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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World Food Books Gift Voucher
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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.
2019, English
Hardback, 48 pages, 30 x 37cm
Ed. of 400,
Published by
Publisher Revolver Publishing / Frankfurt
Secession / Vienna
$40.00 - In stock -
Published to accompany Gerard Byrne's exhibition titled Beasts at Secession, Vienna in February-March 2019, this large-format, cloth covered volume contains a text by the artist and a series of black and white silver gelatin and colour photographs taken at the Biologiska Museet in Stockholm. The circular-shaped museum, which closed in 2017, presented a comprehensive 360-degree diorama picture of the wilderness of northern Scandinavia. For the elaborate staging, prepared animals were arranged in front of a painted background. The museum was lit exclusively by daylight and in winter only for a few hours. In this dependence on daylight, according to Byrne, the museum resembled a camera, with the skylights as the lens and the diorama stuffed and frozen in photographic motionlessness as an image.
Published in an edition of 400 copies.
Gerard Byrne (b. 1969) is a visual artist working with photographic, video, and live art. In 2007 he represented Ireland in the Venice Biennale. Other major presentations of his work at international biennials include the biennales of Gwangju and Sydney in 2008, Lyon in 2007, the Tate Triennial in 2006, and the Istanbul Biennale in 2003.
2018, English / Spanish
Softcover, 96 pages, 33 x 23 cm
Published by
Koenig Books / London
CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo / Madrid
$59.00 - Out of stock
The work of Jochen Lempert (b. 1958) engages with photography from the optic of research and visuality, very often with the intention of questioning the criteria behind a search for the truth and the models that shape the world.
The artist portrays the animal world in the most varied contexts: ranging from the natural habitat to Natural History museums, from the zoo to the city, in remote locations or in banal situations and objects.
In his tireless quest, Lempert has managed to create a vast archive of images that covers a wide spectrum spanning everything from everyday views to compositions that tend more towards abstraction.
This interest in the natural world as subject matter is coupled with an exhaustive examination of the properties and materiality of the photographic image. Analogue, in black and white, and developed in the darkroom, his photos refuse to be categorised and are removed from contemporary aesthetic canons.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition, Jochen Lempert at CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid (1 June – 23 September 2018).
English and Spanish text.
2020, English / Japanese / French
Paperback, 192 pages, 22 x 30 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Koenig Books / London
$110.00 - Out of stock
Takashi Homma first encountered the work of Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret in Chandigarh, India in 2013, while producing photographs commissioned by the CCA. Following that experience, he decided to research and photograph the spatial and perceptual richness of windows in other works by Le Corbusier across the world. His research is part of the Windowology program initiated by the Window Research Institute, which aims to define the position of windows in the history of architecture across cultures—in this particular case, their role as spaces, rather than surfaces, that connect the interior of a building and the surrounding landscape, or the private and the public.
An essay by Tim Benton complements Homma’s photographs by tracing the evolution of the concept of windows in Le Corbusier’s work.
English, French and Japanese text.
2019, English
Softcover (w. die-cut jacket), 66 pages, 22 x 31.5 cm
Published by
MACK / London
$100.00 - In stock -
"An inexorable short circuit of beauty and violence" – Mousse Magazine
Out-of-print.
In this dark and beautiful book, Takashi Homma traces the blood trails of deer killed in Shiretoko National Park on the Japanese island of Hokkaido. Like ritualistic stains or calligraphic compositions, the photographs, which Homma made in the winters of 2009 to 2018, are at once abstract and symbolic. Considered by some to be sacred, deer in Japan have controversially faced culls due to their growing population, which upset agricultural communities struggling to protect their crops. To aid their mission in reducing numbers, the government encourages local hunters to take matters into their own hands. Homma photographs the effects – the red vestiges of wild life in the snow.
2017, English
Softcover, 198 pages, 33 x 25.5 cm
Published by
Arcadia University Art Gallery / Glenside
$90.00 - Out of stock
Photocopier is the most comprehensive publication on the work of Pati Hill (1921-2014), published on the occasion of the major survey exhibition, Pati Hill: Photocopier, A Survey of Prints and Books (1974-83), 2017-2018, Arcadia University Art Gallery, Glenside. This profusely illustrated publication considers the first phase of the cross-disciplinary art of Pati Hill. Although her exploration of the copier, which she called “a found instrument—a saxophone without directions,” did not begin until the early 1970s, Hill is regarded as a pioneer due to her singular approach and commitment to the medium. Employing the copier to record items as common as a gum wrapper or as unexpected as a dead swan, she also applied the process to transform appropriated photographs for her experiments with narrative. This catalogue features twelve different projects, including Hill’s attempt to photocopy the palace and grounds of Versailles.
1990, English
Hardcover, 48 pages, 26.5 x 31 cm
1st edition of 3000 copies.,
Published by
Miyake Design Studio / Tokyo
$160.00 - Out of stock
First edition of the scarce "Issey Miyake by Irving Penn" (1990), printed only once in a limited edition of 3,000 copies and published by the Miyake Design Studio in Tokyo, 1990. Said to have not been available for sale, but rather distributed to trade only.
This beautiful oversized hardcover volume is made up entirely of legendary photographer Irving Penn's elegant images of the great Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake's 1990 collection, in full-colour on gloss stock. One of the greatest collaborative partnerships in fashion image history.
‘through his eyes penn-san reinterprets the clothes, gives them new breath, and presents them to me from a new vantage point — one that I may not have been aware of, but had been subconsciously trying to capture. Without penn-san’s guidance, I probably could not have continued to find new themes with which to challenge myself, nor could I have arrived at new solutions.’ – Issey Miyake (from Irving Penn: A Career in Photography, the Art Institute of Chicago, 1997)
credits:
Clothing Design by lssey Miyake
Photographs by Irving Penn
Book Design by lkko Tanaka
Face by Tyen
Hair by John Sahag
Modeled by Yuki Fujii
Printed and bound by Nissha Printing Company, Kyoto, Japan
Published by Miyake Design Studio, Tokyo, Japan
Published in a limited edition of 3,000 copies
Fine copy.
1985, Japanese / English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 242 pages, 28 x 36 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Obunsha Co. Ltd. / Tokyo
$180.00 - Out of stock
First edition of the beautiful and incredibly rare "Issey Miyake & Miyake Design Studio 1970-1985 (Works Words Years)". This heavy, over-sized monograph on Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake was published in 1985 by Obunsha in Tokyo. Lavishly illustrated with full-colour photographic documentation of Miyake's designs between 1970-1985, with texts largely in Japanese (and a small amount of English), all designed by Miyake Design Studio and printed immaculately in Japan. Includes a chronology of these years with various clippings, plus a wonderful group portrait of the Miyake Design Studio staff. A stunning volume from the 1980's on one of the greatest fashion designers of our time.
Includes the original industry press-release from Miyake Design Studio president Midori Kitamura inserted and printed on great 80s MDS letterhead.
Very good copy in VG original dust jacket, with only light wear and light occasional age spotting.
2002, Japanese
Softcover, 307 pages, 259 x 180 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Tokyo Shimbun / Tokyo
$100.00 - Out of stock
First edition of this scarce, visually generous Japanese catalogue that takes a deep look into the photographic work of Man Ray. Published on the occasion the exhbition 'Photographies de Man Ray' that opened at the Bunkamura Museum and then traveled to three other museums in Japan in 2002-03. Densely packed with 559 beautifully reproduced photographs, the well known and the seldom seen, catalogued into major subjects, often thematically sequenced. From his prolific, experimental portraiture, nudes, fashion, still-life, landscapes, and work within the Surrealist and Dada movements, this heavy volume provides an exhaustive study of this great photographer. Man Ray is also noted for his work with photograms, which he called "rayographs," and many other experimental processes he brought into the photographic studio, all featured herein. Includes an illustrated biography, bibliography, catalogue listing and texts in Japanese and French.
Born Emmanuel Radnitzky in 1890 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Man Ray was a renowned representative of avant-garde photography in the 20th century and is considered as the pioneer of Surrealist photography. A major contributor to the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal, Man Ray produced major works in a variety of media including drawings, objects and films, but considered himself a painter above all. one of the most significant contributors to the Dada and Surrealist movements, and to modern art in general.
Very Good-Fine copy.
1979, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 27.6 x 21 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Shogakukan / Tokyo
$100.00 - Out of stock
Huge photographic compendium of famed Japanese photographer Kishin Shinoyama's commercial "Gekisha" works for 1970s Japanese men's magazine GORO and other sun-kissed commercial nude portrait work, featuring mostly full-bleed vivid colour photoshoots of 135 young models, mostly famous Japanese actresses and pop idols of the period... including Momoe Yamaguchi, Aki Mizusawa, Saori Minami, Aiko Morishita, Yūko Asano, Hiromi Iwasaki, Kumiko Oba, Nana Okada, Ikue Sakakibara, Junko Sakurada, Keiko Takeshita, Satomi Tezuka, Masako Natsume, Akiko Nishina, Mieko Harada, Aiko Morishita... even The Runaways. As friends and models, Shinoyama continued to photograph and collaborate with many of these women throughout their careers. Includes summary of the shoots with magazines covers, spreads, outtakes, behind the scenes and commentary in Japanese.
Kishin Shinoyama was born in 1940, in Tokyo, Japan. He embarked on his career while studying in the Department of Photography at Nippon University, and was awarded the Advertising Photographer’s Association prize, among others. After being employed at the Light Publicity advertising company, he started to work as a freelance photographer in 1968. His work is acclaimed for the portraits of the most famous celebrities of our day and age, such as John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Rie Miyazawa, and other major personalities. In his “Gekisha” and “Shinorama” series, he carries on capturing the times using new forms of expression and new technologies. He is also an exponent of solarization and has used it to challenge preconceived ideas of beauty and the nude.
Very Good copy but glue binding has seperated, yet all content (book block) remains well-bound together to covers, so actually makes for better use! Otherwise nicely preserved with light wear and tanning to edges. In Good dust jacket.
2009, English / Japanese
Softcover, 214 pages, 21 x 25.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography / Tokyo
$180.00 - Out of stock
First edition of this great out of print monograph on the work of Japanese photographer Keizo Kitajima, published by the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. Contains 189 works from 1975 to 1991, beautifully reproduced, introducing and surveying all of Keizo's incredible major bodies of work : KOZA, TOKYO, NEW YORK, EASTERN EUROPE, USSR, alongside biography, and great texts in English and Japanese. A terrific overview of a great artist.
Keizo Kitajima (b .1954, Suzaka, Nagano) is a leading figure in the rise of Japanese photography in the 1970s and 1980s, first coming to be known for his grainy black-and-white shots of people on the streets of Tokyo, at an American military base in Okinawa after the end of the Vietnam War, and in New York. Daido Moriyama, with whom Kitajima first studied photography, praised his talent as a gifted snapshooter by calling him ‘a street killer in broad daylight.’ Kitajima’s image Shop CAMP, set up in the bustling Shinjuku area in 1976 in collaboration with Moriyama, was a pioneering experimental space for photographers before the gallery system was established. In his legendary experimental series Photo Express (1979), Kitajima photographed people at bars and on the streets in Shinjuku at night right outside the CAMP, converted the gallery into a darkroom to make wallsized prints as a public performance event, and even published the images as an instant booklet. Through these processes of delivering images immediately, the artist explored the ways that time affects photography in terms of documentation, record and memory. Kitajima spent six months in New York roaming its gritty streets and hanging out in its clubs, resulting in the book New York (1982) . He presents a vision of the 1980s New York, full of energy, decadence and moments of quiet desperation. Like the city the publication is full of stark juxtapositions, flamboyant displays of outrageous behaviour are shown next to pictures of desolation and dejection. For this photo book Kitajima received the important Kimura Ihei Award in 1983. Kitajima’s work has been shown in many Japanese and international exhibitions and his publications are popular among collectors of photo books and the importance of his work has been recognised by numerous Japanese photographic awards.
Very Good copy.
2014, English / German
Hardcover, 104 pages, 24 x 18 cm
Published by
MACK / London
$86.00 - Out of stock
With his series of black and white images of German landscapes, created between 1987 and 1997, Michael Schmidt has designed a new imagery that deconstructs the world that presents itself to him. As works of light and form, Schmidt's paintings are characterized by a wealth of silver tones and a spectrum of shades of gray, whose play of light and dark evolves imperceptibly and in an almost mystical way. Through the use of filters Schmidt is also able to neutralize the world, making it difficult for the subjective perception of the viewer. Through this process, a process of montage, Michael Schmidt creates his own idiom and with the linear sequence of images in the book a self-contained world.
Michael Schmidt was born in 1945 in Berlin. He died there on May 24, 2014, a few days after NATURE was printed. With his photographic works Michael Schmidt has created some of the most important works of his medium. He became known through his books, in particular "truce" (1987), "U-NI-TY" (1996), "Berlin after 45" (2005) and "food" (2012).
2020, English / German
Hardcover, 120 pages, 26 x 24.1 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$120.00 - In stock -
After the reissue of Michael Schmidt’s legendary photobook, Waffenruhe (1987) comes a second edition of the artist’s book, Berlin-Wedding from 1978 that has long been out of print.
In it, Schmidt photographed the district of Berlin-Wedding in a documentary style. Although the project was the result of an assignment from the district authority, Schmidt formulated his artistic vision of the city and its inhabitants.
Part of the realisation is the conscious composition of the black-and-white photographs in a broad palette of grey tones. This trait of the original photographs and the first edition of Berlin-Wedding is also realised in the reissue.
Michael Schmidt commented on this: “Pushing the pictures into immeasurable grey, so that black and white no longer even appear in them, was a completely conscious step […] I thought the world can not be clearly defined, but presents itself in many nuances.”
Features texts by renowned art critic and author, Heinz Ohff (1922-2006), and Chief Curator of the Haus der Kunst in Munich, Thomas Weski.
English and German text.
2006, English / Japanese
Softcover, 110 pages, 28 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography / Tokyo
$100.00 - Out of stock
Scarce Japanese catalogue on contemporary Australian artist Destiny Deacon, published on the occasion of the 2006 Japanese presentation at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography of a major touring survey exhibition, "Destiny Deacon: Walk & Don't Look Blak", curated by Natalie King and assistant curator Virginia Fraser. Profusely illustrated throughout with Destiny's incredible photographic works, alongside a collection of her writings, a conversation with Virginia Fraser, contributions by Marcia Langton, Richard Bell, Harumi Niwa and Natalie King, biography, catalogue of exhibited works and more. Edited by Museum curators Harumi Niwa and Keishi Mitsui, with exhibition curators Natalie King and Virginia Fraser.
Texts in English and Japanese.
Destiny Deacon (b. 1957, Maryborough, Queensland. Lives and works Melbourne, Victoria). Destiny Deacon is a descendant of the KuKu (Far North Queensland) and Erub/Mer (Torres Strait) people. An artist, broadcaster and political activist, her performative photographs, videos and installations feature members of her family and friends as well as items from her collection of ‘Aboriginalia’ – assorted black dolls and kitsch. Partly autobiographical and partly fictitious, her acerbic and melancholic work deals with both historical issues and contemporary Aboriginal life and is informed by personal experience and the mass media. Deacon’s humorous works examine the wide discrepancies between representations of Aboriginal people by the white Australian population and the reality of Aboriginal life. In her ‘lo-tech’ productions, Deacon creates an insightful comedy that is effective in establishing a discourse about political, Indigenous and feminist concerns.
Fine copy, almost As New.
1993, French
Softcover, 144 pages, 12 x 17 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Editions Yellow Now / Belgium
$50.00 - Out of stock
First edition of the 1993 French photo-book of Jean-Luc Godard's "Bande à part" (Band of Outsiders, 1964), published in Belgium and written by Barthélemy Amengual, the Algerian born film critic, essayist, historian, educator, and film club host who settled in Paris in 1968 where he would write for the film periodicals Cahiers du Cinéma, Positif, French Screen, Young Cinema, CinémAction and more.
Alongside profuse photographic documentation through beautiful film stills, this landscape book compiles Amengual's accounts and commentary of this iconic genre-defying milestone of French New Wave cinema, conversations with director Jean-Luc Godard and cinematographer Raoul Coutard, filmography, bibliography, and more. An ingenious and unconventional study by one of the greatest names in French criticism.
"Four years after Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard reimagined the gangster film even more radically with Band of Outsiders (Bande à part). In it, two restless young men (Sami Frey and Claude Brasseur) enlist the object of both of their fancies (Anna Karina) to help them commit a robbery—in her own home. This audacious and wildly entertaining French New Wave gem is at once sentimental and insouciant, effervescently romantic and melancholy, and it features some of Godard’s most memorable set pieces, including the headlong race through the Louvre and the unshakably cool Madison dance sequence."
2015, English
3 leporello books in slipcase, 24 photographs, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
The Fondazione Querini Stampalia / Venice
$180.00 - Out of stock
Wonderful first, only edition of this special catalogue of work by Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri, published on the occasion of an exhibition at the Carlo Scarpa designed Fondazione Querini Stampalia in 2015, organised by Italian collector Roberto Lombardi. Comprises of a collection of three double-sided leporello photographic books of 8 Ghirri photographs, each photo 21 x 15 cm, totalling 24 works, housed in a cardboard slipcase and only available via the exhibition. The exhibition established the Ghirri Fund at the Fondazione. The cycle is conceived as an "artist's book": a story, devoid of protagonists, of the landscape of the Po Valley between Veneto, Emilia and Lombardy in which, retracing the photographed places, the author does not respect the topographical location, but follows a itinerary all immersed in the associative memory: melancholy, imprecision of memory, a sense of suspension and enchantment are the feelings that animate this journey.
Luigi Ghirri (1943–92) was a celebrated Italian artist and photographer known for his color photographs of landscape and architecture. He published his first photography book, Kodachrome, in 1978, and continued to utilize a conceptual framework to interrogate the line between fiction and reality.
The Fondazione Querini Stampalia is a cultural institution in Venice, Italy, founded in 1869 at the behest of Conte Giovanni (Count John), the last descendant of the Venetian Querini Stampalia family. Architect Carlo Scarpa designed interior, exterior, and garden elements and spaces on the ground floor of the historic building.
As New.
2015, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 17 x 24 cm
Published by
Valiz / Amsterdam
$50.00 - Out of stock
The Shape of Evidence examines the role and use of visual documents in contemporary art, looking at artworks in which the document is valued not only as a source of information but also as a distinctive visual and critical form. It contends that for artists who use film, photography or written sources, adopting formats derived from specific professional, industrial, scientific of or commercial contexts, the document offers a way to develop a critical reflection around issues of representation, knowledge production, art and its history.
It addresses several issues that are key both in art and in general culture today: the role of the museum and the archive, the role of documents and the trust that is placed in them, the circulation of such images and the historical genealogies that can be drawn in relation to images. Its uniqueness, however, also derives from its method: it is based on a close reading of a select number of works of art (e.g. Christopher Williams, Fiona Tan, Jean-Luc Moulène), which makes it approachable and engaging with the reader.
Moreover it applies an interdisciplinary perspective: while being about contemporary art it discusses objects and ideas drawn from a wide spectrum of areas including literature, history, photography history, scientific representation, surrealism, conceptual art, commercial photography and so forth.
The Shape of Evidence invites viewers to reflect upon the production and interpretation of seemingly straightforward images, and proposes that some artists can show us through their practice how to turn these deceptively simple images inside out.
Sophie Berrebi (1973) is a writer, art historian and occasional curator, born in Paris and living in Amsterdam. Her writing has appeared in frieze, Afterall, Metropolis M, and Art and Research, among other publications. She received her PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, and has been based at the University of Amsterdam since 2003 where she teaches art history and theory, mainly in the areas of photography and contemporary art.
2014, English
Hardcover, 330 pages, 26 x 24 cm
Published by
Steidl / Göttingen
Fundación Mapfre / Madrid
$120.00 - Out of stock
This comprehensive book accompanies the first large retrospective exhibition of Lewis Baltz’s work following his passing in 2014. Lewis Baltz explores the artist’s oeuvre as a complex whole of interrelated series, from his first “Prototypes” and “The Tract Houses” to “Park City,” “San Quentin Point,” and “Candlestick Point” through to “New Sites of Technology” and “Venezia Marghera,” all published by Steidl. The book simultaneously locates Baltz’s work in the context of photography and contemporary art since the 1970s, to fully examine his significant influence and legacy.
Baltz is one of the most prominent representatives of the New Topographics movement, which was seminal to the development of conceptual photography. His photo series document the impact of industrial civilization on the landscape, focusing on places outside the bounds of canonical reception: urban wastelands, abandoned industrial sites, warehouses. His photographs uncover the correspondences between everyday spatial forms and the more advanced forms found in art. Baltz’s strategies reflect a deep knowledge of the history of photography and present the photographer as a teacher of seeing who visualizes the world in reductive, often ironic, gestures.
2013, English
Hardcover, 312 pages, 28 x 27 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$100.00 - Out of stock
"Objects as Friends" - the collaborative work of Belgian artists Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys - consists of some 300 digital photographs of identical proportions depicting seemingly random, brightly lit assemblies of cheap, battered objects shot against a recurring gray background and standing or lying on a dust-stained floor. A tire, a stool, a rubber boot, a dismembered umbrella; many things appear broken, picked up from the street, or bought in one of those one-euro shops whose garish interior lighting is so successfully duplicated in these bleak, underwhelming stilllives.
The Belgian artists Jos de Gruyter (b. 1965) and Harald Thys (b. 1966) have collaborated for more than two decades on artworks in a variety of media, including film, photography, drawing, painting, and sculpture; they are known for thought-provoking works, often imbued with an antic sense of humor. Depression, autism, power games, psychosis, sexual tensions and idolatry are just a few of the interests that Jos De Gruyter & Harald Thys have cited as crucial to their dark repertoire. The pair was selected to represent Belgium at the 2019 Venice Biennale. Its title, "Mondo Cane", refers to a 1962 Italian film that documented-in a style intended to provoke Western audiences-cultural practices from around the world.
2012, English
Softcover, 72 pages, 15 x 25 cm
Published by
Getty Trust Publications / Los Angeles
$56.00 - In stock -
Annette Leddy and Donna Conwell
Introduction by Dawn Ades
“Farewell to Surrealism” is the title of a 1943 essay by Austrian artist-critic Wolfgang Paalen published in the inaugural issue of the journal Dyn. The journal was founded by Paalen and an international group of writers and artists taking refuge in Mexico City during World War II, including Wolfgang Paalen, Alice Rahon, and Eva Sulzer. Several of them had been part of André Breton’s Parisian surrealist circle in the 1930s. When they arrived in Mexico, they were still proponents of surrealism. Two years later, however, this group had broken with Breton and set out to define a new direction for art. Their vision coalesced in the pages of Dyn.
While recent scholarship has treated individual artists in the circle, this study is the first to examine the new aesthetic found in Dyn itself. Transformed by the mysterious pre-Columbian artifacts, distressed by the failure of political ideology, and inspired by scientific discoveries of the day, these artists played a critical but under-recognized role in the transition from surrealism to abstract expressionism. This catalogue accompanied an exhibition of the same name on view at the Getty Research Institute October 2, 2012 to February 17, 2013.
Annette Leddy is a senior cataloguer and a consulting curator at the Getty Research Institute. Donna Conwell is an associate curator at Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, California. Dawn Ades is a semi-retired professor at the University of Essex.
1980-1990, Japanese
Softcover (staple-bound), 36 pages, 12.5 cm x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Fiction Inc. / Tokyo
$55.00 - Out of stock
"The Catalog" published sometime in Japan in the 1980s-1990s by Fiction, Inc., a specialty shop and distributor/publisher of fetish and erotic books in Tokyo in the 1980-90s. This lovely catalogue-fanzine is mostly comprised of full-page reproductions sampling a cross-section of content from catalogue publications including the work of John Willie, Bill Ward, Guido Crepax, Eric Stanton, Eneg, Carlo, Simone Devon, Sally Roberts, Irving Claw, Betty Page, and periodicals such as Glamour International, Stiletto, Rigorosa Disciplina, Sweet Gwen, Bizarre Comix, Bizarre Classix, Bizarre Photo Treasures, Best of Bizarre, and much more... Very heavily illustrated throughout with erotic photography and artwork, all catalogue text in Japanese, map to Fiction, Inc. shop.
Very Good, light tanning. Well preserved.
1990, Japanese
Hardcover, 120 pages, 13 x 19 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Heibonsha / Tokyo
$100.00 - Out of stock
First 1990 edition of this iconic photobook by Araki, distributed on the day of the funeral of Yoko, Araki's wife who died of cancer in 1990. One of the most popular of Araki's books, 'Chiro, My Love' is a delightful book devoted entirely to Araki's photographs of he and his wife Yoko's beloved cat, Chiro. Consisting of some 100 black and white photographs, this photographic essay presents Chiro in a variety of different moods and situations. On the balcony and on the roof of the neighborhood, on the sofa, in the shower, in Yoko's arms, on the sleeping belly of Araki... The figure of Chiro behaving freely, and Araki taking the shutter to love it. Poignant in retrospect as it includes a number of photos of Chiro with Yoko. ‘Yoko was very much looking forward to this book; its a pity she couldnt live to see it.’ Like Masahisa Fukase's "Sasuke", this is an intimate book for cats and photographers.
Very Good copy.
1993, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket and obi-strip), 150 pages, 26 x 19.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Heibonsha Limited Publishers / Tokyo
$100.00 - Out of stock
Wonderful first edition of this 1993 photobook of Nobuyoshi Araki's cat photographs, captured in black-and-white throughout the streets of Tokyo. Lovely design with mostly full-page reproductions throughout on various gloss and raw paper stocks.
Nobuyoshi Araki is a prolific Japanese photographer who has produced thousands of photographs over the course of his career. He became famous for “Un Voyage Sentimental” (1971), a series of photos depicting both banal and deeply intimate scenes of his wife and lifelong muse, essayist Aoki Yoko (whom the artist credits for making him a photographer), during their honeymoon. To date the 75 year old has produced 450 photo books and counting. With a repertoire that knows no boundaries, Araki's diaristic style of photography has captured the world around him (his cat Ciro, the people and landscapes of Japan and his travels, flowers, family), though it is Araki’s intensely sexual imagery that has elicited particular controversy and fascination throughout his career. Similarly to Helmut Newton, Araki has often addressed subversive themes — such as bondage in the Japanese style Kinbaku — in his provocative depictions of female nudes. He typically works in black-and-white photography, and his hallmark style is deliberately casual. “Rather than shooting something that looks like a professional photograph, I want my work to feel intimate, like someone in the subject’s inner circle shot them,” he says. Pushing against the world of commercialised photography, he is celebrated for his history of self-publishing and distributing his work, beginning with his Xerox Photo Albums of 1970. Amongst many others, Araki has collaborated with American photographer Nan Goldin and Icelandic musician Björk.
Very Good in peach gloss wraps with original illustrated dustjacket (light wear) and publisher's obi-strip.
1983 / 1986 Ed., English
Softcover, 96 pages, 20.5 x 22 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Currey O'Neil / Melbourne
$190.00 - In stock -
Award winning Australian photographer Rennie Ellis' cult classic photo-book, "Life's A Beach", first published in Melbourne in 1983. Steeped in beach lore since his early days as a lifesaver and surfer, Ellis put together this vivid collection of quintessential images of Australian beach life with great affection and insight. These early 1980's photographs shimmer with summer light and a graceful, infectious sensuality - the greatest photographic collection of Australian beach culture put to paper.
"On the beach we chuck away our clothes, our status and our inhibitions and engage in rituals of sun-worship and baptism. It's a retreat to our primal needs." Rennie Ellis
No other photographer has documented Australian society in such depth and with such insight into the human condition as Rennie Ellis. Active from the 1970s until his death in 2003, Rennie Ellis' non-judgmental approach was his 'access-to-all-areas' pass. Ellis used his camera as a key to open the doors to the social arenas of the rich and famous and to enter the underbelly of the nightclubs, bearing witness to the indulgences and excesses. In today's post-Henson era, these captured moments offer an intimate access to an Australia tantalisingly, but sadly, now almost out of reach.
As New copy except for light creasing to covers. Otherwise a perfectly kept unread deadstock copy.
2011, English
Softcover, 84 pages, 200 x 170 mm
Published by
Monash University Museum of Art / Melbourne
$20.00 $10.00 - Out of stock
Catalogue for the exhibition A Different Temporality which brought together feminist approaches to temporality in the visual arts, with a focus on late 1970s and early 1980s Australia. Rather than an encyclopaedic summation of feminist practice at that time, selected works reflected prevalent debates and modes of practice; with a focus upon the dematerialisation of the art object, the role of film theory, and the adoption of diaristic and durational modes of practice, including performance, photography and film.
Includes a major new contribution to the scholarship on Australian feminist art history from Dr Kyla McFarlane as well as important reviews and supporting texts from the 1970s and 80s, including notably, a previously unpublished interview conducted by Janet Burchill and Jennifer McCamley with the American conceptual artist, feminist, educator, and writer, Mary Kelly, in 1982.