The Dailies

For the 25th Kaldor Public Art Project, Thomas Demand’s series ‘The Dailies’ occupies an entire floor of Harry Seidler’s structure for the Commercial Travellers’ Association in Sydney, Australia. The floor of sixteen bedrooms, which house The Dailies, extend off a circular corridor creating a labyrinthine effect. Demand’s images sit above the beds in each room, the transient scenes capturing everyday moments and objects, suspended in time like the environment around them. He offers only traces – signs of consumption, or the spectres of things left behind.

Sacrifice your body

Esoteric, exotic and mildly erotic in equal measure, Roe Ethridge’s ‘Sacrifice Your Body’ is a wonderful distillation of his particular brand of “synthetic photography”. Intriguing, odd and downright bizarre motifs and themes intermesh – from Chanel shoot outtakes and jarring still-lifes to an orchestrated scenario in which a brand new Durango SUV was driven into a Florida canal and later salvaged from the sludge.

Blush

‘Blush’ is a sumptuous compile of the work of renowned Melbourne photographic artist Janina Green. A non linear narrative of unconnected images taken over 22 years. Stunningly published by Helen Frajman’s local M.33 imprint.

Conflict Resolution

Louis Porter’s ‘Conflict Resolution’ might be described as a series of typologies. The project is part of Porter’s wider archive, which tracks fragments, markers and traces of minor suburban conflict – the kind that can be unearthed amid the streets, buildings, vehicles and detritus of any modern town or city. The book offers a very different vantage on conflict, considering its cumulative effects on the psyche of place. Published by Porter’s own Twenty Shelves imprint (Melbourne).

I Cannot Repeat What I Hear

The work of artist Natalie Czech, presented here in ‘I Cannot Repeat What I Hear’, skirts concrete poetry and conceptual photography. Here, she focuses on the writing process and its inherent possibilities. In many instances, she uses newspaper articles, record covers, books, different iPad models and Kindle readers as source material and supporting media for her poems and creates a dialogue between printed text and illustration, the literary form of a poem and the artistic practice of photography. Published by Spector Books (Leipzig).

For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness

In a series of photographs made over eight years, Julian Germain captured the quiet, contemplative existence of an old man living alone in a small house in a city on the south coast of England. Unfettered by the misplaced aspirations of the modern world, Charles Albert Lucian Snelling (Charlie) spent the last years of his life absorbed in his memories of his wife, his children, his love for flowers, music and the quotidian pleasures of the crossword, and his albums of his own photographs. Germain’s photographs of Charlie, his home and the things he owned are a beautiful, gentle portrait of a gentleman in his twilight years.

Close Your Eyes

A frenzied reworking of the accumulated archive of photographer Gareth McConnell. An onslaught of kaleidoscopic imagery fuses portraits he took of rave-goers in Ibiza with pictures he both shot and found of a number of key moments in recent British history, from the 1985 Battle of the Beanfield to the London Riots of 2011. Amongst this we find collected references to the Zen mystic Osho, whose people are said to have experimented with Ecstasy and taken it into clubs in Ibiza for the first time. This is a personal, political body of work–a frustrated meditation on the nature of human occurrence, the power of mass communion in it’s many forms, and the delirious experience of losing oneself to hedonism from the view of someone who saw it from within.

Mad Deep Thoughts

Tracing Melbourne artist Riley Payne ‘s photorealist graphite renderings of fruit, foliage and figure, this book captures Payne’s technical acumen and offbeat humour to equal effect. Comprising uncanny accumulations and pairings of classical forms and Google image search results, Payne’s fastidiously realised drawings might be considered in terms of collage. Banana bunches and cigarette-smoking carrot men coalesce, while a neon hot dog perches before Antonio Canova’s ‘Sleeping Nymph’. Art history and the absurd knock heads, as do the labour of technique and the flippancy of the one-liner.

Glacial Jubile

Customs and traditions: the originality of Estelle Hanania’s photographic work appears in the fact that it focuses on the european vernacular rites in a very unique way. Unlike the anthropologist or pure documentarist, she doesn’t try to understand nor to decode the mystery of those rites, letting them pass trough her camera.

A procession of giants in a field, a magician in a parking lot, a wild cave… The shadows of a singular identity are standing as a non-exotic setting yet revealing themselves as an hallucination.

Elad Lassry

Elad Lassry has developed a reputation for the wit and rigour of his investigations into how we perceive and conceive pictures, through photographs, films and sculpture, as well as interventions in the gallery space. For Lassry, the act of looking, whether at a unique artwork, human face or generic coffee cup, is always a picture making process, an instant that combines a particular sensual experience haunted by the memory of countless images that transform that experience. This book includes an accompanying text by Andre Rottman – research fellow at the Department of Art History at the Freie Universitat Berlin and contributor to Artforum International.

Antarktis

In 2001, through a grant from the Swedish Polar Research Secretariat, Gerry Johansson (b. 1945, Sweden) travelled to the inaccessible and distinct landscape of Antarctica on a research trip for two months. With him on the journey he had a large-format camera and his fearless curiosity. The series of photos eventuate in an unusual reality and relevant perspective. They capture the astonishing non-distance relationship between physicality and nature.

This Place

An exploration into the complexity of Israel and the West Bank, as place and metaphor, through the eyes of 12 internationally acclaimed photographers, each of whom use photography to ask essential questions about culture, society and the inner lives of individuals. The photographers, all outsiders to Israeli and Palestinian society, represent an array of nationalities, cultures, and visual grammars. They are Frédéric Brenner, Wendy Ewald, Martin Kollar, Josef Koudelka, Jungjin Lee, Gilles Peress, Fazal Sheikh, Stephen Shore, Rosalind Solomon, Thomas Struth, Jeff Wall and Nick Waplington.

Ukrainian night

Until tires burned on the Maidan, Ukraine was a blank spot on the map on the margin of Europe. The Maidan – symbol and location of month-long civil protests – marks a new era which the authors capture in words and images. In 2012/13 the photographer Miron Zownir and Kateryna Mishchenko, a Ukrainian writer and translator, visited the Ukraine to explore everyday life there from its margins. Zownir photographed drug addicts from Poltava, homeless people at Kiev’s main station, street children in Odessa and Chernivtsi and the inhabitants of several Roma camps. Mishchenko’s sensitive texts and Zownir’s close-up images document the profound fault lines in Ukrainian society, in which the harbingers of revolution can already be felt.

Snowpark

This new volume from swiss photographer Philippe Fragniere merges and extends the tropes of landscape photography, abstract formalism and a playful compositional logic sidling the contemporary still-life to weave together one of most vibrant series of the year. Coupled with incredible materials, production and design – which includes a series of reverse-out gatefolds – it is a joyous anomaly and one of the most stunningly realised books we’ve seen.

Archipelago

A journey into an interior, upriver, towards an enigmatic hinterland. At any one instance, Matthew Porter sets up correlations between disparate images, configured on each page like islands in an archipelago, clusters which form their own, indigenous subjects. Short texts, placed at intervals, reveal the connective tissue binding varied subjects – Jane Fonda and the Vietnam War, the Hawaiian Island of Kaua’i and Hollywood. What interests Porter is the legacy of the photographic image, and its capacity to reach across history, to make intelligible to us what we already know, or, encountered at the right moment, that which we could not otherwise know.

Grapevine

An exhibition of ceramics curated by Ricky Swallow at David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles in the American summer of 2013. Stunningly economical in its design and production, ‘Grapevine’ traces the work of Magdalena Suarez Frinmkess, Michael Frimkess, John Mason, Ron Nagle and Peter Shire.

Between the Shell

A collection of images created by Paul Salveson between 2006 and 2011 in New York and Virginia. Salveson has constructed a series of still life arrangements within the context of a domestic environment in which everyday household objects are used to create at times disturbingly hilarious images.

Holding a Thread

In recent years Benjamin Armstrong has established himself as one of contemporary Australian art’s most inimitable practitioners. Tracing his alien glass sculptures, stunning painting practice and working methodology, this wonderfully produced volume is an equally beautiful and important document of a young artist at the height of his powers. Holding a Thread comes courtesy of astute Sydney publishing house Emblem. Highly recommended.

More than what there is

This publication brings imaginative vision to the notion of monograph-as-art-practice. It functions both as an artist book and as a survey of Australian artist Elizabeth Newman’s paintings, installations, objects, collages, text works and writing over the past three decades. The book documents around 150 works in full colour, and gathers together many of Newman’s own written pieces, along with new commissioned texts from Juan Davila, Damiano Bertoli, Geoff Lowe (with Jacqueline Riva), Kate Briggs, Eve Sullivan and Michael Graf.

Accidental Design

This volume traces the ceramic and design work of the brilliant Takashi Sugimoto, Super Potato founder extra-ordinaire.

SALT

Melbourne photographer Emma Phillips’  body of landscape images is so striking in its minimalism that it almost borders on abstraction. Shot amid the dramatic man-made undulations of a salt mine –  huge, white mounds of glistening salt. It’s a familiar form, but an alien landscape. Phillips also traces fragments of industrial and domestic infrastructure within this strange environment. Phillips has used salt as an allegory – reduced and economised – for the Australian interior.

Almost There

A series of images by Spanish photographer Aleix Plademunt. Via his striking monochrome photographs, Plademunt explores the theme of physical distance. The images have been carefully arranged to tell the story of a journey, which begins by Plademunt exploring his inner self through photographs of his own red blood cells, images of his father when he was young, before going on to capture vast landscapes and naturally occurring phenomena.

Elementary Calculus

New York-based photographer J. Carrier’s debut book traces the lives, movements, surfaces and situations experienced by West African immigrants in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Loose and poetic in cadence and style, this collection of photographs is equally incisive and elusive, giving hints and traces of the paths trodden by the displaced.

Field Trip

Slovakian photographer Martin Kollar’s images from Israel occupy an elusive space. In some cases resembling still lives or other premeditated situations and arrangements, these documentary photographs poetically describe both the mundane and surreal realities of life in Israel. One key resonance is that of psychological weight. It is no mistake that in his artist statement for ‘Field Trip’, Kollar makes a comparison between the tensions his childhood growing up behind the Iron Curtain in the former Czechoslovakia and the day-to-day realities of life in contemporary Israel.

Veramente

A comprehensive overview of Italian photographer Guido Guidi’s oeuvre, which has spanned the best part of half a century. A pioneer of Italian landscape photography, Guidi was one of the first photographers to redefine the concept of the landscape in the aftermath of World War II.

8 Women

American photographer Collier Schorr’s latest book ‘8 Women’ presents work spanning from the mid-90s to the present. Schorr’s earliest works used appropriated adverts from fashion magazines to address issues of authorship and desire; the works introduced a female gaze into the debate about female representation. Appropriation was Schorr’s first medium and in some sense she returns to it, taking her own commissioned fashion images and folding them into a dialogue with other works.

Preganziol, 1983

‘Preganziol, 1983’ is a key piece of work in the oeuvre of legendary Italian photographer Guido Guidi. Taken in 1983, the sequence of images depict the same room in an attempt to measure space-time using light. Located in Preganziol, Italy, the small and dilapidated room has two windows from which sunlight enters; in each photograph the angle, intensity and volume of light changes. The work is an exploration of how to define and describe physical space and the idea of camera obscura more widely.

Human - Space - Machine

Initiated by Walter Gropius in 1921, the Bauhaus Stage investigated the mechanical and organic body in the context of space, movement, form, colour, light and sound. ‘Human – Space – Machine’ explores the work of the Bauhaus Stage workshop, attempting to discover a new synthesis of man, space and machine in a new modern age.

On One Side of the Same Water

‘On One Side of the Same Water’ explores the state of art production in the south and southeast Mediterranean region, an area rife with conflict. Edited by the director of the Villa Romana Artists’ Centre in Florence, Angelika Stepken, it takes a look at how art has been influenced by and shaped the state of current events in this particular part of the world.

Double Bound Economies

‘Doppelte Okonomien’ (Double Bound Economies) archived commercial photographer Reinhard Mende, who was based in the East Germany from the 1960s to the 1980s. Mende photographed the Leipzig Trade Fair and the showcase of socialist industrial products for visitors from Western countries. The book’s title refers to the doubling of capitalist and socialist economies, suggesting how we may come to approach this unique body of work today. Despite being commissioned to shoot the products, people, especially workers are strongly featured throughout.

Ai Weiwei New York 1983-1993

A young Ai Weiwei’s life and practice in New York throughout the 80s and early 90s. In the decade he lived there, Ai took over 10,000 black and white photographs, which had been left untouched until he selected 277 of them to be showed in 2010. These photographs now populate ‘Ai Weiwei: New York 1983-1993’, and capture some of city’s key social and cultural upheavals and moments such as the Tompkins Square riots.

Cose In Corso

An extensive volume of monochrome documentation photographs published to coincide with celebrated Dutch artist Mark Manders’ exhibition at Collezione Maramotti centering on the installation work ‘Isolated Bathroom / Composition with Four Colors’. The images – which include behind-the-scenes photographs and works in progress – assume various vantages on Manders’ practice, teasing out the semantic and spacial elements and hierarchies that have informed his work since 1986.

Wandering Off

‘Wandering Off’ details the works of Antwerp-based artist Lara Dhondt, whose artistic process comprises various stages of documentation. Plotting the location of her public sculptures on Google Maps, the sites of her creations and her photography can be traced via the Internet coordinates as well as physical maps. Dhondt’s approach to working is both methodical and creative, the art itself occurring exclusively in outdoor, public spaces, and her process of documentation stylistically similar to movements such as land art and conceptual art of the late 60s and 70s. Constructed based on the dimensions of personal space, these demarcations and sculptures assume the form of nomadic symbols and serve as a monument to temporariness.

Moonshine

Spanning almost three decades, Moonshine is a portrait of the American Appalachian folk, a mythologised region populated by ‘moonshiners’.  These intergenerational images subtly trace the insidious changes undergone in Appalachia – the slow and steady demise of the mining industry, and the migration of inhabitants from ramshackle wooden cabins to the city, or urban trailer parks. Van Manen intermixes black-and-white images with later colour work – another register of time passing and the inevitability of change.Her images are defined by a fierce intimacy with her subject, as the viewer teeters on the edge of the frame, perpetually trespassing on private moments.

South of Market

Janet Delany’s photos poetically describe the San Francisco district – once home to blue collar workers, small business owners, artists and members of the gay community – in the late 1970s as the neighbourhood teetered on the cusp of gentrification. A stunning document of a now barely recognisable sliver of San Francisco.

Rodeo Drive 1984

A book of 41 photographs of shoppers on Beverly Hills’ infamous Rodeo Drive shopping strip. American artist Anthony Hernandez uses these photographs to explore human agency, social relationships and taboos such as economic disparity and racial divide in the social landscape of LA during the 1980s. Whilst working in the 1970s, Hernandez participated in the landmark exhibition The Crowded Vacancy at the Pasadena Art Museum (1971), which, quire pivotally, introduced a new type of American landscape photography to the wider populace.

American Colour 1962–1965

An edited collection of colour photographs taken by English photographer Tony Ray-Jones early in his career. Ray-Jones arrived in America in 1961.  On the busy streets of New York ­– in places such as Fifth Avenue, Times Square, China Town and Little Italy – Ray-Jones developed the ability to isolate particular moments. Presented here is a collection of street images and scenes from New York that show an incredible attention for detail. Taken from the National Media Museum’s archives, these photographs have been published here for the very first time.

Moved Objects

‘Moved Objects’ traces the collaborative practice of young Australian artists Georgia Hutchison and Arini Byng. Happily suspended between sculpture and image, Hutchison and Byng’s works are in a constant state of considered and choreographed flux. And there is an essay by Melbourne artist and academic Lou Hubbard.

Surface Series

Dutch artist Batia Suter’s found photographic practice spans the topographical, historical and genuinely enigmatic. Created between 2008 and 2010 (and originally conceived for a site-specific installation at Culturgest Porto) this book uses enlarged photographic images and fragments from other books to compile a textural and poetic study of surface, image and place.

The Arrangement

Dutch photographer Ruth van Beek has sourced imagery from flower arrangement books to create the works in ‘The Arrangement’. As a longtime collector of flower arranging books, van Beek’s depth of knowledge on the art of ikebana and keen eye for colour arrangement and collage has resulted in a striking body of photographic work. The images funny and oddly textural.

Still Life / Work Life

Two disparate photographic genres – still life and documentary photography. Through a rich and varied selection from the Hasselblad Foundation Collection, this juxtaposition reflects photography’s complex cultural history and draws attention to the medium’s formal, aesthetic and social structures. This publication features 25 artists – Lennart Nilsson, Kerstin Bernhard, and Walid Raad among them – contextualised by accompanying essays and an introduction by curator Dragan Vujanovic.

Paraphernalia

Belgian artist Wim Wauman’s ‘Paraphernalia’ brings together 21 still life compositions featuring 171 objects, which he garnered from fellow artists specifically for the project. Each object is discreetly connected to its respective donor and therefore each artist’s own creative strategy. Included are commentaries from the artists about their contributions, as well as an essay by Stefaan Vervoort about the project.

Gasoline

David Campany has collected images from the archives of several North American newspapers of gas stations from 1944 to 1995. Although generally considered lacklustre sites, Campany places them in something of a culturally indicative light. In an interview with George Kaplan, Campany suggests that the gas station provides “a good measure of what’s going on in society” due to their recurring presence in the news as sites of accidents or crimes.

Executive Model

From 1992 to 1995, celebrated American photographer Ron Jude photographed businessmen in the financial districts of Atlanta, Chicago, New York and San Francisco, capturing the subtleties, mood, fashion and visual language of corporate America in the early 90s. Revisiting this amazingly powerful, yet delicate series with a renewed sense of urgency and relevance, Libraryman (Stockholm) have published this work for the first time in book form.

The Patriarch's Wardobe

New York-based photographer and artist Nick Waplington’s book features paintings and photographs capturing landfill sites south of the city of Hebron – landscapes once acknowledged as Palestine. These works document the life of scavenging through landfill from Jewish Settlements, where each landscape depicted represents a disputed area.

Adventures of a Japanese Businessman

An incredible book by José Domingo in which anything can happen: intergalactic battles, love stories, sinister encounters, or divine apparition. A hardcover edition with Nobrow’s usual print quality, Adventures of a Japanese Businessman is a hilarious, unique comic book delight.

Useful Photography #11

Erik Kessels has collected images from various shooting ranges across the US to take a closer look at the variety of shooting targets that make up what is a strange, hilarious and somewhat disturbing visual language. The series of images asks the pertinent question of whether firearms are acquired for added protection or whether they simply contribute to more violence.