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:
OPEN 12—5 THU—FRI
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
Please note: The bookshop is closed until February 1, 2024.
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after this date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 3 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.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund, 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.
2020, English
Softcover, 241 pages, 25 x 17.5 cm
Published by
Monash Art Projects / Victoria
$25.00 - In stock -
These are the reviews from 2018, the second year of Melbourne's Memo Review. Memo Review is Melbourne's only weekly art criticism, publishing reviews of "a broad variety of art exhibitions at public art museums, commercial galleries and smaller artist-run spaces in Melbourne, offering new critical perspectives from an up-and-coming younger generation of Australian art scholars, writers and artists."
As readers engage with this second year of reviews, they might see a group of art writers coming to grips with the particular limitations and opportunities of the weekly review format and even the particularities of its online delivery. Some will track the successive mentions of the same artist or gallery space, seeing what different writers make of them. Others will follow the progress of individual writers, finding and developing their own style and argument.
Contributions by Amelia Winata, Anna Parlane, Audrey Schmidt, Benison Kilby, Chelsea Hopper, David Wlazlo, Eva Birch, Francis Plagne, Giles Fielke, Helen Hughes, Hester Lyon, Jane Eckett, Kate Warren, Nicholas Tammens, Paris Lettau, Philip Brophy, Rex Butler, Shelley Mcspedden, Sophie Knezic, Tiarney Miekus, Tim Alves, Victoria Perin.
2020, English
Softcover, 241 pages, 25 x 17.5 cm
Published by
Monash Art Projects / Victoria
$25.00 - In stock -
The third hardcopy Memo publication, collecting the 52 reviews from 2017 published by Melbourne's Memo Review. Memo Review is Melbourne's only weekly art criticism, publishing reviews of "a broad variety of art exhibitions at public art museums, commercial galleries and smaller artist-run spaces in Melbourne, offering new critical perspectives from an up-and-coming younger generation of Australian art scholars, writers and artists."
Contributions by Amelia Winata, Aneta Trajkoski, Anna Parlane, Audrey Schmidt, Brendan Casey, Chelsea Hopper, David Homewood, David Wlazlo, Ella Cattach, Elyssia Bugg, Francis Plagne, Giles Fielke, Helen O'toole, Jane Eckett, Luke Smythe, Maddee Clark, Marnie Edmiston, Matthew Linde, Paris Lettau, Philip Brophy, Rex Butler, Sophie Knezic, Stephen Palmer, Victoria Perin.
2020, English
Softcover, 269 pages, 25 x 17.5 cm
Published by
Monash Art Projects / Victoria
$25.00 - Out of stock
These are the reviews from 2020, the third year of Melbourne's Memo Review. Memo Review is Melbourne's only weekly art criticism, publishing reviews of "a broad variety of art exhibitions at public art museums, commercial galleries and smaller artist-run spaces in Melbourne, offering new critical perspectives from an up-and-coming younger generation of Australian art scholars, writers and artists."
"There is no getting around it: 2020 was the year of COVID. It was something that all kinds of cultural activities tried to make sense of. We could quote, to show it has all apparently happened before, Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year at you. Or, like everybody else, you could read some prominent philosopher or cultural theorist try to make sense of it. Slavoj Žižek wrote no fewer than two books on the subject during the year, which made us realise that at least he was doing what he usually does during lockdown."
"And we for our part at Memo Review also did what we usually do. Here are the forty-seven reviews we published during the year—a year when virtually every show we reviewed was only available online."
Contributions by Amelia Wallin, Amelia Winata, Amy May Stuart, Anna Parlane, Audrey Schmidt, Benison Kilby, Bianca Winataputri, Cameron Hurst, Chelsea Hopper, David Wlazlo, Giles Fielke, Helen Hughes, Hester Lyon, Jane Eckett, Kate Meakin, Levi Mclean, Lisa Radford, Luke Smythe, Paris Lettau, Philip Brophy, Rex Butler, Robert Schubert, Sarinah Masukor, Tara Heffernan, Victoria Perin, Vincent Le.
1976 / 1992, German
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 130 pages, 31 x 24 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Schirmer & Mosel / Munich
$60.00 - Out of stock
"White Women was and still is the legendary first book by Helmut Newton, first published in 1976. His inimitable blend of aestheticism, technical perfection and luxurious, unsettling upper-middle-class decadence is today just as appealing and controversial as it was thirty-three years ago. White Women is a delicacy in visual erotic literature that connoisseurs and people in the know still consider to be Newton's best book ever."
1992 German hardcover edition of this highly original, widely acclaimed, lavish collection by Newton.
Helmut Newton (b. Helmut Neustädter; 1920 – 2004) was a German-Australian photographer. He began his career at the age of 16, working in Berlin for Yva, famous German Jewish photographer Else Ernestine Neuländer-Simon. As an 18-year-old, he emigrated to Australia, marrying actress June Browne (June Brunell), who later became a successful photographer under the ironic pseudonym Alice Springs (after Alice Springs, the central Australian town). In 1946, Newton set up a studio in fashionable Flinders Lane in Melbourne and worked on fashion, theatre and industrial photography in the affluent postwar years. He spent much of his life living between England, France, Australia and the USA, settling in Paris in 1961 where he established himself as one of the world's leading fashion photographers, his images a mainstay of French Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. His prolific, often provocative work was highly technical, marked by erotically-charged, stylised, almost cinematic scenes, often with sado-masochistic, fetishistic subtexts and dark undercurrents of middle-upperclass decadence. The first of his countless solo exhibitions took place in Paris in 1975, followed by many book publications and awards. To this day Newton is considered one of the most radical and iconic fashion photographers of the 20th Century.
Average-Good copy in Good dust jacket. A very good copy were it not for some light rippling through the pages, and a mysterious (candle smoke?) darkening to the bottom and side edges, not effecting content or jacket.
1982, German
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 80 pages, 32 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Schirmer & Mosel / Munich
$85.00 - Out of stock
First 1982 German edition of this iconic collection of photography by Helmut Newton, with introduction by Karl Lagerfeld. Simply titled "Helmut Newton", later printings added the "Big Nudes" title for which this classic photo-book has been commonly referred to ever since. "With his Big Nudes, in the 1980s Helmut Newton created a quite unprecedented long-term bestseller. Simultaneously, it provided a concentrated image of his aesthetic agenda. Powerful women were presented in all their naked truth-without fig leaves or fashion frills. This series of black-and-white photos, produced between 1979 and 1981, also marked a stylistic change in Newton's work. Elaborate layouts full of luxury and decadence gave way to an unambiguously formulated and monumental statement-'Here they come!' Dressed only in their indispensable high heels, Newton's amazons self-confidently paraded on show. They rippled their muscles and marched individually as well as in formation toward the observer. [...]" — publisher's blurb.
Helmut Newton (b. Helmut Neustädter; 1920 – 2004) was a German-Australian photographer. He began his career at the age of 16, working in Berlin for Yva, famous German Jewish photographer Else Ernestine Neuländer-Simon. As an 18-year-old, he emigrated to Australia, marrying actress June Browne (June Brunell), who later became a successful photographer under the ironic pseudonym Alice Springs (after Alice Springs, the central Australian town). In 1946, Newton set up a studio in fashionable Flinders Lane in Melbourne and worked on fashion, theatre and industrial photography in the affluent postwar years. He spent much of his life living between England, France, Australia and the USA, settling in Paris in 1961 where he established himself as one of the world's leading fashion photographers, his images a mainstay of French Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. His prolific, often provocative work was highly technical, marked by erotically-charged, stylised, almost cinematic scenes, often with sado-masochistic, fetishistic subtexts and dark undercurrents of middle-upperclass decadence. The first of his countless solo exhibitions took place in Paris in 1975, followed by many book publications and awards. To this day Newton is considered one of the most radical and iconic fashion photographers of the 20th Century.
Very Good copy.
2011, English
Softcover (unbound), 14 pages, 42 x 30 cm
Published by
Osiris / Japan
$38.00 - Out of stock
In the 1970s, Kohei Yoshiyuki (born in 1946) used an infrared camera, equipped with a filtered flash, to photograph couples having sex and capture the voyeurs watching them in the dark, in the parks of Tokyo. Yoshiyuki’s first solo exhibition abroad ‘The Park’ was held some 30 years later at the Yossi Milo Gallery in New York, 2007 and the corresponding book ‘Kohei Yoshiyuki: The Park’ was published by Hatje Cantz/Yossi Milo Gallery in the same year. Since then, Yoshiyuki’s work has attracted worldwide attention, as a social document of the megalopolis of Tokyo, raising questions related to human desire, privacy, voyeurism and ‘to see and be seen’.
This tabloid sized book ‘The Park 1971-73’ was published by Osiris on the occasion of his exhibition in Tokyo, 2011 and includes the 14 best known images from this amazing series of work.
2014, Japanese
Hardcase folio (w. pockets, 2 leporello booklets), unpaginated, 32 x 19.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Amana / Japan
$140.00 - In stock -
This beautiful limited edition Balthus photobook was produced in Japan, containing a carefully selected collection photographs from approximately 2000 Polaroid photographs discovered after the death of the last master of the 20th century, Balthus (1908-2001). The elegant hardcase bookbinding, housing two folding screen-like Orihons (Japanese-accordian style book) enveloped in rich textile hues, is like a dedication to Balthus, who loved Japanese culture. The title "room 17" comes from the name of the room in the Swiss mansion Grand Chalet, where Balthus worked and photographed a young female model for eight years in study for his much loved paintings. A lovely selection of these photographic studies are collected in this touching tribute, alongside text by Nicola Page. Translation to Japanese by Tadashi Miyagi, book design by Daishiro Mori.
Very Good copy.
2013, English
Softcover, 416 pages, 32 x 24 cm
Ed. of 800,
Published by
Koenig Books / London
$98.00 - Out of stock
Daan van Golden: Photo Book(s) is a book composed of other books: it reproduces the photo pages of Van Golden’s earlier books (most of which have long been out of print), as well as two little known photo essays, in their entirety.
The reproduction of pre-existing material, the insistent adherence to a set of core elements, gestures and images, the conviction that creating different juxtapositions and interactions between those same elements will yield new readings and meaning: these are the hallmark of Van Golden’s work, and here for the first time they serve as the organising principle for a book, one whose patient rhythm creates the space for the logic of a practice to establish its sensible presence.
More than just the images, the book documents the way in which the images were used over the years and the aesthetic and conceptual world they inhabit. It is common to see Van Golden’s photography in light of his painting, as an extension of it.
Edited by Daan van Golden and Emiliano Battista.
2021, English
Softcover (french folds), 288 pages, 22 x 25.5 cm
Published by
Whitechapel / London
$60.00 - In stock -
A major survey of the pioneering cult British painter, collagist and photographer and her unique passage from biomorphic Surrealism to Tachist abstraction.
Painter and photographer Eileen Agar (1899–1991) was born in Buenos Aires and spent the majority of her life in Great Britain. In spite of her own pioneering contributions to painting, collage, photography and sculpture, Agar’s career has largely been appraised in relation to her connections with major male figures of European modernism such as Paul Nash, Ezra Pound, Roland Penrose and Paul Éluard. This monograph seeks to overturn that narrative and delve into Agar as a fully autonomous artist whose unique style was a crucial element in the development of European culture in the 20th century.Dense with pattern and color, Agar’s work across various media draws from Cubist and Surrealist tendencies of material juxtapositions and fractured imagery, evoking emotion through distortion. Alongside reproductions of rarely seen artworks, writer Marina Warner, poet Daisy Lafarge and Agar’s biographer Andrew Lambirth reflect on the artist’s progressive attitudes toward art, sexuality and art history. The book is published with four different colored covers.
Edited with text by Laura Smith, Grace Storey. Text by Marina Warner, Daisy Lafarge, Andrew Lambirth.
2021, English
Softcover, 176 pages, 21.5 × 17 cm
Published by
Viscose / Copenhagen
$42.00 - Out of stock
Viscose is a new journal for fashion criticism. Launched between Copenhagen and New York in 2021, the periodical publishes critical writing and projects by a wide range of authors from the worlds of art, fashion, literature, and academia. Through specially edited thematic issues, Viscose gives space to projects that challenge and expand the possibilities of research, practice, and critique of fashion.
Issue 2 of Viscose inverts issue 1’s focus on the immaterial notion of style to instead explore the most material of fashion’s building blocks: Clothes.
Clothes are literally everywhere and cite complicated systems of production, distribution, and exchange on their paths around the world. Still, they never fully reveal their journey or destination, and may often signify little else than their own commodity status, the total genericness of the fashion product. Bringing together a wide range of artists, thinkers, and writers, the issue sets out to explore clothes as a signifier at once empty and over-burdened: as expressions of desires, people and places, as palimpsests for capitalist production cycles and histories of dressed bodies, and even, as nondescript material debris. While not necessarily foregoing an analysis of the fashion system, we hope to develop a form of fashion criticism that begins – and perhaps ends – with the single garment, that takes the everyday use of clothing objects as an intellectual starting point. What knowledge can we gather from the studying of fashion objects, be they material or immaterial? What is the difference between clothes and fashion? And to which extent is even "fashion" ever successfully signified by things?
Featuring Nina Beier, Anna-Sophie Berger, Paige K. Bradley, Laura Brown, Pia Camil, Dal Chodha, Victoria Colmegna, Exatitudes (Ari Versluis and Ellie Uyttenbroek), Anna Franceschini, Laura Gardner, Rhonda Lieberman, Eric N. Mack, Kristian Vistrup Madsen, Christian Oldham, Kembra Pfahler, Carl Gustaf Von Platen, Mattia Ruffalo, Tenant of Culture, Torbjørn Rødland, Barbara Sanchez-Kane, Else Skålvoll Thorenfeldt, Jeppe Ugelvig, Femke de Vries, Issy Wood, Bruno Zhu.
1985, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 62 pages, 30 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / average
Published by
CROWD / Melbourne
$35.00 - Out of stock
Scarce copy of the February 1985 issue of Melbourne's CROWD magazine, committed to "Fashion Music Style", published in Melbourne with heavy ties to Tokyo. With cover photographed by Rozalind Drummond, this issue, "The Parade Issue", includes features on "Fashion '84" (major Melbourne fashion parade presenting 32 Australian designers), "The Third Wave" a feature on Tokyo designers, "London Goes To Tokyo", "Tokyo International Collections" (Comme, Gaultier, Katharine Hamnett), an interview with PiL's John Lydon, Australian designer Marc Newson, British milliner Stephen Jones, interview with Sade Adu, fashion designer Reva Manicavasagar, Nick Lowe, fashion shoots, hair styling, films, records, social pages, clubs, clubs, clubs, fstreet fashion, great Melbourne advertisements, and more!
Good copy with wear and marking to covers, edges. Rippling to front cover.
1984, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 46 pages, 30 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
CROWD / Melbourne
$35.00 - In stock -
Scarce copy of the November 1984 issue of Melbourne's CROWD magazine, committed to "Fashion Music Style", published in Melbourne with heavy ties to Tokyo. With cover (Yohji Yamamoto) by photographer Polly Borland, this issue opens with Street Fashion and includes an exclusive interview with Andy Warhol via Keith Haring, an interview with Divine, interview with Howard Jones, Berlin (with photography by Rozalind Drummond), Polly Borland interview, The Cure, Machinations, Australian fashion designer Kara Baker's Sirens clothing label, Japanese fashion designer Koshin Satoh's ARRSTON VOLAJU clothing label (designer for Miles Davis), fashion shoots, hair styling, films, records, social pages, clubs, clubs, clubs, fashion parade reviews, great Melbourne advertisements, and more!
Good copy with wear and marking to covers, edges.
2020, English
Hardcover, 88 pages, 16.5 x 20.6 cm
Published by
Siglio Press / Los Angeles
$60.00 - Out of stock
An artist whose beautiful, restrained and often mutable works are abundant in compelling contradictions, Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957−1996) was committed to a democratic form of art informed as much by aesthetic and conceptual concerns as by politics. His work eschews the polemical and didactic, while challenging authority and our obeisance to it, dissolving the delineations between public and private, and inviting the viewer to collaborate and complete works with her own inferences, point of view, imagination, and actions.
Made at the height of the AIDS crisis, in a pre-internet era, the photostats—a series of fixed works with white serif text on black fields framed behind glass to create a reflective surface—are profoundly suggestive lists of political, cultural, and historical references. These works disrupt linear time, the seemingly causal relationships of chronology, and hierarchies of information as they ask how we receive and prioritize information, how we remember and forget, and how we continuously create new meaning. The photostats have a deep kinship with poetry in their use of specificity and ambiguity, operating as open fields: each juxtaposition and its oblique friction illuminates connections and disconnections.
The photostats also recall the screen—the television, and now the computer and phone—in which information is furiously delivered, and we are challenged to parse substance from surface, what we choose to assimilate from what we choose to reject. In the gallery, the glass surface of the framed photostats brings the viewer into an intimate relationship with the work as she may literally see herself in it—reflecting, too, her own assumptions. Now, as we find ourselves thirty years later, in a global pandemic, with a national reckoning in the face of enduring protests against police brutality and racial injustice, there is more to see of ourselves in the photostats and their uncanny multiplicity: layers of history with which we are only beginning to grapple as a society, grief in the wake of devastating loss, and the possibility of reinvention and regeneration.
Intended as discrete space to closely read the photostats with sustained attention, this elegant, clothbound volume opens from both sides: on one side, the framed photostats are reproduced as objects as one might encounter them in a gallery; on the other, white texts appear on full-bleed black fields to be read as writing. Its intimate size and its attention to the book as a physical object create a new way to experience the photostats.
In between the two sides, there are gorgeous and thought-provoking writings by poets Mónica de la Torre and Ann Lauterbach that do not explicate the work but instead enter it. Lauterbach penetrates the atmosphere of the photostats, contemplating mourning and memory while invoking Gonzalez-Torres’s spirit of generosity. De la Torre mines Gonzalez-Torres’s dates and references in her constraint-based essay, tracing time from past to present, while keenly attentive to the impossibility of linearity. Both demonstrate the richness of the work and its potential to inspire multiple readings.
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
MÓNICA DE LA TORRE works with and between languages. Her poetry books include Repetition Nineteen (Nightboat Books, 2020) and The Happy End/All Welcome (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017). She is co-editor of the anthology Women in Concrete Poetry 1959–79 (Primary Information, 2020). A contributing editor to BOMB, de la Torre has also written for Artforum, Granta 151: Membranes, and The Believer. She teaches poetry at Brooklyn College and is on the faculty of the Bard MFA.
ANN LAUTERBACH is author of ten books of poetry and three books of essays, including The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience (Viking 2006) and The Given & The Chosen (Omindawn, 2011) ; Spell, her most recent collection, was published by Penguin in 2018. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (1993), she is Ruth and David Schwab II Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College, where she was co-Chair of Writing in Bard’s MFA (1992-2020). A native of New York City, she lives in Germantown, New York.
2016, English
Hardcover (clothbound), 412 pages, 21 x 27.3 cm
Published by
Steidl / Göttingen
$105.00 - In stock -
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, one of the most influential artists of his generation, lived and worked resolutely according to his own democratic ideology, determined to “make this a better place for everyone.” Combining principles of conceptual art, minimalism, political activism and poetic beauty, Gonzalez-Torres’s ever-changing arsenal included public billboards, give-away piles of candy or posters, and ordinary objects (clocks, mirrors, light fixtures) often used to startling effect. His work challenged the notions of public and private space, originality, authorship and—most significantly—the authoritative structure in which he functioned.
Now in its second edition, Gonzalez-Torres’s editor Julie Ault has amassed a comprehensive monograph of this important artist. In the spirit of the artist’s method, Ault rethinks the very idea of what a monograph should be. The book, which places strong emphasis on the written word, contains texts by Robert Storr and Miwon Kwon among other notables, as well as significant critical essays, exhibition statements, transcripts from lectures, personal correspondence, and writings that influenced Gonzalez-Torres and his work. Ample visual documentation adds another decisive layer of content. We see works not just in their finality, but often witness their transformation over a lifespan. This collection is a critical reference for the history of contemporary art.
Edited by Julie Ault
Designed by Pascal Dangin
2012, English
Softcover, 222 pages, 24 x 29 cm
Published by
Roma / Amsterdam
WIELS / Brussels
$88.00 - Out of stock
From the early diametric abstraction to the recent series of silhouette paintings, passing through photographic works and ephemera never printed before, this book offers the most comprehensive gathering of Daan van Golden's work to date. It includes, moreover, a complete list of work, arranged by medium and chronologically, and the collections that hold them. Essays by Devrim Bayar, Sven Lütticken and Erik Thys. Published in collaboration with WIELS, Brussels.
1987, German
Softcover, 294 pages, 17 x 23.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Schirmer & Mosel / Munich
$65.00 - Out of stock
First 1987 edition of this excellent compendium of early films by prolific German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Introduction by Michael Toteberg. 252 film stills alongside script excerpts from the 5 early films : ' Der Stadtstreicher '(1965),' Das kleine Chaos' (1966), 'Liebe ist Kalter als der Tod / Love is Colder Than Death' (1969), 'Katzelmacher' (1969), and 'Gotter der Pest / Gods of The Plague' (1969). A must for any Fassbinder fan. Unfortunately they only made this one, first volume, not to be followed with more. It would've a tremendous collection!
Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945 – 1982) was a West German filmmaker, actor, playwright and theatre director, who was a catalyst of the New German Cinema movement. Although Fassbinder's career lasted less than fifteen years, he was extremely productive. By the time of his death, Fassbinder had completed over forty films, two television series, three short films, four video productions, and twenty-four plays, often acting as well as directing. Fassbinder was also a composer, cameraman, and film editor. Fassbinder died on 10 June 1982 at the age of 37 from a lethal cocktail of cocaine and barbiturates.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The films 1: Der Stadtstreicher; The little mess; Love is colder than death Katzelmacher; Gods of the plague: Ed. Michael Töteberg. - Nothing more appeared.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The movies 1
Published by Schirmer / Mosel Verlag GmbH, Munich, Federal Rep. Of Germany (1987)
ISBN 10: 3888141826 ISBN 13: 9783888141829
New Trade Paperback/ OBroschur First Edition Quantity: 1
Seller:Lighthouse
(Flensburg, Germany)
RatingSeller Rating: 5-star rating
Book Description Trade Paperback / OBroschur. Condition: New, New. First edition / first edition. no more appeared. 294 p., 17 x 23.5 cm. Films: Die Stadtstreicher: 1965, Das kleine Chaos: 1966, Love is colder than death: 1969, Katzelmacher and: Gods of the Plague: both 1969. RWF. Seller Inventory # 88814182_Bd.1_Y
1974, Italian
Softcover, 29 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Skema / Italy
$60.00 - Out of stock
Scarce, early 1974 edition of Skema, the Italian cultural magazine, dedicated entirely to the work of Irina Ionesco. Ionesco (b. Paris 1930) is a French photographer famous for her unique style of baroque, gothic, erotic photography. At a young age she was sent to Romania where she was raised by her family who were circus performers. From the ages of 15 to 22 she performed as a contortionist. She traveled and painted for several years before discovering photography and gained wide attention when she exhibited her work at the Nikon Gallery in Paris in 1974, leading to her work being published in this issue of Skema, along with other magazines, books, and exhibitions at galleries across the globe. A major part of Irina's work features lavishly dressed women, bejewelled, gloved, and in other finery, but also adorning themselves with symbolic pieces such as chokers and other fetishistic props, posing provocatively, offering themselves partially disrobed as objects of sexual possession. Irina Ionesco is most famous for her photographs using her young daughter, Eva, as her model and muse, a decision that remains controversial to this day.
Very Good copy.
1981, German
Softcover, 142 pages, 26 x 21cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Mahnert-Lueg Verlag / Münich
$65.00 - Out of stock
First edition from 1981, the amazing and criminally overlooked only photo book by German photographer Sibylle Mallmann. This book collects Mallmann's portraits of young women living in Germany in the early 1980s, including many familiar artists, actresses, musicians captured beautifully in their essence. Portraits taken in bedrooms, studios, living rooms, cafés and gardens, these lovely images seem more in collaboration with the subjects, surrounded by their belongings, drying clothes, and so many animal accomplices(!), Mallmann's camera becomes a mirror of her model's character. So so good.
Mallmann (b. 1944) worked as a freelance commercial photographer in Germany, quite active in the new music scene.
Introduction by Wolfgang Limmer, German critic, screenwriter, and film director.
Good copy, light cover wear (small crease to bottom corner not affecting pages), small unobstructive pencil crosses on some pages from previous owner, easily removed. Otherwise clean and crisp throughout.
1983, English / German
Softcover, 80 pages, 24 x 28.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Eichborn Verlag / Frankfurt
$190.00 - Out of stock
First edition of this rare photographic study of youth tribes between 1977 and 1982 by British photographer Chris Wroblewski and French photographer Nelly Gommez-Vaez. A masterpiece of punk rock and youth culture, City Indians aims to draw a comparison between contemporary subcultures and ancient native tribes thought its influences on hairstyles, tattoos, piercings and fashion. Chapters on "Mohicans", "Skinheads", "Sons of hell", "Sic Boys", "Rastas", and others, with incredible portraits of "City Indians" in Europe and the UK set against Martin Knox's incredible complimentary graphic design and a foreword by Claude Levy-Strauss, a prominent Native American ethnologist. All texts in English and German.
“As the western armies and cultures marched in and took over the civilizations of the east, the displaced and unwanted ceremonies, rituals and modes of dress quietly graduated and entrenched themselves in the west in return. Just as our museums and galleries are cramped with the looted remnants of vanished civilizations so too are our streets and inner cities brimming with the evidence of a tribal past.”
Very Good copy with light cover wear.
1998, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket and obi), unpaginated, 20 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Asahi Press / Japan
$80.00 - Out of stock
First edition of the second publication of Kishin Shinoyama's "Accidents" series of books. Shinoyama established these lovely photo books in the late 1990s as a way to present the consequential photographs that would develop from commercial nude photoshoots with his models. Each book represents a collaboration between the photographer and one model, Accidents 2 "Breezy Day" presenting a shoot with Japanese actress Keiko Oginome. Shinoyama had close friendships with many of his regular models, working closely with them throughout their entire careers. The "accidental photographs", unrestricted by the editorial outcome of the icon "pin-up", unfold with an intimacy, tenderness and freedom that carry with it the passing of time between the photographer and model, sometimes over one shoot, at others across ages. Lavishly illustrated throughout in colour and black and white.
Very Good w. VG dust jacket.
1998, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), unpaginated, 20 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Asahi Press / Japan
$80.00 - Out of stock
First edition of the first publication of Kishin Shinoyama's "Accidents" series of books. Shinoyama established these lovely photo books in the late 1990s as a way to present the consequential photographs that would develop from commercial nude photoshoots with his models. Each book represents a collaboration between the photographer and one model, Accidents 1 "Waterfruit" presenting a shoot with Japanese actress Kanako Higuchi. Shinoyama had close friendships with many of his regular models, working closely with them throughout their entire careers. The "accidental photographs", unrestricted by the editorial outcome of the icon "pin-up", unfold with an intimacy, tenderness and freedom that carry with it the passing of time between the photographer and model, sometimes over one shoot, at others across ages. Lavishly illustrated throughout in colour and black and white.
Very Good w. VG dust jacket.
1982, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 68 pages, 12.9 x 18.2 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Nippon Geijutsu Shuppan (NGS) / Japan
$90.00 - Out of stock
1982 volume of nude photography by Japanese photographer Hiroki Hayashi from the collectible Photo Girl series of green paperbacks from Japanese imprint Nippon Geijutsu Shuppan (NGS). Cover to cover glossy, full-bleed photography, printed in Japan.
Very Good copy.
1982, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 68 pages, 12.9 x 18.2 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Nippon Geijutsu Shuppan (NGS) / Japan
$90.00 - In stock -
1982 volume of nude photography by Dieter Schmitz from the collectible Photo Girl series of green paperbacks from Japanese imprint Nippon Geijutsu Shuppan (NGS). Cover to cover glossy, full-bleed photography, printed in Japan.
Very Good copy.
2002, English
Softcover, 1088 pages, 25.2 x 16.4 cm
Published by
Harvard University Press / Cambridge
$89.00 - Out of stock
"To great writers," Walter Benjamin once wrote, "finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives." Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when Benjamin fled the Occupation in 1940, "The Arcades Project" (in German, "Das Passagen-Werk") is a monumental ruin, meticulously constructed over the course of thirteen years--"the theater," as Benjamin called it, "of all my struggles and all my ideas."
Focusing on the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris-glass-roofed rows of shops that were early centers of consumerism--Benjamin presents a montage of quotations from, and reflections on, hundreds of published sources, arranging them in thirty-six categories with descriptive rubrics such as "Fashion," "Boredom," "Dream City," "Photography," "Catacombs," "Advertising," "Prostitution," "Baudelaire," and "Theory of Progress." His central preoccupation is what he calls the commodification of things--a process in which he locates the decisive shift to the modern age.
"The Arcades Project" is Benjamin's effort to represent and to critique the bourgeois experience of nineteenth-century history, and, in so doing, to liberate the suppressed "true history" that underlay the ideological mask. In the bustling, cluttered arcades, street and interior merge and historical time is broken up into kaleidoscopic distractions and displays of ephemera. Here, at a distance from what is normally meant by "progress," Benjamin finds the lost time(s) embedded in the spaces of things.
Edited by Rolf Tiedemann
Translated by Kevin McLaughlin, Howard Eiland