British Photobooks

• Photo Editions 2021
• Softcover, 1st edition with print
  
• New

“The sheep stopped in their eating and looked timidly at us;
and the cattle, their heads turned from the wind and sleet,
stared angrily as if they held us responsible for both annoyances;
but, except these things, and the shudder of the dying day in every blade of grass, there was no break in the bleak stillness of the marshes.”

- Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

Situated on the Thames Estuary in southeast England, the North Kent Marshes are an overlooked but vital swathe of land. For centuries, trade has flowed in through the estuary and the surrounding wilderness harbours a rich history. In the 18th century, plague outbreaks ravaged Europe and ships were quarantined in the nearby Medway. The low-lying terrain provided the ideal conditions for smugglers, as small vessels would target ships transporting goods to the capital, allegedly sneaking the contraband down underground tunnel networks once ashore. It was against this illicit backdrop that Charles Dickens set the early parts of Great Expectations (1861), where the escaped convict Magwitch takes refuge in the marshes. 

Since 2011, Martin Amis has been photographing in the same marshland near his home, finding solace in the landscape through walking. This Land is the result of many walks over the past decade – much in the period from March 2020, coinciding with the UK’s first coronavirus lockdown. Devoid of people, Amis’ images invite a reconnection with nature: derelict industry reclaimed by the wild, grazing sheep and lone birds drifting across a monotone sky. Despite an undertone of loss and absence, Amis portrays a land that is continually being shaped by the elements and the civilisations that pass through it. If we listen closely, we might almost hear the shouts of the night watch over the gulf of time and the creaking prison hulks that once inspired Dickens.

Double hit-silver wraparound softcover
24 x 30cm, 76pp
Tritone offset printed on Munken Lynx Rough

Special edition of 25 copies, with a signed 10x8" archival pigment print on Hahnemule Photorag.  See the alternative special edition available here.


The regular edition of This Land is available here.

• Photo Editions 2021
• Softcover, 1st edition with print
  
• New

“The sheep stopped in their eating and looked timidly at us;
and the cattle, their heads turned from the wind and sleet,
stared angrily as if they held us responsible for both annoyances;
but, except these things, and the shudder of the dying day in every blade of grass, there was no break in the bleak stillness of the marshes.”

- Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

Situated on the Thames Estuary in southeast England, the North Kent Marshes are an overlooked but vital swathe of land. For centuries, trade has flowed in through the estuary and the surrounding wilderness harbours a rich history. In the 18th century, plague outbreaks ravaged Europe and ships were quarantined in the nearby Medway. The low-lying terrain provided the ideal conditions for smugglers, as small vessels would target ships transporting goods to the capital, allegedly sneaking the contraband down underground tunnel networks once ashore. It was against this illicit backdrop that Charles Dickens set the early parts of Great Expectations (1861), where the escaped convict Magwitch takes refuge in the marshes. 

Since 2011, Martin Amis has been photographing in the same marshland near his home, finding solace in the landscape through walking. This Land is the result of many walks over the past decade – much in the period from March 2020, coinciding with the UK’s first coronavirus lockdown. Devoid of people, Amis’ images invite a reconnection with nature: derelict industry reclaimed by the wild, grazing sheep and lone birds drifting across a monotone sky. Despite an undertone of loss and absence, Amis portrays a land that is continually being shaped by the elements and the civilisations that pass through it. If we listen closely, we might almost hear the shouts of the night watch over the gulf of time and the creaking prison hulks that once inspired Dickens.

Double hit-silver wraparound softcover
24 x 30cm, 76pp
Tritone offset printed on Munken Lynx Rough

Special edition of 25 copies, with a signed 10x8" archival pigment print on Hahnemule Photorag.  See the alternative special edition available here.


The regular edition of This Land is available here.

• Mack 2021
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

The British Isles is an account of thirteen years of life across the United Kingdom, as seen through the lens of Jamie Hawkesworth. In this sprawling sequence of portraits and landscapes, Hawkesworth surveys the characters and terrains that make up the everyday fabric of his home country: schoolchildren and shopworkers, markets and estates, priests and professionals, cities and construction sites.

These photographs chart an alternative history of this eventful period of British history; a period punctuated by austerity, referenda, celebration, and conflict. And yet as much as a historical document this book is an exercise in curiosity, presenting a radically democratising portrait of the United Kingdom in which individuals, buildings and natural scenes are imbued with Hawkesworth's generous and dignifying eye. 

Signed to the title page in pencil.  

• Setanta 2020
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• New
  

Into the Fire is Matt Stuart’s second book of photographs following on from his critically acclaimed ‘All that life can Afford’.

Into the Fire documents the daily lives of people who live in Slab City, an off-grid community based on a former military base in the Sonoran desert, just north of the Mexican border.

It is home to travellers, dog lovers, thieves, military veterans, artists and inventors. Its population numbers thousands throughout the winter, in the summer, when temperatures can exceed 120°F (49°C) it dwindles into the low hundreds. True ‘Slabbers’ are the people who have managed to survive two summers. These are the people Matt befriended and photographed.

This is a world where people build earth covered bunkers to live in and bathe in muddy desert springs, tyres are used as decorative wreaths, and a fork in the road is signposted with an oversized plywood fork.

Slab City invites people to come as they are. Most Slabbers struggled in a world of paying rent and small talk, disadvantaged by their lack of social conformity. The Slabs provide refuge.

Accepting others flaws is a step towards accepting yourself.

SIGNED COPY.

• Mack 2021
• Hardback, 1st Mack edition
• New

“The force of Graham’s Beyond Caring photographs remains undiminished. [...] one of the most commanding and gravest monuments to Thatcher’s Britain produced by any British artist” – David Chandler

Originally self-published in 1985, Paul Graham’s renowned series, ‘Beyond Caring’, was made in the waiting rooms and corridors of the Social Security and Unemployment offices around the UK, documenting the long waits, queues and poor conditions of an overburdened system, to produce a powerful series of photographs conveying the hardship people experienced. Denied official permission to make the work, Graham’s photographs were taken discreetly, usually without looking through the camera, resulting in a spatial disorientation that emphasised the unmoored distress of vulnerable citizens. The work shocked many on its release – leading Magnum photographers were outraged by its use of colour in a classic documentary topic, while others celebrated how it straddled the world of activism and art (it was exhibited at both Trade Union conferences and the Museum of Modern Art, New York). Graham forged a fresh form of engaged photography, mixing elements of social documentary, ‘new colour’ and reportage to create a striking body of work that endures to this day. Many decades have passed since their making in 1984, but these images have grown not only in photographic importance, but also as a unique historic record of the mid-1980s unemployment crisis in the UK. This edition of Beyond Caring is part of Graham’s iconic 1980’s trilogy of UK books, being republished by MACK, which also includes A1 – The Great North Road(2020) and Troubled Land (Fall 2021).

The signed edition includes an extra image plate signed by the artist and glued into the inside back cover.

• Kehrer 2016
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

A pale yellow glow in the late night gloom illuminating the near deserted street below, the neon sign of a first floor restaurant: Magic Party Place. This is an apt title for CJ Clarke's series of intimate encounters documenting contemporary England through the lives and habits of the post industrial town of Basildon, located 25 miles east of London. A new- town, it was built as part of a massive urban renewal program following the devastation of London in the Second World War. As a constructed community, the town is statistically close to the national average, which makes it the perfect paradigm through which to explore the state of the contemporary English nation. This is Middle England territory, the hearts and minds fought over by political parties for electoral success. Ruggedly individualist in spirit, 73 percent of the town's population label themselves as working class and, in many ways, it epitomizes Thatcher's England, the legacy she left behind and the continuation of such conservative policies which seek to make us consumers first and citizens second.

Signed copy.

• Loose Joints 2021
• Softcover, 1st edition, 44pp
• New

• Ampigt Förlag 2021
• Softcover, 1st edition with polaroid
• New

"Made over the last year, this series of Polaroid chemigrams is a celebration of nature and that despite the darkness of the past year hope is growing and peeking up thought the soil to bring us joy and solace.

My garden, as well as the plants that I grow outside and inside our home, have always given me comfort. Something that calms my mind, quiets the noise when nothing else can, in this past year even more so. Lockdown gave me the time to work on these images of flowers. Allowing me to push my process, seek new textures and visual landscapes, and create vibrant daydreams that I could lose myself in.

These experiments were made from:
Flowers grown 
Flowers received
Flowers I have seen. 
Each flower carries with it the memory of a moment, place or person."

- Zara Carpenter.

Special edition of 26 copies including a unique Polaroid chemigram of a flower and an obi on the cover. Signed and numbered alphabetically from A-Z. 

Note: Polaroids shown are for example purposes, each is unique and assigned at random.

• Stanley Barker 2020
• Softcover, 1st printing
• New
  

In 2016 Robbie Lawrence first travelled to a remote stretch of coastline in the west coast of Scotland, to Linn Gardens, which lies at the head of Cove Bay on the west side of Rosneath peninsula. The gardens had been run for fifty years by Jim Taggart, an avid botanist and gardener. 

Jim discovered that the region’s subtropical climate allowed him to grow plants and flowers from all over the world. His endeavours led to the estate being covered in an intricately plotted web of ferns, bamboos, Magnolias and Rhododendrons. As Jim got older, his son Jamie took over the more physical elements of maintaining the garden, including traveling abroad to research and gather new plants. On one such journey, to the northern mountainous region of Vietnam, Jamie disappeared. His body was found years later, he had evidently fallen in one of the mountain’s higher passes.  

“When I first met Jim, who by this point was well into his 80s, he told me that he decided to keep the garden going as a memorial to his son. Over the past few years I went back to the visit Jim and document the garden as it passed through the seasons. Despite his age, Jim would bound around the garden, occasionally stopping the provide a lengthy anecdote about a particular fern or tree. Last summer, Jim passed away at the age of 84.” - Robbie Lawrence 

In ‘A Voice Above The LInn’ Lawrence collaborated with the renowned poet John Burnside, who contributed four beautiful new poems to segment its chapters. 

1st printing.

• Nobody 2020
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• New
  

It was in 2017 that I began to have an inkling that a single fish might contain a universe of infinite proportions and how amazing a journey within its body could be. So I started to research everything I would need to embark on such an expedition. By January 2020 I had built a work top, obtained a microscope, a camera, optics, lights and fridge. Mentally, though, I was far from ready. I was lacking the courage, time, energy and mental strength to set out on this unknown voyage. 

By February, the world exposed and in the unimaginable grasp of the pandemic. Time moved in entirely new ways as so many were affected, taken ill and had their lives claimed. 

This void in time, with all movements restricted, somehow presented a platform from which I could finally launch my inwards fish journey. I was prepared to explore for an unknown period but first of all I had, of course, to catch a fish. Being really unskilled at fishing this took a total of nine trips and thirty hours. 

On the 10^th April 2020, at around 15.30, equipped with sleeping bags and instant noodles, my children and I arrived at a spot where flat rock, grass and shrubs meet the sea. I had almost got into the idea of never catching a fish by this point, so it was a sudden shock when a jolt was sent through the rod to my hands followed by a silver splash that appeared on the waveless water. My daughter Ada shouted, “Get the net dad!” and she saw the slight panic in my face as I had failed to remember the next thing required to land the fish. 

Knowing it would be a time-sensitive journey as decay commenced the following day, I started what was eventually a ten-week voyage. Nothing could have prepared me for what I was going to encounter along the way or how sick I was to become during the making of this work. 

- Stephen Gill

Signed copy.

• Setanta 2020
• Hardback, 1st edition
• Near fine
  

Sleepless in Soho is Joshua K. Jackson’s debut monograph.

For three years, Jackson walked through the lamp-lit and neon-filled streets of Soho, turning to photography initially as a way to escape the frustrations of insomnia.

Jackson’s work from this period, reveals the complex and intense atmosphere in London’s best known entertainment district — observing the juxtaposition between the Soho of today and the faded character of its past.

'Guided on by the flickering of neon lights
I know well the hours filled with sleepers dreams
I search them peacefully as I journey through the nights.'

(An extract from Sarah Tucker’s poem included in the book)

The photographs were made between January 2017 and December 2019.

Some marks/scuffs to the black parts of the cover.  Spine a little askew due to nature of binding - common to all copies.

• RRB 2020
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New
  

101 Pictures is the first english language retrospective of Wood’s work, casting light on his 25 year long testament to the people of Merseyside. It includes previously unseen photographs, alongside major works such as the infamous nightclub series, Looking for Love, (1989) and from his seminal Photie Man (2005) publication.

"Many of the images that I have selected here are portraits; these are strong, albeit subtle and understated. Tom photographed whole families, groups of workers, couples and individuals, always conveying a sense of dignity and respect.” - Martin Parr

“Wood achieves an intimacy with his subject that’s at once rude and tender…  loose, instinctive, and dead-on.” - Vince Alletti, The New Yorker. 

Edition of 1500 copies.

Signed copy.

• Setanta 2020
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• New
  

Into the Fire is Matt Stuart’s second book of photographs following on from his critically acclaimed ‘All that life can Afford’.

Into the Fire documents the daily lives of people who live in Slab City, an off-grid community based on a former military base in the Sonoran desert, just north of the Mexican border.

It is home to travellers, dog lovers, thieves, military veterans, artists and inventors. Its population numbers thousands throughout the winter, in the summer, when temperatures can exceed 120°F (49°C) it dwindles into the low hundreds. True ‘Slabbers’ are the people who have managed to survive two summers. These are the people Matt befriended and photographed.

This is a world where people build earth covered bunkers to live in and bathe in muddy desert springs, tyres are used as decorative wreaths, and a fork in the road is signposted with an oversized plywood fork.

Slab City invites people to come as they are. Most Slabbers struggled in a world of paying rent and small talk, disadvantaged by their lack of social conformity. The Slabs provide refuge.

Accepting others flaws is a step towards accepting yourself.

• RRB 2020
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• New
  

Peter Mitchell’s Early Sunday Morning is made up of over 90 previously unpublished images, each one selected from a cache of five hundred negatives which have sat undeveloped for over 30 years.

Early Sunday Morning, edited and sequenced by John Myers, shows a different Leeds to Mitchell’s earlier publications. It is neither the sombre look at destruction seen in Memento Mori, nor the detached view of ‘the man from mars’ of A New Refutation of the Viking 4 Space Mission, but a more intimate document of Mitchell’s own Leeds.

The book reveals the layers of the city’s history, exposed by the changes to the urban landscape that epitomised the 1970s and 80s. Hundred-year-old terraces and cobbled streets sit flanked by concrete flats, with newly cleared ground to either side are presented with Mitchell’s typical graphic framing.

“It is as if Peter Mitchell has taken the atmosphere and mood of Edward Hopper’s famous painting and established it as a matter of documentary fact in the north of England at a moment when collapse can lead to further desolation or possible renewal. So these beautiful pictures are drily drenched in history – social, economic and photographic.”  - Geoff Dyer

Early Sunday Morning is available in an edition of 1500 copies.

• Nobody 2019
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• New
  

A pillar knocked into the ground next to a stream in a flat, open landscape, trees and houses visible in the distance, beneath a vast sky. That is the backdrop to all of Stephen Gill´s photographs in this book. We see the same landscape in spring and summer, in autumn and winter, we see it in sunshine and rain, in snow and wind. Yet there is not the slightest monotony about these pictures, for in almost every one there is a bird, and each of these birds opens up a unique moment in time. We see something that has never happened before and will never happen again. That it takes place in the midst of a landscape characterised by repetition, in which time is cyclical, sets up a keen existential dynamic: on the one hand, everything has happened before, there’s nothing new under the sun; on the other, every moment is unique and carries the hallmark of the miracle: what happens happens only once and never again.

But this wasn’t what I thought about the first time I looked at these photographs. In fact, I barely thought at all, for I was shaken, as a person so often is when confronted with an extraordinary work of art. I’d never seen birds in this way before, as if on their own terms, as independent creatures with independent lives. Ancient, forever improvising, endlessly embroiled with the forces of nature, and yet indulging too. And so infinitely alien to us.

- Karl Ove Knausgård

The Pillar / Winner of the 2019 Les Rencontres de la Photographie author book award.

Imperfect copy with faint bump to one corner - see photo, and some other faint shelfwear to the cover.  Inside very fine.   Signed 1st edition.

Signed copy.

Out of print, 1st edition/printing.

• RRB 2019
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• New
  

John Myers’ The End of Industry is the third and final volume of Myers’ work to be published by RRB Photobooks, forming a Catalogue Raisonne of his entire photographic output.

These photographs were taken between 1981 and 1988 in ‘The Black Country’ a part of England that was famous for making things from metal.

Changes occurred in the early 1980s that hit metal manufacturing particularly hard. A record number of bankruptcies resulted in high levels of unemployment. Factories either closed completely or realigned their business model to warehousing and retailing components that had been manufactured overseas. Foundries, forges and steelworks - not easily transformed into industrial units or office space - quickly morphed into housing estates, enterprise zones or retail parks.

The change was rapid and irreversible. A landscape that had been formed by the Industrial Revolution disappeared.

The End of Industry is available in a signed and numbered edition of 450 copies. Each book is accompanied by a 5x4” signed and dated silver-gelatin print of ‘Bricks Drying, William Mobberly Brickworks, Kingswinford, 1983’.

• RRB 2019
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• New
  

John Myers’ The End of Industry is the third and final volume of Myers’ work to be published by RRB Photobooks, forming a Catalogue Raisonne of his entire photographic output.

These photographs were taken between 1981 and 1988 in ‘The Black Country’ a part of England that was famous for making things from metal.

Changes occurred in the early 1980s that hit metal manufacturing particularly hard. A record number of bankruptcies resulted in high levels of unemployment. Factories either closed completely or realigned their business model to warehousing and retailing components that had been manufactured overseas. Foundries, forges and steelworks - not easily transformed into industrial units or office space - quickly morphed into housing estates, enterprise zones or retail parks.

The change was rapid and irreversible. A landscape that had been formed by the Industrial Revolution disappeared.

The End of Industry is available in a signed and numbered edition of 450 copies. Each book is accompanied by a 5x4” signed and dated silver-gelatin print of ‘Bricks Drying, William Mobberly Brickworks, Kingswinford, 1983’.

Special edition of 50 copies, which also includes a 10x8” signed, dated and limited silver-gelatin print of ‘Cupolas, Crqadley Casting, Cradley Heath, 1983’.

• RRB 2019
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• NEW
  

Early Works covers the early part of Parr’s career, comprised of images shot between 1970 and 1984, mainly in the north of England and Northern Ireland.

The book contains many of Parr’s iconic early images, as seen in earlier publications such as Bad Weather and A Fair Day. The work weaves Parr’s better known black and white work with over 20 previously unpublished images, adding new breadth and perspective to Parr’s prolific body of work.

Sealed. 

(note: signed copies have now sold out)

• RRB 2019
  
• Hardback, 1st edition with print
  
• New
  

Ken Grant’s photography is characterised by slow and deliberate series made - often over years -in the Northwest of England. 

Benny Profane is drawn from a long term engagement with a dockland district that Grant first knew as a labourer in his youth. Bound by a few square miles at the edge of the River Mersey, it dwells on the river's hinterland and, in particular, the vast expanse of the Bidston Moss, to become an immersion into one area and those who depended upon it. It is an involved and tender body of work, an account of kinship and defiance in a difficult land. The book has been designed and sequenced by Ania Nalecka-Milach.

Limited edition of 500 signed copies, including a 5x6" signed pigment print ('Ciggy Lads').

• RRB 2018
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• New
  

Martin Amis’ photobook The Gamblers is the culmination of his long-term project photographing at racecourses across the South of England. The Gamblers is an affectionate portrait of the racing crowd, a well-informed tribe of racing enthusiasts, from a quirky mix of class and social backgrounds, who come together to find the next winner. Martin immersed himself in the racing crowds, camera at the ready, often betting himself as he sought his next subject. Despite covering so many races over more than a decade with a variety of cameras and shooting strategies, Martin has skillfully collected his images into a single story. Filled with moments of gentle humour, The Gamblers will take you from highs to lows, through moments of tension to the frenetic and jubilant energy of the holding the winning slip.

“Some of my fondest childhood memories are my regular trips to the races with my father. I loved to watch the horses race, but I loved even more to watch the motley cast of characters betting on them. The stench of beer and tobacco would fill the air, bookmakers’ chants of the latest odds cut through the gamblers lively conversations as I helped my father place his bets. As a photographer, it was a very obvious subject to focus my camera lens upon.”  – Martin Amis

Signed copy. 

In the press:

British Journal of Photography

Collector Daily

Creative Boom

The Guardian

GUP Magazine

Huck

Washington Post

• RRB 2018
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• New
  

Martin Amis’ photobook The Gamblers is the culmination of his long-term project photographing at racecourses across the South of England. The Gamblers is an affectionate portrait of the racing crowd, a well-informed tribe of racing enthusiasts, from a quirky mix of class and social backgrounds, who come together to find the next winner. Martin immersed himself in the racing crowds, camera at the ready, often betting himself as he sought his next subject. Despite covering so many races over more than a decade with a variety of cameras and shooting strategies, Martin has skillfully collected his images into a single story. Filled with moments of gentle humour, The Gamblers will take you from highs to lows, through moments of tension to the frenetic and jubilant energy of the holding the winning slip.

“Some of my fondest childhood memories are my regular trips to the races with my father. I loved to watch the horses race, but I loved even more to watch the motley cast of characters betting on them. The stench of beer and tobacco would fill the air, bookmakers’ chants of the latest odds cut through the gamblers lively conversations as I helped my father place his bets. As a photographer, it was a very obvious subject to focus my camera lens upon.”  – Martin Amis


Special edition of 50 copies with a signed and numbered 10’x8” archival print.



In the press:

British Journal of Photography

Collector Daily

Creative Boom

The Guardian

GUP Magazine

Huck

Washington Post

• RRB 2019
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• Imperfect - see below

Looking at the Overlooked describes a way of encountering the world. The images, all taken within walking distance of Myers’s home in Stourbridge are scenes encountered without narrative or emotion, as if Myers were the first person to come across the places he turned his lens upon. The work is sequenced as a journey through a town, generic and not site-specific, a backdrop to the mundane and everyday that is too often seen and yet not considered as part of our visual landscape.

Looking at the Overlooked is available in a limited edition of 450 signed and numbered copies, each containing a 5 × 4” original silver gelatin print of ‘Bed, 1976’, which is signed and dated to the verso.

Imperfect copy with bumped corner - pages inside are only very faintly affected.  See photos.

• RRB 2019
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• New
  

Looking at the Overlooked describes a way of encountering the world. The images, all taken within walking distance of Myers’s home in Stourbridge are scenes encountered without narrative or emotion, as if Myers were the first person to come across the places he turned his lens upon. The work is sequenced as a journey through a town, generic and not site-specific, a backdrop to the mundane and everyday that is too often seen and yet not considered as part of our visual landscape.

Looking at the Overlooked is available in a limited edition of 450 signed and numbered copies, each containing a 5 × 4” original silver gelatin print of ‘Bed, 1976’, which is signed and dated to the verso.

• Nobody 2017
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• New
  

In March 2014, my family and I moved from east London to rural south Sweden where my partner Lena is from. I understood that these new surroundings would inform my work in very different ways and that nature would play a key role. I was looking forward to making work that did not feel restricted and suffocated by modern photographic technology nor would make an inaccurate projected impression of the natural landscape we had become part of. 

On my many walks, I soon came to realise that this new, apparently bleak, flat and open landscape was in fact teeming with intense life. Small clues appeared during daylight hours that helped me understand the extent of activity during the night. Clusters of feathers, animal footprints of all sizes showing regular overlapping routes, gnawed branches, eggshells, ant hills, nibbled mushrooms and busy snails and slugs working through the feast provided from the previous night

I started to imagine the creatures in absolute darkness on the forest floor driven by instincts and their will to survive. I imagined them encountering each other. I thought of their eyes – near redundant in the thick of the night – and their sense of smell and hearing finely tuned and heightened. 

Envisaging where this activity might unfold, coupled with a hopeful foresight, I placed cameras equipped with motion sensors, to trees, mostly at a low level, so that any movement triggered the camera shutter and an infra-red flash (which was outside the animals’ visual spectrum). 

The first results filled me with fascination and joy as they presented what felt like stepping off into another parallel and unearthly world.  The silent photographs also seemed to invent sounds. This frame of mind and way of working took me back to my first ever photo project at the age of 13, sitting in the bathroom window of my parents’ house in Bristol with a 10-metre cable release, attached to the camera, attempting to photograph garden birds.

As time went on I started to think, if I were a deer where would I drink from, or if an owl where would I prefer to perch, and positioned cameras in such places. I was already composing the rectangular view in my mind’s eye – even though the nocturnal animals were absent – imagining they were there.  Nature itself helped to decide the palette and the feel of the images as plant pigments were incorporated from the surrounding areas to make the final master prints.

I had grappled for many years with this idea of stepping back as the author of images to give space for chance and to encourage the subject to step forward. I had attempted this in various ways; for example, in 2005, by burying colour prints close to where they were made, as a collaboration, to entice the place itself to leave its physical mark on the images once they had been unearthed. Or, between 2009 - 2013, in the series Talking to Ants, I placed objects such as plant life, insects, seeds and dust from the place I was photographing inside the film chamber to create in-camera photograms creating a confusion of scale. Or, in 2012, in Best Before End, as a photographic response to the rise of high-energy drinks, I used the drinks themselves to part-process the film as they ate into the emulsion. These approaches added an element of uncertainty, without knowing exactly where the images would land, and relied on a point where intentions met chance with the hope that the subject itself could play a part, lead the way or become embedded in the finished images.

This time, though, it felt as if I was stepping out altogether, so that the subjects would orchestrate and perform and take on the role of author while at that moment I was likely to be sleeping. This was nature’s time to speak and let itself be felt and known. 

Stephen Gill


Signed copy.

• Mack 2018
• Softcover, 1st edition
• NEW
  

And Time Folds accompanies a retrospective exhibition of the British photographer Vanessa Winship at the Barbican Art Gallery, London. At once intimate and epic, Winship’s black-and-white photographs explore notions of borders, land, memory, desire and history. This volume comprises photographs from seven series, including projects made during a decade living in the region of the Balkans, Turkey and the Caucasus; as well as work made in Georgia, America and the U.K. Winship has long been concerned with the elusive nature of transience in our landscape and society, and her oeuvre moves sure-footedly between genres – reportage, documentary, portraiture and landscape. Alongside her luminous photographs, And Time Folds brings together personal archival material that reveals Winship's thought process, working methods, and the importance of the written word, as well as an extensive essay by the renowned photography historian David Chandler, proffering a multi-faceted view of her work and artistic trajectory.

Out of print.

Sealed.

• Skinnerboox 2017
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• New
  

[...] Indeed, there is a lot of detail in many of the photographs in this project.

A lot to look at, a lot to get lost in. Detail, of course, has always been part of the photographic illusion, part of its sleight of hand. Open the shutter and the camera will receive the light bouncing off whatever is before it. It could be a blank white wall. It could be a million pebbles. A photographer may have considered every little detail before taking the picture, or barely looked at all.

That possibility lurks in every camera image. We cannot look at a photograph with the same indifference, the same mathematical rationality with which the camera recorded it. To look at a photograph, any photograph, is to intuit that while it has been made to be seen, ultimately it does not belong to us. It belongs to the camera from which it came. And while the camera shows us worldly things according to its own construction, it leaves those things exactly as it found them.

This is an unusual series of photographs. Peter Fraser has shot them in many countries and his motifs could hardly be more varied. Only the theme of mathematics, as the photographer has understood it, could have brought these pictures together. And what of the enigmatic portraits that punctuate the series? Fraser has revealed that just before taking photographing five or six of these people he asked them to imagine that something they had held to be true for most of their life had just been proved wrong. We do not know what these people were thinking, what axiom each has imaginatively and momentarily undone. Fraser could not have known either. But in those brief states of self-critical thought, when contemplation was itself being contemplated, he photographed them. These portraits anchor the project but they also provide its most reflexive moments. There are deep affinities between the states of mind depicted here and what Fraser might be inviting from us, his flawed and inconsistent audience.

- David Campany

Edition of 750 copies. Text by Mark Durden and David Campany.

• RRB 2017
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• New
  

Peter Mitchell’s groundbreaking show was first presented at the Impressions Gallery of Photography York in November 1979, and more recently at Arles. Now, only 38 years overdue, it will be published as a book for the first time.

In the mid-seventies, the Viking Landers were the first to land on planet Mars. Though the alien landscape was magnificent, there were no canals or skeletons or wind-blown ruined dwellings. Today, not a single trace remains of Viking Landers 3 and 4.

But myth (and conspiracy theories) have it that an alien survey was commissioned of planet Earth.

Peter Mitchell’s A New Refutation of the Viking 4 Space Mission features photos and portraits, taken in Leeds in the 1970s. The pictures show the traditional urban landscape presented on a background of space charts, the concept being that an alien has landed from Mars and is wandering around Leeds with a degree of surprise and puzzlement.

In the Earthly vernacular these photographs are of Nowheresville. Yet, for some people, they are the centre of the universe. Usually they call it Home.

"At last we can see one of the most important bodies of work in the history of colour photography. Better late than never." - Martin Parr

Signed copy.

• Images En Manoeuvres 2008
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• Fine
  

Photographer Vanessa Winship lived and worked in the area of Eastern Turkey for almost a decade an explosive region containing the borderlands of Iraq, Iran and Armenia. Struck by enduring images of rural schoolgirls wearing little blue dresses and their delicate status within politically loaded discussions over borders and identity, Winship systematically documented her encounter with them. The result is a fascinating collection of images, each of which tells a simple story while also documenting these girls in their fragility, grace and without any form of posturing.

Sealed copy with some very faint ageing/rippling to the dust jacket.

Unsigned.

Text in French and English.

• Nobody/AMC 2014
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• New
  

Stephen Gill's photographs are devoid of sentiment or affectation – rather than showing the pigeon in our world, they take us into theirs. The lens noses in under bridges, squeezes through cracks and scopes out crannies. These are images that bestow on the despised flying rats that oft-trumpeted but seldom realised attribution: their dignity. Here are pigeons making their lives in a natural landscape, for whatever else humans may be, we are animals too, and as such our buildings are analogous to the earthworks of termites, and our bridges to the dams of beavers.

It's this inversion of the anthropocentric view that makes Gill's images so compelling. That, and another revelation – for fluffed-up and blinking in the dust and the grime and the rust and rime, we see those mythical beings: the young pigeons. I suspect it's because we've entered this otherworldly realm that we find these juveniles to be arousing not of pity, but a grudging respect. Far from being scroungers or undeserving poor, these doughty birds survive and even thrive despite barbs and more barbs of outrageous human fortune. They are, like the urban foxes, the economic migrants of the animal world – forced into the cities to scratch a living as best they may – and before we condemn them, we would do well to ask ourselves this question: would we do as well were the tables to be turned?

- Will Self

Clothbound hardback with silkscreen printed cover.

• AMC 2014
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• New
  

Stephen Gill has worked for many years exploring the culture and environment of Hackney in East London. Some time ago he discovered the work of a lost photographer who had begun to interpret the photo of a kiss in a special and personal way. Kissing can be quite like the reverie in a beautiful forest; it can also be end-of-pier theatre. Our Master of the Hackney Kisses knows how these traits combine. His sensibility transcends the profession of wedding photographer – in each kiss you see the future; the past recedes. Reenactment is a pleasure. — Timothy Prus

Recommended  publication from Stephen Gill and The Archive Of Modern Conflict

• Nobody 2007
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• New
  

In Hackney Flowers Stephen Gill has again used his east London surroundings as the inspiration for his work. This time he has collected flowers, seeds, berries and other objects from various locations in Hackney, pressed them in his studio and photographed them alongside his own photographs and found ephemera. Some of the base photographs were also buried in Hackney Wick, and the consequent staining and decay has left its imprint upon the images, stressing the collaboration with place. A parallel series within the book shows members of the Hackney public with floral details imposed upon their person.

• Nobody 2007
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• New
  

A poetic, sometimes eerie and quiet photographic study of a place in a state of limbo prior to the rapid transformation that the Hackney area faces during the build-up to the Olympics in 2012.