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
Art
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World Food Books Gift Voucher
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Australian Art
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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.
1973, English
Softcover, 56 pages, 26.5 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Baroque Press / London
$30.00 - In stock -
The Image was a great periodical dedicated to the Graphic Arts and Photography, published monthly in the early 1970s by the Baroque Press of London. Each issue profiles artists with heavily illustrated spreads of their work alongside commentary and interviews.
This issue (Vol. 2 No. 1, 1973) includes features on: Youssuf Karsh, Australian photographer John Thornton (Bucci), Sue Coe, Grace Coddington, Alberto Vazquez, and more.
1973, English
Softcover, 56 pages, 26.5 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Baroque Press / London
$30.00 - In stock -
The Image was a great periodical dedicated to the Graphic Arts and Photography, published monthly in the early 1970s by the Baroque Press of London. Each issue profiles artists with heavily illustrated spreads of their work alongside commentary and interviews.
This issue (Vol. 2 No. 2, 1973) includes features on: Australian photographer Bob Davis, Terry O'Neill, Len Hickman, Brian Grimwood, Rod Turner, Laurie Lewis, and more.
1973, English
Softcover, 60 pages, 26.5 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Baroque Press / London
$20.00 - In stock -
The Image was a great periodical dedicated to the Graphic Arts and Photography, published monthly in the early 1970s by the Baroque Press of London. Each issue profiles artists with heavily illustrated spreads of their work alongside commentary and interviews.
This issue (Vol. 2 No. 3, 1973) includes features on: Dick Frank, David Montgomery, Celestino Valenti, George Hurrell, Arnaldo Putzu, and more.
1973, English
Softcover, 60 pages, 26.5 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Baroque Press / London
$25.00 - Out of stock
The Image was a great periodical dedicated to the Graphic Arts and Photography, published monthly in the early 1970s by the Baroque Press of London. Each issue profiles artists with heavily illustrated spreads of their work alongside commentary and interviews.
This issue (Vol. 2 No. 4, 1973) includes features on: David Hamilton, James McMullen, Michael Drobny, John Minihan, Mad Magazine, Rib Field, and more.
1969, English
Softcover, 66 pages, 29 x 22.5 cm
1st UK Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
C. J. Bucher Ltd. / Lucerne
$50.00 - In stock -
First English edition of the April 1969 issue of Switzerland's legendary Camera - International Magazine of Photography and Cinematography. Wonderful issue with the topic of the month being "Out of Fashion", featuring the photographic work of Jeanloup Sieff, Sam Haskins, Will McBride, Kishin Shinoyama, John Pfahl, and William Larson.
Very good copy with creases to back cover only, common light curling to both glossy covers.
1984, English
Softcover, 250 pages, 21 x 30 cm
1st edition, Out of print title / used*,
Published by
Biennale of Sydney / Sydney
$70.00 - Out of stock
Catalogue published on the occasion of the Fifth Biennale of Sydney 1984, 11 April – 17 June 1984. Under the artistic direction of Leon Paroissien the 1984 Biennale was titled "Private Symbol: Social Mataphor" and featured the work of Davida Allen, Armando, Art & Language, Terry Atkinson, Breda Beban, Joseph Beuys, Tony Bevan, Annette Bezor, Francois Boisrond, Peter Booth, Tomasz Ciecierski, Tony Cragg, Juan Davila, Antonio Dias Gonzalo Diaz, Eugenio Dittborn, Felix Droese, Marlene Dumas, Edward Dwurnik Mimmo Germana, Gilbert & George, Mike Glier, Hans Haacke, Jenny Holzer, Ralph Hotere, Jorg lmmendorff, Berit Jensen, Birgit Jürgenssen, Mike Kelley, Peter Kennedy, Anselm Kiefer, Karen Knorr, Barbara Kruger, Robert Longo, Colin McCahon, Syoko Maemoto, Sandra Meigs, Cildo Meireles, Gianni Melotti, Marisa Merz, Annette Messager, Olaf Metzel, Sara Modiano, Michael Mulcahy, Josef Felix Müller, Christa Näher, Annick Nozati, Anna Oppermann, Andy Patton, A.R. Penck, Robert Randall & Frank Bendinelli, Jytte Rex, Georges Rousse, Klaudia Schifferle, Hubert Schmalix, Cindy Sherman, Vincent Tangredi, Peter Taylor, Dragoljub Raéa Todosijevié, Vicki Varvaressos, Jenny Watson, Michiko Yano, Eva Man-Wah Yuen
This catalogue includes colour examples of the work of all participating artists alongside texts by Leon Paroissien, Annelie Pohlen, Carter Ratcliff, Jean-Louis Pradel, Leon Paroissien.
2015, English / German
Softcover, 216 pages (colour ill.), 31 x 24.5 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$80.00 - Out of stock
In a career spanning more than 30 years, encompassing such internationally renowned exhibition events as documenta (1997 and 2012) as well as the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (1999), and which has led the way to the world’s major museums, the artist has succeeded in creating new work complexes, objects and images that are continually surprising.
There had already been a great furor in the 1980s surrounding the reception of her wool works, machine knitted woolen fabrics attached to stretchers and then displayed as pictures. In a second group of works she assembled ordinary hotplates on shiny, white, enameled metal panels.
Objects with gender specific connotations were again re-contextualized, as had already occurred in the knitted pictures. These abstract works mainly originate from the 1990s and were the ones that secured Trockel’s place in the history of 20th century art.
This catalogue contains contributions by Johanna Burton, Yilmaz Dziewior, and Beate Söntgen that shed light on Trockel's art historical significance as well as her position in contemporary art. In his contribution, the American artist and author Sam Pulitzer takes an unconventional look at the work of Rosemarie Trockel.
Published for the exhibition at Kunsthaus Bregenz, 24 January – 6 April 2015.
Due to the weight of this volume, your order will likely incur additional postage costs. We will contact you with the best shipping advice upon your order, or alternatively, please email us in advance. Thank you for understanding.
2003, English
Softcover, 27 × 20 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used*,
Published by
Purple Institute / Paris
$80.00 - Out of stock
PURPLE Number 15, Spring-Summer 2003.
A rare early issue of the iconic Purple magazine, edited by Elein Fleiss and Olivier Zahm, this wonderful early edition features work by: Jeff Rain, Bruce Benderson, Nick Tosches, Dike Blair, Jens Hoffman, Miltos Manetas, Wolfgang Tillmans, Pierre Leguillon, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Desiree Heiss amd Ines Kaag, Kelley Walker, Robert Wright, Yukinori Maeda, Oscar van den Boogbaard, Rita Ackermann, Laetitia Benat, Mark Borthwick, Giasco Bertoli, Cécile Bortoletti, Lizzie Bougatsos, Anders Edström, Richard Kern, Justine Kurtland, Emmanuelle Mafille, Terry Richardson, Henry Roy, Masafumi Sanai, Chikashi Suzuki, Bless, and many many more.
In 1992 Olivier Zahm and his partner Elein Fleiss printed the first issue of Purple Prose, a Parisian literary art zine that over the years has evolved into Purple Fashion Magazine and Purple. Soon after the birth of Purple Prose, Zahm and Fleiss created spin-off publications like les cahiers purple, Purple Sexe, Purple Fiction, and of course, Purple Fashion. Zahm aimed at fusing together his two worlds, fashion and art, in creating Purple.
2018, English
Softcover (w. french flaps), 260 pages, 22.8 x 14 cm
Published by
MACK / London
$49.00 - Out of stock
Victor Burgin is one of the most influential artists and writers working today. He came to prominence as a key figure in the Conceptual Art movement of the late 1960s. After turning to photography in his artistic practice he produced a series of groundbreaking theoretical essays that drew on semiotics, psychoanalysis and feminism in order to think through the ideological role of photographs in the production of beliefs and values, and in the understanding of memory, history, subjectivity and space. This collection brings together for the first time Victor Burgin’s writings related specifically to the camera, following the shifts and nuances in his thinking over nearly five decades. Moreover, it allows us to chart the evolution of what the camera was and is, and how its affects are to be understood.
1974, German
Softcover, 112 pages, 30 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Heyne Verlag / Münich
$100.00 - Out of stock
First and only edition of Gunter Sachs' "Mädchen in Meinen Augen", published in 1974. This wonderful collection of intimate photographs by famous German photographer, gallerist, playboy and art collector, Gunter Sachs, collects his sensuous imagery of young women in sun saturated colours and dusky purple hues. Since 1972, Sachs was working professionally as a photographer, in 1973 he caused a stir with the first nude photograph for French Vogue. In 1976 he was awarded the Leica Award.
Gunter Sachs (1932 – 2011) was a German photographer, art collector, gallerist, industrialist, and third husband of Brigitte Bardot. Sachs was an assiduous art collector, and spirited supporter of the artists who he began collecting from a young age. In 1972, Sachs opened a gallery in Hamburg with the first exhibition of Andy Warhol in Europe. Nothing sold, so Sachs bought most of the exhibition himself – which was of course the best investment he ever made. Sachs amassed one of the world's most important private collections of Pop art, Nouveau réalisme, and Surrealism, with work by the likes of Jean Fautrier, Andy Warhol, René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, Roy Lichtenstein, Tom Wesselmann, Mel Ramos, Yves Klein, Allen Jones, Max Ernst, Jean Tinguely, Arman, Martial Raysse and many more. He bought art for the love of it and mostly by relatively unknown artists (at the time). Sachs decorated his homes and hotel penthouse suites with the most fabulous art and furniture. He had Lichtensteins in his bathroom, a Warhol Campbell's Soup in his kitchen, a Mel Ramos Banana Split in the guest bedroom. He commissioned a table direct from the sculptor and designer Diego Giacometti and owned a set of Allen Jones' famous fetishistic female mannequins furniture pieces. As a professional photographer, Sachs published 7 books of work and won numerous awards.
2018, English / German
Hardcover, 112 pages, 20 x 22 cm
Published by
Lecturis / Eindhoven
$64.00 $35.00 - In stock -
Walker Evans’ 'American Photographs' and Robert Frank’s 'The Americans' provide the DNA for many photo books including those by René Burri and Sven Martson. It is useful to view Martson’s work in the context of earlier and like minded books. Martson spent September of 1974 photographing in East and West Berlin. In what was undoubtedly a stifling context, he captured those timeless occupations and preoccupations common to us all – labour, joy and loneliness, vanity and pride, lust and love. He served up a faithful visual journal of an inhibited culture.
2017, English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 130 pages, 21.6 x 28 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$48.00 $25.00 - Out of stock
Edited by Dr. Daniel S. Berger, John Neff
Texts by Daniel Berger, Debra Levine, Ray Navarro, John Neff, Hunter Reynolds, David Wojnarowicz
This book is the first survey of the art and practice of Art+Positive, a significant affinity group of ACT UP New York during the early years of the AIDS epidemic. Staging self-initiated actions, and also participating in larger demonstrations organized by ACT UP, Art+Positive practiced an improvisational approach to activism at the intersection of the AIDS crisis and the culture wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Their multiplatform projects were especially focused on fighting AIDS phobia, censorship, homophobia, misogyny, and racism within the art world. Members, collaborators, and contributors to Art+Positive included artists Lola Flash, Nan Goldin, Aldo Hernández, Zoe Leonard, Ray Navarro, Hunter Reynolds, Catherine (Saalfield) Gunn, Julie Tolentino, and David Wojnarowicz.
The Art+Positive archives, assembled by Hunter Reynolds in the mid-1990s, were out of public view for more than twenty years. Art collector and HIV/AIDS researcher Dr. Daniel Berger acquired the group’s archives in early 2015. Shortly thereafter, he and artist John Neff presented an exhibition of the archives at Iceberg Projects, Chicago. Militant Eroticism: The ART+Positive Archives documents that exhibition and is extensively illustrated with artworks, documents, protest ephemera, and meeting notes from the Art+Positive archives. Also included are essays by Berger, Neff, and former ACT UP member and scholar Debra Levine. These essays are presented alongside previously unpublished writings by Ray Navarro, Hunter Reynolds, and David Wojnarowicz.
Design by Alex Kostiw
2013, English
Softcover, 27.5 x 21 cm
Published by
Modern Matter / London
$20.00 $10.00 - Out of stock
Stel·lar
[Stel-er] adjective
Issue five of Modern Matter is dedicated to all things stellar: this is a homonym for its cover star, STELLA TENNANT, but is also a word which can be used to describe her. The interior space of a magazine is defined, by and large, by its writers, its artists and its photographers, while the outer space is often defined by a cover model. Here, Stella – iconic, playful, a born performer, and above all, independent – embodies the interior and the ethos of Modern Matter magazine, in its first truly unisex issue.
A strong commercial prospect, despite resembling nothing and nobody else on the market, Tennant represents an intersection of the popular and the artistic, or the alternative; the masculine and the feminine; the British and the international. Photographed for Modern Matter by MARK BORTHWICK, she is something "like a star, as in brilliance."
ISSUE 5 ALSO CONTAINS:
MARK LECKEY on ambition, dumb things, and doing battle with YouTube commenters.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST in conversation with TOBIAS REHBERGER about scale, the Bar Oppenheimer, and the ingredients of the elusive “vodkastein.”
An exploration of the purpose of art in 2013, including interviews with BEATRIX RUF and HELEN MARTEN, and work by PAUL McCARTHY, WOLFGANG TILLMANS, JIM LAMBIE and many more.
A retrospective of AMBIT MAGZINE’s Invisible Years series, including interviews with DR. MARTIN BAX and RONALD SANDFORD on their work with their late colleague, the esteemed J.G. BALLARD.
Visual essays by OSCAR MURILLO and ENRICO BOCCIOLETTI.
A conversation with Dazed & Confused founder (and "socialist cowboy"), JEFFERSON HACK.
SARAH LUCAS on the secret to making a good fried egg.
The best of MENSWEAR and WOMENSWEAR A/W 2013, including LANVIN, CELINE, PRADA, RAF SIMONS, STELLA McCARTNEY, and many more.
2018, English
Hardcover, 48 pages 29.7 x 21.0 cm
Ed. of 300,
Published by
Sturm & Drang / Zürich
$116.00 - Out of stock
First English version of Das Auge der Liebe. First published in 1954, Das Auge der Liebe (The Eye of Love) by the Swiss photographer René Groebli is a small book featuring images that were made during the honeymoon with his wife Rita in France.
In Groebli's own words: "I tried to convey the typical atmosphere of French hotel rooms. There were so many impressions: the poor-looking furniture in a cheap hotel, the word 'Amors' embroidered on the curtains. And I was in love with the girl, the girl who was my wife. I think a series of photographs should be compared with a novel or even a poem rather than a painting: let us tell something!"
This poem in black and white is now ready for another closeup. Sturm & Drang is proud to present this extended re-edition of "The Eye of Love" with five additional images chosen by the photographer, presented as a limited edition (300 copies only) hardcover book.
With an english introduction by Birgit Filzmaier.
René Groebli is a Swiss photographer born 1927 in Zurich.
2018, English / Japanese
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 234 pages, 23 x 31 cm
Published by
Kokushokankokai / Tokyo
$77.00 - Out of stock
Shinkō Shashin, the New Photography, influenced by Germany’s Neue Sachlichkeit, the New Objectivity, and by Surrealism, differed strikingly from Pictorialism, which had been the leading form of art photography in Japan. The goal of the New Photography movement, which flourished from about 1930 on, was creative expression possible only through photography, making effective use of the mechanistic nature of the camera and lens. ‘Koga’ was a small-press magazine that remained in print for less than two years, from 1932 to 1933. Founded by Yasuzō Nojima, its central figures were Ihei Kimura and Iwata Nakayama. Kōga also involved amateur photographers, largely from the Kansai region (members of the Naniwa Photography Club and the Ashiya Camera Club, for example) and spurred on the New Photography movement. The New Photography Research Society, of which Kimura Sen’ichi, the editor-in-chief of the magazine Photo Times, was the central figure, had been formed in 1931, with participation by Horino Masao and Watanabe Yoshio. It published its own journal, New Photography Studies, for only three issues. The magazines attracted attention from Kansai-based artists and played an important role in the emergence of the Shinkō Shashin movement, which challenged photography’s unique powers of expression.
Revisiting these two groundbreaking magazines, this major hardcover catalogue, “The Magazine and the New Photography”, provides a comprehensive overview of the Shinko Shashin movement, featuring many works never before re-printed, and all three published issues of the New Photography Studies journal, alongside new major essays, artist biographies, list of works, all in English and Japanese.
1988, Japanese
Softcover, 80 pages, 22 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Seibu / Tokyo
$100.00 $50.00 - Out of stock
Very scarce catalogue for the only major exhibition on Kiyoshi Koishi and Naniwa Shashin Club, held in 1988 at Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Modern Art and Seibu Contemporary Art Gallery.
Kiyoshi Koishi (March 26, 1908 - July 7, 1957) was one of the most prominent Japanese photographers in the first half of the 20th century. He was born in Osaka and became a member of Naniwa Shashin Club (浪華写真倶楽部, Naniwa Photography Club) in 1928.
In 1933 he published the monograph Shoka Shinkei (初夏神経, "Early Summer Nerves"), one of the most important works for Japanese modernist photography and one of the most sought after volumes. In this work, he used many photographic techniques such as photomontage and photograms, succeeding in creating surrealistic images. From 1938, he worked for the Japanese government in the magazine Shashin Shūhō (写真週報, "Photo Weekly"). And he became a war photographer of the Second Sino-Japanese War. Therefore, he was no longer able to produce avant-garde photo. After World War II, he continued to take many photographs. But tragically, he couldn't leave the works from the effects of restricted activity due to the war. In 1957, Koishi died by accident, falling on the station platform in Moji, Fukuoka Prefecture.
Very rarely seen outside of Japan, and little printed document there either, this catalogue collects a valuable photographic history of Koishi's stunning work, alongside the work of his fellow Naniwa Shashin Club members from 1921-1950.
2018, English / German
Softback, 300 pages, 26.5 x 26.5 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$72.00 - Out of stock
Since 1987, Galerie Bruno Bischofberger has combined the advertisements for its gallery program with images of traditional Swiss life; a montage of contrasts that brings local traditions face to face with a globalized art world’s cosmopolitan self-image.
For roughly thirty years, the advertisement series has appeared parallel in the art magazines Artforum and Kunstbulletin and has helped the gallery achieve a high level of recognizability.
Accompanies the exhibition Backcovers: Summer Fall Winter Spring, 21 Apr – 8 Jul 2018, Museum im Bellpark Kriens, Switzerland.
German and English text.
2013, English
Softcover, 48 pages, 22 x 17 cm
$39.00 $15.00 - Out of stock
British artist Stephen Willats’ visually intense works explore the nature of human interaction, communication and connection between individuals and communities.
CONSCIOUS – UNCONSCIOUS the artist’s fourth exhibition at Modern Art Oxford, and continues a connection with the gallery which began in 1968. This latest exhibition examines social interaction, the influence of technology on daily life and the way we look at and think about our surroundings.
Unique to this exhibition is The Oxford Community Data Stream, a new commission that presents alternative and highly personal perspectives on life in Oxford through a collaboration with residents of Kennington and Blackbird Leys.
This catalogue includes an interview between Stephen Willats and Ute Meta Bauer.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition CONSCIOUS – UNCONSCIOUS: in and out the reality check at Modern Art Oxford, 27 April – 16 June 2013.
2015, English
Softcover, 304 pages. 24 x 28 cm
Published by
Hatje Cantz / Berlin
$99.00 - Out of stock
Text by Sabine Breitwieser, Andrea Fraser, Shannon Jackson, Sven Lütticken.
Controversial, provocative and poignantly humorous, American artist Andrea Fraser (born 1965) is one of the most influential and pioneering figures of her generation and has been captivating a devoted audience for more than 30 years. She employs a wide range of media, including prints, photographs, installations and performances as well as texts and videos, time and again reformulating the same fundamental questions: what do we want from art, how do we view it and how does the art market distribute it? Fraser's brand of performance during the 1990s popularized the institutional critique art movement, a loosely formed artistic practice meant to critique the very institutions that are involved in the sale, display, and commerce of art. Fraser's work typically comments on the politics, commerce, histories, and even the self-assuredness of the modern-day art museum, including the hierarchies and the exclusion mechanisms of art as an enterprise. Her performances, despite having serious undertones, are often presented in a humorous, ridiculous, or satirical manner. Fraser was a founding member of the feminist performance group, The V-Girls (1986-1996); the project-based artist initiative Parasite (1997-1998); and the cooperative art gallery Orchard (2005-2008). She was also co-organizer, with Helmut Draxler, of Services, a “working-group exhibition” that has been conceived at Kunstraum of Lüneburg University and toured to eight venues in Europe and the United States between 1994 and 2001.
This richly illustrated catalogue presents a full overview of the artist's career for the first time. It assembles the early Four Posters (1984) as well as her famous performances such as Museum Highlights (1989), Inaugural Speech (1997), Official Welcome (2001/03), and Untitled (2003) linking them with her most recent videos.
2018, English
Hardcover, 420 pages, 23 x 31 cm
Published by
Self Service / Paris
$54.00 $20.00 - Out of stock
Self Service 48 includes fashion photography by Edwina Preston, Ezra Petronio and Nigel Shafran with Melanie Ward, and features Christopher Michael, Naomi Rapace, Harriet Quick, Nadja Auermann and many more. With an homage to Azzedine Alaïa curated by Joe Mckenna.
2017, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 24 x 16 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$42.00 - Out of stock
REPRINTED IN 2017 DUE TO POPULAR DEMAND
“Concorde is perhaps the last example of a techno-utopian invention from the sixties still to be operating and fully functioning today. Its futuristic shape, speed and ear-numbing thunder grabs peopleʼs imagination today as much as it did when it first took off in 1969. Itʼs an environmental nightmare conceived in 1962 when technology and progress was the answer to everything and the sky was no longer a limit … For the chosen few, flying Concorde is apparently a glamorous but cramped and slightly boring routine whilst to watch it in the air, landing or taking-off is a strange and free spectacle, a super modern anachronism and an image of the desire to overcome time and distance through technology.” (Wolfgang Tillmans)
An artist’s book by Wolfgang Tillmans.
2010, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 145 x 210 mm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
Whitechapel / London
$49.00 - Out of stock
The chance situation or random event—whether as a strategy or as a subject of investigation—has been central to many artists' practices across a multiplicity of forms, including expressionism, automatism, the readymade, collage, surrealist and conceptual photography, fluxus event scores, film, audio and video, performance, and participatory artworks. But why—a century after Dada and Surrealism's first systematic enquiries—does chance remain a key strategy in artists' investigations into the contemporary world?The writings in this anthology examine the gap between intention and outcome, showing it to be crucial to the meaning of chance in art. The book provides a new critical context for chance procedures in art since 1900 and aims to answer such questions as why artists deliberately set up such a gap in their practice; what new possibilities this suggests; and why the viewer finds the art so engaging.Artists surveyed include: Vito Acconci, Bas Jan Ader, Francis Alÿs, William Anastasi, John Baldessari, Walead Beshty, Mark Boyle, George Brecht, Marcel Broodthaers, John Cage, Sophie Calle, Tacita Dean, Stan Douglas, Marcel Duchamp, Brian Eno, Fischli & Weiss, Ceal Floyer, Huang Yong Ping, Douglas Huebler, Allan Kaprow, Alison Knowles, Jiri Kovanda, Jorge Macchi, Christian Marclay, Cildo Meireles, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Yoko Ono, Gabriel Orozco, Cornelia Parker, Robert Rauschenberg, Gerhard Richter, Daniel Spoerri, Keith Tyson, Jennifer West, Ceryth Wyn Evans, La Monte Young
Writers include: Paul Auster, Jacquelynn Baas, Georges Bataille, Daniel Birnbaum, Claire Bishop, Guy Brett, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Stanley Cavell, Lynne Cooke, Fei Dawei, Gilles Deleuze, Anna Dezeuze, Russell Ferguson, Branden W. Joseph, Siegfried Kracauer, Jacques Lacan, Sarat Maharaj, John Miller, Alexandra Munroe, Gabriel Pérez Barreiro, Jasia Reichardt, Julia Robinson, Sarah Valdez, Katharina VossenkuhlDocuments of Contemporary Art series
Copublished with Whitechapel Gallery, London
2018, English
Hardcover, 120 pages, 23.5 cm x 23.5 cm
Published by
MACK / London
$79.00 - Out of stock
Between 1974 and 1975, the American photographer John Divola – then in his mid twenties and without a studio of his own – travelled across Los Angeles in search of dilapidated properties in which to make photographs. Armed with a camera, spray paint, string and cardboard, the artist would produce one of his most significant photographic projects entitled Vandalism. In this visceral, black and white series of images Divola vandalised vacant homes with abstract constellations of graffiti-like marks, ritualistic configurations of string hooked to pins, and torn arrangements of card, before cataloguing the results. The project vigorously merged the documentary approach of forensic photography with staged interventions echoing performance, sculpture and installation art. Serving as a conceptual sabotaging of the delineations between such documentary and artistic practices, at a time when the ‘truthfulness’ of photography was being called into question, Vandalism helped to establish Divola’s highly distinctive photographic language.
John Divola (b. 1949 in California, United States) earned a BA from California State University, Northridge (1971) and an MA from University of California, Los Angeles (1973). His images challenge the boundaries between fiction and reality, as well as the limitations of art to describe life. Vandalism (1974-1975) is one Divola’s earliest series, predating Zuma (1979), As Far as I Could Get (1997) and Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert (2004).
2017, English
Hardcover, 92 pages, 22.9 x 24.9 cm
Published by
D.A.P. / New York
$75.00 - Out of stock
In 1977, photographers Larry Sultan (1946–2009) and Mike Mandel (born 1950) published a book that would radically transform both photography and the photobook canon—a book described by Martin Parr, in The Photobook: A History, as "one of the most beautiful, dense and puzzling photobooks in existence, an endless visual box of tricks." Sultan and Mandel sifted through thousands of photographs in the files of the Bechtel Corporation, the Los Angeles Police Department, the Jet Propulsion Laboratories, the US Department of the Interior, Stanford Research Institute and a hundred other corporations, American government agencies and educational, medical and technical institutions. They were looking for photographs that were made and used as transparent documents and purely objective instruments—as evidence, in short.
Selecting 59 of the best, they published these images with the care you would expect to find in a high-quality art photography book, issuing them in 1977 in a simple, limited-edition volume titled Evidence.
Long established as a photobook classic and a seminal example of conceptual photography, Evidence was reissued as a facsimile edition in 2004 by D.A.P. with a new spread of images and a group of black-and-white illustrations selected by the artists from an archive of photographs that were not included in the original book, plus a commissioned essay by Sandra Phillips. Today both this reissue and the original 1977 publication are exceptionally rare and command high prices.
D.A.P. now reprints the 2004 edition of Evidence, making available to a general readership a truly pioneering and canonical photobook.