Casual Relationships
Max Creasy
Published by InOtherWords, London, 2018, single section mounted into a case with exposed core and 4 foil blocks to cover, 56 pages (colour ill.), 21.8 × 30.6 cm, English
Price: €30 (Out of stock)

Casual Relationships explores the mechanisms at work in the construction of visual culture. By carefully curating and simulating photographs from contemporary vernacular sources, Max Creasy identifies the way these images are endorsed within social groups and norm circles. The sequencing and design of the publication articulate the associations and patterns discerned from this promiscuous collection of images. The book is offered as a 56pp single section mounted into a case with exposed core and 4 foil blocks to cover.

Designed by OK-RM, London.

#2018 #maxcreasy #okrm #photography
Always Starts with an Encounter
Wols & Eileen Quinlan
Published by Radio Athènes, Athens and Sequence Press, New York, 2019, 220 pages (colour & b/w ill.), 18.2 × 22.7 cm, English
Price: €30

Wols (1913–1951) was celebrated posthumously as one of the pioneering artists of the Art Informel movement. His distinctive early photographic work of the 1930s is however very little known. In an unusual travel across time and space his work is discussed in connection to that of contemporary American artist Eileen Quinlan (b. 1972). This book, a companion to the eponymous exhibition Always Starts with an Encounter, Wols-Eileen Quinlan, curated by Helena Papadopoulos and organized by Radio Athènes at the Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens in 2016, further explores the relationship between the work of the two artists through an indexical structure, various textual forms and inflections, different registers of images and close-up textures that act like another text. Spectral and suggestive, but also precise and factual it reflects on a circular idea of time as it wanders in the abstruse physicality of the photographic.

Texts by Quinn Latimer, Laura Preston, Helena Papadopoulos, Oliver Berggruen. Designed by O-R-G Inc., David Reinfurt.

#2019 #abstractphotography #davidreinfurt #eileenquinlan #helenapapadopoulos #josephinepryde #laurapreston #photography #quinnlatimer #radioathenes #sequencepress #wols
Photo Album
Man Ray
Published by Asahi Shimbun Publishing, Japan, 1981, hardcover (clothbound in foil-printed cardboard sleeve), unpaginated (b/w ill.), 22.5 × 31 cm, Japanese
Price: €80

Japanese monograph dedicated to the photographic works of Man Ray.

#1981 #abstractphotography #manray #photography
(1890–1976) CENTENNIAL EXHIBITION
Man Ray
Published by Sezon Museum of Art, 1990, 2 softcover volumes in slipcase, 196 & 64 pages (colour & b/w ill.), 23 × 30.2 cm, Japanese
Price: €80

Publication produced on the occasion of the exhibtion Man Ray, to commemorate the centenary of the artist’s birth. Travelling to the following locations; Sezon Museum, 29 September–4 November, 1990; Tenjin Daimaru, Fukuoka 14 March–26 March, 1991; Yokohama Museum of Art, 6 April–8 May, 1991; Kyoto Daimaru Museum, Kyoto 15 August– 20 August, 1991.

2 softcover volumes, dedicated to the sculptural practice and photographic practice separately.

#1990 #abstractphotography #manray #photography
Serena
Josephine Pryde
Published by Walther König, Köln, 2001, 72 pages (colour & b/w ill.), 21.5 × 27 cm, English
Price: €20 (Temporarily out of stock)

Produced on the occasion of Josephine Pryde’s exhibition Serena at Kunstverein Braunschweig, 28 April–10 June, 2001.

Pryde’s work attacks stock photographic aesthetic by technically reworking and reconfiguring images and by addressing the conditions of their display. The surfaces of glossy fashion photographs are disrupted by the insertion of aluminium tubes, which emphasise their ‘objectness’ and their status as artworks. Colourful photoshop juxtapositions of MRI scans of the human foetus and macro-lens desertscapes are unnervingly loaded. They refer to the history of darkroom experimentation and to contemporary medical-imaging techniques. Pryde doesn’t reject the language of photographic imagery, rather she adopts it and layers it up. Her guinea pig portraits are inspired by ‘cute pet photography’ but her choice of subject conjures associations with laboratory research.

Texts by Pamela M. Lee, Pauline van Mourik Broekman and Josef Strau.

#2001 #abstractphotography #josefstrau #josephinepryde #photography
Wild Plants of Palestine
Alaa Abu Asad
Published by Alaa Abu Asad, Maastricht, 2019, hand numbered edition of 25 (second edition), risograph print, unpaginated (b/w ill.), 14.5 × 20 cm, English
Price: €25

Wild Plants of Palestine follows journeys of observational tours solicited by the Palestinian Museum and conducted by two professors from Birzeit University to collect photos of and information on the Palestinian Flora. The title is adapted from a collection of 123 images (circa 1900 to 1920) of wild flowers in Palestine found in the Matson Collection in the Library of Congress. Despite the tendency to trace the wild plants, the text in general aims at questioning the territorial extension of what is meant by the term “Palestinian”, while standing on insignificant topographical features of the (postcolonial) landscape in West Bank. Furthermore, it addresses photography as a practice and a tool of distributing and restricting information at once.

#2019 #alaaabuasad #artistbook #photography