Photography Art Books

The first ever book on Ellison's lifelong photography practice, from New York scenes to domestic vignettes.

Ralph Ellison is a leading figure in American literature, hailed for his seminal novel Invisible Man (1952), a breakthrough representation of the American experience and Black everyday life. Lesser known, however, is his lifelong engagement with photography. Photographer is the first book dedicated to Ellison’s extensive work in the medium, which spans the 1930s to the ’90s.

Throughout his life, photography played multiple roles for Ellison: a hobby, a source of income, a note-taking tool and an artistic outlet. During his formative years in New York City in the 1940s, he keenly photographed his surroundings―at times alongside fellow photographer Gordon Parks―with many images serving as field notes for his writing. In the last decades of his life, as he grappled with his much-anticipated second novel, Ellison turned inward, and he studied his private universe at home with a Polaroid camera. At all times his photography reveals an artist steeped in modernist thinking who embraced experimentation to interpret the world around him, particularly Black life in America. In a 1956 letter to fellow writer Albert Murray, Ellison underscored photography’s importance to his creative process: "You know me, I have to have something between me and reality when I’m dealing with it most intensely." Accompanying the photographs in this book are several essays situating Ellison’s work within his broader career as a writer, as well an excerpt from his 1977 essay "The Little Man at Chehaw Station: The American Artist and His Audience."

152A sumptuous trove of photographs, stills and more from Goldin’s innovative work in film.

This is the first book to present a comprehensive overview of Nan Goldin’s work as a filmmaker. Accompanying the retrospective show and tour of the same name, organized by Moderna Museet, Stockholm, the book draws from the nearly dozen slideshows and films Goldin has made from thousands of photographs, film sequences, audio tapes and music tracks. The stories told range from the trauma of her family history to the portrayal of her bohemian friends to a journey into the darkness of addiction.

By focusing exclusively on slideshows and video installations, This Will Not End Well aims to fully embrace Goldin’s vision of how her work should be experienced. The book retains the presentation of the slide shows by showing all images in the same format on a black background and sequenced as they are in the sources. The 20 texts, the majority of which are newly commissioned by Goldin, complement and deepen the intention of her work.

47Crewdson’s epic photographic trilogy―a portrait of America a decade in the making.

Over the past three decades, Gregory Crewdson has been fleshing out a portrait of middle America, an America gazing wide-eyed at the glimmers of a fading dream. His cinematographically staged photos have pieced together the fragments of a twilight world tinged with numbness.

This book brings together three bodies of work made between 2012 and 2022: Cathedral of the Pines (2012–14), An Eclipse of Moths (2018–19) and Eveningside (2021–22). Envisaged as a trilogy, they provide unique insight into a decade of creation and offer a comprehensive view of the universe that has positioned Crewdson as one of the major figures of contemporary photography. This trilogy is introduced by Fireflies (1996), a pivotal series for grasping the intimate undercurrents in Crewdson’s work.

Long-lost images of family and friends from the late 1970s by the acclaimed portraitist and chronicler of domesticity.

Over the course of her 40-year career, acclaimed American photographer Tina Barney has illuminated the inner lives of her subjects, observing the generational repetition of familial traditions and rituals as played out in domestic settings. In the summer of 2020, at the height of Covid and quarantine restrictions, Barney began to sort through her archive, which contained thousands of 35mm negatives taken between 1976 and 1980. Finding these long-forgotten images engendered a rediscovery of some of her most intimate memories as a young artist: “the photographs in this book seem like X-rays of my mind and thoughts through the summers I spent with family and friends on the East Coast and in Sun Valley, Idaho.”

Revisiting her work from decades prior, Barney found herself meditating on who and where she was at the time, as well as why and how she approached specific subjects. What was the impetus to capture these moments? The Beginning encompasses Barney’s nostalgic exploration of her earliest work in the medium, and further reflects a self-examination of this formative period through a critical lens.

The photographs of Tina Barney (born 1945) are in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Nicola Erni Collection, Zug, Switzerland. Barney's work has been the subject of major recent exhibitions at the New Orleans Museum of Art; Frist Center, Nashville; and the Barbican, London.

Sumptuous and tender portraits of an empowered Black queer experience.

Eric Hart Jr.’s black-and-white photo series presents more than 70 portraits focusing on the notion of power as it relates to the Black queer experience. Begun in 2019, When I Think About Power investigates and expands the contemporary reimagining of men through themed chapters. “I'm fascinated with the intersectionality and the layers of what it means to be Black in the modern day,” he has said. “From masculinity, queerness, to dress, I strive to utilize image-making in a way that displays people like myself in all of their power and all of their beauty.” Hart's approach stems from his own journey toward self-acceptance growing up in Macon, Georgia. By visually exploring the differences and similarities between himself and the men who surround him, studying the words of Black queer icons and researching the visibility of power in eras such as the Ming dynasty or ancient Egypt, Hart has created an iconography of a power that so many queer individuals seek.

The work of Brooklyn-based photographer Eric Hart Jr. (born 1999) has been published in Rolling Stone, the Washington Post, the New York Times and i-D magazine, and has been praised by artists such as Beyoncé and Spike Lee. Hart is a two-time Gordon Parks scholar, a 2022 Forbes 30 under 30 Art & Style choice, and in 2020 was named one of Men's Health magazine's “20-year-old mavericks changing America.”

In ONYX, photographer Adrienne Raquel explores the intensity and escapism of the strip club experience, documenting performers at Houston’s famed Club Onyx. Raquel’s photography is usually editorial, with high-powered celebrities such as Megan Thee Stallion, Lil Nas X and Travis Scott as subjects. Now, for this project commissioned by Fotografiska New York, she turns her lens toward a community of underrepresented artists in her hometown. At Club Onyx, strippers display their bodies and seductiveness, but there’s a virtue to this particular space: “they don’t get naked” is a common description of the club’s ambiance. Performers there negotiate what “stripper” means to them on their own terms.

Raquel captures these performers with her signature glossy style. From powerful images of the dancers mid-movement to detailed shots and intimate portraits, Raquel’s photographs place their beauty and energy on full display. She also takes viewers behind the scenes, giving us a window into the community the dancers have built in the privacy of the locker room. ONYX displays the empowerment and inclusivity in strip clubs that society has tended to ignore.

Adrienne Raquel (born 1990) is a Texas-raised photographer and art director working between Houston, New York and Los Angeles. Featured in Aperture's New Black Vanguard, she received her first solo exhibition at Fotografiska New York in 2021. Clients include Apple, Savage x Fenty, Pat McGrath Labs, Dior, Bacardi, Rare Beauty, Bacardi, Nike and Beats By Dre, as well as covers for Vanity Fair, V Magazine, GQ and Interview.

34Key works and previously unseen images from the archives of the great humanist photographer.

“Ikonar” (“maker of icons”) is the nickname bestowed on the Czech French photographer Josef Koudelka (born 1938) by a group of Roma he encountered on his travels. The group assigned this name to Koudelka quite aptly; for some time, they had been treating his famous photographs of Roma communities as quasi-religious icons in their places of prayer. Josef Koudelka: Ikonar is the first survey of the photographer to explore in depth his personal archive: 30,000 35mm contact sheets covering the years from 1960 to 2012.

The catalog is structured around key works from his most important series, including Theatre, Gypsies and Invasion 68: Prague and Exiles. It also includes a section entirely devoted to Koudelka’s archive, analyzing its role in his personal and artistic journey, as well as a selection of works from his key books. Altogether, the book addresses some of the central paradoxes of Koudelka’s work, life and career: a nomadic life versus an unrelenting focus on collecting and archiving, and a constant revision and reworking of his iconic works versus a “maximalist” philosophical agenda.

115How the legendary portraitist forged enduring relationships with his sitters, from Marilyn Monroe to Truman Capote.

Over the course of his six-decade-long career, photographer Richard Avedon worked with a tremendous range of portrait subjects: models, actors, ballet dancers, celebrities, civil rights activists, heads of state, inventors, musicians, visual artists and writers. He also frequently returned to the same subjects. Published for an exhibition at Palazzo Reale, Richard Avedon: Relationships spotlights these recurring figures: painter Jasper Johns in 1965 and 1976; novelist Carson McCullers in 1956 and 1958; the Beatles, Andy Warhol, Marilyn Monroe and Allen Ginsberg in 1963 and 1970. Perhaps his most intimate and enduring photographic relationship occurred with his friend and collaborator Truman Capote.

Selected from the extensive Avedon collection at the Center for Creative Photography by curator Rebecca A. Senf, this catalog presents 100 fashion and portrait photographs that emphasize the role of relationship-building in Avedon’s practice. His attunement to his individual subjects―as well as his crystalline technical proficiency―enabled him to create portraits radiant with vivid life.

492A grand panorama of race and civil unrest in America’s past and present.

Carrie Mae Weems has often confronted the uncomfortable truths of racism and race relations over the course of her nearly 40-year career. In The Shape of Things she focuses her unflinching gaze at what she describes as the circuslike quality of contemporary American political life. For this new work, Weems created a seven-part film projected onto a Cyclorama―a panoramic-style cylindrical screen that dates to the 19th century―where she addresses the turmoil of current events in the United States and the “long march forward.” Drawing on news and TV footage from the civil rights era to today, elements of previous films such as The Madding Crowd (2017) and new film projects that bring us into our tumultuous present, the films in The Shape of Things combine documentary directness with poetic rhythm to create an enveloping experience. The films are narrated by Weems, and the layering of her resonant voice with these images articulates the dangerous mounting resistance to the “browning of America.” As Weems shows in these powerful works, America is irreversibly changed and changing.

1586On Singh’s inventive explorations of archives―with an essay by Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk.

This book celebrates Dayanita Singh (born 1961) as the 2022 winner of the Hasselblad Award, considered the most prestigious international photography prize. Sea of Files highlights Singh’s consistent and unique engagement with the archive, both literally and metaphorically. The book includes Singh’s associative visual essay Sea of Files in its entirety, as well as―for the first time in a publication―Museum of Innocence (The Madras Chapter) and other series engaging with the meanings and materiality of archives. A personal essay by Orhan Pamuk explores Singh’s photographs of state archives, for him images of aura and melancholy that evoke the “texture of memory,” “an idea of poetic decrepitude and a sense of profundity.” The book furthermore shows how Singh has paved new ways for engaging with photography, be it through humanist portraiture or her innovative display structures and book objects that recast conventions of the museum and publishing.

117“These are cautionary tales of tenuous survival, and while the pictures themselves are fascinating because of how strange it is to think of the animals and people calmly sharing personal space, it should not be happening and it feels both magical and ominous, hopeful and unsettling.” –Shana Nys Dambrot, L.A. Weekly.

Some of Nick Brandt’s subjects are humans, some are animals, but they all are creatures of equal and obvious personhood. The overwhelming sense in the photographer’s ongoing global series The Day May Break is that they are figuring out how to live in a new world. Each has arrived at the shoot at Senda Verde wildlife sanctuary in Bolivia through their own cascade of tragedy. Both extreme droughts and floods have destroyed people’s homes and livelihoods.

Some of Nick Brandt’s subjects are humans, some are animals, but they all are creatures of equal and obvious personhood. The overwhelming sense in the photographer’s ongoing global series The Day May Break is that they are figuring out how to live in a new world. Each has arrived at the shoot at Senda Verde wildlife sanctuary in Bolivia through their own cascade of misfortune. Both extreme droughts and floods have destroyed people’s homes and livelihoods.

Nick Brandt (born 1964) studied film and painting at St Martin’s College in London. He turned to photography in 2001 with his trilogy On This Earth, A Shadow Falls and Across the Ravaged Land. His more recent books are Inherit the Dust (2016), This Empty World (2019) and The Day May Break (2021). He lives in Southern California.

112A career-spanning survey of the influential modernist photographer.

In 1985, the National Museum of Luxembourg unexpectedly received a generous bequest from the estate of the world-renowned Luxembourg-born American photographer Edward Steichen (1879–1973). The bequest comprised a total of 178 prints, 175 of which were by Steichen himself. These prints cover all aspects of his photographic oeuvre―from the pictorialist images of his early years to the portraiture, fashion, advertising, landscapes and family photographs of his late career.

Edward Steichen: The Luxembourg Bequest presents this extraordinary collection in a comprehensive and scholarly treatment for the first time. Replete with full-page illustrations of all 178 photographs, the publication includes six new essays by five authors that examine the provenance and historical significance of the Luxembourg donation, as well as Steichen’s special role as a transmitter of modernism from Europe to America.

72A deep dive into the iconic oeuvre of the man dubbed by Picture Post “the greatest war photographer in the world”.

Hungarian American photographer Robert Capa (1913–54) lived a short but eventful life. Engaged in the highly dangerous occupation of combat and adventure photography, Capa risked his life many times for his reportage, and ultimately died while at work during the First Indochina War. This volume traces the main stages of his career, featuring Capa’s most iconic works―images that now loom large in the canon of 20th-century photography. Not only a retrospective of Capa's work, the book also aims to reveal the photographer’s personality through more than 300 of his black-and-white images. Including several points of view of the same event on different occasions, as if to reproduce a movement of field-counter-field, the volume also conveys the cinematic character of his work.

Jacobson’s lyrical defocused photography evokes inner states and fleeting memories.

The images in New York–based photographer Bill Jacobson’s (born 1955) When Is a Place suggest risks and uncertainties. They question both the nature of perception and our existential place in the world, themes explored throughout his five decades of making photographs. Jacobson’s use of a defocused lens, bleached-out skies and a curious tonal range challenge boundaries of traditional photographic practice. Diffuse horizon lines dramatically bisect distant landscapes; the subtle curves of vague human bodies and unknown spaces suggestive of architecture play prominent intertwining roles. Jacobson’s original large-scale prints are analog silver gelatin, printed by him in a traditional black-and-white darkroom. Created between 2018 and 2020, the images were made in Virginia, the south of France, upstate New York and in Jacobson’s studio in New York City.

A beautifully somber photographic meditation on an ancient Jewish ritual.

The Jewish tradition of leaving a stone or pebble at the gravesite of a loved one is an ancient custom of remembering the departed by means of a humble natural object. Minneapolis-based photographer Vince Leo (born 1949) began taking photographs of these “visitation stones” after several people close to him died in quick succession, and he found himself enacting the ritual of grief over and over. Placing a stone is a simple but powerful gesture that connects the living to the dead.

Remembered as a Blessing contains 30 of Leo’s black-and-white photographs, which honor these stones as the complex objects they are: simultaneously hard, durable pieces of matter and embodiments of ineffable spiritual relationships, often among many generations. Each of Leo’s photographs fuses light, focus, viewpoint, reflection and magnification into a moment in which the ordinary and the symbolic coexist. Daniel Mendelsohn, acclaimed author of The Lost, contributes an essay.

Hennek’s gorgeous photography taps into the harmonizing musical resonances of all living things.

In the atmospheric photographs of Sounds of Spheres, New York– and California-based Mat Hennek (born 1969) creates striking impressions of how we imaginatively engage with nature. Whether depicting the world from a traditional receding perspective (a misty landscape at sunrise, snow-laden branches, palm trees bending in the wind) or from above (the serpentine curves of a river, fossil-like patterns in sand, the churning surface of the ocean), Hennek does not record nature but captures the apparitions it evokes. Through the soft blurring of edges, lyrical color and a focus on pattern, his images move between representation and abstraction, simultaneously capturing and veiling form. The idea of the sphere links subjects that may at first seem unrelated: the glowing ball of the setting sun, the round shapes of ice crystals in a miniature frozen universe, the great globe of the earth upon which all this unfolds.

A comprehensive overview of Michener’s practice over nearly four decades, including previously unseen images from the artist’s archive.

This three-volume boxed set offers a sweeping retrospective of Diana Michener’s (born 1940) photography. With more than 600 images newly scanned from Michener’s archive, Mirror covers her work from 1975 to 2021, including many previously unpublished images.

Photo-collages made from iconic Hollywood film stills.

German photographer Martina Sauter (born 1974) combines original photographs with film stills and newspaper images to create visual spaces with unfamiliar perspectives within which fragmented figures or text appear. This volume features a selection of her works from 2008 to 2022.

A photographer-cum-explorer presents his stunning landscape images from around the world.

Italian photographer Gustav Willeit (born 1975) journeys across Italy, China, Japan, California, Iceland and Uganda in his quest to claim the title of World Citizen. His breathtaking landscape photography points to the finiteness and fragility of life and nature.

Photographs of Italy’s underbelly.

German photographer Christian Jungeblodt (born 1962) captures the uglier side of Italy overlooked by tourists―poverty, chaos, environmental pollution, the mafia, a corrupt and decadent political system―and in doing so makes visible the closeness of beauty and ugliness, luster and squalor, grandeur and the abyss.

Outtakes from a photographer’s river walks and imagined utopia during lockdown.

German photographer Wolfgang Strassl (born 1956) presents his photographs from 2020 and 2021, taken by the river near his home where he wandered in search of “Arcadia”—an ancient philosophical concept of a utopian land in which humanity lives in full harmony with nature.

An ode to summer vacations and fleeting nostalgia.

French Italian photographer Riccardo Fregoso (born 1981) revisits spots across Italy’s Adriatic Coast where he once vacationed as a child. Traveling from Abruzzo to Marche to Puglia, Fregoso captures the contradictions and atmospheric wonder of a region shaped dramatically by mass tourism.

224A portrait of the effects of climate change, from a famed Magnum photographer.

Award-winning Italian photojournalist Paolo Pellegrin (born 1964) presents his latest project centered on the four natural elements: earth, water, air and fire. His sublime photographs immortalize the grandeur of nature while also reflecting the devastating consequences of climate change.

A photo-essay on the state of the British nation, spanning over three decades.

British documentary photographer Mark Pinder (born 1966) examines the social, political and economic changes that Great Britain—in particular the Northeast of England—has faced during the years of rapid decline of traditional industries such as coal mining, engineering and shipbuilding.

Photographic outtakes from the final nine months of the Calais refugee camp.

French photographer Gilles Raynaldy (born 1968) documents the life of refugees in the “Jungle of Calais” over the nine months preceding their evacuation in October 2016. Around 80 analog photographs, along with excerpts from Raynaldy’s journal, constitute a sedimentary memory.

Photographs of Berlin point to the remnants of the 1920s, the Holocaust and the Cold War.

American photographer Jason Langer (born 1967) presents photographs taken in Berlin between 2009 and 2013. Turning his camera to the city’s streets and people, he tracked traces of the Holocaust and the Cold War and imagined the freedom and creative expression of the Roaring Twenties.

Documentary travel photography reflecting on the human condition.

Swedish photographer and filmmaker Stefan Bladh (born 1967) presents work from his travels between 2002 and 2018. Informed by Bladh’s background in storytelling, this documentary photo work raises existential questions and examines the relationship between the inner and outer worlds of his subjects.

A comprehensive survey on a photographer known for her nude self-portraiture.

This monograph provides a sweeping overview of the career of Swiss artist Hannah Villiger (1951–97) who was known for her photo-based works centered on the body, in particular on her own body.

671 Achak’s dreamlike landscapes and mysterious portraits bring together human and spiritual worlds.
In All the Colors I Am Inside, Deb Achak reflects on our relationship with the soft, quiet voice of our intuition and the beauty of who we are under the surface. Achak explores how our inner voice leads us on the most surprising and glorious adventures, but to hear it, we must quiet our brains and savor the present moment. Bringing together human and spiritual worlds, she uses landscapes that are rich and mysterious, the way our dreams and meditations might feel, and portraits in which the subject is consumed by nature, swept up by it. Achak seeks to represent the pictorial quality of intuition using imagery that walks the line between rare and familiar. Ultimately, the work invites us to think less, feel more. Deb Achak is an American artist. All the Colors I Am Inside marks the artist’s debut monograph.

Mystery and manners, romance and fun—the sophisticated compositions and stylish characters in the extraordinary pictures of fashion photographer Rodney Smith (1947–2016) exist in a timeless world of his imagination. Born in New York City, Smith started out as a photo-essayist, turned to portrait photography, and found his niche, and greatest success, in fashion photography. Inspired by W. Eugene Smith, taught by Walker Evans, and devoted to the techniques of Ansel Adams, Smith was driven by the dual ideals of technical mastery and pure beauty. This lavish volume features nearly two hundred reproductions of Smith’s images—many that have never before been published—and weaves together a biocritical essay by Getty Museum curator Paul Martineau and a technical assessment of Smith’s production by the Center for Creative Photography’s chief curator, Rebecca A. Senf. It maps Smith’s creative trajectory—including his introduction to photography, early personal projects, teaching, commissioned pieces, and career in fashion—and provides insight into his personal life and character, contextualizing his work and creative tendencies within his privileged but lonely upbringing and complex emotional and psychological makeup. Rodney Smith is the definitive record of the life’s work and worldview of a truly original artist.

''Millions of eyes were suddenly upon us, creating a picture I will never forget.'' -Paul McCartney Taken with a 35mm camera by Paul McCartney, these largely unseen photographs capture the explosive period, from the end of 1963 through early 1964, in which The Beatles became an international sensation and changed the course of music history. Featuring 275 images from the six cities―Liverpool, London, Paris, New York, Washington, D.C., and Miami―of these legendary months, 1964: Eyes of the Storm also includes: • A personal foreword in which McCartney recalls the pandemonium of British concert halls, followed by the hysteria that greeted the band on its first American visit • Candid recollections preceding each city portfolio that form an autobiographical account of the period McCartney remembers as the “Eyes of the Storm,” plus a coda with subsequent events in 1964 • “Beatleland,” an essay by Harvard historian and New Yorker essayist Jill Lepore, describing how The Beatles became the first truly global mass culture phenomenon Handsomely designed, 1964: Eyes of the Storm creates an intensely dramatic record of The Beatles’ first transatlantic trip, documenting the radical shift in youth culture that crystallized in 1964.

1655The transformation of Dior’s mythic Parisian headquarters at 30 Avenue Montaigne as seen through the eyes of Robert Polidori.

Following the reopening of 30 Avenue Montaigne in 2022, this exquisite volume offers a unique look into the metamorphosis of the House of Dior’s legendary Parisian headquarters via images captured by acclaimed photographer Robert Polidori.

For over two years, the iconic hôtel particulierunderwent a radical transformation, during which Polidori was granted exclusive access to the site for the entire duration of the restoration—documenting the original state, the demolition phase, and the reconstruction of Dior’s home. Registering the past, present, and future of the spaces within a single frame, Polidori’s images capture layers of history in extraordinary detail. This impressive iconography offers an extraordinary visual experience recorded in one of the finest pieces of bookmaking, featuring neon printing, hand-tipped images on crystal paper, and a beautiful hemstitched cloth cover for an oversized book with a slipcase.

778Southern wetlands, with their moss-draped trees and dark water obscuring mysteries below, are eerily beautiful places, home to ghost stories and haunting, ethereal light. The newest collection from award-winning photographer Keith Carter, Ghostlight captures the otherwordly spirits of swamps, marshes, bogs, baygalls, bayous, and fens in more than a hundred photographs. From Ossabaw Island, Georgia, to his home ground of East Texas, Carter seeks “the secretive and mysterious” of this often-overlooked landscape: wisps of fog drifting between tree branches; faceless figures contemplating a bog; owls staring directly at the camera lens; infinite paths leading to unknown parts. Similarly, spectral images are evoked in the original short story that opens this book. Ghostlight, writes best-selling author Bret Anthony Johnston, “hovers, darts, disappears. It can be as mean as a cottonmouth, as mischievous aes a child. The closer you get, the farther the light recedes.” A masterpiece of “Bayou Gothic,” Ghostlight challenges our perceptions and invites us to experience the beauty of this elusive world.

1616enowned portrait photographer Mark Mann documents an impressive host of dancers—their eloquent bodies in posed tranquility and vibrant motion—representing years of excellence and varied disciplines of the art form. A celebration of the strength and emotive ability of dancers, this book is a collection of images that captures the dynamism and energy of the mediums of both dance and photography. In homage to Mann’s hero Irving Penn, he installed a backdrop of old monochromatic muslin. Dancers from many genres—ballet, jazz, African, tap, Broadway theater, hip-hop, ballroom—perform and discuss their passions about the art form in this stark environment. Mann captures the humanity and spontaneity of principal and lead dancers from the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, American Ballet Theatre, Martha Graham Dance Company, New York City Ballet, and many other troupes. Subjects include dance personalities Misty Copeland, Carmen de Lavallade, Tiler Peck, Chita Rivera, James Whiteside, Omari Wiles, Xin Ying, and many others. As a photographer, Mann is used to working hard at making something happen in his images; here, he has taken a slightly more passive role, witnessing and capturing the expressive and talented subjects that take control of each frame. This book is a testament to the emotional and physical power of each dancer, in stillness and in motion.

1613A poetical portrait of the world of professional sumo wrestling.

The Polish photographer and filmmaker Tomasz Gudzowaty (born 1971) is known for the strong sense of perfection in his work―clear compositions, precisely chosen image frames, carefully considered down to the last detail. In Sumo, a photographic tribute to the Japanese national sport, Gudzowaty confronts his subject with the rebellious aesthetic of are-bure-bokeh, which means “rough, blurred, out of focus.” This visual style developed in Japan in the 1960s as a countercurrent to the prevailing aesthetic norm of photojournalism. In this latest series, Gudzowaty photographs not only the wrestlers in the throes of combat, but also life within the training stables where these young men live, eat and sleep together. The result is an extension of Gudzowaty’s previous documentary work, and a stunning black-and-white portrait of a remarkable sport within a society strongly shaped by both tradition and modernity.

1584The street life and political tensions of Tod Papageorge’s late 1960s New York, in a two-volume clothbound presentation.

This publication comprises two books of pictures Papageorge made after moving to Manhattan as a young man. As different as they are from one another―each book advances a distinct argument supporting Papageorge’s belief in photographic “fiction-making”―together they amount to a comprehensive portrait of an uneasy city during a grim, fevered time.

Down to the City follows (and ironically twists) the first sentences of Plato’s Republic, threading phrases from Socrates’ description of a religious festival through a stream of pictures seized in Manhattan’s secular streets. This novel-like flow builds the sense of a place haunted by dystopian disorder, which is amplified late in the book when the war in Vietnam takes center stage, clarifying the tensions leading to that moment.

The Dear Common Round traces a softer arc. Here the actions and exchanges that a city’s people make in the streets thousands of times a day are photographically honored simply and directly, as if the style of picture-making, at least initially in the book, had reverted to the first days of hand-camera photography. This changes as the sequence progresses, but for all its increasing visual and narrative complexity, The Dear Common Round holds true to the promise of its opening: this is a city sweet, if serious, at its heart, built to belong to and cherish.

Weird, weirder, weirdest. New works from the sports universe of Sol Neelman.

In this third volume of his series Weird Sports, Sol Neelman revisits the joy and community surrounding people’s love of nontraditional sports. They include surreal competitions like: Barbie Jeep racing, log riding, redneck shing, medieval rugby, cheese rolling, lightsaber fencing, mochi lifting, and live monster wrestling. Many of these events are more performance art than competitive sport, a celebration where a participation trophy is the ultimate medal of excellence. All Weird Sports aim to achieve the same goal: bring together like-minded, creative, and active humans, often in costume and usually with cheap beer in hand.

As it so happens, this photo collection wraps up right at the very start of the pandemic, creating an unintentional time capsule of life and laughter before the world came to a halt.

Meditative landscape photography featuring softly lit mountain ranges.

Belgian photographer Bastiaan van Aarle (born 1988) captures the ever-changing landscape of mountains, transformed by light, time and the planet’s constant rotation. Experimenting with different techniques, van Aarle explores the boundaries of photography, its medium-specific properties and how they relate to the perception of reality.

A cinematic meditation on how physical settings and realities are shaped by fictional and popular narratives.

Spanish photographer Mikel Bastida (born 1982) makes staged photographs inspired by cinema and history. In this latest photobook he constructs a new vision of the United States through cinematic references such as the ghost town in Archer County, Texas, from Bogdanovich’s film adaptation of The Last Picture Show by McMurtry.

51Ethereal black-and-white treescapes from a master of long-exposure photography.

Published to accompany the eponymous exhibition at Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire in France, this catalog gathers a stunning selection of photographs of trees by English-born, Seattle-based photographer Michael Kenna (born 1954). For over 40 years, Kenna has been traveling around the world with his camera immortalizing trees and forests in his signature ethereal lighting, which he achieves by working in the early morning and late-night hours, and through his use of extremely long exposure times, often lasting up to 10 hours. Captured exclusively in black and white, these idyllic images are divorced from both seasonal and geographical context, emphasizing the diversity and plurality of the photographed specimens. On rare occasions, the existence of human civilizations peeks through in his work: some road sections, buildings, fences and stakes or, more surprisingly, slippers, constitute the only traces of human presence.

This flattening of setting and simplification of subject allows us to reimagine the colors that are traditionally associated with trees and focus on the interaction between the opaque, delicate black of their branches and the fleecy light that filters through them, generating the wonderful atmospheric effect so distinctive to Kenna’s photography.

62An unsettling seven-year chronicle of severe resource depletion across Africa.

In Edward Burtynsky’s recent photographs, produced across the African continent, the patterns and scars of human-altered landscapes initially appear to form an abstract painterly language; they reference the sublime and often surreal qualities of human mark-making. While chronicling the major themes of terraforming and extraction, urbanization and deforestation, African Studies conveys the unsettling reality of sweeping resource depletion on both a human and industrial scale.

From natural landscapes to artisanal mining and mechanized extraction, several distinct chapters culminate with China in Africa: a series depicting the economic inroads being made by China, including the interiors of gigantic newly built manufacturing plants. This project brings together the work of seven years, the latest installment in Burtynsky’s ongoing oeuvre.

50An epic visual history of Dior by one of France’s most iconic fashion photographers.

This three-volume publication explores three distinct phases in the history of the legendary French fashion house founded in 1946. The first volume presents 33 black-and-white images of Dior’s original designs, staged by French photographer Sarah Moon at the Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris during the summer of 2021. It interweaves almost abstract photographs of the Fondation with vivid portrayals of the models. The second volume contains 43 images documenting a selection of garments designed by the various artistic directors of Dior between 1958 and 2015: Yves Saint Laurent, Marc Bohan, Gianfranco Ferré, John Galliano and Raf Simons. The third and final volume presents 38 photographs taken since the arrival of Dior’s current artistic director, Maria Grazia Chiuri.

Sarah Moon (born 1941) grew up between France and England. As a young woman, she started working as a model which plunged her into the world of fashion, a world that would later propel her toward photography, which became her ultimate passion. By 1970, she had devoted herself exclusively to photography and her work was published in numerous magazines. Robert Delpire hired her to make photographs for his advertising agency and they subsequently became lifelong romantic partners. Moon is famous for her blurred aesthetic, use of Polaroids, halftone photos and erasure of faces.

Looking back at a pioneer of 1970s self-portraiture, with unpublished diaries and sketches.

This catalog compiles the self-portraits, working diaries and sketches of Swiss photographer Hannah Villiger (1951–97), best known for her large-format photographs of her own body, arranged into blocks of fragmented and abstracted body parts.

394While at grad school in the early 1970’s Henry Horenstein would attend Speedway races, in New England to see his brother in law compete. In front of his camera the drivers would fly around the track in beat-up cars customised for racing at break neck speeds in the hopes of small town glory. Horenstein's joyful images present us with a slice now of what the world of motor racing looked like then, before racing became big business, as it slowly morphed into Nascar - the worlds fastest growing sport. “I was still in grad school and I was looking for subjects. There had to be good pictures there for a wanna-be historian-with-a-camera. What better than an old-school sport that would certainly be extinct one day? I’m still waiting. My brother-in-law Paul raced stock cars―old. Paul’s cousin Dickie Simmonds owned the local Gulf station and modified the junkers that Paul drove at places like the Seekonk Speedway (Seekonk, MA) and the Thompson Speedway (Thompson, CT). Paul and Dickie had friends in low places.” Henry Horenstein "As I started to look at the photos I recognized most of the cars and I began to marvel at the skills of some of these drivers and their teams for keeping these heaps going. They must have been geniuses... As I looked over the photos for a second time I noticed that for a book about stock car racing there are more pictures of the people than their cars and this is something else that Henry and I share. On Car Talk we used the cars as an excuse to talk to people and get to know them and their stories." Ray Magliozzi

157This exclusive numbered and signed leporello is published on the occasion of the exhibition Lightness, which runs at Cultural Centre Scharpoord, Knokke-Heist from 26 March to 12 June 2022 "Janssens's new photo series 'Lightness' is teeming with contradictions, dualities and ambiguities. Her photos are both unbearably light and unbearably heavy. It opens the door to a series of new ideas on our desire to escape, our lack of a sense of reality, and our superficiality." - Thijs Demeulemeester With Lightness Frieke Janssens has created a cathartic photo series, tapping into our urge to escape and our individual quest for a sense of purpose and meaning. Her compositions explore the visual dichotomy between weightlessness and gravity, water and air, aesthetics and imperfection. Using the sea and its eternal ebb and flow as a backdrop, the photographer contemplates the universally human. To what extent can we ever know or understand each other? This exclusive numbered and signed leporello is published on the occasion of the exhibition Lightness, which runs at Cultural Centre Scharpoord, Knokke-Heist from 26 March to 12 June 2022. Its publication coincides with 'Foto Knokke-Heist'. With contributions by Sofie Crabbé, Lize Spit and Thijs Demeulemeester.

770Separated into four parts, Ballenesque takes readers on a visual, chronological journey through Roger Ballen’s entire oeuvre, including both iconic images and previously unpublished photographs. Part I explores his formative artistic influences and his later rediscovery of boyhood through photography, culminating in his first published monograph, Boyhood, in 1979. Part II then charts the period between 1980 and 2000, during which time his deeper search for the elemental self found its way into the ‘Dorps’, or small towns, of South Africa and concluding with the release of his seminal monograph Outland. Part III covers the years 2000–2013, when Ballen achieved global recogition with Shadow Chamber and Boarding House and his work began to veer away from portraiture altogether. Finally, in Part IV, Ballen reflects upon his career in its entirety.

With over 300 photographs and an introduction by eminent academic Robert J. C. Young, this book provides both an entirely new way of seeing Ballen’s work for those who already follow his career and a comprehensive introduction for those encountering his photographs for the first time.

1645In 1943, Roy Stryker, the head of the Department of Defense's Office of War Information sent Esther Bubley on a series of bus trips throughout the Midwest and South. Her assignment? To document the role that the nation's bus lines played not only in mobilizing troops and war workers, but also in providing transportation between cities for individuals who could not do so under wartime rationing.

Bubley would go on to contribute 40 photo essays to Life, and in her first major assignment, her skill at capturing the wide range of human experience is already on display.

This book features over 140 photographs by Bubley arranged into three chapters.

1629Byker is an intimate portrait of a community faced with redevelopment.

When Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen came to the North East of England in 1969 as a founder member of Amber, she set up home in Byker, a working class part of Newcastle upon Tyne. As she began to document the terraced community, she became aware of the plans for its demolition, to make way for the building of the Byker Wall, designed by architect Ralph Erskine.

This lent urgency to her work, which continued over until the early 1980s and the completion of the new estate.

In 1981 Amber began work on the film. Drawing on Sirkka’s images and interviews, on documentary footage and dramatisation, it evokes an entire era in British working class life.

1238Bruce Gilden has never taken a break from his photography... Except once, in that miserable spring of 2020 when the first Covid attack took us prisoners. Stuck upstate New York with no assistant, and left with his Leica, his wife and a car, ‘lockdowned’ Bruce was going nuts. Late May, after the death of George Floyd, History came to the rescue with the massive protests springing out all over New York City. Bruce went to explore, driving back and forth to war zone Brooklyn and walking miles and miles on the street in pursuit of the rallies. Until one special day in early June at Barclays Center when the story of Bruce and the Bikers took off. Bruce found himself caught right in the middle of a loud and spectacular crowd of bikers, predominantly Black. He had just landed in a ride-out prayer for George Floyd called by the mysterious ‘Circuit’, as New York’s Black motorbike community nickname their huge network and its numerous social affairs. After that, Bruce had only one idea in mind: “Find the Bikers...” And so began a relationship that continues to this day. Determined to explore the real ‘Bike life’ of this unknown and often feared community, Bruce embarked on the social itinerary of the MC ‘Circuit”, photographing tirelessly in and out and beyond New York at the events where the family of riders meet. By the end of the summer, the Bikers had a nickname for Bruce – they called him ‘Everywhere’. Now that he’s a regular on the Circuit, with many good friends within the community, that’s changed to ‘OG’ (Old Guard) or simply ‘Bro’.

560Misr is the Arabic name for Egypt. Since 1992, Denis Dailleux has been tirelessly photographing this country, taking an interest in both the bustle of Cairo and the tranquility of Upper and Lower Egypt. His total immersion - he lived in Cairo for many years - allowed him to have access to scenes of daily life, in the street, in cafes or on the banks of the Nile, at family or religious celebrations, but also in the intimate sphere of the Egyptians that he was able to capture with a powerful and generous aesthetic. This book brings together Denis Dailleux's most emblematic photographs of Egypt and unpublished images rediscovered for the occasion. A valuable account of popular Egyptian culture, it is accompanied by texts by Christian Caujolle and Ahmed Naji.

1245"Since 2014, Alessandra Sanguinetti has been returning to the small town of Black River Falls in Wisconsin, creating the photographs that would come to form the stark and elliptical series Some Say Ice. The same town is the subject of Wisconsin Death Trip, a book of photographs taken by Charles Van Schaick in the late 1800s documenting the bleak hardships of the lives and deaths of its inhabitants. Sanguinetti first came across this book as a child, and the experience is engraved into her memory as her first reckoning with mortality. This encounter eventually led her to explore the strange relationship of photography and death, and ultimately to make her own visits to Black River Falls. The austere, sculptural scenes and ambiguous, uneasy portraits that make up Some Say Ice depict a place almost outside of time. Presented unadorned by text or explication, the photographs are touched with the spirit of the gothic as well as the unmistakable tenderness familiar from Sanguinetti’s series The Adventures of Guille and Belinda. By bringing undercurrents of doubt and darkness to the surface of her images, Sanguinetti alludes to things absent or invisible, playing on atmospheres both real and imagined, as well as the ghostly possibility of undoing death through the act of photography. With its title inspired by Robert Frost’s famous poem equivocating on how best one’s inevitable death might be met, Some Say Ice is a humane look at the melancholic realities underpinning our lives, seen with glacial clarity by one of the world’s foremost photographers."

9In 1973, Michael Lesy was a young scholar whose first book had just been published. In the soon-legendary Wisconsin Death Trip he combined 1890s photographs and newspaper clippings to evoke a devastatingly tragic epoch, the real-world antithesis of the fanciful "Gay Nineties." It startled readers then and remains a touchstone of modern photographic interpretation.

That year Lesy met and became close friends with the great photographer Walker Evans, who in the 1930s had collaborated with writer James Agee to create another towering landmark in the American photo-essay, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Old, frail, with just two years left to live, Evans was still urgently and obsessively photographing. "Outside the rooms he inhabited," Lesy writes, "the world was scattered with objects on their way to oblivion. He photographed them in their passage." Brief as their friendship was, it was intense and rewarding. Each admired the other; each saw himself reflected in the other: aesthetic visionaries who shared a radical belief that photographs were not flat and static documents—that "the plain truth of the images . . . wasn’t as plain as it seemed," Lesy explains. "Meanings, beliefs, and emotions lay crisscrossed under the surface of the most plainspoken photographs." Throughout his career in the classroom and in more than a dozen books, Lesy has continually inspired us to open our eyes, our minds, and our hearts to those many layers of meaning and feeling in photos, from seemingly ordinary snapshots to majestic landscapes.

In this unconventional, lyrical biography, Lesy traces Evans’s intimate, idiosyncratic relationships with men and women—the circle of friends who made Walker Evans who he was. "Wonder and scrutiny produced the portraits Walker made in his prime," Lesy writes. Evans’s photographs of Agee, Berenice Abbott, Lady Caroline Blackwood, and Ben Shahn, among others, accompany Lesy’s telling of Evans’s life stories.

877 Father and son collaborate on a photographic panorama of humanity Famed photojournalist Steve Schapiro (1934–2022) and his son Theophilus Donoghue (born 1982) have collaborated on a photo project that is 70% Schapiro, 30% Donoghue. Seventy Thirty depicts the various faces and expressions of humanity, from metropolitans to migrants, homeless people to conspicuous celebrities such as Alec Guinness, Allen Ginsberg, Muhammad Ali, Robert De Niro, René Magritte, Janis Joplin and Andy Warhol. Schapiro photographs early New York skateboarders while Donoghue documents current Colombian breakdancers. Schapiro includes his classic photograph Man on Iceberg, which was the opening spread of a Life story on existentialism. Similarly, Donoghue contributes his contemplative photograph Hindsight Intersection, recently featured in ARTSY’s 20 21 Artists in Support of Human Rights Watch benefit auction. Shooting in monochrome with an occasional dash of color, Schapiro and Donoghue portray the proud and lofty as well as the humble and humorous.

1614Fifty years of portraying American lives and landscapes, from the New Topographics veteran and author of The Brown Sisters.

American photographer Nicholas Nixon (born 1947) is famed internationally for his large-format black-and-white photographs of intimate everyday moments. His first solo exhibition, curated by John Szarkowski, was held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1976. Nixon’s early depictions of Boston and New York in the mid-1970s were featured in one of the most influential exhibitions of that decade, New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape at the George Eastman House in Rochester. He is also famed for his series People with AIDS, begun in 1987. For his most iconic series, The Brown Sisters, he created an annual portrait of his wife, Bebe, and her three sisters, consistently posed in the same left to right order, as they grew and aged over nearly a half century. His oeuvre, however, encompasses a much broader spectrum, from his documentation of life in the American South to his landscape portraits of the rough industrial terrains around Detroit. Nicholas Nixon: Closing the Distance takes us on a journey through the artist’s life and work―at once distant and intimate and close―and features new, previously unpublished photographs.

1611Chambi’s chronicles of Andean life and Inca ruins highlight Peru’s emerging Indigenous discourse.

Of Indigenous origin, Peruvian photographer Martín Chambi (1891–1973) dedicated a large part of his life to photographing the Peruvian Andes, reclaiming the pre-Hispanic past through images of Inca ruins and portraits of life in Andean communities in the early 20th century. Chambi’s work brings a new perspective to photography of the time, highlighting the emerging Indigenous discourse that was starting to gain force in South America. While he was not the first to photograph Machu Picchu, Chambi was among the first Peruvian chroniclers of the Inca citadel. Drawing on Machu Picchu’s geometric forms, Chambi’s work entered a new phase in which shape, space and texture build toward more complex compositions and starker contrasts, making him an emblem of contemporary documentary photography in Peru and Latin America. This gorgeous clothbound volume compiles 170 of Chambi’s black-and-white images.

1608Like 17th-century Dutch painters who made otherwise ordinary interior scenes appear charged with meaning, Pennsylvania-based photographer Jessica Todd Harper (born 1975) looks for the value in everyday moments. The characters in her imagery are the people around her―friends, herself, family―but it is not so much they who are important as the way in which they are organized and lit by Harper. A woman helping her child practice the piano is not a particularly sacred moment, but as in a Vermeer painting, the way the composition and lighting influence the content suggests that perhaps it is. This collection of photographs presented in Harper's third monograph makes use of what is right in front of the artist, what is here, a place that many of us came to contemplate especially during the pandemic. Beauty, goodness and truth can reveal themselves in daily life, as in the Dutch paintings of everyday domestic scenes that are somehow lit up with mysterious import. Harper shows how our unexamined or even seemingly dull surroundings can sometimes be illuminating.

TBW Books is pleased to present River’s Dream, the latest monograph by Curran Hatleberg and a complete realization of the series exhibited at the 2019 Whitney Biennial. Hatleberg is known for traveling America, guided by intuition, to create scenes of American life and landscape. Working collaboratively with the people he meets, he recounts intimate stories of family and community. Here, in the follow-up to his first monograph Lost Coast (TBW Books, 2016), Hatleberg centers his narrative on the dog days of summer. Sweltering heat, dripping humidity, lush vegetation, and screaming insects– River’s Dream is a pulsing and episodic hallucination of life lived outdoors. In these sixty-five photographs, we move through swamps and groves, front yards and junkyards, encountering moments of haunting mystery and beautiful impermanence. Heightened by formal repetition, echo, and refrain, everyday scenes take on surreal, allegorical qualities. In the end, Hatleberg leaves us with the impression of memory, where the past is never gone, but appears and reappears endlessly, as in the flickering of a dream. This book includes new texts by Natasaha Trethewey and Joy Williams commissioned for the publication.

770An expanded edition of Ballen’s debut photobook―a charming homage to the spirit of boyhood around the world.
This new and expanded edition of Roger Ballen’s (born 1950) widely acclaimed 1979 debut photobook Boyhood, admired by André Kertesz, Bruce Davidson and Elliott Erwitt, features new and unpublished images taken by the photographer in the 1970s. In photographs and stories, Ballen leads us across the continents of Europe, Asia and North America in search of boyhood: boyhood as it is lived in the Himalayas of Nepal, the islands of Indonesia, the provinces of China, the streets of America. Each stunning black-and-white photograph―culled from 15,000 images shot during Ballen’s four-year quest―depicts the magic of boys revealed in their games, their adventures, their dreams, their mischief.
More of an ode than a documentary work, Ballen’s first book is as powerful and current today as it was 43 years ago―a stunning series of timeless images that transcend social and cultural particularities.

1596A visual homage to Nantucket, photos blk / white.Square format. 1st printing, limited edition to 1000 copies, stated.

"When I look about Nantucket I see everywhere photographs already half made. It is the nature of this island to be kind to photographers, especially those making black and white photographs like the ones in this book that I have made over almost a quarter century. Returning whalers called Nantucket “The Little Grey Lady of the Sea,” no doubt because of the combination of frequent fog and the ubiquitous grey cedar shingles. Often she appears to the eye with little or no color, like a monochromatic photograph waiting to happen.

In making the photographs in this book I have been inspired by the unique architectural tradition of Nantucket. Although I have not documented each style of architecture represented on the island, I have use elements of those styles as the building blocks for these photographs. Taken as a whole, the architecture of Nantucket is simple and geometric. Even the more flamboyant styles of the past, like the Victorian vernacular and Second Empire, take on a reserved quality on Nantucket. This may be the ongoing influence on the island of one hundred years of Quaker severity and emphasis on simple utility. The spareness -- even austerity -- in some of these photographs is my attempt to evoke that tradition and use it expressively. Today the traditional spareness of Nantucket architecture is being “dressed up.” There are more trees, more gardens, more sculpted privet hedges than ever before. Houses are being lovingly and lavishly restored and maintained. Sometimes this “dressing up” goes too far, becoming sentimental or ostentatious. Yet the spare geometry of Nantucket architecture endures, in part, because of an enlightened building code that is preserving much of the authenticity of the island, and because of a general awareness that Nantucket is a place like no other and therefore one well worth protecting." -- Gregory Spaid

1585LaToya Ruby Frazier’s Flint Is Family in Three Acts chronicles the ongoing manmade water crisis in Flint, Michigan, from the perspective of those who live and fight for their right to access free, clean water. Featuring photographs, texts, poems and interviews made in collaboration with Flint’s residents, this five-year body of work, begun in 2016, serves as an intervention and alternative to mass media accounts of this political, economic and racial injustice.

In 2014, as a cost-cutting measure, the Flint City Council switched the town’s water supply from a Detroit treatment facility to the industrial-waste-filled Flint River. Forced to use water contaminated with lead at 27 times the government’s maximum threshold, Flint’s citizens―predominantly Black and overwhelmingly poor―fell ill almost immediately and many battle chronic medical conditions as a result.

Frazier first traveled to Flint in 2016, as part of a magazine commission to create a photo essay about the water crisis. During that trip she met Shea Cobb, a Flint poet, activist and mother who became Frazier’s collaborator. Divided into three acts, the book follows Cobb as she fights for her family’s and community’s health and well-being. Act I introduces Cobb, her family and their community. Act II follows Cobb and her daughter Zion to Newton, Mississippi, where they move in with Cobb’s father, Douglas R. Smiley, and learn to take care of family-owned land and horses. Act III documents the arrival of an atmospheric water generator to Flint that Frazier, Cobb and her best friend, Amber Hasan, helped set up and operate in their neighborhood. Spurred by the lack of mass-media interest in this ongoing crisis, Frazier’s approach ensures that the lives and voices of Flint’s residents are seen and heard. Flint Is Family in Three Acts is a 21st-century survey of the American landscape that reveals the persistent segregation and racism which haunts it. It is also a story of a community’s strength, pride and resilience in the face of a crisis that continues.