Photography

'The MoMA Plant Collection' displays the tradition of including plant life in the Museum of Modern Art NY. The book presents 340 photographs and drawings that pay tribute to the pairing of plants with art. What can the placement of greenery next to the works of Mark Rothko, Henri Matisse, and many others tell us about the relationship between culture and nature? A question that Meijer started to investigate in her first artist's book, 'The Plant Collection' (ROMA, 2019), on plants in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and continues at this museum in New York.

‘Amidst the fire, I am not burnt’ is a documentary approach to the iconic landscape shaped by Vesuvius. It investigates the different temporalities, scientific and popular perceptions, historic and present-day photographic representations, and stories inscribed in this cyclical landscape. The book interweaves documentary writing and photography in a varied constellation of subjects and experiences, from derelict quarries, archaeological sites, and souvenirs, to a parking lot, bonfires, and lovers parked along the road at night. As each eruption of the volcano adds a layer on top of the last, Vesuvius continues to sense, store, destroy, shape, and transmit information.

The small French village of Aumont, where Géraldine Jeanjean’s grandmother lives, is filled with childhood memories and has been a subject for the photographer’s work for many years. Her photos are proof of what her stories contain and identify the places that have almost become imaginary. By observing them, she noticed similarities between her children and her grandmother. While the children discovered reality, her grandmother, suffering from memory problems, lost touch with it. A search for reality has developed like a game of rock-paper-scissors.

Jochen Lempert’s photographs begin with an encounter: his meeting with plants and animals, real or artificial representations in urban or rural settings, museum displays, scientific books, and more. The resulting images display a certain ease, a proximity that speaks to his comfort around his subjects. Rather than applying his scientific knowledge to what he photographs, he visually invites meaning through the act of seeing. ‘Pairs’ appears with an exhibition of Lempert’s work in Frankfurt am Main, curated by Yasmil Raymond and Deborah Müller. The juxtapositions in this series might be two pictures of the same subject, a pair of animals, or visually evocative matches.

Aglaia Konrad’s photographic work probes the social, cultural, economic, political, and historical parameters that inform architecture and urbanism. 'Japan Works' is the result of her journey through Japan in the autumn of 2019. Using a pre-compiled list of places with exceptional architecture, Konrad took thousands of photos in Tokyo, Itoigawa, Kyoto, Nagoya and Osaka. In addition to mostly iconic, post-war Metabolist architecture, Konrad also took a large number of photos of nonspecific architectural moments and infrastructure that, with the same intensity, give their own impression of the architectural landscape in Japan. Free associations of full-page photographs alternate with contact sheets documenting her itinerary. These are informed by postscript glosses written by architect and critic Julian Worrall.

Dutch cinematographer Robby Müller (1940–2018) was one of the greatest pioneers in modern film history. A new book celebrates the Polaroids taken by this daring “master of light”, who worked as a cinematographer alongside Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch, and Steve McQueen. This delicate, printed collection shows Müller’s sensitivity to light, acute aesthetic eye, and his attraction to natural motifs. Each snapshot of flowers, insects, and trees sparkles like a jewel, exposing such minute details as a translucent petal or a miraculous close-up of a stamp. With a contribution by French cinematographer Agnès Godard, it is designed by Linda van Deursen and edited by Andrea Müller-Schirmer.

Through the media of photography, film, and text, Dutch visual artist and photographer Petra Stavast unravels and structures complex social issues, often departing from a seemingly insignificant personal observation. ‘S75’ is a project she named after the Siemens S75, a mobile phone that was launched in 2005. It was Stavast’s first phone which featured an integrated camera, with a maximum resolution of 1280 × 960 pixels. All the portraits appearing in this series were photographed by Stavast using the S75 between 2006 and 2022 in Amsterdam, Banff, and Shanghai. The book is designed by Hans Gremmen.

Matthew Harvey’s ‘Future Estate’ is a long-term artistic research project documenting the spatial and organisational processes of commodity production, the geopolitics of development, and the zoning practices, extractions, and transnational investments that shape the material and social environments of the precarious present. Drawn to disorganised, peripheral, and contingent contexts, Harvey attempts to navigate a possible set of coordinates to follow the flow of production networks and infrastructural throughlines. As the uneven processes of global labour and distribution play out, his photographs move between subtle and transcendental moments.

Inspired by ‘Tokyo Papers’ by Karel Martens, Ari Marcopoulos arranged his pictures while thinking about what would distinguish inside and outside, public and private. It is an idea that had already become a prevalent thought during the Covid-19 pandemic. The images in colour, hidden on the inside folds of the pages of this publication, are mostly portraits of objects and people, while the black-and-white photographs on the visible pages are recent work, primarily exterior shots taken in January and February of 2021. Envisioning his own photos in book form is “a good way to see how images look together”, according to Marcopoulos. “I even think of the book as a form of a short film”.

Invited to exhibit on the Mauvoisin Dam in Switzerland, Camille Llobet created a photographic series capturing a glacial landscape in transition. Shot on and around the moraines of the Mer de Glace, the images reveal a layered world of rock, ice, and sediment - remnants of a largely vanished glacier. Through diptychs that often exclude the sky and horizon, Llobet invites viewers to re-experience the scale and materiality of this grey-toned terrain. The book also features an in-depth interview with Jean-Paul Felley, in which Llobet discusses her working process, collaboration with geomorphologists, and the choreography of mountain landscapes in flux.

This volume presents a visual history of Dana Lixenberg’s iconic photographs of the legendary artists Tupac and Biggie, broadly considered by many critics and fans to have been the best rappers of their time. These photographs, commissioned by ‘Vibe’ magazine in 1993 and 1996, have been appropriated over the years by innumerable admirers around the world. Both shoots are shown here in their entirety for the first time, retracing the unforeseen trajectory and ubiquity of these images. The images are accompanied by an essay written by Robert Kenner and a poem by Kevin Powell, both renowned contributors to ‘Vibe’, while the book is designed by Mevis & van Deursen.

Photographer Nicolas Floc’h dives into the coastal waters of Brittany with his camera, revealing the serene, surreal, and astonishingly organic underwater landscapes he finds there. Taken between 2015 and 2021, this series of photographs is framed by the notion of the sea as paradox: both the original place from where terrestrial life emerged and autonomous, a place that has continued to exist, assuming other forms and faces. Seas are places where the distinction between extension and space becomes irrelevant, but also where traditional metrics collapse, giving way to materiality in perpetual motion. A space for multiplying and diversifying forms of life on this planet.

Imagine a collection of perforated leaves in which organisms like insects, fungi, or bacteria existing in the foliage have created an array of patterns. Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky’s ‘Feeding on Light’ examines photosynthesis through experimental photography. Bringing the outdoors into her analogue colour darkroom, the artist captures the traces of the often symbiotic relationships observed between trees, insects, and the sun. The book takes the form of a field guide, with an extensive index of common and scientific plant names linking the hundreds of photograms, contact prints, and negative prints. Essays contextualise her work through biology, ecology, and philosophy.

‘Then, Now, and Then’ consists of 16 films that Marijke van Warmerdam made during her stay in Rome in 2017 and subsequent visits to the city. All the films are loops, and most last no longer than a few minutes. They portray life on the street as the artist takes us on a walk through the city. Distance and proximity, visibility and invisibility, movement and rotation alternate as the films show how the dynamism of the Baroque lives on in today’s Rome. With her keen eye for abstract image qualities, Van Warmerdam celebrates the hidden order of chance that makes street life so colourful throughout the centuries. This collection of stills and summaries brings the films to life.

The series of portraits in this book were made during two trips that Ari Marcopoulos made to Tokyo and Kyoto, in 2013 and 2023 respectively. Despite the informality of the situation in which the subjects are captured, each individual meets the camera’s gaze with a sense of self-assurance and openness that reflects the trust that was quickly gained in each situation. The images reveal the crucial affinity between his camera and the technical skills and athleticism on display – a generous understanding of creativity and technique that goes beyond conventional boundaries and in which the distinction between practicing and performance becomes unimportant.

This book is a continuation on the 2019 publication by Jan Kempenaers, ‘Belgian Colonial Monuments’. Kempenaers researched, sought out, and photographed another 60 monuments related to Belgium’s colonial past. To date, all of them can be found in the public space. The photographs raise certain questions, as Phillip Van den Bossche writes in the introduction, “How can you make the moments when you enter the public space (with countless monuments accumulated over time) ‘acceptable’ for as many people as possible? Why have no legal principles been elaborated… with regard to memorials and monuments? Why don’t they have an expiration date?”

Invited to exhibit on the Mauvoisin dam in Switzerland, Joan Ayrton chose to photograph the dam and the surrounding landscape with a camera called Tessina. An extremely tiny camera which appeared on the market at the end of the 1950s, when the Mauvoisin works were completed. In a history that is highly emblematic of the modern era, that of the construction of dams in the Swiss Alps, and that of a watchmaking industry that, following the stock market crash of 1929, had to reinvent itself, entering the field of photography.

You look nice. How exhilarating and terrifying to be looked at, to be seen – to realize you’ve been an image this whole time. All that patient primping, that painstaking preparation, suddenly confronted with its own potential: This is me! you say, aspirationally tucking a stray strand of hair behind your ear, I’m trying to look like me! You turn to face the audience, and in that state of perpetual becoming, you wonder: Will my outside ever meet my inside? Will I see it when it does?

‘Capital Compression’ explores the poetics of blockchain. On a semiotic level, a blockchain is self-referential. It is a document documenting itself. This publication employs strategies of authentication and documentation, both photographically and discursively. A nineteen-line poem mimics blockchain technology by employing a system of hashing, encrypting the poem with each successive line and page. The history, progression, and sequence of the poem in this way becomes immutable. The poem intertwines with a series of photographs and an essay entitled “The Glow”. What erodes elsewhere, gathers here. Until carbon turns into diamond, and compression into capital.

Katinka Bock’s book ‘Der Sonnenstich’ appears with the first exhibition to focus solely on her photographic work. Parallel to her work as a sculptor, she often takes pictures using an old analogue camera. The subjects are diverse, and when people come into the frame they tend to be anonymised, close-up details of body parts like hands, feet, and necks. The book includes 55 reproductions of analogue photos taken between 2015 and 2023, attesting to the ‘sculptural’ view she has on objects, spaces, bodies, and living organisms. Many of them appeared previously in Bock’s ‘One of Hundred’ publications, an ongoing irregular series in collaboration with graphic designer Louis Lüthi.

Over a period of 11 years, Bergbauer photographically collected "image rags" and "object scraps" at flea markets in 11 European countries. He was particularly attracted to art reproductions. For a moment the long-gone aura of "pictures of pictures" seems to be recharged by being unconsciously staged. In the immediate vicinity of reproduced "masterpieces", almost everything turns into an equally seductive sensation. For the concept and design of this book, two particular publications have been inspirational: Le Musée Imaginaire (1947) by André Malraux, and the Xerox Book (1968) by Seth Siegelaub.

Dana Lixenberg’s ‘Polaroid 54/59/79’ is a remarkable collection reflecting the American celebrity culture she encountered in the 1990s and 2000s. It takes us back to the heyday of print media, when photos were primarily analogue. The title refers to the types of peel-apart instant film Lixenberg used between 1993 and 2010, when Polaroid prints formed an essential part of her work process, serving as test and reference material for lighting and composition. She made these Polaroid tests in between shooting, usually in black and white. Their inherently analogue qualities – marked by uneven patches, notes, scratches, or fingerprints – attest to their uniqueness and utilitarian function.

This book presents a selection of the images collected by Mexican architect Luis Barragán (1902–1988) as part of a reference archive that he displayed on a lectern in the living room of his home. In an ever-changing arrangement of pictures, Barragán’s thinking was made visual. Because it was a personal archive from which the architect simply added or removed images over time, the 170 currently registered pictures are all that can provide us today with a kaleidoscopic insight into Barragán’s mind, itself a myriad network of personal relationships, professional influences, and formal obsessions. The publication is the manifestation of a project by Roger Willems and Mark Manders.

Every day, people come to the municipal outdoor gym in Parc de Bercy in Paris. Among them is Medhy, who is behind several initiatives to transform the site into more than just a workout space. In 2020, he invited Marine Peixoto to photograph the scene there. Her practice then took on the rhythm of the gym. Just as some do push-ups and pull-ups, Peixoto carried out an intensive photoshoot. The routine, the repetition, and the cycle of the seasons challenged her determination to “occupy the present”, forcing her to constantly renew her perspective on the same subject. This experience of exhausting a place and a way of seeing is a relentless act of faith in others and in oneself.