Published twice a year since 2002, Encens is focused on fashion as artform from the perspective of designers rather than trends. The magazine investigate new forms of dressing from past to present with probing interviews, extensive use of photography and vintage, and dynamic layout. This issue features Willie Christie, Dominique Issermann, Sonia Rykiel, Aurore Clement, Wim Wenders, Margot Pilz, Barbara Hulanicki, Roger Vivier and Emanuel Ungaro.

Mark Borthwick belongs to a generation of photographers who, in the 1990s, changed fashion’s imagery. Breaking the conventions of fashion photography, he developed a style that was at once intuitive and personal, integrating elements, props, attitudes, that touch contemporary art, environmental issues, interior and architectural design, and a reverence for clothes as works of art.

*Please note this publication is secondhand and has some traces of previous ownership.

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Example: Dix-Huit Leçons sur la Société Industrielle at the Contemporary Art Gallery, January 13 – March 6, 2005.

It includes a forward by Christina Ritchie, essays; Mechanization takes command: Modernization, Terminable and interminable by John Miller and Some References for Christopher Williams by Claudia Beck.

Designed by Christopher Williams with Yvonne Quirmbach.

For thirty years, Heinz Peter Knes has developed a large body of work, focusing on photographic-documentary practice that seeks to engage image with society. Reflecting on the multiple “correspondences”, influences and interactions at the heart of his artistic work, we travel with him through the five chapters of this book, crossing paths with Josef Winkler, Hervé Guibert, Pasolini, Moyra Davey, Julie Ault, Jean-Luc Moulène, Danh Vo, Artaud and many others. Creating a new language, a sort of echo, as sensitive experience, which in a way dematerialize our perceptions, but enable “to gather” them.

Gėlės, flowers in Lithuanian, features an extremely rare series of pictures taken by photographer Algirdas Šeškus in the 1980s. The series is comprised of ten portraits of flowers originally commissioned as decor for an institutional building in the then Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic. Yet, decoration wasn’t their only purpose. In reality, the flowers were intended to lift the spirit of the workers, making them happier and more productive. Expectations that Šeškus’ images were unable to fulfill. Not finding them encouraging enough, the authorities in charge deemed the photographs unfit for the task and rejected them. And that’s how they ended up forgotten under the photographer’s couch, where they remained for the last 40 years, until now. Eventually, it is due to their quiet, dramatic character that these photographs outlived their socialist duty and reached our days. Never exhibited or published before, this book presents the complete series of rejected flowers, along with a brief account of the episode written by Šeškus. Sorrowful, yet strikingly erotic, these images ultimately belong to today: a time unfit for the uplifting.

Editied and designed by Gabriel Pericàs.

Edition of 100 copies numbered and signed by the artist on a certificate, plus 13 artist’s proofs.

As the Latinization of the Japanese name akebi, “akebia” designates fives species of plants native to East Asia. These are climbing evergreen shrubs that have been used in many ways (decoration, medicine, craft), including for the consumption of its sweet, white fruit. Delicately placed at the center of the composition, the leaf appears in this work as in an herbarium, its familiar but inexhaustible form offered to the viewers for their contemplation. But a closer examination reveals a constellation of water droplets on the surface, as well as irregular edges – and we finally understand that the leaf is a photographic cut-out. Just for a moment, we mistook the reproduction for its original. What appeared to be a clear reference to the standards of scientific, botanical representation drifts off towards another domain.