World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
THU—SAT 12—6 PM
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after order date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 2 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected. If you cannot make it in to the bookshop in this time-frame, please choose postage option.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund or exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
1976, Japanese
Hardcover, 88 pages, 26 x 23.7 cm
Ed. of 600,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
TB Design Institute / Japan
$450.00 - In stock -
Rare, first, limited edition printing of Gashō Yamamura's 1976 masterpiece, "Plants", for which he won the 1st Ina Nobuo Award in the same year. After Yamamura (b. Osaka, 1939—1987) began photographing plants in 1974, he published two incredible, largely unknown collections of his otherworldly botanical photo-studies before his sudden death by suicide in 1987 — “Plants” (1976) and “Botanical Planetarium” (1988). Yamamura's plant photography is like no-other. "Caught in stroboscopic light, the plants stiffen momentarily; they emerge as strange shapes not seen in natural light, rising up and towering high as if by desire." [...] "The perspective is different to how we usually see flower beds and plants; there are no downwards, surveying gazes. Instead, many of Yamamura’s photographs employ an upwards angle, taken in close vicinity to the plants, the way a bug would see them. Here, even the tenderest of flowers appear as bold, towering structures. With this insectuous, un-human perspective, Yamamura carves out the strange and unfamiliar hiding in everyday reality and questions a way of looking that turns its subjects into mere trivialities." [...] "The sights that Yamamura captured expose plants as strange entities that exist in indifference towards human life. At the same time, they let us imagine a world before the presence of human life, or perhaps the world after our disappearance from this earth."—Mika Kobayashi, photography researcher
Includes poetry by Yasuo Fujitomi.
Highly recommended, an absolute favourite.
Yamamura began photographing in high school, focusing mainly on the children in his neighborhood. In 1959, he turned his attention to Americans living in Washington Heights, a residential area in central Tokyo that housed soldiers and their families. His images of American children, shot through fences or wearing masks, convey not only a sense of sinister strangeness and distance, but also the stark economic differences between American and Japanese children immediately after the war. He began photographing plants in the mid-1970s and continued to do so until his suicide at age 47 in 1987.
Very Good copy, internally perfect FINE copy, light cover wear. Limited edition of 600.
1971, Japanese
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 96 pages, 38 x 26.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Shashin Hyoron-Sha / Tokyo
$350.00 - In stock -
First 1971 edition of Eikoh Hosoe's celebrated work "Embrace", published by Shashin Hyoronsha Publishing House. 6 years later it would be republished in the collection of Japanese photographers by Asahi Sonorama. This beautiful oversized original hardcover edition by legendary Japanese photographer Eikoh Hosoe, builds upon the approach of his much celebrated earlier project, Man and Woman (1961). Featuring a preface by Yukio Mishima, "Embrace" is a wonderful collection of photographs of human bodies studio shot in abstract detail using high exposure, Hosoe creating dramatic contrasts that emphasise the dynamism and physicality of these bodies that have become some of his most iconic images. Rich black and white gravure printing, a gorgeous book.
VG—NF copy in VG—NF dust jacket. This copy lacks the publisher's shipping box.
1995, Japanese
Hardcover (w. dust jacket and obi-strip), 200 pages, 27 x 19 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Libro Port Publishing Co. Ltd. / Tokyo
$100.00 - In stock -
Scarce, first hardcover edition of this wonderful 1995 Araki photo album. From cover to cover this book is entirely comprised of Araki's date-stamped photographs taken in the year 1995, presented chronologically and in rich colour. Araki documents all his favourite subjects — women, nudes, flowers, still-lifes, Japanese city details and his beloved cat Chiro, all in amazing panoramic format. Robert Frank and Nan Goldin even make appearances. The landscape format of this hardcover book allows for the images to be grouped into selections of two per page (four per spread) or a glorious single shot spanning a spread, making a jam-packed collection of almost 400 photographs. One of his best collections.
Very Good copy with Good dust jacket and obi-strip.
1993, Japanese / English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 144 pages, 23 x 31 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Libro Port Publishing Co. Ltd. / Tokyo
$220.00 - In stock -
Never to be missed, the first 1993 over-sized hardcover edition of Araki's incredible Erotos photo book, our favourite of his books. In this provocative work, controversial and legendary Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki makes a radical departure from his usual portraits and cityscapes, zooming his lens in on his evocative subjects. An exquisitely printed collection of arrestingly primal close-ups of parts of the human body, as well as pipes, fruit, wet sidewalks, flowers, snails—Erotos delves deep into the erotic subconscious. Reproduced in gorgeous glossy duotone full-page bleed, bound in heavy gloss red, foiled hardcovers. A stunning book! Araki at his most surrealist. Highest recommendation.
Nobuyoshi Araki is a prolific Japanese photographer who has produced thousands of photographs over the course of his career. He became famous for “Un Voyage Sentimental” (1971), a series of photos depicting both banal and deeply intimate scenes of his wife and lifelong muse, essayist Aoki Yoko (whom the artist credits for making him a photographer), during their honeymoon. To date the 75 year old has produced 450 photo books and counting. With a repertoire that knows no boundaries, Araki's diaristic style of photography has captured the world around him (his cat Chiro, the people and landscapes of Japan and his travels, flowers, family), though it is Araki’s intensely sexual imagery that has elicited particular controversy and fascination throughout his career. Similarly to Helmut Newton, Araki has often addressed subversive themes — such as bondage in the Japanese style Kinbaku — in his provocative depictions of female nudes. He typically works in black-and-white photography, and his hallmark style is deliberately casual. “Rather than shooting something that looks like a professional photograph, I want my work to feel intimate, like someone in the subject’s inner circle shot them,” he says. Pushing against the world of commercialised photography, he is celebrated for his history of self-publishing and distributing his work, beginning with his Xerox Photo Albums of 1970. Amongst many others, Araki has collaborated with American photographer Nan Goldin and Icelandic musician Björk.
Very Good copy in Very Good dust jacket with small amount of wear and tear.
1982, French
Softcover, 28 pages, 37.5 x 28.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Créatis / Paris
$50.00 - In stock -
Issue no. 18 of Créatis, June 1982, the wonderful French photographic art magazine published in Paris, founded in 1979 by Albert Champeau and Jean-Pierre Renard. This issue features Christer Strömholm, Joel-Peter Witkin, Alain Bergala, Jeff Silverthorne, Pierre Boucher, William Klein, Roland Barthes, and more.
Average—Good copy due to gloss laminate covers peeling to edges, some pinching to spine, tanning to edges.
1982, French
Softcover, 50 pages, 37.5 x 28.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / average
Published by
Créatis / Paris
$40.00 - In stock -
Special double issue (19 & 20) of Créatis, Autumn/Winter 1982, the wonderful French photographic art magazine published in Paris, founded in 1979 by Albert Champeau and Jean-Pierre Renard. This issue features Irina Ionesco, Alfred Stieglitz, Jean Dieuzaide, Stefan de Jaeger, Peter Hujar, Susan Sontag, Corinne Bronfman, Edgar Degas, Douglas Crimp, Raúl Beceyro, Charles Gatewood, Didier Gaillard, Lynn Davis, and more.
Average copy due to gloss laminate covers peeling to edges and resultant tanning, some pinching to spine, tanning to edges.
1994, English
Softcover, 632 pages, 23 x 15.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
University of California Press / Berkley
$35.00 - Out of stock
First 1994 edition.
Long considered "the noblest of the senses," vision has increasingly come under critical scrutiny by a wide range of thinkers who question its dominance in Western culture. These critics of vision, especially prominent in twentieth-century France, have challenged its allegedly superior capacity to provide access to the world. They have also criticized its supposed complicity with political and social oppression through the promulgation of spectacle and surveillance.
Martin Jay turns to this discourse surrounding vision and explores its often contradictory implications in the work of such influential figures as Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Guy Debord, Luce Irigaray, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida. Jay begins with a discussion of the theory of vision from Plato to Descartes, then considers its role in the French Enlightenment before turning to its status in the culture of modernity. From consideration of French Impressionism to analysis of Georges Bataille and the Surrealists, Roland Barthes's writings on photography, and the film theory of Christian Metz, Jay provides lucid and fair-minded accounts of thinkers and ideas widely known for their difficulty.
His book examines the myriad links between the interrogation of vision and the pervasive antihumanist, antimodernist, and counter-enlightenment tenor of much recent French thought. Refusing, however, to defend the dominant visual order, he calls instead for a plurality of "scopic regimes." Certain to generate controversy and discussion throughout the humanities and social sciences, Downcast Eyes will consolidate Jay's reputation as one of today's premier cultural and intellectual historians.
Martin Jay is Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include Force Fields (1992), Marxism and Totality (California, 1984), Adorno (1984), and The Dialectical Imagination (1973).
Good—VG copy with common rippling of laminate separation to gloss boards, light handling wear. Sample image only.
1999, English
Softcover, unpaginated, 18.5 x 18.5 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Charta / Milan
$100.00 - Out of stock
The great Propo artist's book by Paul McCarthy, published by Charta in 1999. Comprised entirely of photos of everyday objects, soiled, dirtied and ruined, shot against colourful backdrops that contrast with the mysterious nature of the decontextualized objects. Children's toys, condiment bottles, latex masks, dolls ... these objects are in fact props from McCarthy's legendary performances, and their visual inventory here reads like a book of modernity's detritus. A photo book document of residual sculptural objects of performance. One of his best books, like no other!
Born in Salt Lake City in 1945, Paul McCarthy has lived and worked in the Los Angeles area since 1970. Originally formally trained as a painter, McCarthy's main interest lies in everyday activities and the mess created by them. Much of his work in the late 1960s, such as Mountain Bowling (1969) and Hold an Apple in Your Armpit (1970), are similar to the work of Happenings founder Allan Kaprow, with whom McCarthy had a professional relationship. From 1982 to 2002 he taught performance, video, installation, and performance art history at the University of California, Los Angeles. McCarthy currently works mainly in video and sculpture. His work has been widely exhibited throughout Europe and the U.S. including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Whitney Museum of American Art and The Museum of Modern Art; and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
Very Good copy with only light wear.
1970/1971, French
Softcover, 2 volumes, unpaginated, 28.5 x 19 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Marie Concorde / Paris
$320.00 - In stock -
Both of the only volumes ever produced of this wonderful French avant-garde journal, published in Paris at the beginning of the 1970s. A visual manifesto against the prudishness of the times, KITSCH presented hundreds of illustrations of mostly erotic, fetish and fantastic/grotesque artwork by artists from all over the world, and spanning generations, with both issues wrapped in the most striking Tom Wesselmann covers. KITSCH 1 includes Toshio Saeki, Guido Crepax, Richard Linder, Robert Crumb, Guy Bourdin, Petr Herel, Hannes Jahn, Roman Cieślewicz, Ben Vautier, Christian Bour, Jacques Sternberg, Roland Topor, Jim, Allen Jones, Thomas Weir, alongside photo essays on upskirt polaroids, Satanik, Diabolik, fashion and more. KITSCH 2 includes Aslan, Roy Lichtenstein, Virgil Finlay, Jim Osborne, Ronald Lipking, Greg Irons, George Grosz, Egon Schiele, Mel Ramos, alongside photo essays on subjects such as "Pop Art", "Human Concern" and Paris' "Pigalle" district, further featuring work by H.C.Westermann, Paul Thek, Edward Keinholz, William Tunberg, Christian Schad, William Weegee, James Rosenquist, Frank Gallo, Tom Wesselmann, and many more.
Very good copies both, light wear.
1972, Japanese / English
Softcover (w. french folds and fold-out spreads), 160 pages, 22.8 x 29.8 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Ad Angen / Japan
$100.00 - In stock -
First 1972 edition of this erotic anthology from three important and provocative Japanese photographers from the time they were creating their most inspired work. Tatsuki is famous for his books Eves, Private (Mariko Kaga) and Girl (from the famous Chuo Koronsha series). Kanoh is famous for his books Shunga and the banned Fuck. Ichimura is famous for Salome and Come Up. All of these seminal works in Japanese photography were published in 1970 or 1971, as was this book, a collection that includes moments from some of the aforementioned works. The title indicates the uniting theme of the book - couples (and groups) in erotic scenes. Experts of the nude, the invited photographers here express Ukiyo-e's spring paintings through their own photographic visions of sexuality. Saturated and hypnotic, these psychedelic and dreamlike collections are joyous and occasionally confronting, surrealistic and occasionally grotesque, all vividly reproduced throughout with many gate-fold spreads. A great book.
Very Good copy.
1995, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 150 pages, 27 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Shogakukan / Tokyo
$70.00 - In stock -
Beautiful Japanese photobook by famed Japanese photographer Kishin Shinoyama, published in 1995. This entire photographic collection is dedicated to Shinoyama's photographs of his friend, Japanese actress and model Aki Mizusawa (1954-) spanning 1975‐1995.
“It is extremely rare for a photographer to be able to shoot a single subject; one woman continuously for twenty years. Now, seeing all those images - as fleeting and instantaneous then as the magazines that carried them - revived and bound together gives that particular history a closure that weighs like marble. This book captures the twenty year photogenic evolution of a wonderful friend and subject, Aki Mizusawa."—Kishin Shinoyama
Kishin Shinoyama was born in 1940, in Tokyo, Japan. He embarked on his career while studying in the Department of Photography at Nippon University, and was awarded the Advertising Photographer’s Association prize, among others. After being employed at the Light Publicity advertising company, he started to work as a freelance photographer in 1968. His work is acclaimed for the portraits of the most famous celebrities of our day and age, such as John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Rie Miyazawa, and other major personalities. In his “Gekisha” and “Shinorama” series, he carries on capturing the times using new forms of expression and new technologies. He is also an exponent of solarization and has used it to challenge preconceived ideas of beauty and the nude.
Very Good copy in original dust jacket.
2002, English
Hardcover, 288 pages, 27 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Arena Editions / New Mexico
$280.00 - Out of stock
First hardcover edition of the beautiful Carlo Mollino Polaroids book, published in 2002 by Arena Editions. Now highly collectable, Carlo Mollino Polaroids is the first published book of the famed Italian designer's "decadent and hermetic" erotic photographs, selected from the roughly 1200 surviving Polaroids, never exhibited during his life, which were found following his death in 1973. This book represented the first comprehensive look at these polaroids, exquisitely reproducing over 250 examples collected within a lovely gilt, photo-inlayed cloth hardcover.
Carlo Mollino (1905–73) was an architect, designer, photographer, writer, skier, racing driver and stunt pilot. In a career that spanned more than four decades, Mollino designed buildings, homes, furniture, cars and aircraft. One of the most dashing figures of mid-century Italy, Mollino was famed for his design finesse and his elegant organicism. In 1949 he published an important book on photography: Message from the Darkroom. Sometime around 1960, he began to seek out women - mostly dancers - in his native Turin, inviting them to his villa for late-night modeling sessions. The models would pose against extraordinary backdrops, designed by Mollino, in clothing, wigs and accessories that he had carefully selected. Finally, having printed the Polaroids, Mollino would painstakingly amend them with an extremely fine brush, to attain his idealized vision of the female form. The pictures, which totalled around 1,200, remained a secret until after his death, in 1973. Only a few were ever publicly shown, until this acclaimed first edition was published by James Crump in 2002. Reviewing this book, The New Yorker declared, "This lavish selection of several hundred Polaroids preserves the essential mystery of a project both decadent and hermetic. Though clearly the product of a deep obsession, the photographs are deliberately impersonal, each baroque detail an invitation for the viewer to imagine Mollino's encounters with the women."
Very Good copy!
1991, English / Japanese
Softcover (w. acetate dust jacket), 56 pages, 30 x 20.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Fiction Inc. / Tokyo
$160.00 - In stock -
One of the best and earliest publications dedicated entirely to the "decadent and hermetic" erotic photography of Italian designer Carlo Mollino, this wonderful book was published by Fiction Inc. in Tokyo in 1991. Very scarce, this volume comes wrapped in printed acetate dust jacket, and is illustrated in colour throughout with Mollino's private erotic glamour photos accompanied by the essay "Body Furniture" by photography critic and founder of Déjà-vu magazine Kohtaro Iizawa. This special over-sized glossy format benefits viewing the minute details of Mollino's paint-brush edits to the photographs rarely so easily seen in other books by enlarging them dramatically from the original polaroids. Selected from the roughly 1200 surviving Polaroids, never exhibited during his life, which were found following his death in 1973, all re-touched and/or partially coloured by hand by Mollino. Also includes interior photographs.
Carlo Mollino (1905–73) was an architect, designer, photographer, writer, skier, racing driver and stunt pilot. In a career that spanned more than four decades, Mollino designed buildings, homes, furniture, cars and aircraft. One of the most dashing figures of mid-century Italy, Mollino was famed for his design finesse and his elegant organicism. In 1949 he published an important book on photography: Message from the Darkroom. Sometime around 1960, he began to seek out women - mostly dancers - in his native Turin, inviting them to his villa for late-night modeling sessions. The models would pose against extraordinary backdrops, designed by Mollino, in clothing, wigs and accessories that he had carefully selected. Finally, having printed the Polaroids, Mollino would painstakingly amend them with an extremely fine brush, to attain his idealized vision of the female form. The pictures, which totalled around 1,200, remained a secret until after his death, in 1973. Only a few were ever publicly shown, until this acclaimed first edition was published by James Crump in 2002. Reviewing this book, The New Yorker declared, "This lavish selection of several hundred Polaroids preserves the essential mystery of a project both decadent and hermetic. Though clearly the product of a deep obsession, the photographs are deliberately impersonal, each baroque detail an invitation for the viewer to imagine Mollino's encounters with the women."
Very Good copy with only light wear to plastic jacket.
1994, English
Hardcover, 96 pages, 22 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Taschen / Cologne
$100.00 - In stock -
First English edition of the early hardcover monograph dedicated entirely to the "decadent and hermetic" erotic photography of Italian designer Carlo Mollino, published by Taschen in 1994 and long out-of-print. Profusely illustrated throughout in colour and b/w, with accompanying quotes and texts from the designer, illustrated essay by Falvio Ferrari, plus illustrated biography of Mollino.
Carlo Mollino (1905–73) was an architect, designer, photographer, writer, skier, racing driver and stunt pilot. In a career that spanned more than four decades, Mollino designed buildings, homes, furniture, cars and aircraft. One of the most dashing figures of mid-century Italy, Mollino was famed for his design finesse and his elegant organicism. In 1949 he published an important book on photography: Message from the Darkroom. Sometime around 1960, he began to seek out women - mostly dancers - in his native Turin, inviting them to his villa for late-night modeling sessions. The models would pose against extraordinary backdrops, designed by Mollino, in clothing, wigs and accessories that he had carefully selected. Finally, having printed the Polaroids, Mollino would painstakingly amend them with an extremely fine brush, to attain his idealized vision of the female form. The pictures, which totalled around 1,200, remained a secret until after his death, in 1973. Only a few were ever publicly shown, until this acclaimed first edition was published by James Crump in 2002. Reviewing this book, The New Yorker declared, "This lavish selection of several hundred Polaroids preserves the essential mystery of a project both decadent and hermetic. Though clearly the product of a deep obsession, the photographs are deliberately impersonal, each baroque detail an invitation for the viewer to imagine Mollino's encounters with the women."
Very Good copy
1989, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket and original plastic wrap), 80 pages, 22.8 x 16.3 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Gakutokan / Japan
$100.00 - Out of stock
First edition of The World of Pierre Molinier, published in 1989 in Japan. An exquisite book of Molinier's fetishistic gender-bending paintings, photomontages, and drawings, fittingly wrapped in "stocking" dust jacket, with texts by André Breton, translated from French to Japanese by Kosaku Ikuta, imagery from "Molinier" (1966) film by Raymond Borde, beautifully designed and printed in Japan where Molinier's artworks had a particular resonance.
Pierre Molinier (1900—1976) was a French painter, photographer and a forerunner of gender performance art and Body Art (Art corporel). Molinier spent much of his artistic life working in isolation in Bordeaux, exiled from local and national art scenes. Born in Agen, nothing had predestined Molinier to a life as an artist. Self-taught, from a working-class background, he followed in his father’s footsteps and started out as a house painter. He got married and had two children. Tired of his infidelities and provocative behaviour, his wife left their marital home an in 1950 and Molinier begun photographing himself seriously, staging his own death and erecting a fake gravestone proudly declaring himself ‘a man without morals’. He was thrown out of the Bordeaux Salon des Indépendants as early as 1951 amidst controversy over his orgiastic painting of the same year, Le Grand Combat. Stirring up an obsessive correspondence with the anarchic poet-founder of Surrealism, André Breton, Molinier was soon integrated into the Surrealist group with a solo exhibition at Breton’s Paris gallery in 1956. Molinier’s anti-moral project appealed to the group’s interest in repressed desires, fetishism, and the transgression of bourgeois morals. In 1959, he exhibited at the Exposition International du Surrealism in Paris. From the mid-1960s Molinier chronicled the exploration of his subconscious transsexual desires in "Cent Photographies Erotiques": graphically detailed images of pain and pleasure. Cut-up, reassembled, and manipulated, Molinier painstakingly created elaborate and sensual photomontages in which he assumed the roles of dominatrix and succuba previously taken by the women of his paintings. Either alone with doll-like mannequins or with female models such as German sadomasochist Hanel Koeck, Molinier, who considered himself fundamentally androgynous, appears as a transvestite, employing his body and that of his acquaintances to create visions of hybrid identity, where stockinged multi-limbed, multi-sexed beings imitate pagan figures, Hindu gods, and Masonic symbols, in a rejection of a Christian tradition which he argued, had repressed androgyny. Designed to shock, Molinier’s artwork represented a very intimate disclosure about his own sexual ambiguity, inviting the viewer to bring to the images his or her own response of excitement or disgust. The degree of his artistic perversity and blasphemous tendencies was deemed too much for the French cultural elite, and the man Breton dubbed the “magician of erotic art” was shunned from the art world. Molinier did not participate in the 1965 International Surrealist Exhibition. For the last 11 years of his life Molinier played out his own most profound moments in the 'theatre' of his Bordeaux 'boudoir – atelier'. He committed suicide in 1976, shooting himself with a pistol, something he had foreshadowed in his artwork, time and again. Essentially a leg fetishist, but also considering himself as a shaman, facetious and provocative, anti-bourgeois and anti-religious, Molinier enjoyed transgressing gender identification : his outstanding photographs greatly influenced the European and North American Body Art in the 1970s and continue to fascinate artists today.
Very Good copy in original plastic jacket.
2010, English
Hardcover, 400 pages, 24 x 31 cm
Published by
Les Presses Du Reel / Paris
Mennour / Paris
$150.00 - In stock -
The Molinier bible! A mammoth, crucial 400 page book on the method and genesis of Pierre Molinier's provocative, gender-bending photos and artwork. Beautifully printed and prodigiously illustrated with over 800 pictures, mostly unpublished, numerous documents, manuscripts and letters, a complete (nearly 100-page) chronology, a critical biography, and a text by Jean-Luc Mercié.Molinier. Essential publication on Molinier, the most comprehensive to date, and a must for any fan.
Rare English edition translated from the French by Edward Penwarden.
Pierre Molinier is an unknown of worldwide renown. Every book and every exhibition on the body, gender confusion or sexual excess seems to feature at least one work by this artist whose “genius” was acclaimed by André Breton in a memorable text published in 1956. But the bulk of his work has remained inaccessible. A number of pictures have never been shown and a corpus of only 160 prints has been published. The ensemble revealed by the artist's archives is much more extensive. It includes numerous proofs made to prepare his photomontages and working prints given to friends, but also notebooks and personal letters. Here, precise links emerge between his paintings, photographs and scandalous life. The myth carefully constructed by the artist begins to crumble before the reality of the work.
An inveterate seducer, thoroughgoing fetishist, unrepentant transvestite and inadvertent bisexual, to the very last Molinier remained haunted by two obsessions: pleasure, meaning immediate access to la petite mort, and “leaving a trace in the infinity of time.” This book charts the aesthetic incarnation of his passions. Its 819 photographs, most of them never published before, reveal the method, shed light on the procedures and give details of the origin and alchemy of his latent or composed images. Finally, an exhaustive chronology offers a new biography of Molinier, based on his letters: for it is in the intimacy of these writings that the shaman's heart beats closest to the truth.
In a career shared between the university (fifteen years) and publishing (twenty) Jean-Luc Mercié has written widely on painting and photography. This monograph is his fourth book about Pierre Molinier, the master from Bordeaux.
Born 1900 in Agen (France), Pierre Molinier, surrealistic painter and photographer, a precursor to body art, died in 1976 after having thought out radical and pornographic artwork.
2024, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 100 pages, 26.42 x 28.96 cm
Published by
Liveright / US
$120.00 - In stock -
Foreword by Benjamin Moser, With an Introduction by Susan Sontag
A new edition of the cult classic photography book by the legendary Peter Hujar, featuring a foreword by Pulitzer Prize winner Benjamin Moser
The 1976 publication of Peter Hujar’s Portraits in Life and Death, with an introduction by Susan Sontag, “was and remains one of the most somberly beautiful and influential photography collections of its era” (Holland Cotter, senior art critic of The New York Times). When Hujar passed away in 1987, his work was relatively unknown except for a small following. The importance and artistic mastery of Hujar’s photography, its tender gravity and intimacy, became recognised and canonical only after his death. The republication of this collection is composed of the original introduction by Susan Sontag and preceded by a new foreword by Benjamin Moser, with photographs presented in two sequences. A stirring ode to the flourishing downtown scene of the 1970s, this collection remains a deeply moving artefact of post-Stonewall New York City.
"As his posthumous fame only increases, this tightly curated collection of photographs of Hujar’s friends and peers (Paul Thek, Anne Waldman, John Waters and Robert Wilson among them), paired with a haunting series of 1963 photographs of the dead in the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo, will remind fans of what makes him such a singular and original American artist."—Andrew Durbin, Frieze
"[A] stunning new edition… Sensuous and sensitive, this is a real masterwork."—Olivia Laing, The Observer
2025, English
Hardcover (clothbound), 124 pages, 23 x 23 cm
Published by
Drill Hall Gallery / Canberra
$45.00 - In stock -
This title brings the collection of Canberra couple Susan Taylor and Peter Jones into focus on the advent of its 25th anniversary. Seeded from an initial interest in mid-century modern design and early twentieth century avant-gardes, the collection blossomed into an embrace of non-objective and abstract art. Artists featured include General Idea, Maria Kozic, Peter Maloneyi, Elizabeth Newman, John Nixon, Robert Rooney, Janet Burchill, Jennifer McCamley and many more.It has grown to revel in the intersections between conceptual art, geometric abstraction, seriality, non-objective painting, photography, contemporary jewellery and poetics to develop conjunctions across time, place and materiality.
The publication accompanies the exhibition curated by Peter Jones at the Drill Hall Gallery, Australian National University, 19 April – 15 June 2025.
Eye to Eye delves into several of the collection’s multi-faceted and revelatory cross-sections. In his essay Peter Jones explores how the couple’s interests have been refined and extended by the art they love and the people that surround that art. In an interview with Drill Hall Gallery director Tony Oates, Susan Taylor discusses the correlations between sustainable fashion and conceptual art with a focus on jewellery. National Gallery of Australia’s curator of photography, Shaune Lakin, traces developments in local conceptual photography from the 1960s as they play out across the Taylor Jones collection. Acclaimed writer Quentin Sprague offers illuminating insight into the work of Robert Rooney and John Nixon, two stalwarts in the Taylor Jones collection. The publication touches on a vast array of local and international art historically significant developments, revealing the power of the private collection to expose perspectives that may go unnoticed in larger, public collections.
2025, English
Softcover, 208 pages, 23 x 16.6 cm
Published by
Memo Review / Naarm
$35.00 - In stock -
What happens when political art becomes indistinguishable from marketing? Catherine Liu calls it “the highest form of kitsch” — where liberal good intentions become another elite commodity. Vincent Lê sees Apple’s crushingly smooth aesthetics not as mere flattening, but as capitalism’s natural logic of “creative destruction” at work: art compressed into commodity pixels; culture remade through self-improving competition. Either way, we’ve reached peak kitsch. Slavoj Žižek spots it: Trump’s AI-generated Gaza fantasy isn’t just tasteless satire; it’s political kitsch perfected. Call it hasbara via hyperpop.
Meanwhile, Isobel D’Cruz Barnes shows how artists on Narrm’s subculture music scene recognise that the real stage isn’t sound — it’s Instagram, TikTok, and every surface of aesthetic performance. Emerging now is culture as costume, rebellion reimagined as self-design, “lazy representation politics and identity capitalism” countered by their acceleration. And maybe that is just fine.
But no one slices open this tension between image and impact like artist Maria Kozic, whose visceral pop provocations twist kitsch into something uncomfortable, even violent—like Warhol thrown into a meat-grinder. Here kitsch doesn’t comfort but “pops.”
Khaled Sabsabi’s Venice controversy crystallises the stakes: Creative Australia recoiled from his political ambiguities, preferring art to neatly market their own virtue. Adorno (via Benjamin and Greenberg) knew all along: kitsch is the aestheticisation of politics. Or was it fascism? Or is art best when it risks being misunderstood or ambivalent, or, even better, wrong?
1984 / 1995, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 144 pages, 21.3 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Rippu Shobo / Japan
$120.00 - In stock -
First 1984 edition of this seldom seen photo book by Japanese photographer Kazuo Kenmochi, These Are Drugs: A Photographic Look at the Roots of Modern Disease. Kazuo Kenmochi, an extraordinary figure in Japanese photography, published three ground-breaking photo books that rank as some of the most comprehensive books on drug addiction ever published — Narcotic Photographic Document, Narcotic '61-'72, and Narcotic Damage in Japan (published 1963 through to 1975). These illuminating books of frontline photo-reportage detail the drug culture in Japan in the early 1960s that was spread by U.S. soldiers after the war. A photo artist with direct access as photographer for the Ministry of Health and Welfare and the National Police Agency, Kenmochi captures all the aspects of the culture from drug production, to distribution, to use, addiction, withdrawal, overdose, raids, seizure, arrests, incarceration, all in great detail. Alongside incredible photo documents of addicts in varying states of disarray, the books photographically documents the seizures, identifies the drug types/variations, paraphernalia, the methods of use, the signs of use on the body, and charts their origins in nature and distribution. Kenmochi's comprehensive observations, ingeniously utilising methods of identity abstraction and provocative photographic techniques used in erotic photography (a field he was active in), to confidentially capture drug use through stark and very intimate moments with users. This 1984 volume collects a selection of the images (vivid colour and b/w) from these highly sought after books into one concise softcover volume.
First 1984 edition, 1995 printing.
Fine—As New in F dust jacket, preserved under mylar dust jacket.
1994, Japanese / English
Hardcover (w. corflute envelope slipcase), 196 pages, 32.5 x 23.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Sequoia / Tokyo
$220.00 - In stock -
"I dedicate this book to all lives"
Very rare, first volume of the highly collectible cult classic two-volume death photo book series, SCENE, published in 1994 in Japan only. A lavish hardcover production filled with high-quality monochrome reproductions of anonymous, uncredited corpse photography, seemingly sociopolitical photo-journalism of human massacre stripped of text/language as a confronting stream of vivid and graphic images in conceptual photo book form. SCENE presents an unwavering, unapologetic exploration of a world usually hidden from view — the dead and death. Not for the faint of heart. Compiled by Kunio Shimizu and Yoichi Shibata for publisher Hirofumi Nagashima, SCENE is housed in an elaborate black button-and-tie-bound corflute envelope. Select plates have been featured in the pages of Kotaro Kobayshi’s underground publications TOO NEGATIVE and ULTRA NEGATIVE from the same period.
Fine copy with only standard storage wear from button-bind pressure to envelopes/wear to button metal.
2025, English
Softcover, 72 pages, 29.2 x 24.8 cm
Ed. of 500,
Published by
Karma / New York
$75.00 - In stock -
Grosvenor's photographs of color-coated snow investigate the stakes of altering the world around us.
In a Patchogue, New York, parking lot, Robert Grosvenor (born 1937) photographed brightly colored flocking dropped into mounds of snow. Known for his subtle adjustments to readymade objects, Grosvenor makes the resulting images insistently abstract, depicting the aftermath of an action.
Texts by Rob Teeters and Matilde Guidelli-Guidi.
Edition of 500 copies.
Robert Grosvenor (b. 1937, New York, NY) is an American sculptor and photographer known for his surreal captures of vernacular architecture and modernist retrofuturisms. Grosvenor’s monumental sculptures transform a bevy of mid-century technologies, structures, and cultural lores into simple, streamlined forms. These idiosyncratic forms challenge the sculptural conventions of weight, line, movement, and inertia. Grosvenor was included in the historic 1966 Primary Structures survey exhibition at the Jewish Museum, which famously introduced Minimalist art to a broader public. Although his work builds on the aesthetic program of Minimalism, Grosvenor playfully resists the cool austerity emblematic of the genre. Rather he explores the sensuousness of his materials and the nostalgic qualities of their color and design.
2025, English
Softcover, 72 pages. 22.2 x 17.1 cm
Published by
Magic Hour Press / New York
$60.00 - Out of stock
This photobook, one of two from Hervé Guibert published in his lifetime, is filled with characters, settings and mystery. It starts with bodies – their faces either eclipsed or out of frame – before unleashing a bravura sequence of portraits: friends, lovers, family and Guibert himself. As the book approaches its finale, his subjects are obscured and then disappear completely, leaving behind the objects they touched, until even those vanish, leaving only light.
Most of the photographs in The Only Face were taken on Guibert’s European and American travels, but their settings are, with few exceptions, small private interiors. The effect is an inwardness that communicates Guibert’s deep affinity with his subjects.
The Only Face, originally published in Paris in 1984, is the second and final photobook Guibert published in his lifetime (preceded by the photo-novel Suzanne and Louise, also reissued in English by Magic Hour Press). This new edition presents Guibert’s photographs in their original sequence, with his titles and introductory text translated by Christine Pichini and a new cover by the artist Marc Hundley.
French writer and photographer Hervé Guibert (1955–91) was the author of 25 books, beginning with Propaganda Death (1977), a fictional memoir in the tradition of Georges Bataille, Jean Genet and the Marquis de Sade. His best-selling novel To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life (1990) was inspired by his long friendship with Michel Foucault and the two men’s experiences living with AIDS, which tragically ended Guibert’s life at the age of 36.
2023, Czech / English / German
Softcover, 256 pages, 24 x 33 cm
Published by
Edizioni Periferia / Lucerne
$175.00 - In stock -
Despite his art education, Czech painter and photographer Miroslav Tichý (1926–2011) was considered an outsider due to his unconventional approach to photography that revealed a voyeuristic fascination for the female body. His analogue photography shows traces and errors he deliberately sought out by building his own cameras and telephoto lenses. In the 1970s and ’80s, Tichý regularly took pictures of his television screen. Because he lived close to the Austrian border, he was able to circumvent the censorship of Eastern Bloc media and watch the more permissive films and late night shows from the West. Many of his seemingly surreptitious screenshots appear in this book.