Monographs & Art Books / J

Wild Concrete is a series about resilience of nature in an urban environment. No matter how clever we are at dominating our environment with concrete structures, nature somehow finds its way to fight back. This reminds us that our concrete jungle eventually would have to give in to the force of nature if we d let go, as captured by Romain s images of sprouting flowers and maturing trees on unlikely places.

Focusing solely on the phenomena of trees sprouting from residential buildings in the busy districts of Hong Kong, Wild Concrete compares the living conditions between plants and humans both growing in a harsh surroundings. In this series the trees share the same exceptional qualities as their human counterparts: perseverance, diligence, and independence. In pursuit of a small patch of blue sky in the vertical city of Hong Kong, Romain looked up to the skyscrapers and developed the Vertical Horizon series.

Returning with Wild Concrete, Romain has continued with his fla nerie through the same concrete jungle. Exploring his fascination with the humble yet indomitable presence of nature in the harsh urban environment.

Since relocating to Hong Kong, French-born fine art photographer Romain Jacquet-Lagrèze has spent countless hours documenting the quirks, beauty and complexity of his adopted city. His latest work, The Blue Moment, is an architectural series that captures the day s final moments, before dusk settles over the metropolis.

Enveloped in a deep blue blanket, the city s artificial and natural lighting combine to create a near-mystical atmosphere. In these blue moments , the true Hong Kong is revealed; a high-density urban landscape still subject to the influence of nature.

Vertical Horizon is a photographic journey between the buildings of a relentlessly growing city. It is a deep immersion into the city's thick atmospheres, and a visual record of clues in a search for the missing element that brings unity to its wildly diverse built environment.

Both introverted and extroverted, Vertical Horizon is a contemplative dive into the raw nature of Hong Kong and an expression of its vertical elan.

‘Neiges’ (‘Snows’) is a photographic book by the contemporary photographer, Christophe Jacrot, published by h'Artpon Editions in 2019.

After the success of the ‘Snjor’ photographic book, published in 2016 and dedicated to the Icelandic winter, Christophe Jacrot now presents all of his photographic studies on winter and snow in his book: ‘Neiges’ (‘Snows’).

Thanks to this common denominator, he has created similar visualisations to different places, both in the wilderness as well as urban. From Greenland to Bavaria, Canada to Japan, from behind the artist’s lens, all these locations have the same feel. Magical, nostalgic, sometimes even ethereal. If the leading role is snow in all of these photographs, man presence is still quickly seen though lonely silhouettes, tyre-tracks and isolated houses.

"This book is a ramble through wintery scenes, but not uniquely. It takes us to many places, both deserted and inhabited, in front of unlikely architectures, either functional or beautiful and to dreamlike or disturbing landscapes." - Christophe Jacrot

On the night of October 29 to 30, 2012, Hurricane Sandy plunged New York City into chaos. During this disaster, 375,000 people were evacuated, and a large part of the metropolis was inundated and completely deprived of electricity.

It is this vision of New York, "disturbing, ghostly, but beautiful", that Christophe Jacrot has immortalized in a series of images brought together for the first time in an elegant collection.

Catalogue for an exhibition held September 4 - November 14, 1999.

The year is 1949, the place, one of Manhattan's narrow alleys. A laborer squints into the shaft of sunlight spilling down between brick walls and hitches up his suspenders on one shoulder. He leans against a truck...This deep-toned photograph by N. Jay Jaffee discloses a story about its maker as well as its subject.

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 "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.

'Smoking Kids' is the title of Frieke Janssens' somewhat controversial photographic project. Fifteen children aged between four and nine pose in a startling adult way in front of the camera, each smoking a cigarette, cigar or pipe.

Photographer for the well-known Smoking Kids, Animalcoholics and Your Last Shot series, Frieke Janssens is part of a new generation of aesthetic photographers.
Pictures of smoking children and drunk animals, people on their deathbeds and single women on the hunt for men - yet somehow her photographs are never shocking or crude. In fact, you'll have a hard time finding someone more in touch with aesthetics than Frieke Janssens. She's been a professional photographer for twenty years now, so it was about time she published her own book.

Spectacular images from one of the most celebrated wildlife photographers in a much-anticipated photo book. Jarque Krebs focuses his lens on this fragile natural world to draw attention to its precarious situation.

There are few things more fascinating than the diversity of the animal kingdom — and it’s a wonder under immense threat. The latest figures estimate that 60 percent of all animal populations on our planet have been wiped out in the last 50 years. Pedro Jarque Krebs, a multi-award-winning wildlife photographer, focuses his lens on this fragile natural world to draw attention to its precarious situation. His photographs aim to break down the psychological and emotional barriers that separate us from our fellow creatures, capturing every animal — whether a bird, a reptile, or a big cat — in an atmosphere of breathtaking intimacy.

Beautiful and humbling, his images give the animals their full and due dignity. They remind us that we are not the center of the universe, and that our most important project is to protect the intricate ecosystem of which we are just a small, constituent part. “My goal with these images is to raise our awareness of the beauty and diversity of the natural world, but — even more importantly — its dreadful fragility and endangerment.” Pedro Jarque Krebs Text in English, German, French and Spanish.

"The emotion I felt the first time I saw the images of the Homeless project was something which one rarely experiences in front of photographs. This might be because these are only apparently photographs. Sure, the means used is a camera; certainly, on the other side of the lens there is a reality. On the bodies and faces portrayed the signs of devastation due to an existence without any warmth, apart from that given by alcohol or drugs; bodies torn to pieces by the violence of the streets on a daily basis.

What is left of such a person? And yet, in these eyes rejected by the world there is a Light, an otherworldly Light, a Light with violent flashes, that apart from pain talks about elation, truth and wisdom, bitter and infinitely sweet like the taste of freedom. The Light, “this” Light with which Lee Jeffries portrays those without a home, without a land, without anything, is the same Light that emerged from the faces of sinners, saints, common men and women painted or sculpted in marble at the feet of the Divine, be it Christ or the Virgin Mary, by artists such as Caravaggio, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Bernini, and in the greatest art pieces of European Renaissance and Baroque.

Rather than photography, this is Sacred Art, And this is what remains of Jeffries’ divine tragedy: the Sacred, the real meaning of being Human, too Human, in the descent towards the netherworld and return to Heaven." - Giovanni Cozzi

Featuring the most prominent names in contemporary Chinese photography, these pocket-sized monographs explore the extraordinary diversity of the genre and showcase a creative, liberated, and unique artistic perspective. The collections present an obscure tableau of modern Chinese society, from magnificent landscapes and never-before-seen industrial compounds to the desires of China’s new youth and its growing sociopolitical challenges. The imagery from some of the most exciting artists working today—including “the invisible man” photos of Liu Bolin and the world-famous coal miner portraits of Song Chao—is prefaced with a concise essay that explains the background and inspiration of each featured photographer.

Chen Jiagang has taken the former industrial compounds built in central cities of China during the sixties (the Third Front) as the subject matter of his first bodies of work. Trying to capture the specters of industry that still reside there, his pictures tell the sad story of these cities, which in their time were the incarnation of the social ideal, the glory of the country but which have since become useless industrial cemeteries and endless wasteland Making use of an extremely large format camera, Chen Jiagang is fully engaged in a realist but narrative documentation of abandoned and desolate landscapes and the scars left by time and neglect on such regions.

Capturing another side of China, a country currently experiencing one of the highest rates of development in the world, Chen Jiagang's sumptuous, large-scale color photographs of monumental industrial wastelands make us question the usefulness, or absurdity, of the mad development that humans so intrinsically pursue.

No superhero is a series of work by the acclaimed Scandinavian artist, Ole Marius Jorgensen. The work features meticulously staged, cinematic photographs that depict seemingly ordinary situations which are then infused with a juxtaposed narrative. This unlocks an unexpected and unique world that feels both old and new.

Full of mystique and intrigue and set in the artist’s native, rural Scandinavia, this series of images follows the protagonist on a silent, solitary journey that emphasizes complex emotions. From the playful to the dark, to the eccentric, each scene is depicted through a lens that captures childhood nostalgia with the hero as an ordinary man.

Digital artist Erik Johansson starts with a simple hand-drawn sketch, but what you see in the end is anything but simple: dazzlingly realistic scenes made of hundreds of photographs—all meticulously staged and propped and then stitched together in software—offer a glimpse into wholly invented, incredibly detailed worlds.

While shooting takes only a few days, Johansson’s planning and retouching process each take months, resulting in out-of-this-world images that have won him fans worldwide.

The photographer and visual artist Erik Johansson creates surreal worlds through his own unique method. It often takes him months just to make one image, in a process where his photographs are combined so that an original place emerges. The result is often humorous, sometimes even scary, but always mind-blowing. Erik Johansson has become world-famous through his captivating and detailed images.

Places Beyond is his second and biggest book so far, presenting his best images in large format. He also reveals the secrets of his method in an inspirational 'Behind the Scenes' chapter where he explains the creative process from nine of his photographs. Places Beyond contains more than a hundred stunning pictures.

"For me, creating an image is like creating a place. A place that feels familiar, but with a twist that causes the viewer to stop short." - Erik Johansson

"Stockholm. It is impossible to evade your beauty, vulnerability and vanity. And your flaws. Your rottenness. I visit places where you bleed, I am there picking your scabs. Sometimes I grow tired of you and your easily broken promises. But I never give up on you. Your streets have always offered me direction. Walking here today, I stumble on old memories." - Simon Johansson

The sound of the Öland Bridge expansion joints against the tyres. The first years, when the bridge was new, islanders would come out in droves along the road to look at the invasion of the mainlanders.

They don’t anymore. Apart from that most things have kept the same, time runs slower here. I see friendship, happiness, love, a breakup and a sorrow. There is so much ugliness here. So much beauty. - Simon Johansson

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.

Introductory text by Mark Haworth-Booth. An interesting collection of 81 tritone images by Colin Jones. Jones began his career as professional dancer but eventually transitioned to photography and with this collection he examines jobs that require hard labour like dancing, coal mining, and dock workers.

"The Earth is the cradle of humanity, but who wants to spend his life in a cradle?" Konstantin Tsiolkovsky

The Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan was created by the Soviets in the 1950s. It was from Baikonur in 1988 that the first Soviet spaceplane, Buran, was launched, in response to the United States Space Shuttle.

The Buran programme would officially end in 1993 during the presidency of Boris Yeltsin, with only one Buran launch ever taking place - in 1988. Thereafter, parts of the Baikonur Cosmodrome fell into disuse, notably the sites connected with the launch of these Soviet craft. The two shuttles that were completed remain abandoned there, laid to rest in this atmospheric place.

This is the first time that photographs of these spectacular locations have been published in a book.

Jonk travelled 20km through the Kazakh desert under cover of night, entered the hangars clandestinely, and spent three nights there under the radar of military security to produce a truly incredible photographic reportage of what is considered today the world's most important urban exploration site.

Naturalia is a curated collection of images showcasing urban ruins reclaimed by nature. Ornate country mansions, luxury modernist designer homes, stone churches, farm holdings, factories, institutions, private homes, train stations, planes, cars, tanks, trains, palatial courtyards, plantation mansions, spaces of work and play, life and death, all in the vivid processes of reclamation.

A wide range of architectural styles from classical to hyper-modern are pictured in the grip of wild, resurgent nature. - Jonathan Jimenez (jonk)

Spomeniks literally meaning 'Monuments' in Serbo-Croatian, look like spaceships conspicuously parked up in the middle of nowhere, alien to their surroundings, their bizarre beauty deriving from both their location and imaginative symbolism.

Follow in the footsteps of French photographer Jonathan 'Jonk' Jimenez as he tries to track down these super-sized public structures. Once numbering in their thousands and attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors every year, in particular 'young pioneers' for their communist and patriotic education.

Pushing architecture to its limits, Spomeniks are what happens when brutalism, symbolism, space age aesthetics and abstraction meet.

This book presents the work in abandoned places of 26 artists from the current street art and graffiti scene, classified from A to Z, and the special relationship they have with these places.

"Wastelands invites the reader to travel to the unknown territories of free art! Jonk’s superb photographs pay a vibrant tribute to these astonishing works, realistic or abstract, where nature and the wear of time always have their say."

Through the works of Alëxone, Beerens, Caligr, Djalouz, Ecloz, Fabien Del aka La rouille, Gonzalo Borondo, Hopare, Itvan Kebadian, Jace, Katre, Logick, Mouarf, Nineta, Opéra, Plotbot Ken, Qbrick, Roa, Ale Senso, Miles Toland, Uber, Vegan Flava, WAR !, Xkuz, YZ and Zoo Project, around ten nationalities are represented with photos shot in 26 countries.

This text is a retrospective of Jean-Francois jonvelle's work about the world of women. It covers the 1983 - 1999 years, and contains famous portraits and nudes which made him a star in France, Germany and Japan.

Jean-François Jonvelle was born in the Provençal town of Cavaillon in 1943. After working as assistant to American photographer Richard Avedon, Jonvelle turned freelance. He always worked around women, admitting freely that his only subject was the women he loved.

"When I photograph a woman," he used to say, "I want her to know that she is the most beautiful woman on earth, because a women who feels beautiful really is the most beautiful woman in the world."

Collected here are 100 of Jonvelle’s best photographs of women, his ode to femininity.

In a continuation of Dave Jordano's critically-acclaimed Detroit: Unbroken Down (powerHouse Books, 2015), which documented the lives of residents, Detroit Nocturne is an artist's book not of people this time, but instead the places within which they live and work: structures, dwellings, and storefronts. Made at night, these photographs speak to the quiet resolve of Detroit's neighborhoods and its stewards: independent shop proprietors and home owners who have survived the long and difficult path of living in a post-industrial city stripped of economic prosperity and opportunity.

In many rust-belt cities like Detroit, people's lives often hang in the balance as neighborhoods support and provide for each other through job creation, ad-hoc community involvement, moral and spiritual support, and a well-honed Do-It-Yourself attitude. With all the media attention about Detroit's rebirth and revival, it is important to note that many neighborhoods throughout the city have managed to survive against the odds for years, relying on local merchants and businesses that operate on a cash only basis who have stuck it out through decades of economic decline.

Determination and a strong sense of self-preservation: Detroit's citizens manage to survive by maintaining a healthy sense of connection without the fear of giving up. All of these places of business and residences, whether large or small, are in many ways symbols representing the ongoing story that is Detroit, and a testament to the tenacity of those who are trying desperately to hold on to what is left of the social and economic fabric of the city. These photographs speak to that truth without casting an overly sentimental gaze.

These nocturnal images offer a chance to view the locations in an unfamiliar light, and offer a moment of quiet and calm reflection.

Dave Jordano returned to his hometown of Detroit to document the people who still live in what has become one of the country's most economically challenging cities. Against a backdrop of mass abandonment through years of white flight, unemployment hovering at almost three times the national average, city services cut to the bone, a real estate collapse of massive proportions, and ultimately filing the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history, Jordano searches for the hope and perseverance of those who have had to endure the hardship of living in a post-industrial city that has fallen on the hardest of times.

From the lower Southeast Side where urban renewal and government programs slowly became the benchmark of civic failure, to the dwindling enclaves of neighborhoods like Delray and Poletown (once blue-collar neighborhoods that have all but vanished), Jordano seeks to dispel the popular myth perpetrated through the media that Detroit is an empty wasteland devoid of people. He encounters resolute individuals determined to make this city a place to live, from a homeless man who decided to build his own one-room structure on an abandoned industrial lot because he was tired of sleeping on public benches, to a group of squatters who repurposed long-abandoned houses on a street called Goldengate. Jordano discovers and rebroadcasts a message of hope and endurance to an otherwise greatly misunderstood and misrepresented city. Detroit: Unbroken Down is not a document solely about what's been destroyed, but even more critically, about all that has been left behind and those who remain to cope with it.

Thomas Jorion captures in his lens all the strangeness and poetry of places created and then abandoned by human society, places of silence, in a state of decomposition but witnesses of intense human activity - large-scale production in Soviet factories, intimate lives divined in deserted apartments, ancient places of passage like the Japanese konbini, state rooms of old Tuscan palaces, or American theaters-cinemas.

Silencio thus gives food for thought on human temporality and our relationship with the built environment.

After Silencio and Vestiges d´empire, photographer Thomas Jorion continues in this opus his questioning of buildings and places in ruins, abandoned by men. He surveyed Italy from north to south, from Piedmont to Sicily, via Veneto and Tuscany. He returned with surprising and timeless images of mansions, villas, palaces dating from the 18th to the beginning of the 20th centuries, and long since fallen out of favor.

This forgotten heritage surprises with the richness of its decorations barely altered by time: stuccoes, bas-reliefs, paintings ... Sometimes, the almost incongruous presence of a bed or an armchair reminds us that these spaces often invaded by vegetation have been inhabited. Thomas Jorion captures these places in natural light, without retouching or staging. Striking images of an Italy frozen in time.

After Silencio, Thomas Jorion offers us a new journey through dereliction and the aesthetics of ruin. Always attracted by abandoned places of memory, the photographer wanted to open his work on other themes, such as architecture, history, politics. Drawing up a map, he set off in the footsteps of the French colonial empire. The reported images sometimes suggest, despite the variety and geographic distance of the subjects, an architectural similarity, the same French-style drop-off point.

There is no nostalgia in this series, which mixes all types of buildings (private houses, factories, administrations, stations, hotels, bridges, mills, etc.). Man has often reinvested these places, granting them new functions, whether in Guyana, China, Madagascar, Senegal, Morocco, Cambodia, India, Haiti , from Algeria… decadent grandeur and sublimated modesty undergo the same earthworks of time and nature.

For over 50 years, Josephson has been using photography to explore ideas about how we view reality. Formally trained under Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan, Josephson taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1960 to 1997. During his career, he has produced an impressive array of work, ranging from stunning black-and-white prints to striking assemblages to humorous Polaroids and has been exhibited widely in America and internationally.

This book serves as a retrospective of his many experiments and inquiries into the nature of photography, including several extensive series and other pieces being published for the first time. The photographs are framed by informative essays by curator Wolf and critic and author Andy Grundberg and a chronology and interview by Stephanie Lipscomb, a research assistant at the Art Institute.

The result is not only an exciting explication of Josephson's endless curiosity but also an important discussion of photography as a modern, flexible, and fully expressive artistic medium. This book is warmly recommended for large public and academic libraries and would make an affordable addition to smaller local collections.

In 1973, renowned conceptual photographer Kenneth Josephson photographed a sliced loaf of bread from one end to the other to create The Bread Book. A deceptively simple object—photographs of the fronts and backs of ten slices of bread, sandwiched between the heels of the loaf with no accompanying text—this artist’s book raises fascinating questions about the nature of photography and its ability to transform an object into an idea or concept, while creating yet another object: the book itself.

Reviewing The Bread Book in afterimage, Alex Sweetman proclaimed that “the result of this act of transformation is that the original loaf no longer functions as a loaf of bread, but as a self-contained book considering the ideas of sequence and illusion in relation to the photographic medium.”

Originally published in an edition of 1,800 copies, The Bread Book has been out of print and greatly sought after for many years. This new edition is limited to 250 copies, each signed by Kenneth Josephson.

Kenneth Josephson is one of the foremost conceptual photographers in America. Since the early 1960s, when institutions such as MoMA privileged photography in the documentary mode, Josephson has championed the photograph as an object "made," not taken, by an artist pursuing an idea.

Using innovative techniques such as placing images within images and including his own body in photographs, Josephson has created an outstanding body of work that is startlingly contemporary and full of ideas that stimulate the digital generation—ideas about the nature of seeing, of "reality," and of human aspirations, and about what it means to be a human observing the world.

This book showcases the most important work by celebrated street artist and activist JR—the award-winning global street-art project he has been working on for the last six years, involving a quarter of a million people.

Artist and activist JR exhibits freely in the streets of the world, catching the attention of people who are not typical museum visitors. Known for plastering cities with huge black-and-white wheatpaste photographic portraits of the people who live there, JR won a $1 millian TED Prize in 2011 with his “TED Wish”: to create a large-scale participatory art project that transforms messages of personal identity into pieces of artistic work by making digitally uploaded images into posters to display in diverse communities. To accomplish this, JR has visited cities on nearly every continent. Since the project’s inception, approximately 200,000 people have contributed their portraits. From the suburbs of Paris to Israel and Palestine, and from the villages of Kenya to the favelas of Brazil, his art is inextricably linked with activism: his art advocates for universal women’s rights, peace and equality, and maintaining an idealism about humanity.

Inside Out captures the scope of his vision and his innovative model for creating a global art. Packed with hundreds of images from the project, it includes contributions about how JR’s art functions as a worldwide platform for social change, where people either participate in an existing campaign or launch a new action in their own community.

Inside Out is a never-before-seen look at the work that is nearest and dearest to the artist’s heart and is sure to appeal not only to JR fans but also to fans of public art and street art.

Over the past two decades, French artist JR has massively expanded the impact of public art through his ambitious projects that give visibility and agency to people around the world. Showcasing the full scope of the artist's career, JR: Chronicles accompanies the first major exhibition in North America of works by the French-born artist. Working at the intersections of photography, social engagement and street art, JR collaborates with communities by taking individual portraits, reproducing them at a monumental scale and wheat pasting them - sometimes illegally - in nearby public spaces.

This superbly produced volume traces JR's career from his early documentation of graffiti artists as a teenager in Paris to his large-scale architectural interventions in cities worldwide, to his more recent digitally collaged murals that create collective portraits of diverse publics. The centerpiece of the accompanying exhibition is The Chronicles of New York City, a new epic mural of more than 1,000 New Yorkers.

Also included are previously unseen murals set in Brooklyn; Face 2 Face, diptychs of Israelis and Palestinians in Palestinian and Israeli cities; Women Are Heroes, featuring images of the eyes of women gazing back at their communities in numerous countries; The Gun Chronicles: A Story of America, JR's complex work on guns in America; and other equally famous works.

Nausea- taken from the title of Sartre's 1938 existential novel-is a body of photographs that registers the interiors of public schools in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and Atlanta, Georgia from 1990-92 by American photographer Ron Jude.

Departing from mere documentation, Jude lures us into peering through windows, doorways and crevices of walls into empty classrooms and corridors, as we become increasingly conscious of the perils of our own gaze and the uncertainty of looking. Nausea established the building blocks for the next twenty-five years of Jude’s photographic output, including Other Nature, Alpine Star, Lick Creek Line and Lago.