New Colour Guide (with signed print) by John Maclean

” In our day-to-day lives, colour is largely secondary to form by practical necessity: the shape of a tree is more immediately important than its colour. In art history, colour has rarely been considered a worthwhile subject, but has been a discourse continually expanded by visual artists.

New Colour Guide (NCG) is not intended as a means of understanding colour (even if that were possible), but rather a project where colour was chosen to guide and structure my process of image-making. Why? Because, in a contemporary culture where images that cannot be explained by words are mistrusted, colour remains defiantly ineffable, mysterious and uniquely able to highlight the enigmatic nature of human visual perception.

NCG leads the viewer through a photo-world of schools, markets, offices and museums; forests, rivers and skies; artist’s studios, laboratories and crime-scenes. It is populated by parents, children, teachers, pupils, tourists and spectators. Colour here overlaps art and science; it is added and removed by both the people photographed and the photographer. Outside, only the winter season persists; snow provides a background for colour but can erase it too.

We see that colour can rise from abstraction to suggest narrative and meaning; it can infer value through hierarchies, provide form, depth and resonance and be connected with feelings of order and disorder. Crucially these qualities are only palpable to the viewer because they have acquired the necessary experience and conditioning from early childhood to interpret colour. Colour can create context but, paradoxically, cannot endure without a context itself.

NCG is a wholeheartedly digital photo-guide. It acknowledges the parallel natures of the human light-eye-mind image and the photographic light-lens-processor image.

In making these photographs I first welcomed, and then engineered, the file-transfer errors that can disrupt lines of binary image-code and result in colour distortions. Normally corrupted images would be discarded, but here they expose the digital medium’s chromatic building blocks. They ask: if a photograph is ultimately nothing but a white page, variously graded and spotted with colour, where is the tipping point when a million coloured dots becomes a recognisable image? Furthermore, if a digital photograph of a sky is rendered completely abstract by a file corruption, can it acquire qualities of ‘skyness’ simply by being titled ‘Sky’?

Colour arrangements in nature are largely the result of natural selection but in NCG all colour is contrived and the result of artificial selection. The photographer’s camera generates electric light (flash) which creates reflected light (colour). When recorded, this provides us with a layer of information which helps us construct a photo-world, but the discrepancy between colour’s physical fact and psychic effect is ultimately imponderable. If any meaning can be gleaned it is cultural, leading me back to one, central question: how do we get ideas into photographs?” – John Maclean.

Excellent new book by John Maclean. This special edition comes complete with a numbered signed 6″x4″ print from an edition of just 10.

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Two and Two (with signed print) by John Maclean

“Photographing the same subject twice.

A rediscovered interest in Robert Rauschenberg’s collages, particularly his twin paintings (Factum I and Factum II), had diverted my thinking in 2008 away from the single photographic image towards combinations of two or more. This, coupled with a desire to embark on a project that addressed the characteristics of the medium of photography itself, became the genesis of Two and Two – a series in which I have taken two photographs of the same subject and displayed them side by side.

Two and Two asserts that there is more than one way to take every photograph, and that two different photographs of the same subject represent two distinct choices. By presenting these two choices together, I aimed to define my decision-making process and thereby learn something about my use of photographic language.

I began by listing what I thought the intrinsic photographic strategies might be – and these became frequently used points of reference in the project. My list comprised the decisions any photographer might make to influence the perception of an image: point of view, cropping, choice of moment, intervention, focus, lighting, orientation and sequence. Although I wanted the process of taking the photographs to be spontaneous, inevitably I thought about the kind of situations which might illustrate these devices.

As I began photographing, I gradually accumulated a folder of diptychs which I frequently returned to when considering new combinations. I had quickly discovered that taking one photograph in anticipation of taking another meant holding at least two images in mind; and this stretched my capacity for previsualisation. The first photograph was taken whilst thinking of the second, and the second taken with reference to the first. Predictably some carefully considered diptychs failed whilst other, more whimsical, attempts were effortlessly successful. My camera’s subject matter was dictated by its potential to be photographed twice.

After two years I brought the project to completion. The editing process, perhaps unsurprisingly, offered the most valuable overview. The final selection does indeed offer some insight into photographic rhetoric. But what interests me more is the appearance of an underlying theme – a fascination with photography’s ability to describe and distort, conceal and reveal, dislocate and unite.” – John Maclean

Special version complete with a 6″x4″ signed and numbered print (edition of 10) laid inside.

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A to B (with signed print) by John Maclean

“Forty-two photographs taken during 37 walks between the sites of Newgate prison and the Tyburn Tree, between 23 August 2009 and 3 February 2011.

In late 2009, a TV documentary about Stanley Kubrick caught my attention. The programme explained how Kubrick frequently shot more than 30 takes of one scene in order to ‘wear down’ the actors – to force them to work through the obvious approaches and find something new. I began to wonder if I could employ the basis of this process in my own work.

Looking at the 4ft wide map of London on my studio wall, I decided to choose two points (A and B), one east and one west, and take photographs as I walked repeatedly from one to the other. I would record each journey with GPS, and the line between the points (representing my directional choices) would be transcribed onto a map for each day – an apposite metaphor for my drifting thought process, perhaps.

Initially, I had planned to choose the points A and B arbitrarily by sticking a pin into the map. However, I had for some time been aware of the Tyburn Tablet, a memorial to the site of London’s ancient gallows near Marble Arch. The tablet, circular and set into the ground, resembles a full stop. And indeed it was a full stop for the thousands of condemned prisoners who were transported three miles from Newgate Prison in the east, to their demise on this site – a process that ended in 1783. Although I had no intention of producing a literal body of images concerning this historical event, I decided to reemploy these macabre points of arrival and departure, hoping their significance might add a subtle layer of influence to the images I produced.

In keeping with all of my projects, I photographed for two months, then ordered the images chronologically, and took an overview. Immediately, the progressive influence of two photographs I had made for an earlier project (City: Book Two) was clearly evident (cross-pollination between projects is something I relish). Perhaps these two images, Bloom and Nix, represented ‘unfinished business’, or what Charlotte Cotton calls ‘itchy scratchy’ photographs (the transitional pieces, the precursors of a new phase or project).

The ‘itchiness’ of these earlier photographs had arisen, I think, from the fact that they represented two embryonic strands of a new investigation.

Firstly, they were attempts at exploring the resonance of an image that looks from darkness into light. This is something I had been aware of in Eugene Smith’s photograph, A Walk to Paradise Garden (1946), and that was reinforced when I attended Anthony McCall’s Solid Lightworks at the Serpentine Gallery in 2008. Bloom and Nix were the first photographs where I decided to use light to silhouette an object rather than as a means of illuminating it (in this respect, I feel they are related to photograms: the image is formed by light that passes through an object to reach a light-sensitive medium, and everything else falls away to black).

Secondly, Bloom and Nix are abstract images. Abstraction had become intriguing because it addressed a question that had been on my mind: what makes a photograph a photograph? Specifically, if the information in an image is reduced to the point where the object-matter is unrecognisable, when is a photograph no longer a window to look through but an object in itself?

Why, however, did these two seams of inquiry, which had been lying undeveloped in a previous body of work, resurface in the making A to B? Certainly the journey I retraced – from life towards death – echoed with these earlier abstract images of darkness and light, and so offered a framework for exploration. As Wolfgang Tillmans said in his lecture at the Royal Academy this year: ‘If something taps on your consciousness three times, it is usually worth pursuing.”

John MacLean March 2011.

Special edition of this book complete with a 6″x4″ signed and numbered print (edition of 10) laid inside.

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Zine collection No 3 (with signed print) by Zhu Mo

Beautiful black and white work by Chinese photographer Zhu Mo in this exquisite 3rd installment “The Emptiness” in Editions Bessard’s Zine Collection. With a signed and dated colour print. Limited edition of 100 numbered copies.

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Flying (SIGNED with poster) by Morten Andersen

Latest book from Morten Andersen. Edition of 300 copies, with an A2 size poster. SIGNED COPY.

£ 15.00  BUY

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Color F (SIGNED) by Morten Andersen

From publisher:”COLOR F is Morten Andersen 10th book since the debut with FAST CITY in 1999. The book contains new work from Oslo and can be seen as a follow up to the long out of print OSLO F from 2005, but in colors….as opposed to the more direct and raw expression in his earlier b/w work. Maybe a softer temperature, but still irritated…pissed off maybe..? ”

Interesting colour work by talented book maker Morten Andersen. Edition of 500 copies. SIGNED BY MORTEN ANDERSEN.

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Jetlag and Alcohol (SIGNED) by Morten Andersen

A young photographer staggers around New York in a daze of jetlag and alcohol…. all photos taken in New york 1990-1991. The New York City described by Morten Andersen in Jetlag and Alcohol is brutal, tragic, funny, filthy, and beautiful from the inside out, which is how Andersen experiences it, as a fearless explorer with a sincere desire to hear the stories of its inhabitants and to send them back out into the world as hauntingly beautiful black and white images. Taken in 1990 and 1991, Andersen’s photographs depict the denizens of dark alleys, half-empty subway cars, all-night diners, and cheap bars with the gritty poetry of a Tom Waits song. With an introductory text in English by Terje Thorsen.

Limited edition of 500 copies. Another fine book by Morten Andersen. Signed copy.

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Black and Blue (SIGNED) by Morten Andersen

From publisher: “Black and Blue is an enormous photographic examination of the Scandinavian city Oslo by Morten Andersen. The images are dark, grainy, and mysterious. People, conspicuously absent from most pages, congregate in bars, train stations, and parking lots, appearing both approachable and unavailable at the same time. Blurred lights, deserted streets, and austere building facades are juxtaposed with half drunk coffee cups, empty bubble baths, and cigarette butts, suggesting a busy human presence beyond the looming shadows.”

Limited edition of 600 copies. SIGNED BY MORTEN ANDERSEN>

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The Father of Pop Dance (SIGNED) by Tiane Doan na Champassak

“The book is a reproduction of a photo album that shows my father dancing in a Los Angeles photo studio in 1967.”

Edition of 700 copies. Signed in gold pen by Tiane Doan na Champassak. Another very collectable book by this skilled book maker.

£ 35.00  BUY

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