Monographs & Art Books / V

1230A deeply poignant look at the reality of America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through the lens of Peter van Agtmael.

1230Buzzing at the Sill is Peter van Agtmael's work about coming home from years of covering war in Iraq and Afghanistan and trying to understand his experiences and his country. The work is a stew of reflections on war, memory, identity, race, class, family and the landscape.

Buzzing at the Sill was shortlisted for the 2017 Rencontres D’Arles Book Award and Kassel Book Award and was named a “Book of the Year” by Time, The Guardian, Buzzfeed, Mother Jones, and Internazionale.

1230Disco Night Sept. 11 is a chronicle of America's wars from 2006-2013. The photographs shift back and forth from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the USA, unsparingly capturing the violent, ceaseless cost, but also the mystery and the madness, the beauty and absurdity at the core of each conflict. The narrative is complemented by nineteen gatefolds which elaborate on places and individuals.

Disco Night Sept 11 was shortlisted for the 2014 Aperture/Paris Photo Book Award and named a ‘Book of the Year’ by The New York Times Magazine, Time, Mother Jones, and Vogue.

1230Sorry for the War chronicles the dissonance between perceptions of the post-9/11 wars in America, and the violence and upheaval of the wars as experienced by those trapped in the war zones. The photographs in Sorry for the War weave together the war in Iraq during the time of ISIS, the mass exodus of refugees to Europe, militarism, terrorism, nationalism, myth-making and propaganda. This is van Agtmael’s fourth book about the United States and the world after 9/11 and reflects a nation’s struggle to reckon with the chaos unleashed in the fear and anger that followed the World Trade Center attacks. The photographs are disturbing, darkly humorous, contradictory, mysterious and damning, serving as both evidence and interpretation of a country gone adrift, with often disastrous consequences. An extensive text, in English and Arabic, combines journalism and personal reflection into a thorough narrative to accompany the nonlinear, poetic sequencing of the images.

920While Ian van Coller was growing up in the 1970s, the black women working in his parents upper class home in a whites-only suburb of Johannesburg were valued as members of the family. Nannies and maids who helped raise the children and run the household, they were ever-present confidants and friends. And yet they were conspicuously absent from family vacations and photo albums.
Apartheid, though it has been officially consigned to history, continues to live on in nearly a million South African homes where blacks still serve the needs of the white minority. Ian van Coller s first monograph, Interior Relations, deftly probes this enduring racial fault line with a simple yet elegant premise: he has asked black housekeepers, nannies and maids to wear their finest clothes, and to sit for formal portraits in the homes they care for.
Though the subjects' white employers are never shown, evidence of their privilege crowds around the women, forever out of reach: every portrait a cameo of apartheid in redux.
For Sindiwe Magona, one of South Africa's most celebrated black writers, working as a domestic in her youth provided a desperately needed but meager income that she was forced to supplement by selling sheep heads on the street. Serving white families represented a constriction of the soul that was broken only by the force of her will to become a writer.

1263Photographer and visual artist Ruud van Empel has evolved a striking style through his experimentation with the tension between the camera and digital technology. Demonstrating a strong technical prowess, he digitally dissects and reconstructs fragments taken from his own photographs to create hybrid works of astonishing colour: dreamlike scenes, arresting portraits of women and children, quirky and curious gatherings of objects, lush and leafy forests, and surreal undersea vistas. This book is published to accompany a retrospective of his work in Brussels, the scope of which includes nearly 400 images an invitation to enter a sublime, magnificent, and marvellous world.

1263The distinctive style of photographer and visual artist Ruud van Empel has evolved through an ongoing exploration of the tension between the camera and digital technology. He digitally dissects and reconstructs hundreds of diverse fragments taken from his own photographs to create synthesised, hybrid works that portray dreamlike scenes and natural utopias. Following in the romantic tradition, Van Empels stylised collages seek beauty, serenity, and the sublime; a subjective experience of the natural world fuelled by a disenchantment with our contemporary reality. Making Nature is published on the occasion of an exhibition of his recent work at Museum Belvédère.

201The intimate and delicate nude portraits of this Dutch photographer are characterised by an alienating sensuality. This new series of images, in which Van de Puttelaar depicts women in full length for the first time while retaining every breathtaking detail of their skin, draws its inspiration from the painters Cranach and Botticelli.

917

917Belgicum is a photo project about Belgium. It is not an objective representation of a country but rather a subjective photographical document in black and white. It's a journey of exploration into a small country in the heart of Europe, at the turn of the centuries.
More than fifteen years Vanfleteren has wandered through and hunted in the 'Belgicum' territories, guided by emotion and by the love for his homeland. He made a journey through a scarred land, in search of the irretrievable identity of a country with the melancholic soul of an old nation.
Over the past ten years, over 11,000 copies were sold of this international bestseller. Belgicum grew out to be a reference work in the Belgian history of photography. On the occasion of the tenth birthday of this cult book, it was reprinted.

917First major retrospective on photographer Stephan Vanfleteren Includes previously unpublished work with expansive personal reflections and stories from three decades of encounters and photography Stephan Vanfleteren (1969) is best known for his probing black and white portraits, but in recent decades he has also produced a wide range of documentary, artistic and personal work. From street photography in global cities like New York to the genocide in Rwanda, from building fronts and shop windows to the mystical landscapes of the Atlantic Wall, from still lifes to penetrating portraits. To mark Vanfleteren's 50th birthday, he is celebrating with a major retrospective which will occupy the entire Antwerp Museum of Photography (FOMU, 25 October 2019 - 1 March 2020) and with this publication Present, in which he looks back over his fascinating career. "I was there, I was present", says the photographer, who always feels himself to be both accomplice and witness. For Present, Vanfleteren has taken a generous selection of more than 400 photos from his ample archive, some of which have become iconic images while others have never been published before. In extensive texts, he reflects on how his own work and photography as a genre have evolved over the past decades and links these developments with a number of major social changes. This superbly illustrated book is an impressive overview of Vanfleteren's work and offers a comprehensive picture of him as a photographer, as an artist and, above all, as a human being living life with empathy, wonder and curiosity.

917With Surf Tribe, photographer Stephan Vanfleteren shows that there is far more to surf culture than just sport and competition. Surfing is also about a deep admiration and respect for the ocean, as well as the feeling of insignificance when confronted with the forces of nature. Surfers use the waves for fun, but also to forget and to battle, both with others and with themselves.
Vanfleteren looks beyond the traditional borders of the United States and Australia and searches the globe for people who live in places where sea and land meet. He documents a fluid community, with nature as its sole leader. He has sought out young talent, living icons, and old legends, both competitive and free surfers.
The photographs here are serene black and white portraits in Vanfleteren's well-known, haunting style; as always, he reaches below the surface and goes to the core of his subjects. Included, amongst many others, are Kelly Slater, Gerry Lopez, John Florence, Mickey Munoz, Filipe Toledo and Stephanie Gilmore.

Over the last 20 years, Hellen van Meene has produced a complex body of work, offering a contemporary take on photographic portraiture. Characterized by her exquisite use of light, formal elegance and palpable psychological tension, her depictions of girls and boys on the cusp of adulthood demonstrate a clear aesthetic lineage to seventeenth-century Dutch painting. Van Meene captures the intimacy in the photographer-subject relationship, bringing out a sense of honesty and vulnerability from within her models and highlighting the beauty of imperfection. She carefully poses her subjects in their environments to emphasize their fragility, adding a palpable tension to the photographs. At the same time, she captures them at deeper, more introspective moments-masterfully moving between the staged nature of the portraits and the real experiences of her subjects. The combination of van Meene's instinctive understanding of the universality of adolescent experience and the highly intimate collaboration between photographer and model makes for powerful portraits that resonate long after viewing. This book brings together more than 250 images, for the most comprehensive presentation of the artist's work to date.

820Award-winning photographer Craig Varjabedian's new book The Light of Days Gone By was 45 years in the making. It celebrates with stunning imagery the journey of a photographer and the beautiful light he has witnessed and captured along the way. The Light of Days Gone By is a testament to Varjabedian's vision and years of hard work and will appeal to anyone who appreciates fine photography.
Varjabedian's photographs from the magnificent red hills of Ghost Ranch and gleaming white dunes of White Sands to more faraway places—from strong Native Americans to weathered cowboys and more—these expansive landscapes and intimate portraits are all presented in this beautifully printed book.
The 48 color and black & white photographs were carefully curated by Varjabedian's long time studio director Cindy Lane, to not only share the breadth of this photographer's career but also to reveal relationships between individual images and from the themes he has explored over the years. Complementing the images are two essays. Cindy Lane provides insight into the photographer's artistic vision and Myra Bullington looks at the importance of photographs to memory and shares an appreciation for the photographer and his work. The book is not signed.
Museum curator Catherine Whitney writes “Craig Varjabedian's photography captures, with arresting clarity, the ineffable whispers of time and spirit layered deep in New Mexico's cultural landscape. Through the artful combination of his compassionate eye and technical virtuosity, he evokes the past in the present and the holy in the everyday." Craig Varjabedian is a photographer who explores the back roads of the American West, making pictures of the unique and quintessential. 45 years behind the camera, 14 books, 42 museum exhibitions and hundreds of fine art photographic prints all comprise a rich and rewarding career. His images share awe-inspiring stories of the land and the people who live on it—one photograph at a time.

1064Eboundja is a project that occupies Reinout van den Bergh from 2011 onwards. Since 2009, the thirty families of the same-named fishing village in southern Cameroon are in great uncertainty about their future. The village is situated in the middle of a coastal strip where the Chinese, in exchange for Cameroon’s iron ore, are constructing a deep sea harbour. The inhabitants are vulnerable to the combination of a corrupt government and megalomaniac project developers. In a series of photographs van den Bergh shows, with great commitment, the decline as well as the intimacy and beauty of the small community; the resignation but also the pride and resistance.
As of 2006 van den Bergh has been curator of the Dutch BredaPhoto festival. His work has been exhibited in various museums in Eastern and Western Europe and Africa, and published in several books and other publications.

27Photographer Pierre Verger believes that "photography enables us to see what we don't have time to see, for it is fixed. What's more, it memorizes, it is memory." For Verger, who traveled the world and immersed himself in the cultures of the people he photographed, these images capture his history. For others, they convey a sense of history--personal and cultural. These light-drenched photos of images--a small-town Mexican carnival in the '30s, Brazilian dock workers in the '50s, a Peruvian trapeze artist in the '40s, and 1937 Shanghai street scenes--present a portrait of a world now lost amidst decades of war and political and social upheaval. Verger believed that along with his profession came the role of messenger, connecting people of different cultures via his revelatory portraits. And his success in that endeavor is evident in the sheer force of these images, truly a testament to people in another place and time.

954Emphasizing Roman Vishniac's prodigious talents as one of the great documentary photographers of the 20th century, this volume presents the full range of his artistic genius. Drawn from the International Center of Photography's vast holdings of work by Roman Vishniac (1897-1990), this generously illustrated and expansive volume offers a new and profound consideration of this key modernist photographer. In addition to featuring Vishniac's best-known work―the iconic images of Jewish life in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust - this publication also introduces many previously unpublished photographs spanning more than six decades of Vishniac's work. These include newly discovered images of prewar Berlin, rare film footage from rural Jewish communities in Carpatheina Ruthania, documentation of postwar ruins and Displaced Persons' camps, and vivid coverage of Jewish life in America in the 1940s and '50s. Essays by world-renowned scholars of photography, Jewish history and culture address these new found images and consider them in the context of modernist tendencies in Berlin in the 1920s and '30s; the rise of Nazi power in Germany and Eastern Europe; the uses of social documentary photography for relief organizations; the experiences of exile, displacement, and assimilation; and the impact of Vishniac's pioneering scientific research in color photomicroscopy in the 1950s and '60s. This first retrospective monograph on Roman Vishniac offers many new perspectives on the work and career of this important photographer, positioning him as one of the great modernists and social documentary photographers of the last century.

954This pictorial history of Jewish life in Germany in the 1930s before the Holocaust, shows the stories of individuals, their increasing poverty, sad wisdom and enduring love in the years leading up to World War II.

954Between 1935 and 1938 the celebrated photographer Roman Vishniac explored the cities and villages of Eastern Europe, capturing life in the Jewish shtetlekh of Poland, Romania, Russia, and Hungary, communities that even then seemed threatened―not by destruction and extermination, which no one foresaw, but by change. Using a hidden camera and under difficult circumstances, Vishniac was able to take over sixteen thousand photographs; most were left with his father in a village in France for the duration of the war. With the publication of Children of a Vanished World, seventy of those photographs are available, thirty-six for the first time. The book is devoted to a subject Vishniac especially loved, and one whose mystery and spontaneity he captured with particular poignancy: children.

Selected and edited by the photographer's daughter, Mara Vishniac Kohn, and translator and coeditor Miriam Hartman Flacks, these images show children playing, children studying, children in the midst of a world that was about to disappear. They capture the daily life of their subjects, at once ordinary and extraordinary. The photographs are accompanied by a selection of nursery rhymes, songs, poems, and chants for children's games in both Yiddish and English translation. Thanks to Vishniac's visual artistry and the editors' choice of traditional Yiddish verses, a part of this wonderful culture can be preserved for future generations.

954In German

Follow Ellen von Unwerth on a tantalizing tour through her childhood homeland of Bavaria. Amid stunning scenery and charming traditions, you'll frolic in the company of the most rugged farmhands and luscious maidens, all too ready to share their love for the region, and to discard their lederhosen and dirndls. Collector's Edition (No. 401-1,900), each numbered and signed by Ellen von Unwerth

The Moth Wing Diaries is a photographic narrative addressing themes of memory, providence, revival and dreams, by native Texan photographer Lori Vrba (born 1964). Vrba's surreal landscapes and portraiture explore the artist's sense of conflict and ultimate peace with the Southern terrain.