Monographs & Art Books / K

A collection of Simpson Kalisher's street photography spanning a quarter century of the golden age of postwar urban America (1950-1976).It illuminates the ethos of the time with humor and social insight which is all the more pertinent today.This selection spans a quarter century of the golden age of postwar urban America (1950-1976). Kalisher illuminates the ethos of the time with humor and unflinching social insight which is all the more pertinent today.

When considered as an object the photograph exists physically in the world, it belongs to someone; it gets held, it has weight, value. I've been interested in this concept for some time. It was this interest plus the recurrent use of my images online without my permission that motivated the creation of the series Little Romances. I have always made very personal work, my current emotional state and interests get translated directly into my images.

Most all these images reflect questions and anxieties about being a woman, navigating what that means; what is expected of me as a mother, daughter, wife or lover versus what I'm capable of. In sharing my work online, sometimes it is treated with respect, but more often not. Not being asked for its use, and/or not being credited; it's upsetting being treated that way especially with such personal images. In Little Romances I photograph prints of my photographs and they become a physical object; my object.

I surround them with elements from my garden or other personal items not to evoke nostalgia or sentimentality but to deepen my physical connection/claim to these images and distance them from the viewer. The object-image becomes obscured, repurposed, diverted, so that its original intent remains safe from viewing and at the same time it explores a new narrative.

Richard Kalvar, a member of the elite club of Magnum photographers, has an exceptional eye and a talent for catching moments when societal behavior becomes humorous or shifts into the absurd.

His compelling duotone photographs document the human condition. Kalvar seeks to emphasize the unusual, and his penetrating lens reveals a unique brand of humanity. He explores everyday life but with an altogether fresh perspective, at times funnier or darker.

This collector's monograph was produced in conjunction with the artist from photographic "evidence" compiled on his travels from Rome to Paris, New York to Varsovie, and San Francisco to Tokyo.This is the first monograph published on Kalvar, one of the world's most important post war photographers.

Kanaga (1894-1978), turned her lens on subjects typically marginalized by white art photographers of her time, notably African Americans, Native Americans, the urban and rural poor. Having begun as a journalist and news photographer, her gaze was documentary, but not barren of personal engagement.

Colleague and friend of the better-known Imogen Cunningham and Dorothea Lange, Kanaga was unfortunately undervalued while she lived. With 120 b&w photographs from a retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, plus 60 smaller figures, many heretofore unseen and unpublished. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

Nadav Kander (born 1961) is an Israeli-born, London-based artist, director and photographer, internationally renowned for his landscapes and portraiture. His latest photographic series, Bodies, consists of nudes painted white against a black backdrop, their faces tuned away from the viewer.

Accessories are minimal, as is the aesthetic; yet, at the same time, the arrangement makes the sitters' mostly voluptuous bodies seem baroque. Despite the abundance of flesh on display, however, the images lack a superficial sense of the erotic; the white makeup and lack of eye contact function as barriers, and the massiveness of the limbs recalls the work of Hans Bellmer and Lucian Freud.

Like Bellmer and Freud, Kander presents us with a simulacrum of sensuality, questioning our images of the human body as well as the concept of beauty itself.

Nadav Kander (born 1961) is a recipient of the renowned Prix Pictet and one of today's most successful photographers. Upon learning of the existence of two "closed" cities on the border between Kazakhstan and Russia, he decided to visit them.

For Dust he photographed the desolated landscapes of the Aral Sea and the restricted military zones of Priozersk and Kurtchatov, which did not appear on any map until well after the end of the Cold War. Long-distance missiles were secretly tested in Priozersk, and hundreds of atomic bombs were detonated in the so-called Polygon near Kurchatov, until the program ended in 1989. The bombs were exploded in a remote but still populated area, and covert studies were made of the effects of the radiation on the unsuspecting inhabitants.

Kander describes how the ticking of the Geiger counter on his belt while he photographed served as a foil against the aesthetic allure of the ruins.

Nadav Kander's work is a varied interplay of influences. His restrained and articulate compositions have a clarity and calm that draw the viewer into zen-like states.

The London-based photographer's exceptional talent has been rewarded with major success, and his work is featured in the Sunday Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, and Esquire among other publications. His unique skill is especially manifest in his spare and muted landscapes and his straight portraits.

The Yangtze, The Long River work was awarded the second Prix Pictet. His Obama's People feature--which he created for The New York Times Magazine in 2009 -- have a haunting complexity few contemporary photographers could equal.

Regardless of his sitter-whether family member or influential celebrity-the portraiture of London-based photographer Nadav Kander (born 1961) shows what makes that particular individual human. His aim is to move beyond capturing an accurate likeness-to access the emotions within, the uncertainty, the shadow as much as the light, the complex sense of self that otherwise lays hidden.

"Revealed and concealed, beauty and destruction, ease and disease, shame and shameless," explains Kander, "These paradoxes are essential to all my work and represent what is common to all my varied subject matter."

This collection, the first book dedicated to his portraiture, shows the range and nuance of Kander's work. His enigmatic depictions of actors, artists, musicians, authors, sports icons and political leaders-from Barack Obama, John le Carré and Alexander McQueen to Tracey Emin, Robert Plant and Prince Charles-are layered and penetrating, revealing unexpected moments of reverie and vulnerability.

The Yangtze river flows 4,100 miles across China, traveling from its furthest westerly point in the Qinghai province to Shanghai in the east. The river is embedded in the consciousness of the Chinese, and plays a significant role in both the spiritual and physical life of the people.

Using the river as a metaphor for constant change, Nadav Kander (born 1961) has photographed the landscape and people along its banks from mouth to source. "After several trips to different parts of the river, it became clear that what I was responding to and how I felt whilst being in China was permeating into my pictures," he records; "a formalness and unease, a country that feels both at the beginning of a new era and at odds with itself."

Art Kane was one of the most profoundly influential photographers of the twentieth century. A bold visionary, his work explored a number of genres - fashion, editorial, celebrity portraiture, travel, and nudes with an unrelenting and innovative eye.

Like his contemporaries, Guy Bourdin (1928-1991) and Helmut Newton (1924-2004), Kane developed a style that didn't shy away from strong color, eroticism and surreal humor. In 1958 Kane assembled the greatest legends in jazz and shot what became his most famous image, Harlem 1958. In the 1960s and 1970s, Kane photographed, among others, the Rolling Stones, The Who, Cream, Janis Joplin, The Doors and Bob Dylan.

While the battle for civil rights in America and the Vietnam War raged, Kane was refining a conscientious response to the period with his editorial work that was powerfully accessible and populist in its desire to communicate to a large audience. This is the first time Kane's work has been collected into one, breathtaking volume. Beautifully curated, it is a fitting tribute to one of photography's most original and creative forces.

Call Me Lola by Loli Kantor is a poignant and deeply personal photo essay, blending nostalgia, memory, and loss through a visual exploration of the photographer’s family archives. For over two decades, Kantor has unearthed her family’s past, particularly focusing on her mother, Lola, who died in childbirth—a figure Kantor never knew directly but has come to understand through images and stories.

The book, a testament to both personal history and the broader upheavals of the 20th century, intertwines archival material with Kantor’s own contemporary photographic work. The result is a layered narrative that spans war, displacement, trauma, and grief, while also touching on the resilience of love and memory. By merging these past and present visuals, Kantor offers readers a unique reflection on the complex relationship between history and identity.

At the heart of Call Me Lola is the absence of direct memory, replaced instead by the documentation of a life lived in fragments—through family photographs, letters, and artifacts. Yet, Kantor’s work transcends the personal, inviting viewers to contemplate the universal experiences of loss and remembrance.

Kantor’s distinctive approach, rooted in her identity as an Israeli-American artist, underscores the emotional depth of her project. Call Me Lola serves not only as a tribute to her mother but also as a meditation on the way photography can preserve, shape, and reinterpret history.

During his remarkable life, Yousuf Karsh, who was born in Armenia in 1908, traveled the globe to photograph subjects ranging from historical figures to anonymous farmers to steelworks. Karsh: A Biography In Images is a full revision of the 1996 60-year retrospective of his work and brings that popular catalogue back into print in an affordable paperback format.

This new edition covers the photographer's career with greater breadth than its previous incarnation, adding works from his early experiments and his photojournalism commissions in Canada. Karsh's reputation as one of the most sought-after portrait photographers of the twentieth century is well established. A roll call of his subjects is a veritable who's who of the modern age--Winston Churchill, Jacqueline Kennedy, Pablo Picasso, Walt Disney, Elizabeth Taylor and Albert Einstein, to name just a few--and this book features many of these figures, in some of the most recognized images of our time.

But added to the portraits are a number of lesser-known or previously unpublished photographs--early figure studies, atmospheric views of the Ottawa theatre and scenes of wheat fields, city streets and factories across Canada.

With its long autobiographical essay and extensive captions for each photo, many of them new to this edition, Karsh: A Biography In Images is both an elegant celebration and an indispensable overview of a life lived in photography.

Yhis is one of the most successful collections of Karsh photography. This is a large format, square-ish hardback which is designed to be used -- it isn't a mammoth "coffee table" book that ends up hurting your hands after ten minutes.

The quality of the reproduction here is very good indeed with almost all of the images being full-page. The classic Karsh silvery highlights and deep blacks are shown to advantage.

The term "iconic" gets tossed around a lot, but that is what this book consists of: iconic images. Whether you know it or not, Karsh is the photographyer who probably shaped your image of who Hemingway is, who Churchill is, who Einstein is, who Bogart is, and on, and on. The photographic school on display is classic, formal, and dramatic mid-century 20th century photography. It is quite grand in style while still revealing the human being behind the image.

Karsh is a great craftsman who brings unabashed enthusiasm for the power of celebrity -- in these two ways, he has probably most influenced the history of photography.

Yousuf Karsh (1908-2002) made some of the most iconic photography of his age. His wry portrait of Winston Churchill lingers in the mind's eye like few others.

Though prolific, for him there could be no shortcuts. His probing images reveal deeper truths,as he once stated, "Within every man and woman a secret is hidden." He was an artist unafraid to boldly feature negative space. Aesthetically precise, his style makes deft use of studio lights and enveloping, inky tones.

Karsh's stylized compositions captured everyone from Sophia Loren to Bernard Shaw to Fidel Castro,making the Armenian-born photographer who fled to Syria and Canada in his youth, into a powerful photographic master.

Karsh (b.1908), now 92 years old and living in Boston, enthusiastically supported the exhibition (December 2000-February 2001; German Historical Museum, Berlin) upon which this book is based.

Supported by several essays, three bodies of work are presented (186 b&w photos in all): portraits (the major portion of the book); advertising work of the early 1950s; and special assignments, including promotional photos for tourism in Canada. In particular, Karsh's portraits of eminent people of the 20th century are stunning in their eloquent portrayal of character and essence.

If Cartier-Bresson's decisive moment reflects a situation perfectly in tune with the photographer's intuition, flawlessly combining the elements of composition and timing, then Ed Kashi's abandoned moment is the result of an imprecise instant of surrender.

This collection of photographs, made over a 40-year period, reveals imprecise glimpses of transitory events filled with frenetic energy – the chaos of everyday life. Embodying photography's intrinsic power, they preserve moments that can never occur again in exactly the same time and space. When geometry, mood, and possibility unite to unintentionally create something new, the magical and fictional qualities of still photography capture the unplanned essence of existence.

In contrast to my journalistic approach of deep personal connection and keen observation, this work is about capturing the untamed energy of a moment with abandon.

Curse of the BlackGold: 50 Years of Oil in the Niger Delta takes a graphic look at the profound cost of oil exploitation in West Africa. Featuring images by world-renowned photojournalist Ed Kashi and text by prominent Nigerian journalists, human rights activists, and University of California at Berkeley professor Michael Watts, this book traces the 50-year history of Nigeria’s oil interests and the resulting environmental degradation and community conflicts that have plagued the region.

Now one of the major suppliers of U.S. oil, Nigeria is the sixth largest producer of oil in the world. Set against a backdrop of what has been called the scramble for African oil, Curse of the Black Gold is the first book to document the consequences of a half-century of oil exploration and production in one of the world’s foremost centers of biodiversity. This book exposes the reality of oil’s impact and the absence of sustainable development in its wake, providing a compelling pictorial history of one of the world’s great deltaic areas. Accompanied by powerful writing by some of the most prominent public intellectuals and critics in contemporary Nigeria, Kashi’s photographs capture local leaders, armed militants, oil workers, and nameless villagers, all of whose fates are inextricably linked. His exclusive coverage bears witness to the ongoing struggles of local communities, illustrating the paradox of poverty in the midst of plenty.

The publication of Curse of the Black Gold occurs at a moment of worldwide concern over dependency on petroleum, dubbed by New York Times journalist Thomas Friedman as “the resource curse.” Much has been written about the drama of the search for oil—Daniel Yergin’s The Prize and Ryszard Kapuscinski’s Shah of Shahs are two of the most widely lauded—but there has been no serious examination of the relations between oil, environment, and community in a particular oil-producing region. Curse of the Black Gold is a landmark work of historic significance.

Ed Kashi is an award-winning photojournalist, filmmaker and educator dedicated to documenting the social and political issues that define our times. A sensitive eye and an intimate relationship to his subjects are signatures of his work. As a member of the prestigious photo agency VII, Kashi has been recognized for his complex imagery and its compelling rendering of the human condition.

For his contribution to the JGS series 'Witness', Kashi has delivered a powerful and deeply moving view into his world and career. "As a photojournalist who travels extensively around the world, home for me has always been a shifting term, with shifting people and shifting objects vying for my attention. Upon meeting Julie Winokur in 1992, that dynamic was forever altered. When we married in 1994, a pattern of recording journals addressed to Julie was already firmly established. In keeping with the changing times, what began as paper journals was replaced with daily emails by 2000. Encompassing nearly 20 years, this book is a selection of these journal entries from various locations around the world written for my wife. (...) The very act of creating this book touches upon my desire to reach out to others and to report on issues throughout the world. I am constantly looking for ways to expand the conversation of my work and the medium of photojournalism; to ultimately broaden the ways in which we tell stories and share our personal feelings. In a sense, this book is a different way to look at the world using both internal and external impressions, words and images. The depth of my feelings, touched so deeply and so often by the realities I witness, are the testimony I want this collection to reveal." - Ed Kashi.

The photographs collected here represent David Katzenstein’s lifelong artistic journey as a visual chronicler of humanity. Traveling to many parts of the world, he experienced other cultures and peoples firsthand. The photographs presented here were drawn from a much larger body of work, with the hope of creating a journey through journeys for the viewer.

Katzenstein’s travels took him to thirty-seven countries over forty-nine years. What started as a way to combine his two passions—photography and travel—has grown into a visual chronicle of humanity. Steeped in the tradition of documentary photography, Katzenstein imbues his work with immediacy, emotional engagement, and a deep respect for his subjects. He takes the viewer with him on his journeys, sharing public and private moments firsthand.

An intimate portrait of humanity depicting rituals from all over the world. These photographs by David Katzenstein emerged from his lifelong artistic journey as a visual chronicler of humanity. His mission led him to travel to many parts of the world to experience other cultures and peoples firsthand, capturing images that relate to the themes he is drawn to. In the process, he came to be fascinated by rituals. The images in this volume were taken in twenty-six countries on six continents between 1982 and 2019. They document humans in the act of performing a wide array of rituals, both religious and secular. Rituals depicted herein include those of Animism, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and Shintoism, as well as the nonreligious rituals of everyday life such as folk festivals, military assemblies, and parades. Whether rituals are religious or secular, Katzenstein has discovered, they are all, in some sense, sacred to those who perform them.

Rinko Kawauchi has gained international recognition for her nuanced, lushly colored images that offer closely observed fragments of everyday life. In her latest work, she shifts her attention from the micro to the macro.

The title, Ametsuchi, is composed of two Japanese characters meaning "heaven and earth," and is taken from the title of one of the oldest pangrams in Japanese-a chant in which each character of the Japanese syllabary is used. Translated loosely as "Song of the Universe," it comprises a list that includes the heavens, earth, stars and mountains.

In Ametsuchi, Kawauchi brings together images of distant constellations and tiny figures lost within landscapes, as well as photographs of a traditional controlled burn farming method (yakihata) in which the cycles of cultivation and recovery span decades and generations.

In recent years, Rinko Kawauchi's exploration of the cadences of the every day has begun to swing farther afield from her earlier photographs focusing on tender details of day-to-day living. In her series and resulting book Ametsuchi (Aperture, 2013), she concentrated mainly on the volcanic landscape of Japan's Mount Aso, using a historic site of Shinto rituals as an anchor for a larger exploration of spirituality.

In Halo, Kawauchi expands this inquiry, this time grounding the project with photographs of the southern coastal region of Izumo, in Shimane Prefecture, interweaving them with images from New Year celebrations in Hebei province, China - a five-hundred-year-old tradition in which molten iron is hurled in lieu of fireworks - and her ongoing fascination with the murmuration of birds along the coast of Brighton, England. Cycles of time, implicit and subliminal patterns of nature and human ritual, are mesmerizingly knit together in these pages.

Contemporary Japanese photography has not often been concerned with the natural landscape; the seemingly ever-expanding cityscape of Tokyo was more of a preoccupation up until 2011, a moment when the presumed order of things - natural, civic, and otherwise - was upended by the combined disasters of tsunami, earthquake, and human miscalculation. Kawauchi's most recent work is not a commentary on natural disasters and unnatural aftermath. It is, however, an acknowledgment of larger forces at play.

Seydou Keïta was born in Bamako, Mali in 1921, then part of the colony of French Sudan and a bustling transportation hub on the route to Dakar. With a Kodak Brownie given to him by his uncle, Keïta took up photography at the age of fourteen, going on to establish what would become Bamako's most successful portraiture enterprise of the 1950s and 60s. Photographs, Bamako, Mali 1949-1970 draws on an expanded archive to offer over 400 portraits, mostly unpublished, from the height of the photographer's productivity in downtown Bamako.

Providing lushly patterned backdrops and props that now serve to date distinct periods in his career, the artist often styled his subjects but also encouraged their active participation, hanging sample portraits around the studio as inspiration. Migratory youth, government officials, shop owners and Bamako's cultural elite all make appearances here, and while Keïta's photographs served as both family record and cultural status symbol for the clients who commissioned them, these images have become a lasting visual record of Mali at that time

What began as simple curiosity blossomed into an object of national pride; when Seydou Keita bought a camera to take pictures of his family, neighbors assumed his services were for hire and enlisted him to take portraits of themselves and their homes, turning a carpenter into a photographer and a hobby into artistic expression. In such a way did the self-taught Keita become the official photographer of Mali from 1962 to 1977, based almost solely on his impeccable reputation for quality and originality that developed by word of mouth.

This stunning collection of 206 black-and white-portraits illustrates Keita's pride in his country and his gift for capturing the personalities of his subjects. His aim was to create the most natural settings and poses for the people in front of the lens, putting them at ease and gently nudging them into surrendering their inhibitions. Keita utilized a wide variety of props to further this goal, including bicycles, telephones, radios, and musical instruments. He also kept a variety of clothing on hand--both traditional and European--to help his subjects achieve a desired look or style.

What comes across most clearly in these photos is the beauty of the people; Keita brilliantly exposes their essence by focusing on their images.

Abruzzo, located in southern Italy, is known as the green region of Europe because of the system of parks and nature reserves covering more than one-third of its territory. In Abruzzo, Michael Kenna found a cultural identity that elsewhere, for the most part, has been lost to globalization and instant communication.

Kenna photographed medieval ruins, ancient villages and a countryside rich in traditional cultivation. As curator Vincenzo de Pompeis writes in the book s introduction, 'Abruzzo's heritage, together with its impressive natural scenery, brings to mind romantic connotations that have historically attracted many international landscape artists, particularly in the 19th century. Michael Kenna fits perfectly into this rich historical vein of celebrated landscape artists who have worked in Abruzzo.

Kenna's work often evokes the influences of Romanticism. In his photographs of historic rural landscapes, for example, there is an air of melancholy, which accompanies memories from the past. His images of ruins stir up feelings of passing time, of the constantly evolving ties between history and nature.' This gorgeous new monograph by renowned landscape photographer Michael Kenna is published to coincide with a major museum exhibition in Loreto Aprutino, Italy. Richly printed in duotone on matt art paper, and presented in an olive-green cloth slipcase with black debossed text on one side and a tipped-in image on the other, Abruzzo presents 65 images from the series, published here for the first time.

This beautiful book presents a meditative, arresting, and dazzling collection of 240 black-and-white images of Japan, made over almost 30 years by the internationally renowned photographer Michael Kenna. A rocky coast along the sea of Japan; an immense plain of rice fields in the snow; Mount Fuji towering over misty wooded hills; silent temples devoid of people but brimming with Buddhist deities; a Torii gate mysteriously emerging from moving clouds and water--these are a few images from this remarkable collection of photographs by Michael Kenna, whose black-andwhite work is highly renowned.

Forms of Japan, brilliantly designed by Yvonne Meyer-Lohr, is organized into chapters simply titled, "Sea," "Land," "Trees," "Spirit," and "Sky." The quietly evocative photographs, often paired with classic haiku poems of Basho, Buson, Issa, and others, provide a contemplative portrait of a country better known for its energy and industry.

Gorgeously reproduced to convey the enormous subtleties that exist in Michael Kenna's traditional black-and-white silver prints, the photographs in this book include both well-known and previously unpublished images from all corners of Japan: Hokkaido, Honshu, Kyushu, Okinawa, and Shikoku.

Nazraeli Press is thrilled to announce Michael Kenna's long-anticipated monograph on France. Kenna first visited France in 1973 and has been photographing there since the early 1980s.

He has produced thousands of photographs on subjects such as Mont St Michel, Le Notre's Gardens, the Calais Lace Factories and Chateau Lafite Rothschild. 'France' encompasses work from these projects and many others.

Comprising 275 duotone plates, this gorgeous new book was edited by the artist himself, who selected both well-known and previously unpublished material from his own archive.

Huangshan is the name given to a whole range of mountains in Anhui province in eastern China. Also called Yellow mountain, the range is particularly known for its uniquely-shaped granite peaks, ubiquitous pine trees that literally grow out of the rock faces, and the ever changing configurations of flowing clouds as seen from above.

Huangshan has been a source of inspiration and a muse for Chinese painters and poets throughout history. It continues to inspire artists today, including Michael Kenna.

These forty-six photographs, which Kenna made over a period of three years, capture both the sublimity and grandeur of these peaks, and quietly reflect on our human interaction with nature. Kenna has written a brief introduction which describes some of his experiences on Huangshan.

This book is a wonderful introduction and overview of the career of Micheal Kenna. Kenna's long-lived exposures and unusual eye for his subject material are unmistakably unique It is no wonder he is considered one of the world's most collectible photographers and apppeals to collectors just beginning to develop an interest in photography.

Published to coincide with a major 2024 traveling exhibition in Tokyo, Los Angeles and London, this gorgeous new monograph presents 100 of Michael Kenna’s most iconic photographs of the Japanese landscape, many published here for the first time. A perfect pairing of artist and subject, these photographs of Japan comprise perhaps Kenna’s best known body of work and have been the subject of countless exhibitions throughout the world. Michael Kenna first visited Japan in 1987 on the event of his inaugural exhibition there, and he has returned dozens of time and made thousands of photographs throughout the country’s vast and incredibly varied landscape. Our earlier monographs Japan and Hokkaido have been out of print for many years, so we are thrilled to announce this important new publication that includes work spanning Kenna’s decades-long love affair with the country. Japan / A Love Story is beautifully printed in duotone on natural coated art paper and quarter bound in linen and silk. It opens with an essay in Japanese and English by the renowned critic and historian Kohtaro Iizawa.

“Japan has a long and rich tradition of reciprocal gift giving. I have been the grateful recipient of so much over so many years in Japan, and I know that I will never be able to give back in equal measure. I hope this work can be seen as a small token of my desire to do so. I also hope this work can be viewed as a homage to Japan and that it will serve to symbolize my immense ongoing appreciation and deep gratitude for this beautiful and mysterious country.” — From the Afterword by Michael Kenna

In celebration of Michael Kenna’s fiftieth year as a photographer, we are thrilled to announce the publication of Michael Kenna: Photographs and Stories. This gorgeous new monograph, beautifully printed on Japanese Kasadaka paper and bound in custom deep blue cloth, is limited to 2,000 casebound copies. It is published in association with the Center for Photographic Art to coincide with a traveling exhibition opening at their historic Carmel, California exhibition space in November 2023. Kenna has selected one image for each year beginning 1973, when he enrolled in the Banbury School of Art, and for each subsequent year. Following the “Photographs” section is “Stories,” in which Kenna gives context to each image and considers how it connected to his own life at the time. Michael Kenna is arguably the most influential landscape photographer of his generation. Often working at dawn or during the night, he has concentrated primarily on the interaction between the ephemeral atmospheric conditions of the natural landscape, and human-made structures and sculptural mass. Over ninety books and catalogs have been published on his work. His exquisite, hand crafted, silver gelatin prints have been exhibited throughout the world and are included in such permanent museum collections as The National Gallery, Washington, D.C.; The Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai; and The Victoria and Albert Museum, London. In 2022, Mr. Kenna was made an Officer in the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture. “This book is a journey, navigating places foreign and familiar, winding through black and white scenes full of spacious calm. It is a great pleasure to look at these images, to feel that maybe everything is going to be all right after all, that the world isn’t such a bad place, and magic still exists. There is a reassuring quality to these photographs, and I, for one, am grateful for Michael Kenna’s half century of watching the light and recording his vision.”— From the Introduction by Ann Jastrab

Published as a companion book to the artist's Twenty Year Retrospective, Michael Kenna: Retrospective Two presents an overview of Kenna's landscape photographs made between 1994 and 2004. Michael Kenna is arguably the most influential landscape photographer of his generation.

The subject of over 20 books and hundreds of solo exhibitions throughout Asia, Australia, Europe and the United States, Michael Kenna often works at dawn or during the night. He concentrates primarily on the interaction between the ephemeral atmospheric conditions of the natural landscape, and human-made structures and sculptural mass.

From one of the most acclaimed photographers working today comes his most personal work to date—an intimate portrait of the seminary boarding school he attended for seven years and which deeply informed his artistic practice.

At age eleven, Michael Kenna developed his first roll of black and white film in a makeshift darkroom at St. Joseph’s College, Upholland, the seminary he attended with the idea of becoming a Catholic priest. Kenna abandoned his religious calling after leaving the seminary, but his experiences there have continued to inform his work for decades. These gorgeous, meditative photographs were taken when Kenna returned to visit the now-shuttered school in the early 2000s. All of the qualities that make Kenna’s work so appealing and evocative are here—richly nuanced tones, studies in contrast, his ability to transform the ordinary into something extraordinary.

But Kenna is also revisiting a way of life that may be disappearing—not only the, at times, ruthless discipline of the British boarding school, but also the somber beauty of religious practice. In page after page of richly toned images, Kenna’s camera captures the architecture of the school’s built environment as well as its spiritual architecture. Kenna’s richly detailed biographical essay about his experiences and observations at St. Joseph's reveal much about the way Kenna thinks and works.

A critical essay by Vincent Miles focuses on the 110-year history of the college, contextualizing Kenna’s time there. At once captivating and haunting, this series is truly one of the photographer’s most personal and powerful projects to date.

Ethereal 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.

The Sheep and the Goats represents two bodies of work, The Bovidae: Divine Animals and Out to Pasture, in visual conversation. The work calls attention to the cultural landscapes surrounding domesticated animals.

The Bovidae: Divine Animals looks at animals and environments in Kern’s ancestral heritage: Ireland, Germany, Norway, and Iceland. Out to Pasture responds as a meditation on rural America from his home state of Minnesota, USA. Together, these projects offer perspective on the meaning of pastoral in contemporary time.

Among Kern’s influences are the landscape painters of the nineteenth century, especially regarding the use of light and composition.

An amazing book by award-winning Minneapolis-based photographer R.J. Kern (born 1978), The Unchosen Ones features portraits of future farmers in America’s heartland. Kern’s subjects are Minnesota 4-H members posing with their farm animals. Each one spent a year raising an animal, which they then entered into a 4-H competition. Kern first photographed them in 2016, and none of the children who sat for him succeeded in winning an award, despite the obvious care they had given to their animals.

The formal qualities of Kern’s lighting and setting endow these young people with a gravitas beyond their years, revealing self-directed dedication in some, and in others, perhaps, the pressures of traditions imposed upon them. These beautiful portraits capture a certain America, a rural world and a time in life when the layered emotions of youth are laid bare.

Four years later, in 2020, Kern returned to photograph and interview his young subjects. The new images are poignant when juxtaposed with the originals, tapping into the mindset of America’s agricultural youth. The diptychs of the children are punctuated by lush landscapes of the farms where these children have grown up.

As he took the second group of photographs, Kern inquired about what his young subjects had carried forward from their previous experience. What were their thoughts, their advice, their dreams and their goals for the future? How do they fit in future agricultural America?

Since 1995, Hendrik Kerstens has been photographing his daughter, Paula, creating moving portraits in the spirit of Vermeer. Born in The Hague in 1956, Kerstens is a self-taught photographer whose work has been shown in more than 40 exhibitions across Europe and the United States. His work is in major museum collections and is frequently featured in the New York Times magazine, and has inspired tastemakers as diverse as Elton John and Alexander McQueen. (McQueen used Kerstens’s now-iconic portrait Bag as the invitation for his fall 2009 collection.)

Here, Kerstens lovingly portrays Paula as a self-possessed young woman (with a sense of humor), as well as projecting onto her his fascination with the Dutch Master painters of the 17th century. The resulting portraits seem at once contemporary and timeless. Kersten’s beautiful, haunting images, filled with “Dutch light,” express both paternal love and a deep respect for craft.

Essays by photography curators Martin Barnes and Deborah Klochko examine the Paula images, considering them as an ongoing, three-way dialogue between photographer and sitter, and photographer and audience, and also discuss Kerstens' influences his larger body of work.

The first major retrospective of the celebrated photographer offers a complete overview of his life and career, from his early work in Hungary to his later use of "distortions," with essays by Laszlo Beke, Dominique Baque, and Jane Livingston. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

The first comprehensive study of these rare, influential objects, documenting a formative moment in the noted photographer's early career

This elegant book unites all of the known carte postale prints by the photographer André Kertész (1894–1985), including portraits, views of Paris, careful studio scenes, and exquisitely simple still lifes. Essays shed new light on the artist's most acclaimed images; themes of materiality, exile, and communication; his illustrious and bohemian social circle; and the changing identity of art photography. Playful yet refined, the book's design reflects the spirit of 1920s Paris while underscoring the modernity of the catalogue's more than 250 illustrated works. Kertész made his rigorously composed prints on inexpensive but lush postcard stock, sharing them with friends and sending them back to family in Hungary. The works reveal the artist learning his craft as he encountered an international group of modernists-including Piet Mondrian, Fernand Léger, and Joseph Csáky-in the interwar metropolis. Prized by collectors as well as by Kertész himself, the cartes postales influenced his compositions and the intimate scale of his picture making for decades.

This comprehensive book accompanies a major retrospective exhibition of Kertész’s work at Paris’s Jeu de Paume Museum (also visiting several other European venues including Winterthur, Berlin, and Budapest).

The text is organized around the three main periods of Kertész’s seventy-year-long career: Budapest, 1914–25; Paris, 1925–36; and New York, 1936–85. Each section of the text includes an illustrated historical analysis, a portfolio of works, and notes on particular elements of Kertész’s style and practice.

Many rare vintage and period prints produced under the photographer’s control are reproduced to highest standards in this beautiful book, reflecting the visual quality of this exceptional body of compelling and poetic images.

This classic - both playful and poetic - is reissued with striking new duotone reproductions.

André Kertész (1894-1985) was one of the most inventive, influential, and prolific photographers in the medium's history. This small volume, first published in 1971, became one of his signature works. Taken between 1920 and 1970, these photographs capture people reading in many parts of the world.

Readers in every conceivable place - on rooftops, in public parks, on crowded streets, waiting in the wings of the school play - are caught in a deeply personal, yet universal, moment. Kertész's images celebrate the absorptive power and pleasure of this solitary activity and speak to readers everywhere. Fans of photography and literature alike will welcome this reissue of this classic work that has long been out of print. 68 duotone photographs.

His combination of Modernist vision and poetic wit defined a vocabulary that generations of photographers have continued to use. Kertész's iconic images of 1920s Paris, such as "Chez Mondrian" and "Satiric Dancer" and his later images from New York "Melancholic Tulip," "Washington Square" have seeped into contemporary culture, and yet Kertész maintained that the real roots of his work were in Hungary.

This book, the first completely dedicated to Kertész's early Hungarian prints, offers a unique window on the origins of genius. Ninety images, selected from more than 1,000 contact prints in the artist's estate, are meticulously reproduced to actual size, revealing the explosive cultural context of early twentieth-century Hungary. A treasured addition to any photography library, André Kertész: The Early Years is a rare opportunity to witness the beginnings of a great artist. 90 duotone photographs

After the death of his wife, André Kertész consoled himself by taking up a new camera, the Polaroid SX70.

As with earlier equipment, he mastered the camera and produced a provocative body of work that both honored his wife and lifted him out of depression.

British photographer Chris Killip was born at his father's pub on the Isle of Man in 1946; 18 years later he left his post as a trainee hotel manager to pursue photography full time, photographing the island's beaches. He moved to London shortly thereafter but decided to return to the Isle of Man early in the 1970s to document its inhabitants, landscapes and disappearing traditional lifestyles. The series was first published in 1980.

Thirty years after the publication of Isle of Man, Killip found himself reexamining the negatives from the series in preparation for an upcoming retrospective in Germany. "I hadn't had an occasion to think about this work since the first edition of the book was published," writes Killip. "Going through these negatives again I found new images that I now liked, but at the time had overlooked or had not used for reasons that now mystify me." These alternate Isle of Man images--some 250 in total--became what Killip terms his "Isle of Man archive."

Chris Killip: Isle of Man Revisited, a lavish, large-format, clothbound volume, maintains the order of the classic 1980 photobook but with some key changes: some of the original photographs have been replaced by unseen ones from Killip's "Isle of Man archive," and 30 new images have been added.

The acclaimed documentarian’s last completed book revisits his early-’80s portrait of an English fishing village.

Of all Chris Killip’s (1946–2020) bodies of work, the photographs he made between 1982 and 1984 in the village of Skinningrove on the North-East coast of England are perhaps his most intimate and encompassing―of the community he photographed and of himself. “Like a lot of tight-knit fishing communities, it could be hostile to strangers, especially one with a camera,” Killip recalled, “Skinningrove fishermen believed that the sea in front of them was their private territory, theirs alone.”

Although four images from the series were included in his groundbreaking In Flagrante (1988), Killip resisted collecting all in a single book for over three decades―he had become so invested in them and respectful of his subjects that he needed time and distance to understand their significance. For a photographer whose work was grounded in the urgent value of documenting “ordinary” peoples’ lives, these nuanced images―radiating a vast stillness of light and time, embedded with the granularity of lives lived―reveal Killip’s conviction that no life is ordinary: everyday lives are sublime.

First published in 2018 as a newspaper which he personally and anonymously put into every letterbox in the village, this new Steidl edition includes an introduction by the photographer and previously unpublished photos; it was completed shortly before Killip died in October 2020.

Late in 2016, British photographer Chris Killip's (born 1946) son discovered a box of contact sheets of the photos his father had made at the Station, an anarcho-punk music venue in Gateshead, Northern England, open from 1981 to 1985. These images of raw youth caught in the heat of celebration had lain dormant for 30 years; they now return to life in this book.

The Station was not merely a music and rehearsal space, but a crucible for the self-expression of the subcultures and punk politics of the time. As Killip recollects: "When I first went to the Station in April 1985, I was amazed by the energy and feel of the place. It was totally different, run for and by the people who went there ... nobody ever asked me where I was from or even who I was. A 39-year-old with cropped white hair, always wearing a suit, with pockets stitched inside the jacket to hold my slides."

The photographs that Chris Killip (born 1946) took in Northern England between 1973 and 1985 were first published by Secker & Warburg as In Flagrante in 1988, a volume that quickly established itself as the most important 1980s photobook on England and a classic of the genre.

Compassionate but unwavering in its gaze, In Flagrante documented industrial Northern England in decline, suffering from the aftershocks of neoliberal economic strategies most brutally embodied in the policies of Margaret Thatcher. "The objective history of England doesn't amount to much if you don't believe in it, and I don't," reflects Killip. "And I don't believe that anyone in these photographs does either, as they face the reality of deindustrialization in a system which regards their lives as disposable."

Chris Killip: In Flagrante Two revisits the classic photobook with a beautifully produced, radically updated presentation: each double-page spread features a single image on the right side. Strident in its belief in the primacy and power of the photographic image, In Flagrante Two allows for and embraces ambiguities and contradictions arising from the unadorned narrative sequence, completely devoid of text--forcing viewers to truly look, to witness.

Chris Killip (born 1946) began photographing the people of Lynemouth seacoal beach in the north east of England in 1982, after nearly seven years of failed efforts to obtain their consent.

During 1983 to 1984 he lived in a caravan on the seacoal camp, and documented the life, work and the struggle to survive on the beach, using his unflinching style of objective documentation.

Fifty of the 124 images published here were first shown in 1984 at the Side Gallery in Newcastle and others were an important element of Killip's groundbreaking and legendary book In Flagrante, published four years later.

Born in New York in 1929, William Klein is one of the leading photographers of the postwar era, as well as an influential filmmaker, painter, and graphic artist.

This astonishing book, selected and designed by Klein himself, offers a visual survey of his long and varied career. It includes his poetic street photography of New York, Moscow, Rome, Tokyo, and Paris; his exciting fashion photography; stills and posters from his bitingly satirical films; and his graphically powerful painted contact sheets. Klein, whose achievement puts him on a level with Robert Frank, Richard Avedon, and Irving Penn, lives in Paris and is revered in Europe.

This is the first comprehensive book on his work published in the United States in 20 years.

Sixty years after Life is Good and Good for You in New York, his first book and one of the most important in the history of photography, William Klein takes on a new challenge: shoot Brooklyn in digital.

This technique becomes a way for the master of the aesthetic of chaos to refresh his approach to the New York borough. "No rules, no limits, no holding back." Such is his motto. What is important is to capture the exuberance and impertinence of life. For many weeks, the artist wandered the streets, worked days and nights, shot from the window of his car, and roved the beaches of Coney Island and Brighton. With these images, Klein creates a kaleidoscope of Brooklyn.

The first book on the fashion work of the legendary photographer William Klein, to be published in conjuction with a major exhibition at the International Center of Photography in New York.

Working at the nexus of painting and photography, William Klein conceived this original series when he was in the process of reviewing other photographers' contact sheets for a film he was making.

Referencing the age of film photography, when photographers selected images by circling individual negatives on a contact sheet with brightly colored grease pencils, Klein's works invent a new kind of art object that organically marries painting and photography. The resulting pieces are enormous mural-sized works in which bold, kinetic color frames and reframes enlarged black-and-white images from throughout his career.

Klein's iconic fashion and street photography, always gritty and bold, is given a new immediacy and relevance in this second life. In his foreword to this edition, Klein describes these works as "all brush strokes and jubilation. The jubilation of painting recall[s] the celebration of taking the photo."

William Klein always dreamed of living in Paris, like Henry Miller, Gertrude Stein, and other like-minded artists and writers. In 1948, stationed by the United States Army in Paris, he stayed--and fled his family and America to become a painter.

He quickly found another family and recognition for his talent. Today, one is tempted, like critic Anthony Lane, to say that he is "the American in Paris." PARIS + KLEIn gathers together hundreds of photographs shot by Klein from the time he first picked up a camera in the 1960s until he put it down, momentarily, to put together this book.

In his signature color and black-and-white compositions, jostled to the brim with more information than a single camera lens was ever expected to take in, we find: men in the street, celebrities, demonstrations, fashion, the police, politics, races, the m tro, soccer, death. . .The whole life of a capital seen through the lively, acidic, melancholic, humorous, irnoical, and moving eyes of William Klein.

In 1956, a 28-year old William Klein arrived in Rome, fresh from the debut of his now classic monograph Life Is Good & Good for You in New York, to assist Federico Fellini on his film Nights of Cabiria. Filming was delayed, and so Klein instead strolled about the city in the company of Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Alberto Moravia and other avant-garde Italian writers and artists who served as his guides. It was on these walks that Rome, a pioneering and brilliant visual diary of the city, was born.

First published in 1959, Klein's Rome features the quirky extended captions that distinguished his New York book, interspersed with observations about the city by Stendhal, Michelet, Mark Twain, Henry James and others. Today it is one of the most celebrated photography books of the twentieth century.

To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Rome's publication, Aperture (in close collaboration with Contrasto) has produced a revised edition, which includes previously unseen fashion pictures made in Rome and an updated text by the photographer. Redesigned to encompass two volumes in a special PVC slipcase, this new edition offers audiences another chance to celebrate one of the great photobooks. As Fellini said, "Rome is a movie, and Klein did it."

After graduating from university, William Klein (born in New York, 1928) settled in Paris and became a painter. He returned to New York in 1954, and made a photographic logbook which was published two years later, and which won him world-wide acclaim: Life Is Good & Good for You in New York (Prix Nadar, 1956). Later, he produced books dedicated to Tokyo, Moscow and Paris. Painter, photographer, moviemaker and graphic designer, Klein currently lives in Paris.

Based on the original images and dialogue of William Klein’s 1966 film Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?, this fantastic photo-novel tells the adventures of Polly Maggoo, a star model played by Dorothy McGowan (model for Vogue in the 1960s). The plot unfolds across the fashion world of Polly Maggoo; the world of television (based around the character of director Jean Rochefort); and a magical kingdom of operetta whose crown prince (played by Sami Frey) is in love with the young model. Also featuring in this star-studded cast are Alice Sapritch, Delphine Seyrig, Philippe Noiret, Roland Topor and Jacques Seiler.

The publication ingeniously translates into book form the zany universe of the film. Klein’s masterful framing gives exquisite rhythm to its page composition and flow as we follow the crazy adventures of the extraordinary heroine in a madcap race through the streets and rooftops of Paris, all the way up to a distant palace lost in the snow.

The collection The eye that you see publishes this volume dedicated to the winner of the V International Photography Prize Pilar Citoler and one of the most interesting European photographers of today.

With texts by Quentin Bajac, Kathy Kubicki and Alfonso de la Torre. Karen Knorr's work has generated a deep commitment and fascination for taxidermy, objects and spaces; it is a conceptual practice that continuously and consistently disturbs the institutional gaze. Knorr embraces pluralism and the deconstruction of institutions, to explore language, desire, gender, and fantasy.

Although these themes dominated the post-structural theoretical landscape of the 1980s and 1990s, Knorr has developed them with originality and strength in his recent work, exposing them to surprising new influences, especially after his trip to India in 2008.

Photographic venture into the grand architectural settings of museums, stately homes, and academies Karen Knorr’s photographic series Connoisseurs & Academies induce a kaleidoscope of memories: Photographed between 1986 and 2005 with an analog camera, her images let us venture into the intricate world of the history of museums and stately homes, of objects, paintings, connoisseurship, and the structures of academies. The use of animals as an allegorical motif is today embedded in Knorr’s practice, but they first appear in Connoisseurs, where a chimpanzee becomes the Genius of the Place. Karen Knorr’s (b. 1954) works are in the collections of the Tate and Victoria & Albert Museum, London, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, SFMOMA, San Francisco, National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, and Museum of Art and Photography (MAP) in Bangalore, among others.

ncluding essays and an interview with Karen Knorr, this extensively illustrated text is a comprehensive overview of the photographer’s work from the 1990s to 2002.

Knorr’s photographs explore with wit and humour the patronage and heritage that informs our ideas of art and national identity, with images taken at historical art collections and stately homes, and new developments using sound, installation and video. Knorr has been making photographs since the early 1980s, using a documentary style that recalls earlier traditions of portraiture and painting.

In May 2020, in Minneapolis, the brutal murder of George Floyd by the police was recorded by people before and after the murder, and since similar problems were experienced in almost every country in the world, especially in the USA, after being recorded on social media. Despite the pandemic and quarantine measures, people went out to the streets and protested and somehow asked for an account. In general, it is possible to say that the main reasons for all civil movements are based on social justice, human rights demands, anti-racism, freedom, equality, welfare and similar reasons. The demonstrations that started as the protest of Floyd's murder and spread all over the world have evolved into a struggle of honour, global public solidarity against despotic rulers.

Similar protests recently in Turkey, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, France, Hong Kong, India, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Malaysia, Pakistan and possible to see that take place in many countries. Beginning with the destruction of the statues of colonists in continental Europe, especially in England; Afterwards, effective anti-colonial protests took place in the organization of the BLM (Black Lives Matter) movement. Throwing the statue of the slave-dealer Edward Colston into the river in Bristol, the removal of Robert Milligan's statues by the Municipality in London, and especially Cecil Rhodes, the founder of the Rhodes Foundation, which has significant funds at the University of Oxford, but was the leading actor in the enslavement of Africa. The removal of his statue by Oriel College can be seen as a relatively important achievement. This book consists of the protests that took place in Oxford and London in August and are a tribute to the people who lost their lives against racism, injustice and discrimination around the world. Hope to meet you in peaceful days.

Indonesian Hasselblad Master and international award-winning photographer Hengki Koentjoro journeys across the world's largest archipelago, with the aim of capturing and immortalizing the fleeting moments of underwater beauty. These moments are elegantly and delicately showcased in stunning monochromatic images, creating a series of tranquil and ethereal - but no less spectacular - glimpses of Indonesian waters.

This beautifully bound book is the first of its kind, complete with a special foreword by world-renowned American fine-art photographer Michael Kenna and fine-art gallerist Bob Tobin. Certainly, a fine testament to Hengki's expertise and unparalleled mastery in underwater monochromatic photography that features underwater scenes in black and white, showing his confidence, mastery and expertise in picture-taking that has garnered him many international accolades and exhibitions. It shows Hengki's mastery in underwater photography, done in a rich, contrasty black & white tones.

Searching for peace within ― an increasing necessity, and challenge, in our turbulent times. In this richly illustrated book, photographer and physician Jon Kolkin explores how and why Buddhist spiritual practices have come to inspire and enlighten people all around the globe. For 12 years, Kolkin traveled to Buddhist centers across Asia, capturing the everyday life of monks and nuns on camera.

Impressive and respectful, his 220 mostly black-and-white photographs offer powerful insight into the otherwise hushed and hidden world of meditation and mindfulness. With his profound feeling for light and composition, Kolkin's rare and intimate images capture the uniqueness of each mindful moment, as well as the universal reach and inspiration of Buddhist practice.

Byker 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.

Writing in the Sand is a photographic study of the beaches and beach towns of Northern England by Finnish-born photographer Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, whose work has attracted considerable renown. The New Statesman has described her photographs as "master pieces of representation -- political as well as photographic", while New Society has said of her: "Here is a sensibility, a wisdom of the eye and the heart that makes this collection unforgettable". Konttinen holds the singular distinction of having had her work toured in 1985 in China by the British Council as the first British photographic exhibition there since the Cultural Revolution. A documentary film about the making of Writing in the Sand has also been released to much acclaim as well: which the London Times calls "Poetic, uproarious, and thunderously nostalgic".

This collection of pictures by an acknowledged master of photography, now updated to include 11 new images, forms a document of the spiritual and physical state of exile. The sense of private mystery that fills these photographs - mostly taken during Koudelka's many years of wandering through Europe and the United States since leaving his native Czechoslovakia - speaks of passion and reserve, of his "rage to see".

The images here interrogate and penetrate, and reflect the nature of alienation. The accompanying essay by Robert Delpire invokes the soul of man in search of a spiritual homeland. Josef Koudelka's photographs of the Warsaw Pact armies' intervention in Prague won him the Robert Capa Gold Medal in 1969. In 1970 he left Czechoslovakia for asylum in England and became a member of Magnum Photos.

In 1986, Josef Koudelka began to use a panoramic format camera and took part in the DATAR photographic mission, the objective of which was "to represent the French landscape of the 1980s". He then crisscrossed France, then the whole world, to report on the influence of modern man on the landscape. The book is made up of forty panoramic photographs chosen by the artist and François Hébel from among the most emblematic of this theme.

These images, taken on all continents, bear witness to the great human works, ranging from factories to quarries, including huge mining complexes and abandoned areas. The photographs transport the reader to inaccessible and little-known areas, between desolation and curiosity, to capture the imposing reality of the industry. With this photographic aesthetic characteristic of Koudelka's work, this selection shows an imposing work in black and white.

The work appears on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at the Foto / Industria festival in Bologna, an international photographic biennial created in 2013, where exhibitions take place in the city for nearly three months.

In 1968, Josef Koudelka was a 30-year-old acclaimed theater photographer who had never made pictures of a news event. That all changed on the night of August 21, when Warsaw Pact tanks invaded the city of Prague, ending the short-lived political liberalization in Czechoslovakia that came to be known as the Prague Spring.

Koudelka had returned home the day before from photographing gypsies in Romania. In the midst of the turmoil of the Soviet-led invasion, he took a series of photographs which were miraculously smuggled out of the country. A year after they reached New York, Magnum Photos distributed the images credited to "an unknown Czech photographer" to avoid reprisals. The intensity and significance of the images earned the still-anonymous photographer the Robert Capa Award.

Sixteen years would pass before Koudelka could safely acknowledge authorship. Forty years after the invasion, this impressive monograph features nearly 250 of these searing images—most of them published here for the first time—personally selected by Koudelka from his extensive archive. Interspersed with the images are press and propaganda quotations from the time, also selected by Koudelka, alongside a text by three Czech historians. Though the images gathered in this remarkable publication document a specific historical event, their transformative quality still resonates.

Key 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.

An intimate portrait of the life and work of one of photography’s most renowned and celebrated artists.

Throughout his more than sixty-year-long obsession with the medium, Josef Koudelka considers a remarkable range of photographic subjects—from his early theater work, to his seminal project on the Roma and his legendary coverage of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague, to the solitariness of exile and the often-devastating impact humans have had on the landscape. Josef Koudelka: Next embraces all of Koudelka’s projects and his evolution as an artist in the context of his life story and working process. Based on hundreds of hours of interviews conducted over the course of almost a decade with Koudelka—as well as ongoing conversations with his friends, family, colleagues, and collaborators worldwide—this deftly told, richly illustrated biography offers an unprecedented glimpse into the mind of this notoriously private photographer. Writer, editor, and curator Melissa Harris has independently crafted a unique, in-depth, and revelatory personal history of both the man and his photography.

Ruins is the newest monograph by acclaimed Magnum photographer and bestselling author, Josef Koudelka.

For more than twenty years, Koudelka has traveled through the Mediterranean―visiting places such as Italy, Libya, Greece, and Syria―to photograph more than two hundred archaeological sites. Stark and mesmerizing panoramic photographs take the viewer to Delphi, Pompeii, Petra, Carthage, and other ancient locations, including sites now greatly altered or destroyed due to recent conflict. Ruins is a monument of architectural and cultural history, as well as civilizations long past. Published to coincide with a major exhibition at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, this volume includes enlightening texts by a Greek studies expert, curator, and agricultural engineer that cast another look at antiquity and its ruins.

This mini paperback edition of Gypsies makes a foundational body of work by master photographer Josef Koudelka newly accessible. This volume includes all 109 photographs from Koudelka’s recent remastering of the Cikáni series (Czech for Gypsies)―photographs of Roma society taken between 1962 and 1971 in then-Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, France, and Spain.

Roma scholar and sociologist Will Guy, who wrote for both the 1975 and 2011 editions, updates his analysis of the condition of the Roma today, including the most recent upheavals in France and Europe. Stuart Alexander, photo historian and newly appointed editor in chief of Delpire Éditeur, contributes a brief historiography of the evolution of this body of work in book form.

Josef Koudelka's Wall comprises panoramic landscape photographs made from 2008-2012 in East Jerusalem, Hebron, Ramallah, Bethlehem and in various Israeli settlements along the route of the barrier separating Israel and Palestine. Whereas Israel calls it the "security fence," Palestinians call it the "apartheid wall," and groups like Human Rights Watch use the term "separation barrier," Koudelka's project is metaphorical in nature--focused on the wall as a human fissure in the natural landscape.

Sometimes blocks of concrete define the panoramas; at other times displaced olive trees--a lifeline for one man, collateral damage in another's claim for territory--subtly emerge. As in his Black Triangle project, made in the Bohemian foothills of the Ore Mountains in the early 1990s, Wall conveys the fraught relationships between man and nature and between closely related cultures. A chronology, lexicon and captions provide context for the photographs.

"These photos tell my mother's story of isolation, loneliness, abuse, connection, compassion, forgiveness, family, humanity, grace, joy, inspiration and love. It’s the story of a mother-daughter reconciliation. My mother is a symbol of perseverance.” - Hannah Kozak

He Threw The Last Punch Too Hard” by Los Angeles based photographer Hannah Kozak tells the story of her mother Rachel Zarco, a beautiful, passionate, vivacious, and fiery Guatemalan Sophia Loren type burnette who left Hannah and the family after she fell in love with another man. The man turned out to be violent. He beat her so badly that she suffered permanent brain damage and had to be moved into an assisted living facility at the age of forty one, where she still lives today.

Since 2009, Hannah has followed her difficult journey and this book is their story. A story that could inspire other women to leave an abusive relationship, before it’s too late.

New York over the top is the first published monograph on Max Kozloff's activity as a photographer. Max Kozloff walks down the streets of New York and offers to the viewer his particuliar vision of a colorful, multi-ethnic, and multi-faceted city. A series of pictures that can surprise and drive the viewer in a curious path in one of the most photographed places in the world. Kozloff photographs his fellow citizens with an urban eye.

He does not see them as legendary creatures, but he often makes them out to be fabulous presences, glimpsed at carnivals and festivals. He is especially enchanted with that he has called "the music of faces", a spectrum of moods at variance with the consumerism or ethnicity of circumstance. Statues, effigies, or teddy bears seem to offer internal witness to what he calls New York Over the Top.

Juul Kraijer's practice draws upon Surrealist photography, using models as vehicles for ideas rather than portraits: "Without being literal, I'm employing the Surrealist grammar of alienation; mirroring, fusing of disparate entities, animating an object, objectifying a human body part, or casting a dazzling web of shadows on it."

In a situation that would normally arouse anxiety, the model preserves a stillness and grace reminiscent of Renaissance portraiture, further evoking a sense of an otherworldly, dream-like space through real encounters that border on the surreal.

Antonín Kratochvíl was born in Czechoslovakia in 1947, the son of a local photographer, and the youngest of three children. On September 13, 1967, unable to endure the persecution in his homeland, he escaped under the barbed wire of the country's border with Austria. A four-year period of refugee camps, hostile foreign countries, and separation from family and friends ensued.

In 1972, Kratochvíl moved to the United States' West Coast to begin work as an editorial photographer and photojournalist. Practicing in the tradition of humanist photography, he has since captured countless pictures around the world of social unrest and war, documenting people in extreme situations and crisis conditions. The inhuman situation of children in economically weak parts of the globe is a topic returned to frequently. In the essay that accompanies this retrospective of his life's work, fellow photo- and print journalist Michael Persson notes that Kratochvíl's accomplishments have been a retracing in pictorial form of his own hellish life.

He has chosen to document those who are alone, forgotten, reviled and punished, much in the same way that he himself was treated. This volume is the first to provide an overview of his thematically organized publications Broken Dream, Mercy, Incognito and Sopravvivere.

Capturing photojournalist Antonin Kratochvil within the context of his work, this examination shows how the artist has sunk his teeth into his fair share of upheaval and human catastrophes while going about his documentation of the time in which he lives.

Kratochvil's unique style of photography is displayed as the product of personal experience, intimate conditioning, and unprivileged voyeurism. This bilingual edition includes English and Czech.

Created in 1973–74 and previously unpublished in English in its entirety, Circus Sideshow, by Czech-born American photojournalist Antonin Kratochvil (born 1947), offers an amazing pageant of tightrope walkers, jugglers, snake women, giants, dwarves, contortionists and fire eaters at a circus in Gibsonton, Florida, a small coastal town near Tampa.

The town was then known as a winter vacation hotspot for circuses, a place to recharge before setting out on their spring and summer cross-country tours.

Visiting the mobile homes, caravans and trailers of the performers, and walking through their narrow alleys and circus tents, Kratochvil was able to photograph freely and intimately, and his black-and-white photographs testify to his vision of them as people expelled from society, but [who] were able to maintain their dignity. In 1974 he sent his photographs to the New York editorial office of American Photo, which the magazine’s art director, Jean-Jacques Naudet, printed as a ten-page report. Circus Sideshow documents an amazing lost American subculture.

In this, his second book of photographs, Antonin Kratochvil turns his camera away from the human catastrophe and destruction he portrayed in Eastern Europe to reveal another side of modernity - the broad-reaching spectrum of the entertainment industry. Kratochvil's unique take on the famous and fashionable is not the candy-coated imagery so prevalent in today's fashion and movie magazines.

His work underscores the physical and psychological intensity of the creative men and women who have sat before his camera with images not designed to flatter but rather created to reveal something below the surface. Mostly taken on assignment for Detour, W, GQ, and Premiere, Kratochvil's celebrity portraits have never before been assembled in a book. Incognito is the first such compilation. It shows off the photographer's expressionistic, gritty, and sometimes dark style that has become a unique signature in the world of editorial and portrait photography.

Born in Czechoslovakia but forced to live most of his life in exile, photojournalist Antonin Kratochvil has spent the past twenty years documenting the tumultuous upheaval taking place in the Communist countries of Eastern Europe.

Through his extensive travels in Albania, Hungary, Poland, Romania, East Germany, and the Soviet Union -- and during return trips to the land of his birth -- he photographed life during the depths of the Cold War at a time when few photojournalists were willing to partake in such a dangerous adventure.

This unflinching narrative of an era of immense corruption, pollution, loneliness, and terror reveals an unknown and desolate world of workers, gypsies, thieves, street kids, and refugees, where as the photographer says, "All I wanted to do was record how these poor people adapted to lies and suffering, how they got used to it, in fact, that they were bound to miss it when it was over."

Slavery didn’t end with the cessation of trans-Atlantic trade to the Americas in the 19th century. Modern-day slavery is illegal everywhere yet exists almost everywhere, often in plain view. According to the Global Slavery Index, nearly forty-six million people are enslaved today. Lisa Kristine’s new photographic essay Bound to Freedom presents this crime against humanity as it exists today – as child labor, sex trafficking, gold mining, stone quarrying and the manufacturing of textiles.

In compelling images, Lisa Kristine brings us face to face with these people, toiling in inhuman circumstances, and shows us the celebration of freedom of those liberated. Bound to Freedom is a call to action. In order to create change in a world that allows such crimes to exist, we first need to see and understand how it exists. The book concludes with resources and steps we can take to help free the enslaved. It is a statement of hope and commitment to help free the world of this injustice.

One Breath is a book of humanistic portraits that span our planet, reminding us of the basic truth that we are all one people, all connected. No matter what ethnicity, nationality, or beliefs we hold, we all partake in the miracle of our first breath at birth, the adventure of life, and the mystery of death.

This book journeys through the heart of humanity. Lisa Kristine's portraits introduce us to people of all ages, colors, and creeds, celebrating the human family. As John Sweeney of the United Nations Association of New York has said, "Lisa Kristine's sensitive and beautiful portrayal of isolated and distant peoples helps us to better appreciate the diversity of the world. She captures the sheer beauty of the differences in people and places and allows us to comprehend the shared nature of the human conditions: its hope, its joy and its complexity."

With a foreword by National Geographic Fellow Explorer Elizabeth Kapu'uwailani Lindsey, Ph.D., this collection of powerful images illustrates the universal human experience. One Breath carries us on an inspirational passage through the world and into the hearts of our fellow inhabitants.

This evocative compilation of photographs depicts people existing within landscapes from all over the world. Acclaimed humanitarian photographer Lisa Kristine commemorates the awe-inspiring vastness of nature, juxtaposing it with the small, ordinary moments of people's lives.

From the Great Sahara's indigo-swathed Tuareg nomads traversing the desert via traditional caravan, to the majestic ruin of Machu Picchu jutting up from the Andean peaks, to the ethereal River Li in China, where fishermen still train birds to help them hunt, as they have done for generations.

A photographic exploration of Diversity and Unity in Humankind. Stunning.

Germaine Krull (1897-1985) made a name for herself in avant-garde photography in the period between the two World Wars. After attending photography school in Munich, she launched her career in Berlin, and later worked in Paris and Monte Carlo. During World War II, her leftist political beliefs led her to spend time in Brazil and French Equatorial Africa, and afterward she traveled to Southeast Asia and later settled in Northern India. She was a remarkable artist who was a pioneer in her field, particularly in regard to the development of the photographic book and photojournalism.

This exhibition catalogue reveals how Krull balanced her avant-garde, artistic vision and her active role in the media, highlighting more than 150 images produced between 1924 and 1945, some of which appeared in her monographic books and others of which were produced for commercial publication. This major overview of Krull’s work and career sheds new light on one of the great female photographers of the 20th century.

Germaine Krull (1897-1985) led an extraordinary life that spanned nine decades and four continents. She witnessed many of the high points of modernism and recorded some of the major upheavals of the twentieth century. Her photographs include avant-garde montages, ironic studies of female nudes, press propaganda shots, as well as some of the most successful commercial and fashion images of her day. Her political commitments led her from communist allegiance to incarceration in Russia as a counterrevolutionary to support of the Free French cause against Hitler to a reclusive existence among Tibetan monks in India. Kim Sichel's study of this remarkable artist reveals a life of deep convictions, implausible transformations, complex emotional relationships, and inspired achievements.

Krull refused to limit herself to one long-term relationship, one geographical region, or one set of religious and moral beliefs. Contemporary critics ranked her with Man Ray and André Kertesz. Younger photographers such as Berenice Abbott looked up to her. Yet until recently the absence of an archive has made a proper evaluation of Krull's contribution to photography and to modernism difficult if not impossible. In this book, Sichel examines Krull's autobiographical texts and photographic oeuvre to present and unravel the rich mythology that Krull fabricated around her life and work. The chapters follow the geographical and chronological sequence of Krull's life, moving from Munich to Moscow to Berlin to Amsterdam to Paris to Brazil to Africa to Bangkok and other locations. This book, which accompanies the first major retrospective exhibition on Krull, should secure Krull's rightful place among the masters of twentieth-century photography.

Over the course of a career spanning more than 50 years, Magnum photographer Hiroji Kubota has spent his life traveling extensively and documenting the world around him. From his coverage of the Black Panther Party in the mid-1960s to his incomparable access to North Korea, Kubota has prolifically captured the histories of diverse cultures throughout the world.

This sumptuous visual biography encompasses the best images of his life's work, broken down into chapters, with illuminating narrative texts throughout. Rooted in his experience of a Japan ravaged by destruction and famine at the end of World War II, Kubota's work is characterized by a desire to find beauty and honor in human experience. Hiroji Kubota Photographer includes all of Kubota's key bodies of work, including his many extended trips to China, Burma, the United States, and North and South Korea, as well as his home country, Japan.

A photographic portrait of Japan today.

Modern Japan, the second largest economy in the world, is a land of contradictions. Home to some of the most sophisticated technology and manufacturing, it also has communities whose daily life has changed little in the last five hundred years. It is a land of great beauty, both in the landscape and in its celebrations, festivals, and traditional arts.

After photographing China, Korea, and the United States, Hiroji Kubota spent three years traveling the length and breadth of Japan's many islands, capturing the magnificent diversity of his own country. From rice paddies to pachinko parlors, ancient temples to the Honda assembly plants, Kobota's lens has captured both the ordinary and the extraordinary. 185 full-color photographs

From 1945 to 1950, during the formative years of his career, Stanley Kubrick worked as a photojournalist for Look magazine. Offering a comprehensive examination of the work he produced during this period—before going on to become one of America’s most celebrated filmmakers—Stanley Kubrick at "Look" Magazine sheds new light on the aesthetic and ideological factors that shaped his artistic voice.

Tracing the links between his photojournalism and films, Philippe Mather shows how working at Look fostered Kubrick’s emerging genius for combining images and words to tell a story. Mather then demonstrates how exploring these links enhances our understanding of Kubrick’s approach to narrative structure—as well as his distinctive combinations of such genres as fiction and documentary, and fantasy and realism.

Beautifully written and exhaustively researched, Stanley Kubrick at "Look" Magazine features never-before-published photographs from the Look archives and complete scans of Kubrick’s photo essays from hard-to-obtain back issues of the magazine. It will be an indispensable addition to the libraries of Kubrick scholars and fans.

Before becoming the critically acclaimed filmmaker responsible for such iconic films as Dr. Strangelove and The Shining, Stanley Kubrick spent five years as a photographer for Look magazine. The Bronx native joined the staff in 1945, when he was only 17 years old, and shot humanist slice-of-life features that celebrate and expose New York City and its inhabitants.

Through a Different Lens reveals the keen and evocative vision of a burgeoning creative genius in a range of feature stories and images, from everyday folk at the laundromat to a day in the life of a debutant, from a trip to the circus to Columbia University. Featuring around 300 images, many previously unseen, as well as rare Look magazine tear sheets, this release coincides with a major show at the Museum of the City of New York and includes an introduction by noted photography critic Luc Sante.

These still photographs attest to Kubrick’s innate talent for compelling storytelling and serve as clear indicators of how this genius would soon transition to making some of the greatest movies of all time.

Stanley Kubrick Drama and Shadows is the first publication of early photographs by renowned filmmaker Stanley Kubrick (1928–1999), taken between 1945 and 1950 ― many of them never before seen by the general public. Kubrick made these photographs while he was a staff photographer for the New York–based Look magazine, following his graduation from high school and before he made his first films.

Aimed at a broad audience, Stanley KubrickDrama and Shadows reveals the director’s early experimentations with image composition and his attraction to dramatic, often psychologically intense subjects and narratives that would both become elements of his recognizable style as a director.

Divided into four thematic chapters ("Metropolitan Life," "Entertainment," "Celebrities," and "Human Behavior"), this book features a carefully selected group of approximately 350 photographs organized into approximately thirty photographic stories. An insightful introductory essay provides context and examines Kubrick’s photographs in relation to the history of photography.

German scientist and photographer Heinrich Kühn (1866-1944) was one of the central figures in the establishment of international art photography at the turn of the twentieth century. Having studied botany and medicine, Kühn made his first photograph in the late 1870s, dedicating himself solely to the medium within a decade. He achieved this dedication through the support of American photographers Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen and others.

After a meeting in 1904, Stieglitz and Kühn initiated an almost 30-year-long correspondence, ushering in an era of pioneering experimentation with autochrome and other photographic processes. Critical to Kühn's success was an offset process he perfected, which allowed him to deliberately dissolve the sharpness of the image and alter its brightness.

The results are gorgeous, dreamy images full of rich, delicate color. Around 1910, Kühn reduced the romantic cosmos of Pictorialism to the point where his compositions became almost abstract, so that only the study of light and the rendering of tonal values mattered. He later returned to exploring the photograph as objective record, concentrating mainly on writing and to experiments in photographic technology. This landmark volume surveys the works of a revelatory photographer.

TBW Books is excited to present the seventh installment of our Annual Series. This year, four artists were invited to approach the concept of the human form. Implementing stylistically distinct approaches, each book works to challenge the artist's own practice, making room for discovery within not only their own oeuvre but within the language of photography itself.

While each book is thought of as a stand-alone title, an undeniable dialogue is shared between all four when presented together, allowing viewers to experience the collection as a singular photographic meditation.

In a remote landscape near Bordeaux, Mona Kuhn owns a little house: simple, bare and even without electricity. Kuhn travels here each year to entertain family and friends as they drop by.

Bordeaux Series contains portraits of these people dear to Kuhn made over the last four years, as well as landscape photographs. Kuhn photographs her subjects in the same room with a red fabric backdrop and a chair, so that the nudity of each sitter is the only indication of his or her idiosyncrasies. A sequel to Kuhn's Native (2009), Bordeaux Series is a sensual exploration of the contemporary nude.

Critics have observed that Mona Kuhn's subjects seem "nude but not naked…. Completely relaxed before the camera, they give the impression that nothing could clothe them better than their own skin." Kuhn, who photographs in the naturist or nudist community, often in domestic interiors, weaves together gestures from the traditional iconography of nude studies with the comfortable body language of her subjects, creating a visual patois at once classical and contemporary.

And beneath the mellow surfaces of her photographs lies an explosive energy: the artist's controlled play with the power of sensuality. Tension and uneasiness coexist with all that sunlight and soft flesh. The subjects and their gestures are suggestive but ultimately ambiguous. Tenuously held planes of focus provoke the imagination. Kuhn works very close to her subjects, often with a depth of field of only a few inches. Real world and image world seem to blend together as her figures unite the reality of human complexity with the blissful essence of nature. With only sparse reference to physical surroundings, they appear to float in an idyllic picture space, part of a dreamlike narrative just beyond the viewer's comprehension.

These exceptional photographs exist in a space created by the artist and subject alone--the viewer is given a single fascinating glimpse, suspended in time, and then an enduring sense of the resilience and vulnerability of the human body.

"This work started as a personal journey. Metaphorically, I was thinking of a bird that flies back into the forest, searching for its childhood nest. The images here are a creation of my abstracted wishes and dreams. As I was searching, instead of home, I found an empty past, just traces of it. Yet, my journey was filled with new friendships and discoveries made along the way," writes Los Angeles-based photographer Mona Kuhn about her journey back to her native Brazil after 20 years.

Her third photobook, Native unfolds slowly, as a dreamy narration of this adult exploration of her childhood home. Photographed in the rainforest and surrounding city area, the images are suffused with a deep green, gold and pink palette. Native is accompanied by an essay from critic Shelley Rice.

Mona Kuhn is one of the most respected contemporary photographers of her time, best known for her large-scale photographs of the human form. Throughout a career spanning more than twenty years, the underlying theme of her work is her reflection on humanity's longing for spiritual connection and solidarity. As she solidified her photographic style, Kuhn created a notable approach to the nude by developing friendships with her subjects, and employing a range of playful visual strategies that use natural light and bucolic settings to evoke a sublime sense of comfort between the human figure and its environment. Her work is natural, restful, and a reinterpretation of the nude in the canon of contemporary art.

Kuhn's distinct aesthetic has propelled her as one of the most collectible contemporary art photographers―her work is in private and public collections worldwide and she is represented by galleries across the United States. Mona Kuhn: Works, the artist's first retrospective, features images from throughout her career, accompanied by insightful texts by Rebecca Morse, Simon Baker, Chris Littlewood, and Darius Himes. An interview with Elizabeth Avedon provides insights into Kuhn's creative process and the ways in which she works with her subjects and locations, and achieves the visual signature of her imagery. Published to coincide with a traveling international exhibition, opening at Fotografiska in New York, this book introduces Kuhn's distinct aesthetic to a wide popular audience., It is an essential volume for anyone with an interest in the human form in contemporary art.

Color photographs of portraits and nudes.

For her fifth book with Steidl, Mona Kuhn has entered the heart of the American desert and returned with a sequence of pictures that is seductive, enigmatic and a little unsettling.

Private proposes a world in which concrete reality and the imaginary are one. Plants and animals on the edge of survival, sun-drenched landscapes and wind-sculpted earth are intercut with a series of nudes that push Kuhn's renowned sensitivity to human form into unexpected directions. The result is a book somewhere between the poetry of T.S. Eliot, the cinema of Robert Altman and a lucid dream.

Acclaimed for her intimate nudes, Mona Kuhn takes a new direction into abstraction in her latest series, Acido Dorado. Photographed at a golden modernist structure on the edge of Joshua Tree National Park, architectural lines, light reflections and a single figure have been carefully balanced against the backdrop of the Californian desert.

The human figure in these images--Kuhn's friend and collaborator Jacintha--emerges like a surrealist mirage, fragmented and indistinct, at times submerged in shadows or overexposed. The building's facades of glass and mirrors serve as optical planes, an extension of the artist's camera and lens. Light is split into refracting colors, desert vegetation grows sideways, inside is outside and outside in. Kuhn pushes a certain disorienting effect by introducing metallic foils as an additional surface, at times producing purely abstract results. Acido Dorado marks Kuhn's increasing use of techniques that appear to merge the figure, abstraction and landscape into one.

Mona Kuhn (born 1969) is best known for her large-scale, dreamlike photographs of the human form. Her pictures often reference classical themes with a light and insightful touch. Kuhn's approach to her work is distinguished by the close relationships she develops with her subjects, resulting in images of remarkable naturalness and intimacy. Born in São Paulo, Brazil, Kuhn lives and works in Los Angeles.

An inspiring and beautifully produced series of photo-portraits of LGBTQ Russians living in an increasingly homophobic Russia

Do we want children from elementary school to be imposed with things that lead to degradation and extinction? Do we want them to be taught that instead of men and women, there are supposedly some other genders and to be offered sex-change surgeries?—President Vladimir Putin

In late 2022, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine dragged on, President Vladimir Putin signed new legislation cracking down on LGBTQ communities. Almost ten years earlier, Russia had enacted a federal law that prohibited the promotion of “non-traditional sexual values”—seen as Western values—to anyone under the age of eighteen. Known by many as the “gay propaganda law,” it has been used to silence any public discussion or positive messaging about LGBTQ issues in any place or format accessible to minors, including the media and online. The new legislation expands on the 2013 law to cover all ages and all media, causing many to fear for a new wave of homophobic violence.

In Ordinary People, Ksenia Kuleshova, a rising star in the world of photography, has taken a series of color portraits, accompanied by short interviews, of LGBTQ Russians who, despite the relentless homophobia from politicians, religious leaders, and the media, remain open about their sexuality and seek happiness and joy in their everyday lives. Kuleshova also looks beyond Russia’s borders to people in former Soviet states, many of which have taken their lead from Russia’s homophobic policies. Powerful and intimate, Ordinary People is a moving and ultimately joyful testament to the survival and resilience of the LGBTQ community in one of the most oppressive countries in the world.

Teshima is one of the 28 islands of the Shiwaku Islands in Japan. In former times the island has been famous for its navy, and the island’s shipbuilding and ship handling skills were valued and played a major role in maritime distribution.

Today, there are only a dozen or so islanders living on Teshima. The terraced fields that once covered the mountains have been swallowed up by bamboo forest, including the stone walls that had been left. The island’s last fisherman passed away at the end of last year, and his fishing boat remains tied up in the harbor, swaying in the waves. Listening to the island’s quiet sleep without disturbing it will lead us to face the present situation of Japan as an island nation.

Kentaro Kumon (b. 1981) is active in a wide range of fields, including magazines, books, and advertising. In 2012, he was awarded the Photographic Society of Japan’s Newcomer’s Award.

The North American frontier is an enduring symbol of romance, rebellion, escape, and freedom. At the same time, it's a profoundly masculine myth―cowboys, outlaws, Beat poets.

Photographer Justine Kurland reclaimed this space in her now-iconic series of images of teenage girls, taken between 1997 and 2002 on the road in the American wilderness. "I staged the girls as a standing army of teenaged runaways in resistance to patriarchal ideals," says Kurland. She portrays the girls as fearless and free, tender and fierce. They hunt and explore, braid each other's hair, and swim in sun-dappled watering holes-paying no mind to the camera (or the viewer).

Their world is at once lawless and utopian, a frontier Eden in the wild spaces just outside of suburban infrastructure and ideas. Twenty years on, the series still resonates, published here in its entirety and including newly discovered, unpublished images.

Following in the photographic lineage of Robert Frank, Stephen Shore, and Joel Sternfeld, Justine Kurland’s work examines the story of America―and the idea of the American dream juxtaposed against the reality. Her deep interest in the road, the western frontier, escape, and ways of living outside mainstream values pervade this stunning and important body of work.

Since 2004, Kurland and her young son, Casper, have traveled in their customized van, going south in the winter and north in the summer, her life as an artist and mother finely balanced between the need for routine and the desire for freedom and surprise. Casper’s interest ―particularly in trains, and later in cars―and those he befriends along the way often determine Kurland’s subject matter. He appears at different ages in the work, against open vistas and among the subcultures of train-hoppers and drifters around them. Kurland’s vision is in equal parts raw and romantic, idyllic and dystopian.

From highly symbolic pictures of trains moving across epic landscapes to allegorical depictions of mechanics and muscle cars, this book features the full scope of her road work―from her series This Train is Bound for Glory, to her most recent, Sincere Auto Care.

The Chinese city of Chongquing is little known in the West. Yet with its 32 million inhabitants, the city is twice as big as the Netherlands Located on the Yangtze river in southwestern China, it is one of China's most rapidly growing cities.

Ferit Kuyas stayed in Chongqing on dozens of occasions for long periods and became totally fascinated by the megalomaniacal construction fervor he witnessed there, as well as its beauty. The almost ubiquitous haze -- naturally present in this region but intensified by large-scale pollution -- gave his work almost automatically an added layer of mystery.

Kuyas focussed predominantly on the periphery of the city, where the enormity of it cannot be directly seen, but rather felt. The result is a stifling and exceptional book that displays all the superlatives that describe China: huge unstoppable, terrifying, incomprehensible, fascinating, beautiful...

In places, Kuyas's work looks like the precision photography found in engineering texts of the 1930s: portraits of large machines so pristine that they seem to be awaiting their first use. Ironically, Kuyas captures them long after they have been shut down. He prints his black-and-white images in strong contrast, with a special grasp of light and shadow.

For seven years the Turkish-born photographer hauled his heavy equipment through silent Swiss factories stilled by an economy that had replaced the former power of concrete and steel with newer technologies. This book is a ghostly travel guide through doorways, stairwells, random furniture, electrical systems, and huge windows staking claim to a doomed territory once full of activity. There is quiet power here: huge dormant machines, vast spaces without workers, and the shock of a world deemed utterly useless. Kuyas gives nobility, dignity, and a sense of death to the engineered world he has so perfectly photographed.

A spare text accompanies his images.

Though artistic and ambitious, Paul Kwilecki (1928-2009) chose to remain in Bainbridge, Georgia, the small Decatur County town where he was born, raised, and ran the family's hardware store. He had always been interested in photography and taught himself how to use a camera. Over four decades, he documented life in his community, making hundreds of masterful and intimate black-and-white prints.

Kwilecki developed his visual ideas in series of photographs of high school proms, prison hog killings, shade-tree tobacco farming, factory work, church life, the courthouse. He also wrote eloquently about the people and places he so poignantly depicted, and in this book his unique knowledge is powerfully articulated in more than 200 photographs and selected prose.