Photography April 2015

PHOTOGRAPHY

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Leendert Blok - Les Extravagantes Editions Xavier Barral 2015 ISBN 9782365110518 Acqn 24140 Hb 19x26cm 192pp 85col ills 44 Text in French This book gathers flower portraits made in autochrome by Dutch photographer Lendeert Blok who, since the early 1920s, has been experimenting with colour photography and the use of the panoramic format. Blok comes as close as possible to texture and develops a singular approach in which each flower becomes sculpture. He portrays tulips, narcissus, dahlias, hyacinths, irises, and gladioluses. Beyond a documentary approach, Blok captures flowers like objects of desire through a minimal staging, a subtle play of light revealing the autochrome colourful shades. Muted tones and soft bronze hues evoke a timeless world of flora, in which corolla, petals and buds are sublimated by chiaroscuro. The flowers stand out against a plain dark background, alluding to the famous vanitas of the Dutch Golden Age. An accompanying text by Gilles Clment places this work in the historical, artistic and botanical context of the time.

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Bernard Plossu - Voyages Italiens Editions Xavier Barral 2015 ISBN 9782365110617 Acqn 24756 Hb 19x24cm 216pp 120ills 36 Text in French Bernard Plossu has been travelling the length and breadth of Italy for over forty years: Its a need, a passion, I feel good there. I go everywhere, on foot, by car, by train, from the mountains of Piedmont to Apulia, from Cuneo to Bari, from Turin to Palermo, from Bologna to Cagliari. All of it attracts me! Everywhere, I photograph the landscapes, people, atmospheres, architecture, present, past, future, poetry... Bernard Plossu has selected over 150 colour using Fresson processing (matt carbon prints) and black and white photographs for this book, many of which are published here for the first time. Far from the usual shots celebrating the high temples of Italy, Bernard Plossu alternates points of view between street scenes, deserted or buzzing marinas, landscapes taken from moving trains, majestic and serene landscapes from Lake Garda or the Maddalena Pass to wilder natural environments, particularly on islands.

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Cedric Delsaux - Zone de repli Editions Xavier Barral 2015 ISBN 9782365110587 Acqn 24138 Hb 24x32cm 116pp 85ills 60col 34.95 Text in French Through this intimist series, Cdric Delsaux continues his exploration of reality in a fictional state. Strongly influenced by the Jean-Claude Romand case (a news story popularised by Emmanuel Carrres novel LAdversaire, adapted to film by Nicole Garcia), he travelled widely in the region of Gex on the Swiss border for three years. In the solitude of his car, for many hours at a time, Cdric Delsaux strived to capture what this man may have been feeling; trapped in the lie he had been living for 18 years. We are struck by this unsettling series of standalone pictures, as though by a new literary form. During this experience, Cdric Delsaux found himself confronted by everything that he had projected onto this case and strived to faithfully convey how it had deformed his perception of the area, and in this way show our filtered take on reality. Through a perfect mastery of framing and lighting, the beauty of these images implicitly reveals the vision of a wayward society.

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Roger Caillois - Les Pierres Editions Xavier Barral 2014 ISBN 9782365110570 Acqn 24141 Hb 20x26cm 432pp 150col ills 47.95 Text in French This book presents the most beautiful stones in the collection of minerals that Roger Caillois bequeathed to the Musum National dHistoire Naturelle de Paris, as well as the re-edition of the famous texts Stones, The Writing of Stones, and Paradoxical Agates. A man of letters and a companion to the surrealist movement, at a very young age Roger Caillois became interested in the mineral world, whose forms evoked imaginary figures to him. From the 1950s onwards, he started to collect minerals from all over the world, curious stones that attract attention owing to some anomaly in their shape or some meaningful oddity in design or colour. All of them have an unexpected resemblance, one that is improbable and yet natural, which provokes fascination. Agates, marcasite, quartz, jasper...They are like so many fragments of the universe, of a world in which dream and poetry draw analogies with the plant and animal worlds, but also with that of humans.

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Yuriko Takagi Sei Editions Xavier Barral 2014 ISBN 9782365110280 Acqn 24142 Hb 25x34cm 66pp 28ills 42.95 Text in French In this book, Japanese photographer Yuriko Takagi invites us on a journey into the heart of plant life, barely in bud, not yet perceptible to our senses. In Japanese, the word Sei is pronounced in the same way but offers a multitude of meanings: star, voice, blue, sex, energy, death, betrayal, peace of mind, purity... Yuriko Takagi opens up Pandora's box as we discover her 28 plant buds, photographed in close-up and in black & white, that sketch out a constellation of mysterious worlds, without ever relinquishing what they are.

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Jean Claude Pondevie Ainsi Editions Xavier Barral 2015 ISBN 9782365110662 Acqn 24755 Hb 24x33cm 104pp 48ills 35 Text in French This book constitutes the first monograph on the photographic work of Jean-Claude Pondevie, answered by a poem by Eric Reinhardt, which is slowly dispersed through its pages. Jean-Claude Pondevie has developed his photographic work over more than ten years, based on landscapes with no identifying geographic or temporal markers. Through these interior and exterior views with cinematic framing, he focuses on off-screen space, the space in which our undocumented reality takes place. The architecture is reduced to abstract forms, in which plays of light, shadow, and transparency emerge, creating a feeling of strangeness. In his pared-down compositions, a few elements such as a window, staircase, and ladder, create interludes or narrative fragments in this suspended world. Eric Reinhardts words accompany the journey across these landscapes that fuel our imagination.

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The Overcoat - By Nikolai Gogol Art by Sarah Dobai Four Corners Books 2015 ISBN 9781909829039 Acqn 24766 Hb 22x29cm 88pp 17ills 15.99 In The Overcoat, a lowly government clerk's life is briefly transformed by the extravagant purchase of a new coat. This new edition is accompanied by artwork from Sarah Dobai, who has taken a series of photographs of shop windows in London and Paris to reflect upon the storys preoccupation with material desire and illusion.

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The Nose - By Nikolai Gogol Art by Rick Buckley Four Corners Books 2015 ISBN 9781909829046 Acqn 24767 Hb 13x20cm 96pp 17ills 10.99 The Nose is a satirical short story with an unlikely protagonist. Taking on a life of its own, the nose of a St. Petersburg official leaves its rightful place to cause havoc in the city. This edition includes photographs by artist Rick Buckley documenting a Gogol-inspired street intervention where he fixed plaster noses on to buildings all over London.

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Xiaoxiao Xu - The Way To The Golden Mountain Sturm & Drang 2014 ISBN 9780984820245 Acqn 24813 Hb 22x23cm 104pp 49col ills 42.95 In 1999, as a teenager, Xiaoxiao Xu moved from China to The Netherlands. Photography became her antidote to the isolation that she felt, a means for telling stories and making clear what it was that occupied her. In 2009 she started to photograph the city from which she and her parents had come. Wenzhou is a large port city, with a population of three million. She was overwhelmed by the combination of memories and contemporary experiences. She could identify with the city, but at the same time felt herself to be an outsider just as she did in The Netherlands. This resulted in The Way To The Golden Mountain, a book that shows the city and surroundings as a personal and emotional experience.

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Bruno Augsburger - Out There Sturm & Drang 2014 ISBN 9780984820221 Acqn 24815 Hb 36x27cm 88pp 62col ills 64 'Out There' invites the reader on a mythical journey through the wilderness of the Yukon territory. A photographic record of countless escapes by Augsburger in an endless quest to reach freedom. The book is not so much a record of a physical landscape but of an emotional one. In documenting his travels through the snow, the wilderness and the archaic landscapes, the photographer reveals that this is a journey to the basic questions of our existence.

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Ringel Goslinga Circling Lecturis 2015 ISBN 9789462261310 Acqn 24841 Pb 26x33cm 48pp 126ills 21col 29.95 When Ringel Goslinga was given the opportunity to use a camera belonging to celebrated local photographer Lee To Sang, who for years ran a photo studio in De Pijp, one of Amsterdams most vibrant working-class neighbourhoods, he set out to document the people in the area around the former studio. The result is a series of portraits that form a link between the work of To Sang and Goslingas own turbulent childhood, as well as his distinct memories of the diversity of people he encountered in the district. It is a series brimming with nostalgia, full of individual narratives and characters, and interspersed with snapshots from Goslingas own family album.

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American Photography 30 Amilus Inc 2015 ISBN 9781886212428 Acqn 24606 Hb 24x29cm 384pp 357col ills 58.50 For its 30th-anniversary volume, American Photography goes back to basics in a deluxe clothbound tome with over 350 of the year's best photographs. In a subtle nod to earlier books from the collection, the volume is presented with straightforward elegance in a genuine cloth hardcover and dust jacket. Designed by Robert Newman, former creative director of Reader's Digest, and with jacket photographs by David Butow from a series taken in South Africa during the ceremonies that followed the death of President Nelson Mandela, American Photography 30 contains images chosen by a distinguished jury of photo and art professionals from among the 9,644 photos submitted for consideration by photographers, magazines, agencies, publishers and schools. The collection represents the finest work being created by today's top talents and honours the relationship between photographer and client who together seek smart, one-of-a-kind visual solutions for magazines, advertisements and books, despite dwindling budgets and challenging time constraints. In an era of social media and stock imagery that threatens to further homogenize the creation and distribution of photography, American Photography looks beyond the ordinary to celebrate not only the power of the well-crafted still image in its finest form, but to honour its maker and the creative personnel who insist on creating only the most original, thoughtful and compelling pictures.

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Mangini Studio Candela 2014 ISBN 9780984573943 Acqn 23915 Hb 22x26cm 96pp 54col ills 42.95 According to the artists, this collection of photographed hairstyles was not originally intended to be disseminated, as the first image was conceived as a one-off piece. Gordon Stettinius, then a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, had given his students an assignment to create an edition of 16 images, which were collated into portfolios. Stettinius, having always contributed to these class portfolios, decided to get a perm at a hair salon and then visit a commercial photography studio to get a studio portrait. Thus an accidental collaboration was born. Terry Brown was the studio photographer at Mangini Studio at the time, and she wound up with the task of delivering a traditional studio shoot. Brown has been delivering the goods since, recording each hairstyle that Stettinius has put together. Seven years and nearly 50 studio portraits later, this project has been gathered in this extraordinary and witty volume.

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Photography April 2015