1. Martin Parr – The Last Resort
Over 25 years old now, but still remarkably fresh.

2. Paul Graham – Beyond Caring
One of the most sought after social documentary photobooks.

3. Stephen Gill – Hackney Wick
Hackney Wick shot with a 50p camera, now the site of the 2012 Olympic Stadium.

4. Tom Wood – All Zones Off Peak
Parr/Badger featured book with Wood’s atmospheric imagery from traveling on the same bus routes over a 20 year period.

5. Julian Germain – For Every Minute You Are Angry, You Lose Sixty Seconds of Happiness
Recently reprinted by Mack, Germain’s warm and affectionate portrait of Charles Albert Lucian Snelling (Charlie).  See also the excellent In Soccer Wonderland.

6. Chris Killip – Seacoal
Early 1980′s work around the beach of Lynemouth, some of which formed part of his landmark book In Fragrante.

7. Simon Roberts – We English
England at leisure, seen on a grand scale in this equally grand large-format book. Brilliant.

8. Richard Billingham – Ray’s A Laugh
Billingham’s frank and very personal documentary images of his dysfunctional family.

9. John Davies – A Green and Pleasant Land
One of the finest portrayals of the contemporary British landscape.

10. Mark Power – The Shipping Forecast
A poetic and subtly humorous look at the locations featured each morning on Radio 4′s “Shipping Forecast”.

11. Venetia Dearden – Somerset Stories
Rural life in Somerset, captured in the most gorgeous light imaginable.

12. Andy Sewell – The Heath
An evocative portraits of London’s largest green space Hampstead Heath.

13. Burke + Norfolk – Photographs from the War in Afghanistan
Simon Norfolk following in Burke’s footsteps 130 years later in the broken lands of Afghanistan.

14. Jem Southam – The Painter’s Pool
A rewarding lyrical portrayal of nature.

15. Clare Richardson – Beyond The Forest
A brief but beautiful work capturing a Transylvanian farming community.

Compiled by Martin Amis of Photobookstore.co.uk

Circulation, Date, Place, Events by Takuma Nakahira

From publisher: Paris, 1971. At a biennale where young artists from around the world had gathered, Nakahira Takuma performed an experimental project that dared to ask, “what is expression?” He attempted to indiscriminately document a limited reality shaped by “date” and “place” and then immediately re-“circulate” these in reality. This would be the first materialization of his own photographic methodology.

In 1971 photographer Takuma Nakahira participated in the Seventh Paris Biennale for emerging artists from around the world. In his experimental project Circulation: Date, Place, Events Nakahira challenged himself to photograph his surroundings and in the same day exhibit the results for a duration of approximately one week. Indiscriminately documenting everything he encountered — the Parisian streets, the people and cars that came and went there, all manner of posters and printed matter, the installations in the Biennale including the constantly evolving display of his own work, the underground passageways of the subway, news wire reports transmitted by teletype machines, the constant flow of images on television, his room service breakfast in his hotel room and drying underwear — Nakahira exhibited the photographic traces of his daily experiences of Paris within each day. As the photographs proliferated day after day, the exhibition wall could no longer contain them, and Nakahira spread them onto the floor.

Encountering difficulties with the event organizers, Nakahira tore down the exhibited photographs two days before the end of the Biennale. Despite reaching such an extreme conclusion, in an essay written upon his return to Japan, Nakahira would write, “Now, as a result of this project, I can feel that the things that I say and the things that do are beginning to agree with one another for the first time.” Nakahira saw this experience as a crucial attempt to materialize his own photographic methodology.

For Nakahira, Circulation: Date, Place, Events of 1971 (the contents of which only a small portion have been known before now), represented a practice-based step towards radically changing his own photography. Thus, the project demonstrated a vital turning point situated in the passage between 1970’s For a Language to Come (a collection of his photography since the mid-1960s), and the 1973 collection of media criticism, Why an Illustrated Botanical Dictionary? where he would declare his intent to change his methodology in the title essay after critically reassessing his earlier work.

Circulation: Date, Place, Events consisted of the daily process of capturing fragments of material reality with the camera and returning these back to reality as photographic prints made on the spot in the form of a photographic site-specific installation. As a photobook, this volume seeks to newly engage Takuma Nakahira’s critical perspective as produced in Paris, 1971, rather than simply recreating the original installation. In 1973, seeking to make break with the past and reject his own photography up to that point, Nakahira would burn up most of his negatives and prints. Fortunately, or perhaps intentionally un-burned, the negatives corresponding to Circulation: Date, Place, Events have been preserved. There are approximately nine hundred and eighty cut 35 mm negatives (B&W) as well as forty-eight remaining prints confirmed to be part of the photographs taken and exhibited by Takuma Nakahira for his submission, Circulation: Date, Place, Events at the Seventh Paris Biennale. The editing and composition of this volume, which compiles together mainly photographs confirmed to have been exhibited and those which have not been confirmed, is based on analysis of their date and time of exposure as well as the state of their display during the installation found in these existing photographic and related materials. The prints made from the original negatives for the printing of this volume were produced by photographer Osamu Kanemura in consideration of the original aims of the work.

Soft cover with slipcase, 320 pages, 257 b/w plates, 145 x 208 mm. Contains three essays by Takuma Nakahira with text also in English.

A beautiful production, elegantly designed and printed. Very highly recommended for all followers of Japanese photography.

£ 65.00 BUY

Positions by Antoine d’Agata

From publisher: A journal written at the third person that seeks to depict Antoine d’Agata’s quest, “the inexorable course from void to void”. A literary and photographic experiment where words, sometimes descriptive, sometimes poetic, intersect with images in a narrative continuity. An example of the photographer’s existential choice and form of resistance which leads toward the subject’s disappearance and the ego’s negation within the neutral spectrum of the image while insisting on an intimate involvement with its matter and a perfect superposition of art and life.

Texts and photos by Antoine d’Agata. Edited by Giuliana Prucca. Text in English, French and Italian. This is the first occasion that many of the texts have been translated into English. 25 duotone and 2 colour plates.

A beautifully presented mainly text production featuring a hidden fold-out section containing a poster (size 85x64cm, see image).

£ 35.00 BUY

 

Tantra (SIGNED) by Tiane Doan na Champassak

Alternating seven of his photographs taken in Sonagachi, Kolkata’s red light distrct with seven yantras designed by his father thirty years before, Tiane Doan na Champassak delivers a vision of the sexual act made sacred.

Risograph printing by Après Midi Lab in Paris. 16 pages. 12,5 X 19,5 cm.

A small artists book limited to just 137 numbered copies. Our copies are also signed by Tiane Doan na Champassak.

£ 21.00  BUY ]]> http://www.photobookstore.co.uk/blog/?feed=rss2&p=932 0 http://www.photobookstore.co.uk/blog/?p=930 http://www.photobookstore.co.uk/blog/?p=930#comments Tue, 15 May 2012 09:49:42 +0000 admin http://www.photobookstore.co.uk/blog/?p=930
 

Alaska Eskimo by Watabe Yukichi

Just Like On The Radio by Erika Yoshino

Another beautiful Osiris production.

£ 38.00  BUY

A Solitude of Ravens (Karasu) by Masahisa Fukase

A stunning reproduction of The Solitude of Ravens, one of the finest photobooks ever produced. Limited edition of 1000 copies, housed in a slipcase.

Long out of print and very desirable book.

Mint as new copy.

£ 425.00 BUY

Coming Closer and Getting Further Away (SIGNED) by Asako Narahashi

Elegantly produced catalogue published on the occasion of the Asako Narahashi’s exhibition,”Coming Closer and Getting Further Away” at Tokyo Art Museum in Tokyo, from September until December 2009. In this exhibition, her most recent photographs of the coastlines and cityscapes of Dubai, Jindo (Korea), Paris, Cologne were juxtaposed with her earliest black-and-white photographs taken in Japan in 1989. With 9 full-page plates in color, a text by Shino Kuraishi (critic), “Form of Water,”installation photos by Takashi Yasumura, and the List of Works (51 exhibited works with images). With english translation.

Limited edition of 1000 copies. Signed by Asako Narahashi.

£ 30.00  BUY

Isolated Places by Keizo Kitajima

From publisher: After becoming known for his street photography taken both within and outside of Japan from the late 1970s until the early 1990s, in 1992, Keizo Kitajima embarked on two new bodies of work- his PORTRAITS series, featuring portraits of people in white shirts against a white background, and his PLACES series, featuring landscapes void of human figures. Over the past twenty years, Kitajima has worked on these two series concurrently and continues to do so today. The exhibition will be the first time for PLACES to be shown across the span of two decades.

For his early works in his PLACES series, most photographs were taken in major cities around the world including Tokyo, London, New York, and Hong Kong. The homogeneous landscape of a metropolitan setting as a result of the spectacular phenomenon of globalism is expressed in Kitajima’s images. However, from the late 1990s, most of his works have been taken only in Japan, and in more recent years, in small villages and remote islands in the countryside of Japan. While the shift in his subject from urban to rural locations is at first glance a shift between polar opposites- global homogeneity vs. vernacular disparities- Kitajima is more so concerned with the idea of capturing “landscapes that have lost a name and face.”

Such landscapes can be found all over Japan, but rarely do we notice them. They are “isolated places” that have forgotten their past and lost sight of their future.
-Keizo Kitajima

Recommended new title from Japan.

£ 58.00 BUY

Shamanatsu 2011 by Nobuyoshi Araki

Shamanatsu (Summer) 2011 contains 2 distinct series of work. The first is a series of torn studio portraits shot with his trusty Leica, the second shot with a Fuji 6×7 comprises large format views of Tokyo Street Life.

A beautifully printed thick softcover edition of just 700 copies.

£ 70.00 BUY