Photography
‘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.
Jordi de Vetten describes his photographs as a visual testament to the mundane as found in the landscape. While moving past houses and photographing roads, he stumbles upon the most everyday but unusual scenery. From nondescript homes and shadows cast over empty fields to a crumpled electrical transmission tower, scattered jigsaw puzzle pieces, and a piano that seems to have been left behind in a park, the images kindle the observer’s curiosity despite their anonymous and unremarkable appearance.
'One Wall a Web' gathers together work from two photographic series, 'Our Present Invention' and 'All My Gone Life', as well as two text collages all made in, and focused on the United States. Through a mixture of writing, portraiture, landscape, and appropriated archival images, the book describes quotidian encounters with fraught desire, uneven freedom, irrational fear, and deep structural division, asking whether the historical and contemporary realities of anti-Black and gendered violence – when treated as aberrations – do not in fact serve to veil violence’s essential function in the maintenance of "civil" society. The book traces a chronological path through the two series, concluding with an extensive essay that explores resonances between questions of black life and the strange ontology of the photographic image.
Artist and critic Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa presents ‘INDEX 2025’, a book constituted by cuts, folds, citations, terms and images, all of which explore the resonance of its (im)proper name. The book may have begun in the summer of congressional Kente cloth, in the operation of summer camps, or in the imprecise materiality of social distance. Its origins are certainly multiple, multiply uncertain, as stable as any reflection given in space over time. Or, as fixed as any photograph.
In 1992, Dana Lixenberg travelled to South Central Los Angeles for a magazine story on the riots that erupted following the verdict in the Rodney King trial. What she encountered inspired her to revisit the area, and led her to the community of the Imperial Courts housing project in Watts. Returning countless times over the following twenty-two years, Lixenberg gradually created a collaborative portrait of the changing face of this community. Over the years, some in the community were killed, while others disappeared or went to jail, and others, once children in early photographs, grew up and had children of their own. In this way, Imperial Courts constitutes a complex and evocative record of the passage of time in an underserved community.
In October elite snowboarders from all over the world come to Saas Fee, Switzerland, to start their winter season at a high altitude snow park with big jumps and a large halfpipe. While Marcopoulos was there to make a video with American Olympian Lucas Foster, he met and photographed other riders like Japanese Olympic gold medallist Ayumu Hirano, his brother Kaishu, famed for performing the highest air ever in competition, and the Korean Chaeun Lee, who later in the season became world champion halfpipe at age 16. The video and this book are both titled Butter; a word the riders use when a trick is performed smoothly with a lot of personal style.
When the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris asked Ari Marcopoulos to curate an exhibition around their acquisition ‘Brown Bag’, a short film on skateboarders in New York that he made in 1993, he was given access to the museum’s collection of over 15,000 works. He looked for themes related to the body, injuries, and architecture, along with what he perceived as challenging and puzzling works. Some of the artists were already familiar, while others were new to him. The process was not so different from his process as a filmmaker and photographer: so much of his work is about finding things. This book is a new look at photographs from around the time Marcopoulos shot ‘Brown Bag’.
Two years ago, Dutch visual artist Bart Lodewijks received a curious phone call from someone wanting to know if he would be interested in making his signature chalk drawings in Belgium’s newest prison. He arrived to find it is nothing but a construction site, so the first drawings appeared along the street where the prison would be located. He got acquainted with the locals – a landlord, the parcel delivery guy, an orange tomcat – and spoke with residents about the imminent changes in their neighbourhood. More than a year later, the first inmates arrived and Lodewijks ventured inside the prison with them. This book documents the project in its strange and wonderful entirety.
“I came around the bend of the unpaved road that opened up onto a bay and a view out to the ocean as far as the eye could see. I knew this view very well, even though it was my first time there.” This is the scene Ari Marcopoulos describes when he and Kara Walker went to visit Robert Frank and his wife, June Leaf, at their summer house in Nova Scotia. It felt like a pilgrimage. Robert would pass away a year later, shortly after their second visit. Presented here are the intimate photographs Ari captured during these two encounters among dear friends. “Ainsi soit-il” is the phrase Robert taught Ari. “So be it”. Limited edition with a signed Risograph print and other inserts.
‘Deep Sea’ is a collection of eerie underwater images from the Lampaul Canyon in the Bay of Biscay, France. Made at depths of up to nearly 2,000 metres, these seascapes of otherworldly geologies seem rather barren at first sight, until a lone creature appears, caught by the camera’s flash. The bay’s canyons were formed as the continents drifted apart 120 million years ago, opening up the Atlantic Ocean. These bathyal visions by Nicolas Floc’h are filled with rocky outcrops, cliffs, falls, and folds, where marine particulate “snow” merges with living things, the unseen denizens of the ocean depths. With a text by Michel Poivert.
‘Meadow’ is part of the Occupy Mars project conducted by Pauline Julier and Clément Postec, which sees Mars as a mirror of Earth at the dawn of the new age of space exploration, extractivism, and colonialism. Through a series of films, publications, and public discussions, it bridges multiple alternative perspectives that question both past and future to bring new narratives to the fore and give insurgent voices a platform. A first exploration took place in the Atacama Desert in Chile, where the training sites for NASA's rovers are located next to one of the largest lithium mines in the world. Published on the occasion of Julier’s exhibition near the Mauvoisin Dam in Switzerland.
Ari Marcopoulos presents a large-format kineograph of the young Japanese snowboarder Haku Shimasaki performing a technically challenging trick. The idea for the publication came to Marcopoulos after working on his short film ‘Butter’, in which he documents elite snowboarders in Switzerland. He asked a group of them to send him their favourite clips of tricks; this one of Haku, captured by Nishizuka Zensei, stood out. Marcopoulos desaturated the clip and inverted it so it looks like a black-and-white negative. The result is not just an elegant and powerful display of the athlete’s skill – the explosive snow moving around him seems to evoke the dynamic origins of the universe.
This visual manifesto explores the notion of ‘the photographic’, an analysis of the effects the technical image has on the visual culture as a whole. The glossy photo essay focuses on contemporary artistic practises and experimental approaches to photography, divided into four themes: The Photographic Fossil, Chemical Matter, Optical Confusion, and Performing the Image. The accompanying text insert engages a discourse among artists and intellectuals on defining photography and technique. ‘Off Camera’ is the conclusion of a research project carried out by Belgian researcher Steven Humblet’s group, Thinking Tools, at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Antwerp.
This large-sized publication presents 63 photos of Amsterdam by cinematographer Robby Müller (1940–2018). The photos were published every Monday in the Dutch newspaper ‘Het Parool’ in 2019 and 2020, chosen and provided with an accompanying text by Andrea Müller-Schirmer. Her short, associative writings offer insight into Müller's working method, his dealings with light, and tell about Amsterdam. This publication is intended as an ode to the special light of Amsterdam, seen through the eyes of Müller, and a tribute to analogue photography. The book features texts by Andrea Müller-Schirmer and Bianca Stigter and is designed by Linda van Deursen.