dewi lewis publishing
Home | About Us | Index | Mail List | Offers | New & Recent Titles | Forthcoming | Collectors Editions | Links
|
|
I, TOKYO
JACOB AUE SOBOL Magnum photographer Jacob Aue Sobol moved to Tokyo in spring 2006. "Initially I felt invisible. Each day I would walk the streets without anyone making eye-contact with me. Everyone seemed to be heading somewhere – it was as if they had no need of communication. Most mornings I would take the Chuo-line from Nakano to Shinjuku, and even though the train would be packed with salary-men and school girls in uniform, I rarely heard a word being spoken. And so I began taking my pocket camera out with me on the streets and in the parks. Rather than focusing on the impressively tall buildings and the eternal swarm of people, I began searching for the narrow paths and the individual human presence in a city that felt both attractive and repulsive at the same time.” Sobol’s first book Sabine (2004) was nominated for the 2005 Deutsche Börse Prize. Other Awards include a first prize at World Press Photo 2006. Exhibitions during 2008 include the United States, China and Denmark. Previous solo exhibitions include Portugal, United Kingdom, Canada, Poland and Denmark. In 2007 Jacob became a nominee at Magnum Photos. He is represented by the Yossi Milo Gallery in New York. |
||
|
|
THE BIRTHDAY PARTY
VEE SPEERS This is a series of portraits of children about to attend an imaginary birthday party. Inspired by her daughter’s birthday party Speers imagined what characters might be created if role play were pushed to imaginative extremes. The children are placed in front of the same white wall and gaze into the lens of the camera, performing within a strictly laid out frame. They reveal very little of themselves and yet this is what makes the portraits so magnetic. The childlike game of dressing up, of putting on costumes, reinforces the surreal tone of the series. The Birthday Party is “anarchistic” in its take on childhood and play, “both improvisatory and highly theatrical... unsentimental but playful, macabre... in a way which is liberating both for us as viewer and perhaps for her subjects too.” Clare Grafik, The Photographers Gallery, London “There is always a certain tension in my work which draws the viewer into what is hidden beneath the surface. My intention was to show a real side of human nature, to expose a side of childhood that is not care-free or clichéd, and project a range of emotions and definitions which are part of an imperfect world.” Vee Speers For the past fifteen years Vee Speers has been based in Paris, working in fashion, photojournalism and fine art photography. Widely exhibited throughout Europe, the United States, Brazil, Mexico, Japan and Australia, her work has also been seen in publications including The Sunday Times, Harpers+Queen, GQ, Arena and Esquire. |
|||
|
|
ZEBRATO
MICHAEL LEVIN Foreword by Barry Dumka Michael Levin’s award-winning and extraordinarily beautiful photographs have a very painterly quality. In a recent feature profile, the American fine art magazine Focus declared “Michael Levin’s captivating images are soulful and evocative; he is truly one of the rising stars in photography.” Using long exposures Levin reduces the landscape to elemental shapes. Each image has a simplicity and purity capturing the essence of the landscape. Many of his photographs feature water and clouds, and show what has been described as ‘the smooth skin of light’, yet it is the architectural intrusions into these clean spaces that most engage him. Wooden posts, concrete barriers, weathered rocks, dilapidated jetties, even the elegant shape of French topiaries introduce elements which seem to haunt the landscape and introduce a human presence. Michael Levin has won a number of awards including the prestigious ‘Photographer of the Year’ award at the 2006/07 International Photography Awards in New York. Previous honorees include Henri Cartier-Bresson, William Klein and Larry Clark. Levin also won a further ‘Photographer of the Year’ Award at the 2007 Prix de la Photographie in Paris. Born in Winnipeg and presently living in Vancouver, Canada, Levin travels extensively to capture his sharply-observed black and white photographs. |
||
|
|
LOVIN' IT
ADAM HINTON These photographs from Shanghai explore the new culture rapidly developing in China as it expands its domestic market at breakneck speed. As elsewhere in the world, the appeal of modern consumer goods and the benefits they bring is there for all to see. But such rapid change has its dark side. As the not-so-old cultural structures become increasingly irrelevant there are threats to social cohesion as communal identity gives way to individuality and alienation. What we are seeing now is a new Cultural Revolution, a capitalist Cultural Revolution that is more complete, more total, and no less ideological than the Cultural Revolution that was instigated by Chairman Mao in the 1960s. Lovin’ It is introduced by John Gittings, for many years foreign leader-writer and East Asia editor at The Guardian. Gittings first visited China in 1971 during the Cultural Revolution and in 2001 he opened the Guardian’s first staff bureau on the Chinese mainland, in Shanghai. The book also includes an interview with Hinton by writer and cultural critic Nigel Warburton. London based photographer, Adam Hinton has produced several documentary projects based around various communities including a favela in Rio de Janeiro, a coal mining family in the Ukraine and a Himba community in Namibia. His personal and commissioned photography have won numerous awards and been exhibited at various galleries including the National Portrait Gallery and The Photographers’ Gallery, London. |
||
|
|
FRENCH KISS
ANDERS PETERSEN Swedish born, Anders Petersen is a world renowned photographer, noted for his intimate and personal documentary-style black-and-white photographs. Petersen explores the fringes of society and his images depict a raw, and sometimes disturbingly brutal, social portrait. Taken in the South of France, French Kiss is characteristic Petersen, exuding the poetic sadness, restlessness and sense of urgency that runs through all his work. When the work was first shown at Arles Photography Festival the response was astounding: ‘They made everything else on display at the huge photography festival pale in comparison. They became the ‘buzz’ in Arles. And everyone realized that Anders Petersen (that wildly energetic 62-year-old guy) is still making some of the most arresting personal documentary photographs today - Jim Casper, Lens Culture. Petersen first became known for his series Café Lehmitz, a daily chronicle of the regulars – transvestites, prostitutes, drug addicts and harbour workers – of a Hamburg bar in the Reeperbahn, the city’s once notorious red-light district. Starting in 1967, Petersen continued the project for three years. The photobook of the same name was published eight years later, in 1978, first in Germany, and then in France (1979) and Sweden (1982). Café Lehmitz has since become regarded as a seminal book in the history of European photography. Anders Petersen has published more than 20 books and his work has been exhibited widely. |
||
|
|
TRUNCATED
PAUL HART Foreword by Gerry Badger The forest interior is more architecture than landscape. Amongst the trees, your concept of time is changed. As you move deeper inside, and the outside world disappears, the wind is calmed and noise filtered, temperature is altered, and light is bounced and subdued. Some trees stand like sentinels, others are stolid in ranks, an army of trees appearing out of the dark. This apparent sanctuary of stillness can strangely transform. It is it’s own world. Stepping into the forest is always like stepping into the unknown, with the semi-dark concealing much, revealing a little. A place sometimes mysterious, sometimes secretive, but always seductive and always dark. A prize winner at the 2008 Prix de la Photographie Paris, Paul Hart is fast becoming one of the UK’s leading landscape photographers. His work is used by Ilford-Photo to promote their black and white paper range worldwide. Born in the UK in 1961, Hart worked for six years in advertising photography, travelling throughout Europe and the USA, before embarking on a freelance career focusing more on the natural world. His images have been used internationally for advertising, publishing and editorial. Since 2000 Hart has concentrated solely on personal projects. Truncated is his first book. |
||
|
|
THE LAST THINGS
DAVID MOORE texts by Chris Petit & Angela Weight David Moore was allowed unprecedented access to a Crisis Management facility below ground in central London, between September 2006 and April 2007. This space will be used as the first port of call in any situation where the State is under threat. The environment is sustainable for extended periods and is part of a larger network. Over an 8 month period Moore was able to observe a live working space, continuously on standby, and fully prepared for the most extreme national emergency. The facility’s hermetic, tightly regulated environment, artificially lit and air conditioned, is prescient with the threat of crisis. At once sophisticated and touchingly ordinary, part military and part civilian, Moore has documented its labyrinthine depths with chilling clarity. Small areas of certain images have been digitally altered at the request of the MoD to protect what they consider to be sensitive information. All of this begins to hint at the relationship with the MoD and imposes a conceptual requirement on what has become a censored document. Moore’s photographs are accompanied by an essay from the film-maker and novelist Chris Petit and an afterword by the curator, Angela Weight. David Moore has exhibited and published his work widely. The Last Things is his third book. |
||
|
|
IN A WINDOW OF PRESTES MAIA 911 BUILDING
JULIO BITTENCOURT In March 2006 the residents of 911 Prestes Maia, a 22 storey ramshackle tower block in the centre of sprawling São Paulo, Brazil, were surprised to learn that they were to be evicted within 28 days. Whilst the building, neglected by its landlord, had apparently been empty for over a decade 1,630 people, including some 468 families with 315 children lived there. In 2003 the ‘Movement of the Homeless’ had moved in hundreds of homeless families. The new residents drove out the vermin and the drug dealers, and cleaned up the place, and the building became possibly the largest squat in the world, complete with a library, workshops and other educational activities. Bittencourt’s photographs are a powerful record of this diverse community. Photographing from the adjacent building, Bittencourt records the tower’s residents as they appear in weathered window frames. According to him, in a mega-city like São Paulo, where large buildings are packed together cheek by jowl, families and friends often communicate with each other through windows. Julio Bittencourt lives in São Paulo. He was awarded the Leica Oskar Barnack Prize in 2007 for this work. His work has been widely published internationally including Le Figaro, Stern, Leica World Magazine, British Journal of Photography and Le Monde. |
||
|
|
THE ANIMALS
GIACOMO BRUNELLI Foreword by Alison Nordström “Giacomo Brunelli has been looking hard at animals. His focus is not on the framed and caged exotica of zoos but on the ordinary animals that remain with us to some extent: horses, dogs, cats, chickens, pigeons. He shows us a fox, looking sharply at the camera and poised to flee, and there are numerous birds, a snake and several toads, but this wildness is small and fragile, living in the familiar liminal space where manmade and natural meet and overlap. His animals inhabit farmyards, cobbled streets and the façades of stone buildings. There are no tigers here. Brunelli’s animals are often composed only of suggestive fragments. His spare black and white images are attuned to the nuances of a moving mane, a silhouetted whisker, a highlighted, almost illuminated wing. He favours the profile and the counterintuitive angle, setting dark unobservable features against dark undiscernable backgrounds. A dead mouse, on its back, paws in air beside an oversized flower against a stark and distant mountain is no more or less frozen in time than is the growling dog, eyes alight and teeth forever bared; both are icons of states we fear but cannot know. These pictures are timeless and uncanny, powerful in their ordinariness, and emotionally much bigger than their simple subjects.” Alison Nordström. |
||
|
|
COAL, FRANKINCENSE & MYRRH
Yemen and British Yemenis TIM SMITH The reputed home of the Queen of Sheba, Yemen has been at the crossroads of Africa, the Middle East and Asia for thousands of years thanks to its position on the ancient spice routes. Ten thousand years of trade along Yemen’s Red Sea and Indian Ocean coasts, over its mountains and across its deserts made it a meeting point of people, ideas, money and goods and the centuries of trading generated much wealth. There has been a British presence in Yemen ever since the early 1600s when the East India Company set up trading posts in Mukha, a port then famous as the world centre for trade in coffee. In 1839 the port city of Aden was captured to provide a base to protect British trade routes. This began an even stronger relationship which would last some 130 years until 1967 when the British finally pulled out. Yemen is the mother country of the longest-established of Britain’s Muslim communities. Yemenis came to Britain from the 1890s onwards, many as an indirect result of having joined the British Merchant Navy, and after World War Two there was further emigration. By the mid-1970s there were some 15,000 Yemenis in Britain, though today this figure has shrunk back considerably. One of the poorest countries in the region, Yemen still maintains much of its tribal character and old ways. People wear traditional dress and the custom of chewing the narcotic plant khat in the afternoons is still widely observed. Yemen remains a country of great mystery and, though security is an issue, it has attracted the curiosity of a growing number of tourists. |
|||
|
|
THE MIDLAND HOTEL
photographs: SIMON WEBB texts: SARAH HALL & MICHAEL BRACEWELL. Commissioned in 1932 by the London, Midland and Scottish Railway Company, The Midland Hotel is one of the great statements, internationally, about the nature of both modernism and modernity. Its architect, Oliver Hill, put together a list of contributing artists and designers who were all first division modernist chic. With its famous carved reliefs by Eric Gill and Eric Ravilious, a mural by Edward Bawden, furnishings by Duncan Grant and rugs and mosaics by Marion Dorn, this was a hotel as not just a work of art, but a statement of modern aesthetics. Sadly, over time the art deco building became a derelict and decaying reminder of the heyday of Britain’s seaside resorts until developers Urban Splash took the decision to reopen it again. This book is a unique collection of photographs and texts documenting and revealing the transformation. It records, imagines, and celebrates the bringing back to life of a much-loved building of historical and architectural importance. Simon Webb lectures in photography at the University of Chester and has exhibited in galleries across the country. Sarah Hall’s novel The Electric Michelangelo – set in Morecambe and Coney Island – was short listed for the 2004 Man Booker Prize. Her most recent novel, The Carhullan Army, won the 2007 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Michael Bracewell is a writer, novelist and cultural commentator. He was a Turner Prize judge in 2007. |
||
|
|
WHITE SEA BLACK SEA
JENS OLOF LASTHEIN The Iron Curtain is long gone, Germany is unified and the borders of the European Union continue to expand, yet the line between east and west in Europe still remains visible. Jens Olof Lasthein’s book is a visual journey from the White Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south – powerful tales of a boundary in transition. ‘The Yalta Agreement gave the easternmost part of Czechoslovakia to the Soviet Union. Stolnitsy was split down the middle, right over the main street, with barbed wire, mine fields and a guard tower. And that’s how it remains when I come to visit Alisa. The minefields are gone and the old guard tower stands empty, but the cruel wire fence is still there, patrolled now by Ukrainian border guards on this side and Slovakian EU soldiers on the other. So when Alisa wants to have a cup of coffee with her nearest neighbour, they stand on either side, giving the wire a respectful distance, shouting and gesticulating, both of them speaking Hungarian. - Jens Lastehein, diary extract from the book. Born in 1964, Jens Olof Lasthein grew up in Denmark and now lives in Stockholm, Sweden. His book Moments in Between – Pictures from Former Yugoslavia (Journal 2000) was selected by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger for The Photobook: A History, Volume II (Phaidon 2006). |
||
|
A bookprojects.net title |
ROOM:
Photographs by JACKY LONGSTAFF essays by CHRIS WHARTON Newcastle-upon-Tyne’s Town Moor is the subject of this book of photographs and essays. A broad, open area of land at the heart of a bustling, post-industrial city, the Moor is comparable in size to London’s Hyde Park. Like the central parks, commons, moorlands and other unbuilt areas of many of the world’s major cities, Newcastle’s Moor is an important social and environmental feature. Jacky Longstaff’s photographs present the wide, green spaces that are a familiar aspect of the city. They capture an often unfamiliar view – the ‘otherness’ of this historic terrain. Chris Wharton’s essays reveal its rich history and explore concepts of time and space, boundaries and pathways associated with this and other green, urban spaces and the way we come to view and experience them. bookprojects.net is a new imprint of Dewi Lewis Publishing. It has been created to provide a mechanism to publish projects of high quality which we would not otherwise be able to consider. Whilst bookprojects.net undertakes the full design and production process, production costs are funded through external sources. Editorially the projects are primarily artist-led and whilst we provide advice and support we seek to enable the authors to express their particular vision with the minimum of intervention on our part. |
||
|
|
INFECTED LANDSCAPE
SHAI KREMER Infected Landscape by Israeli photographer Shai Kremer is a searing portrait of the military disfiguration of the landscape of Israel. The accumulation of ruins and military remnants is an important part of what defines the Israeli landscape today – wounds in the landscape that correspond to the wounds in the Israeli collective consciousness. The book includes photographs from the ‘Chicago’ miltary training centre in Israel. This centre encapsulates the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Over the years it has been rebuilt to represent different war environments and reflect varying scenarios – from Lebanon through to Gaza City. A further area was also constructed to simulate a refugee camp. The newly established Urban Warfare Training Center (unveiled to the press in 2007) also features. This is a mock city located in the southern Tze’elim military base. From a distance, it looks like any Arab urban centre. Built by the U.S.Army Corps of Engineers and funded largely through U.S. military aid, the 7.4-square-mile generic city consists of modules that can be reconfigured by mission planners to represent specific towns. Known as ‘Baladia’ by the Americans – balad, in Arabic, means village – it is used by U.S. forces as well as by the Israel Defense Force. Complete with shops, a grand mosque, a hospital and a Kasbah quarter, the UWTC even has a cemetery that doubles as a soccer field, depending on the operational scenario. In some of the houses openings have been created to replicate those that soldiers leave behind as they demolish walls in the process of moving through urban areas whilst avoiding streets and alleys. For added realism, charred automobiles and burned tyres litter the roadways. During training exercises Arabian music is played in the background. The facility is enveloped by cameras and an audio system that simulates helicopters, mortar rounds, and prayer calls. Based in New York and Tel Aviv, Shai Kremer has exhibited internationally with shows in the USA, China, and throughout Europe. A finalist in both the 2007 Sante Fe Prize and the 2007 HSBC Award and runner-up in the 2007 Aperture Portfolio Prize, his work has also been published widely including in the New York Times.
|
||
|
|
ONCE UPON A TIME IN WALES
ROBERT HAINES For 35 years this extraordinary collection of photographs remained hidden from the world. Taken around 1971/2, by young photographer Robert Haines, they record life in the Welsh valleys, in the village of Heolgerrig and nearby Merthyr Tydfil. Heolgerrig was a very close-knit community with Welsh the first language. It was a mining community where most of the men worked underground and life seemed to revolve around the pub and the chapel. Merthyr Tydfil, once the ‘Iron Capital’ of the world, had a justifiable reputation as ‘tough’ with characters such as hard man, Melvin Webber, who died after being blasted by a shotgun, and ‘Mad’ Malcolm for whom no chemical substance was too strong The early Seventies were a time of flux and, looking at these powerful photographs now, many of the extraordinary characters featured seem to have drifted in from a previous century. Haines photographed the local people with enthusiasm and energy. Some he knew well, others were complete strangers. Some spent their days in the pub, others worked underground, living conditions were often very poor. The photographs speak to us today of a world very different to our own. |
||
.jpg)
LANDSCAPES: 2001-03
Richard Billingham
Over recent years Billingham has photographed increasingly within the landscape and this new book brings together this work for the first time. The images are contemplative and thoughtful and reflect his primary concern for the ‘making’ of an image.
Billingham first exhibited in 1995 at the Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London, by whom he is still represented. His work has received significant international acclaim – in 1997 he won the Citibank Photography Prize and his work was one of the talking points of ‘Sensation’, the exhibition of Contemporary British Art from the Saatchi Collection. He was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2001.
Billingham lives in Brighton and is currently a part-time senior lecturer at the University of Gloucestershire based in Cheltenham.
The work is introduced by Sacha Craddock, leading art critic and broadcaster.
Richard Billingham
Over recent years Billingham has photographed increasingly within the landscape and this new book brings together this work for the first time. The images are contemplative and thoughtful and reflect his primary concern for the ‘making’ of an image.
Billingham first exhibited in 1995 at the Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London, by whom he is still represented. His work has received significant international acclaim – in 1997 he won the Citibank Photography Prize and his work was one of the talking points of ‘Sensation’, the exhibition of Contemporary British Art from the Saatchi Collection. He was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2001.
Billingham lives in Brighton and is currently a part-time senior lecturer at the University of Gloucestershire based in Cheltenham.
The work is introduced by Sacha Craddock, leading art critic and broadcaster.
£25.00 hardback
96 pages, 224mm x 280mm
45 colour photographs
ISBN: 978-1904587385
Published: February 2008
in association with University of Gloucestershire
ORDER NOW
|
|
AS I WAS DYING
PAOLO PELLEGRIN Winner of the Leica European Publishers Award As I was Dying brings together Paolo Pellegrin’s remarkable and moving images of human suffering within areas of conflict and war. Pellegrin captures both the horror and despair of war, and his photographs convey the powerlessness of those who are victim to it, as they witness the destruction of their homes and the death of their loved ones. These are forceful and unforgetable images that resonate in the memory and give voice to the unbearable suffering of so many people. Born in Rome in 1964. Paolo Pellegrin joined Magnum Photos in 2001 and has been a Newsweek contract photographer since 2000. He has won numerous awards including the Eugene Smith Award, the Vis D'Or, World Press awards, the Hasselblad Grant, the Robert Capa Gold Medal and the Olivier Rebot Award. Paolo Pellegrin has published 5 previous books and has exhibted widely in Europe and the United States. He lives in Rome and New York. |
||
|
|
SOMNAMBULISTS
JOANNA KANE The Somnambulists is a book of contemporary portraits of life and death masks from the cast collection of the Edinburgh Phrenological Society. Linked to the early nineteenth-century science of phrenology, these casts preserve quasi-photographic likenesses of individuals living 150 to 200 years ago – from unknown men and women to writers and artists such as Wordsworth, Keats and Blake. Releasing her subjects from the categories of the phrenological head collection, Joanna Kane magically renders photographic likenesses from before the age of photography. Joanna Kane is a photographer based in Edinburgh. She has shown work in the UK and Europe including at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery and as part of the European Month of Photography festivals. She works at Edinburgh College of Art.
|
||
.jpg)
|
|
SMALL WORLD
MARTIN PARR Introduction by Geoff Dyer This is a revised and updated edition of Martin Parr’s classic book which was first published in 1996. Copies of the original edition of Small World are now avidly sought by collectors and demand a high premium. It is a biting, very funny satire in which Parr looks at tourism worldwide, exposing the increasingly homogenous ‘global culture’ where in the search for different cultures those same cultures are destroyed. The issues that Parr raised a decade ago when the book was first published are even more relevant today. Whilst Parr’s larger-than-life troupe of tourists appear willing participants in an omnipresent consumer culture they are also bemused victims – at the mercy of larger social forces and locked into their insatiable craving for spectacle. Small World‘s citizens become a symbol of western society’s prosperous freedoms, declaring their power and their rights to travel, to choose and to consume. A member of the prestiguous MAGNUM photo agency Martin Parr is one of the best known photographers in the world today. He has published innumerable books and his work has been exhibited and published worldwide. |
||
|
|
DINKY TOYS
A celebration of Dinky Toys in the 1950s Kim Sayer Dinky Toys must be one of the most successful and collectable toys ever made. These delightfully stylish photographs feature models from the golden age of the Dinky toy – an era remembered fondly by every post-war baby-boomer. Now the subject of serious interest from collectors worldwide many of these models have re-emerged as highly collectable, often selling at very high prices. But the toys that feature here are neither pristine or shiny. Collected over the years by photographer Kim Sayer, their charm is in the chips, dents and worn paint work – toys that have been played with and loved. His affection for them is obvious, as each model is given its own delightful setting, reflecting a more gentle and innocent era. Visual puns abound – the Landrover, 'a fine model of a vehicle designed to go anywhere and do anything' climbs its way up a staircase, whilst the Avro York Airliner takes off from the ironing board, and an open-top sports car zooms along fighting the gale force winds of an electric fan. Many of the photographs also play off against the original marketing tagline used to sell the models: ‘Just look at the remarkable detail on this exciting model of Britain’s famous centurion tank. It is a welcome reinforcement for the playroom army.’ ‘Here is a fine new model, the Humber Police Patrol Car containing uniformed driver and patrolman.’ These are wonderful photographs that will appeal to all ages – particularly to those who will remember their days of short trousered bliss crawling about on the floor for hours on end, their imaginations fired by the splendour of their Dinky toys. |
||
.jpg)
|
|
STILL LIFE: KILLING TIME
ED CLARK Taken over the course of more than a year of exclusive access, this work applies large format still life photography to the context of a unique prison community, E Wing at Kingston Prison in Portsmouth. For eight years this was Britain’s only wing dedicated to holding elderly lifers: murderers, rapists, paedophiles and other violent criminals aged from their late 50s to over 80 years old. Still Life: Killing Time, is not simply a reportage about a particular prison. Elements of metaphor, abstraction and documentary explore the experience of long term incarceration and the passage of time, and touch on how ageing and physical decline affect the prison environment. The claustrophobia of these close up, deliberate and regular compositions reflects both the nature of the place and the experience of working in E Wing. The recurring motifs – bars, squares, boxes, grids – show the segmentation and ordering of time and space that is fundamental to prison life, while the details of the inmates’ possessions, notice-boards, walls, tables and bedsides suggest their state of mind and how they adapt to long term incarceration and getting old in an institution. Edmund Clark has built a reputation for combining strong ideas with an ability to work in sensitive situations and with people on the margins of society. His work combines still life, portrait and landscape to explore the relationship between environment, memory and the passage of time. His most recent exhibition was Faces and Memories of Centenarians at the Spitz Gallery, London, and at Bloomingdale’s, New York. A previous winner of a coveted ‘Gold Pencil’ at the New York One Show Advertising Awards, Clark’s work is also in major collections including the National Portrait Gallery. |
||
|
|
A SHORT HISTORY
OF PHOTOGRAPHY HARVEY BENGE introduced by Gerry Badger ‘While looking through his contact sheets, Harvey Benge noticed that one of his pictures reminded him of a ‘Friedlander’, another someone else. All photographers do this, and if the photograph in question apes another photographer too closely, it’s usually a cause for rejection. But Benge did the opposite. Picking out his ‘Friedlander’ and his ‘Parr’ and his ‘Baltz’ he decided to make an ‘anthology’ of contemporary photography featuring some of its biggest names. Yet they are all genuine, original Benges. They are also all good pictures, not mere pastiches of the ‘originals’ of which they gently but insistently remind one. This may be a game, but games can be very serious, and this fascinating book is both a serious and light-hearted exploration of photographic style.’ – Gerry Badger Working from both Paris and Auckland, New Zealander Harvey Benge has established an enviable international reputation with exhibitions throughout the world. He has published over a dozen books and has been a finalist of the Prix du Livre, Arles Festival, France. His work is held in many major collections. Gerry Badger is a well respected photo historian and critic. Co-author (with Martin Parr) of the two volume ‘The Photobook: A History’, he has also curated a number of exhibitions, including `Through the Looking Glass: Post-war British Photography’ for the Barbican Arts Centre, London. His published books include Collecting Photography (2003) and books on Eugene Atget and Chris Killip. He lives in London. |
||
.jpg)
|
Published in Association with |
BOMBAY MIX
KETAKI SHETH introduced by Suketu Mehta ‘Ketaki Sheth’s photographs, so formally interesting, so sharply seen, so deeply felt.’ Salman Rushdie ‘Sheth’s Bombay is subtle, considered and thoughtful, even when it is outwardly brutal.’ Suketu Mehta, author of ‘Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found’ ‘Stunning photographs…. Her work is terrific, fuelling me with energy and inspiration.’ Mira Nair Bombay Mix brings together the street photographs of leading Indian photographer Ketaki Sheth, images taken over a period of almost 20 years. Bombay is a city that never sleeps. Its population (17.7 million) and its geography put a premium on space. A lot of ‘living’ happens on the street, where a disparate and unlikely blend of humanity defines its boundaries in a tightly confined space. The thrill of Bombay is the thrill of contrast. The streetscape of the city is as much psychedelic as it is kaleidoscopic: there is so much to see. What is most difficult to discern is geometry, the internal order amidst the clutter. |
||
|
|
GREAT PHOTOGRAPHIC JOURNEYS
JOHN HANNAVY One hundred and fifty years ago travelling with a camera was both a novelty and an enormous challenge. The intrepid photographers who took their cameras to remote corners of the world brought back images which amazed their peers. Photographer and historian John Hannavy has recreated some of their epic journeys – travelling to Scotland along the route followed by William Henry Fox Talbot in 1844; recreating Charles Kinnear and Thomas Melville Raven’s 1857 journeys to France; exploring the Nile from Cairo to Abu Simbel along the route Francis Frith followed between 1856 and 1859; travelling through Russia and the Ukraine as Roger Fenton did in 1852 and 1855; across India from Calcutta to Simla following Samuel Bourne’s 1863 account of his travels; and exploring China and Cyprus as John Thomson did between 1863 and 1878. This beautifully illustrated book contrasts the Victorian world with our own, and looks at how our view of the world has changed in the intevening years. It chronicles the developments which have taken place in travel, architecture, culture, and of course photography itself. Professor John Hannavy has had a long involvement with photography and photographic history, and has been writing about the subject for over thirty years. He edited the recently published Encyclopaedia of 19th Century Photography, and has previously published many books and articles on travel, history, photography, and photographic history, and has written and presented two well-received series of television films on the history of photography for the BBC. |
||
.jpg)
|
|
LOVE, POWER, SACRIFICE
LIFE WITH THE JESUS ARMY JOHN ANGERSON introduced by William Shaw Photographed over twenty years, this is a portrait of the Jesus Army. For most of us, if we register them at all, they are the tambourine-wielding, gospel-singing fanatics who intrude on our Saturday morning shopping excursions. But for the members themselves, this charismatic Christian sect – often dismissed as a cult – is a total way of life. Founded in 1969 in Northamptonshire, England, believers are expected to renounce all their possessions, live in communes, and share all earnings. Their motto, and three basic tenets – Love, Power and Sacrifice – form the title of this book. It would be easy to ridicule belief, but instead photographer John Angerson has adopted another approach – a profoundly sympathetic authorial style which does not judge, or even simply chronicle, but seems to penetrate the very skin of a religious sect. What gives these photographs an eerie relevance today is that fanatical religious belief has, seemingly out of the blue, come to the foreground of contemporary life. From the Christian fundamentalist certainties that have underpinned recent American policy, to the Islamic extremism that has erupted everywhere from New York to London and Madrid, competing religious beliefs have redrawn the contours of the modern world. Angerson’s photographs provide a searing insight in a world within a world. By peering into this microcosm of fanatical religion we can begin to understand a phenomenon that it is no longer possible to ignore. |
||
.jpg)
|
|
THE VISITORS
CHARLOTTE CORY Charlotte Cory’s ‘Visitors’ are truly creatures of fantasy and fascination – each so delicately posed that we think “can that be real?” A noble tiger in full military regalia, a dejected donkey slumped in a chair in a sparse studio setting, a haughty kangaroo holding a cricket bat and gazing out at us dismissively. What kind of extraordinary creatures are these? Cory’s images rework cartes de visite, the photographic visiting cards that were a Victorian craze. Many millions were produced and are now so commonly discarded in junk shops that they are almost worthless. Can there be anything more poignant than a person got up in their best bib and tucker, preserved for a posterity that is no longer interested? Yet there is something assuredly sadder than discarded photographs of forgotten faces and family pets: all those stuffed animals in museums, shot long ago not on glass plates but with guns, their very bodies preserved for posterity to gawk at. Where did this moth-eaten lion sniff his last antelope? How many of us have stood with our noses pressed to the glass eyeing these captured creatures. The Visitors is a remarkable book that draws us into an imagined world of immense power and originality.In addition to her photographic work Charlotte Cory is an established novelist and writes regularly for BBC Radio. She has published three novels with Faber & Faber; her next historical novel will be published by Harper Collins. |
||
.jpg)
|
|
FLATLAND: A LANDSCAPE OF PUNJAB
MAX KANDHOLA Introduction by Alka Pande India’s Punjab is the land of the five rivers, five (Punj) rivers (Aab) – Ravi, Satluj, Chenab, Beas and Jhelum. It is also the birthplace of Max Kandhola’s family, who historically were landowners, with connections to farming, agriculture and also to the military. Max Kandhola decided to go back to Punjab after completing his project Illustration of Life (2002) in which he documented his father’s last moments of life, and reflected on issues within Sikh ritual, immortality and death. Over the last four years, he has visited the region as part of a continuing project to map family history through an odyssey of ancestral narratives, exploring memory, diaspora and identity. For him it is a land which is unfamiliar, yet it provides both a context and a beginning. Kandhola’s journey began in Nurmahal, in the district of Jalandhar, from which most of his family originally came. Using this as a starting point he travelled from the centre of Punjab outwards. Max Kandhola’s work and essays have been exhibited and published internationally and a touring exhibition of Flatland is currently in preparation. Kandhola lives in Birmingham and is Senior Lecturer in Photography at Nottingham Trent University. |
||
.jpg)
|
|
HOTEL AFRIQUE
Photographs by Stuart Franklin Text by Mark Sealy The elite hotels of Africa serve as an interface between the tribal, religious, social and cultural aspects of Africa and the global uniformity of international business culture. They are also the places where the unseen resources of many African countries – oil, diamonds, minerals – are bartered away behind closed doors. These are environments which have a strangely hybrid quality – their design, their cuisine, musak and global TV echoing ‘international’ standards. Yet they are ultimately sites of tension, where cultures collide and conflict. At the same time, however, these hotels are viewed by their local communities as symbols of achievement which contradict the more usual representations of Africa. Far from being despised as enclaves of the rich, these hotels have become ‘objects of desire’, the dream venue for weddings and where to be invited to a business conference is to have reached the pinnacle of success. And for most hotel employees there is the reassurance of wages that are higher than they could earn elsewhere and therefore their duties are carried out with pride and self-assurance. Stuart Franklin is a member of the prestigious photoagency MAGNUM PHOTOS of which he was president in 2006. He began his photographic career in the early 1980s and has since contributed to magazines world-wide. His work has also been widely exhibited and he has published four previous books. Mark Sealy is a well-known writer and commentator on photography. He is Director of Autograph ABP, an international photographic arts agency that addresses issues of cultural identity and human rights. |
||
|
|
SHUTTING UP SHOP
John Londei Shot over a fifteen-year period beginning in the early 1970s, Shutting Up Shop is a tribute to an era that has all but disappeared: the traditional small shops that feature have now almost all gone. In all there are 60 shops. Each one is unique, and their range diverse: from flowers to condoms, from tea to tobacco. As well as shops from London the series covers many regions of the UK, everywhere from the Isle of Harris to the Isle of Wight. As well as the photographs of the shops are their stories, vividly told through anecdote and interviews with the staff; for just as important as the shops were the shopkeepers, people who were cherished and seen as important members of their community. And how proud they were to be serving it! In 2004 Londei began the task of updating what had become of the shopkeepers and shops he’d photographed so long ago. His findings are included in the fascinating ‘afterword’ section of the book. Many had closed not long after the pictures were taken, others struggled on until the death or retirement of their owners; almost every single one had changed beyond recognition. John Londei is an award-winning advertising and editorial photographer. |
||
.jpg)
|
|
THE MOTHER OF ALL JOURNEYS
Dinu Li Shortlisted in the 2007 Rencontres d'Arles Photobook Award Inspired by the memories of his mother, originally told to Dinu Li as childhood bed-time stories, The Mother of All Journeys traces, through photographs and personal quotes, the story of a woman born in rural China and her escape to a new life via Hong Kong and eventually the industrial north of England. Li collaborated with his mother, using each other’s recollections as starting points and comparing the actual with the images lodged in their minds. Li’s photographs tease out fragmented moments in time, charting rural traditions from 1920s China and the communist ideologies of the late 1940s. Spanning two decades from the mid 50s, Li turns his attention to a Hong Kong changing from fishing village to urban metropolis. Under British administration, it was a time of sweatshops and western influence. Finally Li focuses on Britain, from the resettlement of his family there in the 70s, at a time of strikes and de-industrialisation, through to the millennium, and an era of multiculturalism and globalisation. Aided by family snapshots and Li’s mother’s narration, The Mother of All Journeys triggers a sense of repetition and nostalgia, invoking glimpses of the times we live in. Born in Hong Kong in1965, Dinu Li now lives in Manchester, England. His work has been widely exhibited both in the UK as well as abroad in shows in Beijing, Shanghai, Berlin and Toronto. |
||
|
|
GABRIELE BASILICO
WORK BOOK 1969 - 2006 introduced by Achille Bonito Oliva. This is the first complete monograph dedicated to the work of the Italian photographer Gabriele Basilico, who is recognised internationally as one of the most important contemporary landscape photographers. With more than 300 photographs included – from Glasgow to Tel-Aviv, from Milan to Beirut – it is a comprehensive overview of a major figure whose career has spanned almost 40 years. Born in Milan in 1944, Gabriele Basilico first studied architecture. This early training is reflected in his work and shows in his understanding of the landscape and architectural form. His landscapes avoid human presence and explore the complex interrelationships between the built environment and the natural one. Gabriele Basilico’s work has been widely exhibited in major international galleries worldwide and he has published over a dozen books on individual proejcts for publishers such as Thames & Hudson, Scalo, Phaidon and the Stedelijk Museum. This, however, is the first time that the extensive range of his work has been published in a single volume. A major retrospective of Basilico’s work began an international tour at the prestigious Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris in summer 2006. |
||
.jpg)
|
|
ANGOLA:
JOURNEY THROUGH CHANGE photographs by Sean Sutton Angola has the dubious distinction of being the most heavily landmine-contaminated country in the world. After nearly 40 years of bloody conflict, a peace agreement was finally reached in 2002, and hundreds of thousands of refugees began the journey back to their homelands. This is a story of re-establishing communities and of rebuilding lives shattered not only by the decades of conflict but also by the remnants of that conflict – the landmines and unexploded munitions that litter the country. The book is introduced by Heather Mills who is a patron of MAG and has campaigned vigorously on the issue of landmines. There are also texts by the renowned photojournalist Tim Page whose photographs during the Vietnam War were published worldwide; Lou McGrath, Director of MAG; Sean Sutton; and Benita Ferrero-Waldner Published in association with MAG and with support from EuropeAid. |
||
|
|
DARK DAYS
John Darwell In February 2001 Foot and Mouth Disease arrived in Cumbria. At its peak Cumbria was the worst affected county in Britain with a staggering 41% of all cases. For the local community the environmental and social consequences were to prove devastating. As a local resident, John Darwell found himself surrounded by the effects of the disease. Over the next twelve months he committed himself to recording what was taking place. Despite government reports to the contrary, the Cumbrian countryside became largely a ‘no-go’ area, whilst on the farms thousands of animals were destroyed, their bodies burnt on the now notorious pyres. The ultimate cleanup of the infected farms led to extraordinary lengths being taken to eradicate the virus. Dark Days represents one of the most complete records of this time and provides a powerful and emotive insight into one of the most dramatic and destructive periods in British farming history. |
||
dewi lewis publishing
8, Broomfield Road, Heaton Moor, Stockport SK4 4ND, England
Phone and fax: +44(0)161 442 9450
Email: mail@dewilewispublishing.com