Iwata Nakayama (1895-1949) is regarded as a one of the most important contributors to the Shinko Shashin movement. After graduating from the Tokyo School of Fine Arts in 1918, he received a scholarship from the Japanese government and went to California before settling in New York. At the same time Nakayama was attracted to avant-garde movements and moved in bohemian circles where he met Shimizu Toshi. Shimizu encouraged him to move to Paris in 1926 where he met Man Ray, Fujita Tsuguji, and Enrico Prompolini. These encounters left a deep impression on him and when he returned to Japan in 1927 he energetically set about forming his own vision of ‘pure art photography’. In 1929 he settled in Ashiya (nr. Kobe) and in the following year founded the Ashiya Camera Club with Hanaya Kambei, Korai Seiji, and others. This club became the main driving force of New Photography in Japan. Together with Kimura and Nojima he founded Koga magazine in 1932 that was the most important forum for artistic photography at the time.

Pati Hill (b. 1921 in Ashland, Kentucky, USA; d. 2014 in Sens, France) was untrained as an artist and began to use the photocopier as an artistic tool in the early 1970s, continuing to do so until her death, leaving behind an extensive oeuvre that explores the relationship between image and text. In addition to this comprehensive body of xerographic work, she published four novels, a memoir, several short stories, artist’s books, and poetry. Drawing also became an essential part of her practice. In 1975, Hill published Slave Days, a book of 29 poems paired with photocopies of small household objects.

Produced by More Publishers as part of Hors-série (# 126). Offset print on Olin Regular Absolute White 250 gsm. Signed and numbered edition of 40 (+ 10 a.p).

Jochen Lempert photographs the animal world in the most diverse contexts: from their natural habitat to the museum of natural history, from the zoo to the urban environment, in remote places or banal settings and situations. Lempert compiles his findings in a vast archive of images covering an ample spectrum, from common everyday views, to compositions that tend towards abstraction. This interest in the natural world as a subject has been further complemented by his exploration of the properties and materiality of the photographic image. Analogue, black and white, hand-printed in the darkroom, his photographs resist categorization and confront the canons of today’s aesthetic.

Produced on the occasion of Jochen Lempert’s first solo exhibition in the United States , a major survey at Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis, 3 February–31 March 2012 and and Rochester Art Center, 4 February–22 April, 2012. With a text by Chris Sharp.

Images of the exhibition can be found here.

The Skins of Alca impennis (1992–2017) is an ongoing series of photographs depicting the extinct bird, the Great Auk (Alca impennis). Over the last two decades, Lempert has photographed 52 of the 78 specimens that remain in collections internationally—entering the bureaucracies that surround these birds, gaining permission from those appointed to administer and conserve them for posterity, and uniformly representing their profiles. The book is published on the occasion of Lempert’s solo show Honeyguides held at the Sprengel Museum in October 2017. Images of the bird’s taxidermized heads alternate with blank pages, for the still missing photographs of this ongoing project.

For almost thirty years, Wolfgang Tillmans has been creating new pictorial worlds of abstract photography with his Silver works, which sound out and compellingly expand the boundaries and representability of photographic processes. Brought together for the first time in one opulent artist’s book, Tillmans describes the pictures as ‘stained, impure, bright, unstable, exhausted, fugitive, smear, shimmer, as solid colours’. In addition to the pictures, Tillmans also shows images of the Silver works in exhibition settings: as elements of installations, for example at K21 in Düsseldorf in 2013 or as pure Silver installations like those at Tate Britain in 2003, the Venice Biennial in 2009 or, most recently in 2020, at WIELS in Brussels.