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.
2016, English
Softcover, 32 pages, 23.8 cm x 32.3 cm
Published by
MACK / London
$39.00 $15.00 - Out of stock
Shelter Island comprises a body of work made by Roe Ethridge during a summer stay in Long Island, New York. Renting an all-American kit house, Ethridge and his family discovered objects stowed in the garage, things discarded by a different family and from a different moment in time. The faded objects, which are leitmotifs of an Americana of the past, speak of a lifetime of childhood summers: dusty Cola bottles, a plastic bat or fallen kite. In Ethridge’s work, the passage of time, and youth itself, is both acutely personal and stylised, in images that are at once synthetic and spontaneous, laden with familiar photographic tropes which are shown to us askance.
Roe Ethridge, born in 1969 in Miami, Florida, lives and works in New York. His work has been shown extensively at institutions around the world, including MOMA/PS1 (2000), Barbican Center, London (2001), Carnegie Museum of Art (2002), Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2005), The Whitney Biennial (2008), Museum of Modern Art, New York (2010), Les Recontres D’Arles, France (2011). Solo exhibitions include the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Garage, Moscow, and Le Consortium, Dijon, France (curated by Anne Pontegnie). In 2011 he was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. Thanks to MACK (United Kingdom).
2018, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 136 pages, 19 x 23 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
Bergen Kunsthall / Norway
Bonniers Konsthall / Stockholm
Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art / Helsinki
$84.00 $40.00 - Out of stock
This publication accompanies Torbjørn Rødland’s exhibition “Fifth Honeymoon,” produced as a collaboration between Bergen Kunsthall; Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm; and Helsinki’s Museum of Contemporary Art, Kiasma; and featuring thirty new photographs and a new video work, his first in eleven years. Photographed exclusively on analog material, often in staged studio settings, Rødland’s works hold a unique place in the treatment of images by artists today. His photographs have an almost uncomfortable ambiguity, fully aware as they are of the power of images and the slippery comfort of normative formats, while simultaneously showing a sincere desire for the emotions and the magic that are at play in the world. His photographs manifest what we experience as beautiful, and sometimes repulsive, but not in any conventional way. Rødland makes use of these aesthetic categories and the forms in which they are expressed, and confronts them, complicates them, and exaggerates them with contradictory concepts, such as the uncanny, the nasty, the messy.
Fifth Honeymoon features all of the new works in Torbjørn Rødland’s eponymous exhibition, as well as newly commissioned essays by the American writer and cultural theorist Sianne Ngai and artist colleague Matias Faldbakken. Edited by Steinar Sekkingstad and Axel Wieder.
Design by Mark El-khati
2017, English
Hardcover, 128 pages, 22.8 x 18.5cm
Published by
MACK / London
$79.00 $60.00 - Out of stock
In The Model, Torbjørn Rødland examines one of the defining principles of his approach to photography: that the notion and meaning of ‘the model’ is open-ended. Hyper-aware that we view the world through endless filters that arbitrate our relationship with people, objects and images, from the mid 1990s Rødland’s photography has sought to penetrate postmodern surfaces in order to redefine the possibilities of psychological, erotic and spiritual subjectivity and interconnectivity. He attempts to tap into subliminal thoughts and feelings through images that are both sensual and cerebral. Synthesizing an array of photographic genres and approaches The Model comprises elements of critical appropriation, diaristic snapshot, reportage, commercial and staged photography – all strung together by the iconic face of Polish actress and fashion model Malgosia Bela. The book brings together pictures of Malgosia made over a ten-year period in Los Angeles, New York, Paris, London, Warsaw, Oslo and Lofoten. Serving as an experiment in photographic language and code, each image elicits a response that equivocates between alienation and intimacy. With this in mind, The Model can also be seen as a love letter to both a medium and to a mediated woman.
2016, English
Softcover (cloth-bound), 112 pages, 21.6 cm x 28 cm
Published by
MACK / London
$86.00 - Out of stock
A dictionary will tell you that confabulations are memory disturbances; the production of fabricated, distorted memories about oneself and the world, but without a conscious intention to deceive.
“Subjectivity is not the master signifier of the image,” writes Ina Blom of Rødland’s work, “Nor is it lost in a vortex of abstractions: it is quite simply one point of connectivity among many. The camera, with its associated range of lenses, aperture settings, lighting devices, and film types, is another. […] The emphatic sheen, sleek glamour and casual perversity still thrive, but they take on an independent existence as new textural realities – as if to speak of a material world that we can never fully know."
With Confabulations, Torbjørn Rødland presents a set of analogue photographs that subtly misrepresents broken memories and childhood fantasies. Confabulations distorts facts to get to truth. Fragmentation is neither rejected nor induced in this unitary approach, but seen as a starting point for new connections. Beneath a million silly memes Rødland is looking for new soul.
1991, English / Italian
Softcover, 130 pages, 24.5 x 33 cm
1st edition, Out of print title / used*,
Published by
Versace / Italy
$120.00 $10.00 - Out of stock
Rare 1991 catalogue look-book for Versace's "Collezione Uomo Primavera Estate 1991" with photography by Herb Ritts.
These early 1990s Versace over-sized photo catalogues perfectly visually embody the Versace aesthetic in book-form, with page after page filled with colour-saturated images of luxurious catwalk photography, textile details, model photoshoots, accessories, shoes, backstage, Versace advertisements, graphics and Versace's diary (with Italian and English text).
Good copy with some cover damage.
1991, English / Italian
Softcover, 134 pages, 24.5 x 33 cm
1st edition, Out of print title / used*,
Published by
Versace / Italy
$120.00 $40.00 - Out of stock
Rare 1991 catalogue look-book for Versace's "Collezione Donna Primavera Estate 1991" with photography by Irving Penn and Pasquale Abbattista.
These early 1990s Versace over-sized photo catalogues perfectly visually embody the Versace aesthetic in book-form, with page after page filled with colour-saturated images of luxurious catwalk photography, textile details, model photoshoots, accessories, shoes, backstage, Versace advertisements, graphics and Versace's diary (with Italian and English text).
With Linda Evangelista gracing the cover, the entire book features numerous photographs of Helena Christensen, Linda Evangelista, Yasmeen Ghauri, Christy Turlington, Stephanie Seymour, Naomi Campbell and many more. Photography by Irving Penn, Pasquale Abbattista and others.
2018, English
Softcover, 368 pages, 21.5 x 29 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$69.00 $30.00 - Out of stock
This publication emerges from Uriel Orlow’s Theatrum Botanicum (2015–18), a multi-faceted project encompassing film, sound, photography, and installation, which looks to the botanical world as a stage for politics. Working from the dual vantage points of South Africa and Europe, the project considers plants as both witnesses to, and dynamic agents in, history. It links nature and humans, rural and cosmopolitan medicine, tradition and modernity across different geographies, histories, and systems of knowledge—exploring the variety of curative, spiritual, and economic powers of plants. The project addresses “botanical nationalism” and “flower diplomacy” during apartheid; plant migration; the role and legacies of the imperial classification and naming of plants; bioprospecting and biopiracy; and the garden planted by Nelson Mandela and his fellow inmates at Robben Island prison.
This publication is made up of two intertwining books: one documents the works of Theatrum Botanicum, including the scripts for two films; the second is a compendium of brief, commissioned essays that aims to offer an accessible snapshot of the complex and multifaceted issues that inform and are raised by the artworks. The independent but interrelated essays, which either speak directly to the artworks or follow lines of inquiry alongside them, cover perspectives from postcolonial cultural studies; art criticism and art history; natural history, botany (including ethnobotany and economic botany), and conservation; jurisprudence and critical legal studies; and critical race studies.
Design by In the shade of a tree (Sophie Demay and Maël Fournier-Comte)
Edited by Shela Sheikh and Uriel Orlow
Contributions by Sita Balani, Melanie Boehi, Clelia Coussonnet, Karen Flint, Jason T. W. Irving, Nomusa Makhubu, Bettina Malcomess, Karin van Marle, Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll
2018, English
Softcover, 228 pages, 17 x 24 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$74.00 $25.00 - Out of stock
What Is Different? is the title of this year’s edition of the Jahresring, guest-edited and designed by Wolfgang Tillmans. Since the early 2000s Tillmans has been working on truth study centre, a cycle of works concerned with absolute claims of truth in social and political contexts.
Circling around contemporary issues of newly resurfaced right-wing populism, the phenomenon of fake news, and psychological findings such as the backfire effect, Tillmans, rather than analyzing the status quo, focuses on what has changed in the past ten, twenty, thirty, forty years. Why are societal consensus and institutions now under attack?
Tillmans interviewed scientists, politicians, journalists, and social workers, highlighting the issues at stake from various angles. The publication also contains analytic texts and studies that shed further light on what happens in our brain, ethics, and online behavior when we are confronted with statements that oppose our political beliefs. Tillmans associated these texts with his own images as well as visual material found in print and online. While designing this year’s Jahresring, he has created photocopy works using the four-color scan process on a machine from the 1990s—an early digital collage technique that resonates with the complexity of the situation we find ourselves in today.
The 64th Jahresring includes texts by Philipp Hübl, Jonas Kaplan, Joe Keohane, and Michael Seemann, and interviews with Lionel Barber, Carolin Emcke, Sigmar Gabriel, Bianca Klose, Stephan Lewandowsky, Brendan Nyhan, and Wolfgang Schäuble.
Design by Wolfgang Tillmans
2021, English
Hardcover, 616 pages, 21 x 29 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$90.00 - Out of stock
During the Cold War, modernist art became a flagship of freedom and democracy in the West, and took on the role of a symbolic overcoming of fascism. Parapolitics: Cultural Freedom and the Cold War examines the cultural diplomacy of this period, particularly the activities and magazines of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an organization funded by the Central Intelligence Agency that was tasked with steering the left away from Soviet Communism and toward a new world order established under the aegis of the United States. This book analyzes how the organization’s activities in the non-European world were a major force behind the culturalization of economic liberalism on an international scale. With extensive archival documentation and recent responses by artists and writers, this book is a rich reference for readers interested in challenging the structural conditions of contemporary art and the prevailing canons of modernism.
Edited by Anselm Franke, Nida Ghouse, Paz Guevara, Antonia Majaca
Contributions By Savita Apte, Doug Ashford, Michael Baers, Ivana Bago, Lene Berg, Annett Busch, Rhea Dall, Peter Delius, Kodwo Eshun, Jenifer Evans, Anselm Franke, Andrea Giunta, Nida Ghouse, Paz Guevara, Stacy Hardy, Barnor Hesse, Michael Hochgeschwender, Emmanuel Iduma, Iman Issa, Voluspa Jarpa, Gabi Ngcobo, Alexander Keefe, Hyunjin Kim, Christian Kravagna, Antonia Majaca, Porter Mccray, Sylvester Ogbechie, Rasha Salti, Erhard Schüttpelz, Chinmay Sharma, Yashas Shetty, Quinn Slobodian, Karin Zitzewitz
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
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
$190.00 - 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.
2001, English
Softcover, 86 pages, 20.8 x 29.3 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Pataphysics Books / Melbourne
$45.00 - Out of stock
Out of print 2001 issue of the great Pataphysics magazine from Melbourne, the Pirate issue.
Interviews with Dave Hickey, Bruce LaBruce, Barney Rosset on Grove Press and living in a house designed by Pierre Chareau, Doing Theory by Sylvère Lotringer, 10 business cards and 5 Poems by Tony Towle, Rifle Range Drive by Jennifer McCamley, Burning Interior by David Shapiro, Rudi Ketz on Peter Lindbergh, Area Man Found Crucified by Joyce Carol Oates.
Published and edited by Leo Edelstein and Yanni Florence in Melbourne, with Judith Elliston, 2001, and long out of print. Fine copy.
2002, English
Softcover, 70 pages, 20.8 x 29.3 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Pataphysics Books / Melbourne
$45.00 - Out of stock
Out of print 2002 issue of the great Pataphysics magazine from Melbourne, the Psychomilitary issue.
Interviews with Paul Virilio & Sylvère Lotringer on The Genetic Bomb, Karl Jansen on the near-death experience via ketamine, Teddy Goldsmith on ecological fascism, The Empire of Disorder by Alain Joxe, Lemurs, Survivor by Chris Kraus, The Man and a Man with His Mule by Brian Aldiss, The Secret Mirror by Joyce Carol Oates, Execution I & II by David Miller, Facing the Camera by Sylvère Lotringer, Orangewash: An Amazonian Jungle Beauty by Rudi Ketz, 337,000, December, 2000 by Aaron Fogel, Rise of the Spirit of Independence by David Shapiro.
Published and edited by Leo Edelstein and Yanni Florence in Melbourne, with Judith Elliston, 2002, and long out of print. Fine copy.
1982, English
Softcover, 24 pages, 21.5 x 28 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The Renaissance Society / Chicago
$20.00 - In stock -
"To consume in America is not to buy; it is to dream. Advertising is the suggestion that the dream of entering the third person singular might possibly be fulfilled." — Don DeLillo
These are the artists who put the load-bearing post in postmodern, making the visual politics of media, marketplace and patriarchy the crucial issues for the 1980s: Sarah Charlesworth, Eric Bogosian, Nancy Dwyer, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Robert Longo, Richard Prince, David Salle, Cindy Sherman. A Fatal Attraction brought these and other artists who share these concerns together at a seminal point in this movement. This exhibition catalogue is a valuable reference for scholarship of this period of contemporary art, not to mention a cultural relic from an important moment in recent art history. Tom Lawson's essay links the artists within a set of shared concerns-deconstruction of institutionalized pleasure, demystification of representation-that follow from the discourse of 1960s and 70s conceptual art, but takes this critique of ideology from the insulated art world out into the streets and living rooms of America.
1979, English
Softcover, 188 pages, 28 x 22 cm
1st US Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
St. Martin's Press / New York
$70.00 - Out of stock
Softcover edition of the first (only) printing of cult photobook "High School U.S.A.", Jim Richardson's intimate 1979 portrait of American adolescence at Rossville High in Rossville, Kansas.
For three years in the late 1970's, Richardson photographed and documented the life of these high school teenagers, coming back every year to vicariously live through all of the life-altering events that high school presents to these young adults. Richardson's photographs of students, teachers, and coaches at Rossville High School in Rossville, Kansas, combined with the students' own words, capture the high school experience from football season to graduation and through identity struggles and romantic involvements that files perfectly alongside Joseph Szabo's great "Almost Grown".
Good Copy throughout with decent cover wear (see picture).
1971, English
Hardcover (w. dustjacket), 82 pages, 29 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Thomas Nelson / Melbourne
$190.00 - Out of stock
First hardcover edition of this Australian photo-book classic. In 1971, photographer Rennie Ellis and co-photographer and close friend, Wesley Stacey, published Kings Cross Sydney, which, as Ellis puts it "examines the surface glitter and underground guts of the Cross". An intimate look at the height of Kings Cross, before gentrification and controversial lock-out laws had their way with it. Illustrated throughout with black and white and colour photographs alongside quotes and stories from/about local residents (inc. the "Witch of Kings Cross", Rosaleen Norton), workers, businesses, controversies, and politics of Kings Cross. Colloquially known as The Cross, The Kings Cross district was Sydney's bohemian heartland from the early decades of the 20th century, known for its music halls and grand theatres and home to a large number of artists, writers, poets and journalists. From the 1960s onwards Kings Cross came to serve as the city's red-light district and entertainment mecca.
"Between the time when work was begun on this book and its appearance in the shops, Kings Cross has continued in its haphazard state of flux. The park at the El Alamein Fountain has been paved, the 'full
reveal' has become standard in the strip clubs, several night spots have gone out of existence and others
have opened in their places, Rose the Flower Seller has died, as have Tilly Devine, Chips Rafferty and
Kenneth Slessor, Sammy Lee has grown a moustache, and many more old buildings have crumbled under
the wreckers' hammers. Yet, the book remains a valid statement about the changing society it reflects because its images freeze moments in time that will forever remain symbols of the unusual character of the Cross. With their cameras Rennie Ellis and Wesley Stacey have penetrated the slick veneer of life at Kings Cross and revealed the beauty and the pathos, as well as the seaminess, which lurk beneath the tinsel glitter. The affinity which the authors feel for the place, the people, and their attitudes, has resulted in
an honest appraisal which may sadden, amuse, shock or repel, but never fair to intrigue those who read or look at the book."
"Over a period of six months the authors made frequent forays into the Cross armed with their cameras
and tape recorder. It was only by becoming known to the locals that they were able to record some of
the remarkable scenes in this book. Nevertheless, there is much that they learned about the Cross
which can only be hinted The laws of libel and the threats of bashings ensure a diplomatic silence. As
one of the authors put it: 'When a guy pulls a pistol on you and says that he's going to shoot you, you know
that it's time to put away your camera and retire gracefully.'"
Very Good copy, in Good dust jacket, preserved under mylar wrap. Internally clean, well-preserved, with a great one-page letter home from a group of Americans(?) reflecting on their fond experience of the Cross.
2020, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket and obi-strip), 144 pages, 15 x 21 cm
Published by
Tokyo Kirara / Tokyo
$65.00 - Out of stock
"Do not shoot!" - I heard Miles' real voice trembling for the first time.
A special collection of photographs by photographer Shigeru Uchiyama that capture every moment of Emperor Miles, such as precious recorded photographs from Miles Davis' Japan tours from 1981 to 1988, unreleased photographs, and private shots of his later years.
Shigeru Uchiyama's photographic sensibility is central to Tokyo's jazz scene, his works appearing on numerous jazz record jackets (Sun Ra Arkestra, Jaco Pastorius, Weather Report, Keith Jarrett, The Art Ensemble Of Chicago, etc), in the pages of jazz magazines, and as the exclusive photographer of Jazz clubs in Tokyo, including Bruce Array Japan, Blue Note Tokyo, Keystone Corner Tokyo, Sweet Basil 139. He recorded all of the jazz festivals and large touring concerts and published the cult photo book "Miles Smiles" which documeted Uchiyama's photography of Miles Davis over 10 years. "No Picture!" follows this book into the Miles Davis of the 1980s.
2021, English
Softcover, 184 pages, 23 x 31 cm
Published by
Roma / Amsterdam
$60.00 - Out of stock
BILL 3 is the third issue of an annual magazine of photographic stories, edited and designed by Julie Peeters. BILL 3, a special archival issue, features unpublished Martin Margiela lookbook photographs, a horse, street style from the 90’s, vases of Japan, a silver story, a flash forward and back, tennis, an icecube tray, more Margiela, Hysteric Glamour and a bunch of frivilous images.
The stories are sourced from the book collections of RareBooksParis and Julie Peeters. Printed in 2020, bound in 2021
2016, English / Italian
Softcover (w. dustjacket), 496 pages, 23 x 31 cm
Published by
A+m Bookstore / Viaindustriae
$109.00 - Out of stock
The ultimate compendium of counterculture press in the United States and the Netherlands during the heady decades of the 1960s and ’70s, this volume is the definition of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll. From underground pornography, free love, anti-establishment anarchism, and Provo, to anti-war protests, spiritual empowerment, the Black Panthers, and women’s liberation, it’s all here. Page after page of magazine covers, articles, advertisements, and clippings encapsulate the era when academia revolted, gays marched in the streets, and hippies wondered if Jesus got high, too. Newspapers and magazines included are Aloha, American Avatar, Avatar, Bauls, Berkeley Barb, Berkeley Tribe, Big Muddy Gazette, Countdowm, East Village The Other, Fapto, Fire!, Freedom News, Friends, Gay, Gay Power, Gay Scene, Gay Sunshine, Georgia Straight, Good Times, Haight Ashbury Eye, Haight Ashbury Free Press, Haight Ashbury Love Street, Haight Ashbury Maverick, Haight Ashbury Tribune, Harbinger, Helix, Hitweek, Idiot International, Iets, Insekten Sekte, Juche, Kabouter Krant, Kaleidoscope, King Kong International, Kiss, Klaas Krant, Liberated Guardian, Los Angeles Free Press, Mondo Beat, Muhammad Speaks, Nola Express, Old Mole, Open City, Oracle Los Angeles, Oracle San Francisco, Other Scenes, Peninsula Observer, Pic up, Pleasure, Provo, Quicksilver Times, Rampage, Rat, Real Free Press, Re Nudo, Rising Up Angry, Royal World Countdown, San Francisco Ball, San Francisco Express Times, Screw, Search & Destroy, Sette Aprile, Sniffin' Glue, Southern Free Press, Spy-in, Styng, Suck, The Bird, The Black Dwarf, The Black Panther, The International Times, The New York Review of Sex, The Oracle, The Seed, Virginity, Washington Free Press, Witte Krant.
2021, English / French
Softcover, 336 pages, 15 x 21 cm
Published by
Octopus Notes / Paris
$48.00 $20.00 - Out of stock
The tenth issue of the biannual journal-collection that brings together academic writings, interviews with artists, critical essays and artists’ interventions in the form of inserts.
With & about Sara de Chiara, Rafael Corcostegui, Moyra Davey, Pierre Dulieu, Guillaume Dustan, Jana Euler, Sylvie Fanchon, Jim Fletcher, Alexander García Düttmann, Jeanne Graff, Gary Haller, Alex Hay, Martin Laborde, Daniel Lentz, Mina Loy, Liz Magor, Nick Mauss, Nicolas Moufarrege, Baptiste Pinteaux, Richard Rezac, Clément Roussier, Edith Schloss, Albert Serra, Pierre Thévenin, Belén Uriel, Charles Veyron, Robin Waart, Emily Wardill, Román Yñán.
Edited by Alice Dusapin, Martin Laborde, Baptiste Pinteaux, Alice Pialoux.
Designed by Marc Touitou & Robert Milne.
2021, English
Softcover, 496 pages, 21 x 26 cm
Published by
Roma / Amsterdam
$100.00 - Out of stock
Aglaia Konrad’s photographic work probes the social, cultural, economic, political, and historical parameters that inform architecture and urbanism. 'Japan Works' is the result of her journey through Japan in the autumn of 2019. Using a pre-compiled list of places with exceptional architecture, Konrad took thousands of photos in Tokyo, Itoigawa, Kyoto, Nagoya and Osaka. In addition to mostly iconic, post-war Metabolist architecture, Konrad also took a large number of photos of nonspecific architectural moments and infrastructure that, with the same intensity, give their own impression of the architectural landscape in Japan. Free associations of full-page photographs alternate with contact sheets documenting her itinerary. These are informed by postscript glosses written by architect and critic Julian Worrall.
1991, French / Japanese
Softcover (2 volumes in cardboard slipcase), 112 pages / 112 pages, 19 x 18.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
PARCO / Tokyo
$160.00 - Out of stock
First two-volume box edition of this scarce publication on the work of Bernard Faucon, issued only in Japan in 1991 by PARCO and dedicated entirely to Faucon's major body of photographic work (accompanied by his writings) Les Idoles et les Sacrifices (1989–1991). Beautifully printed and bound in Japan.
“Idols and Sacrifices mark the end of a long cycle of abstraction, idealisation, that had led from the first pleasant times on the beach to the gold haze of the Chambers. The end also of an innocence, a magic confidence in the power of the image, in that 'leibnitzian' idea that every image contains all others, contains the world.
Dressed up as a sort of back-to-basics of photography, back to the classic genres, 'the Portrait and the Landscape'. Idols and Sacrifices constitute a laying-bare, a radicalisation, a simplifying of the means that will take me to the End Of The Image. The wish to face, once at least, the body only, beauty without artifice. The wish to answer in my own way the question of the living: since the living cannot be photographed, we will try and photograph the gods!
The red landscapes imposed themselves later, because Idol and Sacrifice make up an inseparable couple, and also as a metaphor of the powerlessness of photography, of its incurable deficiency faced with the intensity of the living, the red of Sacrifices becomes the wound, the despair of photography itself.” - Bernard Faucon
Bernard Faucon (b. 1950 in Provence) is a French photographer and writer. Faucon was one of the first photographers in the second half of the 20th century to systematically create and master the constructed image, gaining fame worldwide in the late 1970s when he started a new trend of mise en scène photo. His photographic work has a love of youth and dreamy beauty, using saturated colour, natural settings, rooms and often tableaux of mannequins. For more than 20 years, his staged photographs have been exhibited in international galleries such as Leo Castelli in New York, and Agathe Gaillard and Yvon Lambert in Paris. Elsewhere, he has also been a part of collective exhibitions dedicated to staged photography. He has won numerous awards from his work, including the Grand Prix National (1989), and the Prix Leonard de Vinci (1991). His major photographic series are, in date-order: Les Grandes Vacances (1977–1981); Evolution probable du Temps (1981–1984); Les Chambres d'amour (1987–1989); Les Idoles et les Sacrifices (1989–1991); Les écritures (1991–1993); and La Fin de L'image (1993–1995).
Very Good—Fine copy (Fine pristine volumes in VG original cardboard slipcase, with small closed tear, minor wear and tear.
1978, English
Softcover, 94 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Crown / New York
Barre Publishing / Massachusetts
$70.00 - Out of stock
First edition cult classic 1978 photobook on the folk art phenomenon of Scarecrows, and incidentally one of the best fashion photobooks ever published. Profusely illustrated throughout with wonderful portraits of scarecrows in fields and gardens across America and further afield (Portugal, Japan, France...) spanning the changing seasons of the late 1970s and immortalizing the ephemeral lives of these enchanting, melancholic, weather-worn rural custodians. The photography of Ann Parker (contributor to Art in America, the Smithsonian, Life, et al) pays special homage to the varying designs and character of the traditional folk art form.
Here to make a statement, not to make friends!
2020, English / Japanese
Hardcover, 116 pages, 19 x 27 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Tokyo Photographic Art Museum / Tokyo
$90.00 - Out of stock
Lovely hardcover catalogue published in Japan to accompany the 2020 exhibition 'Photography and Fashion Since the 1990s' at The Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, an exhibition exploring the relationship between photography and fashion from the 1990s onward, supervised by Nakako Hayashi. Born in 1966, Hayashi worked for Hanatsubaki, the culture magazine published by Shiseido, before becoming a freelance editor writing fashion and art articles for Ryu-ko-tsu-shin, Purple and other magazines, and publishing her cult journal Here and There. Through works of artists Anders Edström, Kyoji Takashi, Elein Fleiss, Yukinori Maeda, PUGMENT, Takashi Homma, the exhibition attempts to explore the relationship between photography and fashion. It displays, in addition to photographs, rare fashion magazines that became major turning points in their time and is accompanied by related events, for an engaging look at photography and fashion from many angles.
New copy.