearing.

I need a kiss before they leave is an emotional family portrait, filled with immense joy, but also with a disturbing realization of a wonderfulness that cannot be stored. It reflects upon a human desire to freeze time, to forever savoring those moments which are destined to live on only as distant memories. Photography is of course the artistic technique to actually freeze time and to store a split second forever. In this book, Norwegian photographer Mathilde Helene Pettersen captures an entire parenthood, with all its bright and dark moments.
I need a kiss before they leave reflects on becoming and being a mother, on building a family, on the immediate and unpredictable, on strengths and fragilities in life, and sometimes on the overshadowing fear of death and the irreversible.