World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
OPEN 12—5 THU—FRI
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7.
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Please note: The bookshop is closed until February 1, 2024.
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after this date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 3 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund, exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
1979, English / French
Softcover (french folds), 78 pages, 27 x 21.2 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Bernard Letu Editeur / Geneva
$55.00 - In stock -
First 1979 edition of this monograph on French painter, photographer and a forerunner of gender performance art and Body Art (Art corporel), Pierre Molinier (1900—1976), published by Bernard Letu Editeur in Geneva. With accompanying text by Egyptian-French Surrealist author Joyce Mansour, this book is a retrospective survey of Molinier's provocative gender-bending paintings and drawings, illustrated throughout in colour and b/w. Texts in English and French.
Pierre Molinier (1900—1976) was a French painter, photographer and a forerunner of gender performance art and Body Art (Art corporel). Molinier spent much of his artistic life working in isolation in Bordeaux, exiled from local and national art scenes. Born in Agen, nothing had predestined Molinier to a life as an artist. Self-taught, from a working-class background, he followed in his father’s footsteps and started out as a house painter. He got married and had two children. Tired of his infidelities and provocative behaviour, his wife left their marital home an in 1950 and Molinier begun photographing himself seriously, staging his own death and erecting a fake gravestone proudly declaring himself ‘a man without morals’. He was thrown out of the Bordeaux Salon des Indépendants as early as 1951 amidst controversy over his orgiastic painting of the same year, Le Grand Combat. Stirring up an obsessive correspondence with the anarchic poet-founder of Surrealism, André Breton, Molinier was soon integrated into the Surrealist group with a solo exhibition at Breton’s Paris gallery in 1956. Molinier’s anti-moral project appealed to the group’s interest in repressed desires, fetishism, and the transgression of bourgeois morals. In 1959, he exhibited at the Exposition International du Surrealism in Paris. From the mid-1960s Molinier chronicled the exploration of his subconscious transsexual desires in "Cent Photographies Erotiques": graphically detailed images of pain and pleasure. Cut-up, reassembled, and manipulated, Molinier painstakingly created elaborate and sensual photomontages in which he assumed the roles of dominatrix and succuba previously taken by the women of his paintings. Either alone with doll-like mannequins or with female models such as German sadomasochist Hanel Koeck, Molinier, who considered himself fundamentally androgynous, appears as a transvestite, employing his body and that of his acquaintances to create visions of hybrid identity, where stockinged multi-limbed, multi-sexed beings imitate pagan figures, Hindu gods, and Masonic symbols, in a rejection of a Christian tradition which he argued, had repressed androgyny. Designed to shock, Molinier’s artwork represented a very intimate disclosure about his own sexual ambiguity, inviting the viewer to bring to the images his or her own response of excitement or disgust. The degree of his artistic perversity and blasphemous tendencies was deemed too much for the French cultural elite, and the man Breton dubbed the “magician of erotic art” was shunned from the art world. Molinier did not participate in the 1965 International Surrealist Exhibition. For the last 11 years of his life Molinier played out his own most profound moments in the 'theatre' of his Bordeaux 'boudoir – atelier'. He committed suicide in 1976, shooting himself with a pistol, something he had foreshadowed in his artwork, time and again. Essentially a leg fetishist, but also considering himself as a shaman, facetious and provocative, anti-bourgeois and anti-religious, Molinier enjoyed transgressing gender identification : his outstanding photographs greatly influenced the European and North American Body Art in the 1970s and continue to fascinate artists today.
Very Good copy.
2012, English / German
Softcover, 104 pages, 20.3 x 24.8 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Walther König / Köln
Collection de l'Art Brut / Lausanne
$120.00 - Out of stock
Scarce out-of-print monograph on the work of Morton Bartlett, one of only a couple of books on the artist, published by Collection de l'Art Brut Lausanne and Walther Koenig in 2012 and quickly sold out.
When the freelance photographer and graphic designer Morton Bartlett (1909–1992) died at the age of 83, his relatives found 15 chests among his possessions. Each chest contained a half-life-size doll and its accessories: 12 girls and three boys, a wardrobe of hand-sewn clothes, black-and-white photographs of each doll as well as countless studies and archival materials. Bartlett began designing these dolls in the mid-1930s, studying anatomy books and histories of costume, and learning to sew and mold with clay to make them as true to life as possible. Each doll entailed a huge amount of labor, taking up to a year to complete; Bartlett created costumes and wigs for each one and then staged them in lifelike scenarios and photographed them, documenting a family he had never had and creating a body of work that would remain unexhibited during his lifetime. The third installment in the Bahnhof Museum’s series on outsider artists, this volume examines Bartlett’s extraordinary lifelong obsession.
Edited and with foreword by Udo Kittelmann, Claudia Dichter. Text by Lee Kogan.
As New copy.
2001, English
Hardcover (w. galssine dust jacket), 254 pages, 22.5 x 18.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
University of California / Berkeley
International Centre of Photography / New York
$90.00 - Out of stock
First 2001 hardcover edition of Behind Closed Doors: The Art of Hans Bellmer, Therese Lichtenstein's highly original book studying the the life-size, adolescent-girl dolls created by German artist Hans Bellmer in the 1930s.
Disturbing and controversial, Bellmer's dolls with their uncanny, fragmented bodies and eroticized poseswere just as shocking during Bellmer's time as they are today. Until now there has been little available in English about Bellmer's dolls, and Lichtenstein's book will be welcomed for its fresh interpretation of the artist's work and his place in European modernism. Eighty striking photographs accompany the text. Working during a time when Nazism was on the rise, Bellmer created several dolls with fragmented bodies that could be dismantled and arranged in various configurations. Using a narrative format, he then photographed the dolls in a range of grotesque, often sexual, positions. The images he conveyed were of death and decay, abuse and longing, in stark contrast to Nazism's mythic utopian celebration of adolescence.Lichtenstein interprets Bellmer's complex expressions of eroticism as a protest against the Nazis and also against his father, a cold and repressive Nazi sympathizer. At the same time, she says, by hyperbolically flaunting a passive femininity in a theatrical manner, Bellmer's images allow us to consider how cultural representations can affect the formation of identity and alternative possibilities.
"Behind Closed Doors reveals the complex structure behind these photographs of violated female adolescence, a structure in which sadism, masochism, hermaphroditism, fetishism, utopianism, and nostalgia all play a role. Above all, Lichtenstein's study makes clear the political aspect of these transgressive images: the way in which they served to question and undermine the contemporary authoritarian Nazi image of sexual 'normalcy' by recourse to a violent return of the repressed." -Linda Nochlin, author of Representing Women "Behind Closed Doors: The Art of Hans Bellmer is a compelling gathering of the narratives around psychoanalysis, visual culture, biology, and gender. Therese Lichtenstein rigorously examines Bellmer's picturing of the body as the site of desire, confusion, and sudden disaster, and in doing so produces a telling tale of history's secrets and lies."—Barbara Kruger
Therese Lichtenstein has taught art history and museum studies at New York University, Rice University, and Mount Holyoke College.
Very Good copy in Good original glassine dust jacket with some light wear.
1969, Japanese
Hardcover (clothbound w. plastic dust jacket in slipcase), 168 pages, 22 x 16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Shoshi Soubikan / Tokyo
$180.00 - Out of stock
Very rare copy of SM Photo Collection Rose Mirror, an exquisite early 1969 hardcover collection of bondage photographic works housed in heavy cardboard slipcase adorned with Beardsley illustration. The photographic works follow in the decadent tradition, with beautiful b/w gravure photo reproductions and lush colour plates with colour fold-out spreads, each of the eight kinbaku/shibari scenarios shot by photographer Yoshimi Sunaji in response to fictional stories, the chapters titled: "`The Mirror of the Rose," "The Lesson of the Cat," "The Queen Angel," "The Ballad of the Pearl Shell," "The Trapped Agarwood," "The Play of the Twigs," "The Sacrifice of the Spider," and "The Mermaid's Bond," performed by eight women. The book concludes with the texts "Rope Arakaruto" by Arata Beppu, "Flowers of Heresy" by Akira Shiokawa, and "SM Yomoyama Story" by Oniroku Dan, "the most celebrated writer of popular SM novels in Japan."
Very Good copy with some general age and wear in gilded cloth bound hardcover and original publisher's plastic jacket (VG), housed in illustrated cardboard slipcase in Good—VG condition (light wear, age, marking). Very well preserved.
1993, Japanese
Softcover, 240 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Atelier Peyotl / Tokyo
$65.00 - Out of stock
"Mannequin" Special Feature Issue of cult Japanese underground magazine Yaso, published in 1993, edited by Yuichi Konno and Atelier Peyotl (publishers of Night Vision/Yaso/Peyotl/Wave/Silvester Club...). Heavily illustrated with texts in Japanese that look at the theme of the mannequin from fashion apparatus to fetish object, automatons to living dolls, including a panoramic photographic history of mannequins, a photo feature of French photographer Bernard Faucon's boy mannequin collection, a huge illustrated article on famous Japanese costume, stage and exhibition designer, and Issey Miyake collaborator Tomio Mohri, the wax anatomical models of dissected corpses by Clemente Michelangelo Susini of Florence (1754–1814) shot by Ryuji Miyamoto, Czech animator Jirí Barta's Klub odlozenych, Japanese model and actress Sayoko Yamaguchi, the living dolls of the Japanese theatre, medical mannequins, crash-test dummies, icons, "Doll Love" and erotic dolls, plus lots more and a lot more Bernard Faucon!
Very Good—Near Fine copy.
2006, English
Softcover, 336 pages, 26 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Center for Curatorial Studies Bard College / New York
$290.00 - In stock -
First edition of this very special, now very rare catalogue published in 2006 on the occasion of the major survey exhibition Witness To Her Art, featuring the work of Adrian Piper, Mona Hatoum, Cady Noland, Jenny Holzer, Kara Walker, Daniela Rossell and the seminal magazine Eau de Cologne, published by gallerist Monika Sprüth between 1985 and 1989. Profusely illustrated throughout with artworks by all artists, reproductions of important artist publications, installation views, and many works by other related artists, alongside texts by Adrian Piper, Kara Walker, Daniela Rossell, Mona Hatoum, Cady Noland, Jenny Holzer, Monika Sprüth, Rhea Anastas, Michael Brenson, Norton Batkin, Johanna Burton, Aruna D’Souza, Pamela Franks, Janet Kraynak, David Levi Strauss, Cuauhtémoc Medina, Ann Reynolds, Hamza Walker, and many more.
Publisher's blurb:
"This radical new study aims to change the way that some of the most influential artists of the past 40 years are seen—all of them women. Emphasizing questions of autonomy, critical intelligence and artistic intention, "Witness to Her Art" presents works by Adrian Piper, Mona Hatoum, Cady Noland, Jenny Holzer, Kara Walker, Daniela Rossell and "Eau de Cologne," a magazine published by gallerist Monika Sprüth. The artworks are accompanied by original writings by the artists, contemporaneous criticism and newly commissioned essays by Pamela Franks, Aruna D'Souza, Johanna Burton, David Levi Strauss, Hamza Walker and Cuauhtémoc Medina. The ambitious works presented and interpreted herein invite us to consider the impact of the feminist revolution across generations while rendering obsolete any stigma associated with shows or catalogues limited to women artists. Taking its lead from Conceptualism, feminism, and from its included artists, "Witness to Her Art" reaches for art history's capacity as a medium of world-making."
Highly recommended. Very Good copy with light edge wear/rounding to stiff overlay boards.
1984, English
Softcover, 62 pages, 21.5 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Kunsthalle Basel / Basel
$90.00 - Out of stock
Wonderful 1984 catalogue, Private Property Created Crime, surveying the work of American conceptual artist Jenny Holzer (b. 1950), published on the occasion of a major European exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel and Le Nouveau Musée.
"THIS IS A BOOK OF STREET WORK AND INSTALLATIONS; POSTERS, T-SHIRTS, PLAQUES, STICKERS AND ELECTRONIC SIGNS. THE PHOTOGRAPHS ARE ARRANGED IN SERIES: TRUISMS, 1977–1983; ESSAYS, 1979–1983; LIVING, 1981–1983; AND SURVIVAL, 1983-1984. THE BOOK ACCOMPANIES EXHIBITIONS AT THE KUNSTHALLE, BASEL AND LE NOUVEAU MUSÉE, VILLEURBANNE."
Profusely illustrated in b/w and colour. Introduction by Jean-Christophe Ammann, plus biography and bibliography. All in English.
Jenny Holzer (b. 1950) is an American conceptual artist best known for her text-based works, which are constructed from "truisms" such as "abuse of power comes as no surprise"and "protect me from what I want." By experimenting with the use of words visually displayed in public spaces, Holzer is able to stimulate public discussions about violence, sexuality, oppression, human rights, feminism, power, war, and death. Starting with street posters, Holzer's practice has come to incorporate LED screens that run with stock-ticker-like texts, painted signs, plaques, photographs, sound, video, and the Internet.
Until 1993, Holzer wrote her own texts, after which she began to appropriate texts by Polish Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska and other champions of human rights, including Elfriede Jelinek, Fadhil Al-Azawi, Yehuda Amichai, and Mahmoud Darwish. Recent works include I Was in Baghdad Ochre Fade (2007), a series of oil on linen transcriptions of torture documents from the Iraq War; Redaction Paintings (2009), which were created using recently released classified memos with texts blacked out by censors; and an installation in the lobby of 7 World Trade Center. In 1990, she was the first woman to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale, where she won the Golden Lion for the best artist.
Good—VG copy with cover wear.
1969, Japanese / English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 166 pages, 26 x 19 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Tojusha / Tokyo
$390.00 - In stock -
Extremely rare first 1969 edition of Anger Is Our Daily Bread, Japanese photographer Tatsuo Kurihara's arresting book of front-line photographic student protest reportage published by Tojusha, Tokyo. The book of the "Zengakuren", Japan's radical student activists. With stunning, richly gravure-printed imagery, Anger Is Our Daily Bread is one of the most provocative and powerful photographic records of political unrest in Japan ever published. A desperate documentary and a master work from a Japanese photo-journalist at the forefront of bloodshed. Text in Japanese and English.
Anger Is Our Daily Bread concerns one of the most important political events in post-war Japan, The Anpo protests, also known as the Anpo struggle, a series of massive protests throughout Japan from 1959 to 1960 against the US–Japan Security Treaty, which allows the United States to maintain military bases on Japanese soil. Inspired by anti-imperialist left, these protests, the largest popular protests in Japan's history, were the coordinated actions of various citizen movements, from labor unions, student and women's organizations, mothers' groups, poetry circles, theatre troupes, groups affiliated with the Japan Socialist and Communist Parties, even conservative businessmen, who all wanted to prevent the ratification of the treaty and, as survivors of the unrivalled disasters of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, end the trauma of American military presence in Japan. The planned visit of the US president Eisenhower escalated the protests, which gripped hundreds of thousands to protest daily for a year around the Japanese Parliament National Diet building. With an unparalleled police presence physically removing the Socialist Diet members' attempted opposition sit-in, Prime Minister Kishi undemocratically passed the treaty provoking nationwide outrage, strikes and actions. The Zengakuren were always on the front-line. Facing strong anti-government public opinion which had been enhanced by the death of a female Tokyo University student named Michiko Kanba during a demonstration, Eisenhower's visit was cancelled and Kishi resigned as Prime Minister, in order to quell the widespread popular anger at his extremist actions. Yet the treaty remained in effect and wide-spread Americanisation of Japan ensued.
On the eve of the 1970 treaty revision, Anger Is Our Daily Bread was published.
"Another revision term coming next year, the Zengakuren students started to resort to "Molotov cocktail" method. They are not only against the Japan—US Security Treaty, but also struggling to address those problems like university reform, the new international airport at Narita, Chiba, the U.S. bases in Japan, Okinawa's return to Japan, etc. Helmeted and armed with the so-called "Gewalt" clubs and sticks, those students of Zengakuren repeatedly clash with the armed police. Pictures shown here are the record of the Zengakuren movement for the past twelve months."—from Tatsuo Kurihara's introduction
Kurihara's extremely vivid first hand visual accounts of the immense student demonstrations, their meetings, their brutal conflict with the police, the molotov cocktails from stormed buildings, and constant armed street battles, make for one of the most moving protest books ever printed. His stark, heavy contrast images are so immersive they give the viewer the impression of themselves being in the violent clashes, a witness to people's lives thrown into turmoil, the urgency and desperation to be heard by the elite.
Tatsuo Kurihara was born in downtown Tokyo in 1937. Upon graduating from Waseda University's Faculty of Political Science and Economics in 1961, he began working at the Asahi Shimbun Tokyo Headquarters Publishing Photography Department. In 1962, he won the Japan Photographers Association Newcomer's Award. In 1967, he left Asahi Shimbun and became a freelancer and a member of the Japan Photographers Society (JPS).
Very Good copy in Good—VG dust jacket with some light wear to jacket extremities. Corner bump to front top first few pages.
1988, English
Hardcover (clothbound w. dust jacket), 96 pages, 31x 26 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Secker & Warburg / London
$990.00 - In stock -
Very rare first 1988 edition, first printing of Chris Killip's masterpiece, In Flagrante, one of the greatest photo books of the late 20th century by one of Europe's most outstanding and uncompromising photographers, published by Secker & Warburg, London. For this book Killip became the first recipient of the prestigious Henri Cartier-Bresson Award. Extremely rare in this original UK hardcover edition.
In Flagrante is a beautiful, brutal, powerful and enduring collection of black and white photographs made in Northern England during its "de-industrialisation" between 1973 and 1985. Set against the miners strike and the dark age of the Thatcher years, Killip's arresting "portraits of Tyneside's working class communities amongst the signifiers of the region's declining industrial landscape" are recognised as among the most important visual records of living in 1980s Britain. Gerry Badger describes the photographs as "taken from a point of view that opposed everything [Thatcher] stood for". "A dark, pessimistic journey, perhaps even a secret odyssey, where rigorous documentary is suffused with a contemplative inwardness, a rare quality in modern photography." Killip has chosen, for the book's epigraph, Yeats's poem, "He wishes for the cloths of Heaven", with the famous closing lines, "tread softly because you tread on my dreams", a choice which Berger & Grant, in their essay, describe as "searingly apt. for it is as if all the photos here have been branded, like a hundred cattle, with the tenderness of those eight lines." The essay which follows the photographs is the result of a unique and remarkable collaboration between John Berger and Sylvia Grant.
Highest recommendation in the rarest edition.
Chris Killip (1946—2020) was was a Manx photographer born in Douglas, Isle of Man. Leaving school at age sixteen he become a beach photographer while working at his father's pub on the Isle of Man in order to earn enough money to leave the Isle of Man. By 1964 he took up photography full-time, working as a freelance assistant for various photographers in London from 1966—69. In 1969, after seeing his very first exhibition of photography at MoMA, he decided to leave commercial photography to return to photograph in the Isle of Man. The work from this time was eventually published by the Arts Council as Isle of Man: A Book about the Manx in 1980 with a text by John Berger. Killip received the Henri Cartier-Bresson Award for his acclaimed second book In Flagrante and was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize. Killip worked at Harvard University from 1991 to 2017, as a Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies. He exhibited all over the world, wrote extensively, appeared on radio and television, and curated many exhibitions.
Near Fine copy in NF dust jacket, protected by archival mylar wrap.
1947, French
Softcover, 142 pages, 24 x 20.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Maeght Editeur / Paris
$650.00 - Out of stock
Very scarce copy of the legendary "Le Surréalisme en 1947 : Exposition Internationale de Surréalisme présentée par André Breton et Marcel Duchamp", published by Maeght Editeur, Paris, in conjunction with an important exhibition of Surrealist artists in 1947. Features the cover design by Marcel Duchamp - a photographic reproduction by Rémy Duval of "Prière de toucher (Please touch)", the famous Duchamp rubber breast edition, created with Italian-born painter Enrico Donati, that adorned the first 999 copies of the catalogue. This gorgeous catalogue features the work of artists from 24 countries including Victor Brauner, Max Ernst, Leonora Carrington, Jacqueline Lamba, Jacques Hérold, Wilfredo Lam, Joan Miró, Hans Bellmer, Marcel Jean, Maria Martins, Yves Tanguy, Dorothea Tanning, Hans Arp, Frederick Kiesler, Alberto Giacometti, Hector Hyppolite, Serge Brignoni, Alexander Calder, Bruno Capacci, Elizabeth van Damme, Jacques Halpern, Julio de Diego, Enrico Donati, Francis Bouvet, David Hare, Iaroslav Serpan, Jacqueline Lamba, Taro Okamoto, Roberto Matta, Kay Sage, Toyen, Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen, Leonard Baskin, Jindrich Heisler, Jeanne Reynal, Isabelle Waldberg, Roger Brielle, Jindrich Styrsky, Bruno Capacci, Jean Guerin, Isamu Noguchi, Gerome Kamrowski, Frédéric Delanglade, Eugenio Granell, Francis Picabia, Remedios Varo, Hans Richter, Arshile Gorky, and many more, along with the folding sheet catalogue, and newspaper clipping about the show inserted.
Good copy considering age. Tanned edges and wear to corners, edges and spine. Some spine chipping.
1997, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 286 pages, 23 x 19.2 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$55.00 - In stock -
First 1997 hardcover edition.
In an 1828 letter to his partner, Nicéphore Niépce, Louis Daguerre wrote, "I am burning with desire to see your experiments from nature." In this book, Geoffrey Batchen analyzes the desire to photograph as it emerged within the philosophical and scientific milieus that preceded the actual invention of photography. Recent accounts of photography's identity tend to divide between the postmodern view that all identity is determined by context and a formalist effort to define the fundamental characteristics of photography as a medium. Batchen critiques both approaches by way of a detailed discussion of photography's conception in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He examines the output of the various nominees for "first photographer," then incorporates this information into a mode of historical criticism informed by the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. The result is a way of thinking about photography that persuasively accords with the medium's undeniable conceptual, political, and historical complexity.
"Given its ambitious and groundbreaking scope, "Burning with Desire" is bound to become the touchstone for any further consideration of the topic of photography's invention."—Douglas R. Nickel, Assistant Curator of Photography, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Very Good copy in VG dust jacket.
1997, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 440 pages, 15 x 11 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Kyoto Shoin / Tokyo
$70.00 - Out of stock
First 1997 edition of the hefty 440-page pocket version of what is now one of the truely iconic interior "design" books - Tokyo Style. Over a period of two years, Japanese writer-photographer Kyoichi Tsuzuki visited apartments, condos and suburban homes in Tokyo, and documented exactly what he saw in colour photography. First published in 1993 in the larger format, Tokyo Style is a collection of these photographs along with Tsuzuki's texts. Divided into eight sections - Beauty in Chaos, The Fancy Fetish, Artsy Pads, The Traditional Touch, Monomaniacs, Kiddie Kingdoms, Inertial Living and Hermitages - the book shows readers a demystified Tokyo and the ordinary lifestyles of the Tokyo people. No wide-angles or post-production here, just the most amazing compendium of hundreds of tiny Tokyo living spaces, no two alike. Somehow this print format seems all the more appropriate!
Reprinted many times since, this is the first edition of this format, 2nd printing from 1997.
Good copy. Very Good book in Average—Good dust jacket with wear to extremities and light fading.
1961, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 90 pages, 28 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Bodley Head / London
$340.00 - In stock -
Rare first hardcover 1961 edition of this very important book of nude photography by British photographer Bill Brandt, published by Bodley Head, London, with a preface by Lawrence Durrell and an introduction by Chapman Mortimer. Fascinating Braque, Picasso, Dubuffet, Henry Moore, Edward Steichen, Eikoh Hosoe, Kishin Shinoyama, to name but a few, and having a profound influence on nude photography hence-forth, Brandt's nudes are as powerful and beautiful now as they were fifty years ago.
"These startling images rewrote the language of nude photography ... Brandt's approach was primarily formal, but his own sensibilities, combined with photography's tendency to overwhelm form's purity with life's impurities, ensured that his nudes are as interesting for their psychological undertones as for the wealth of unexpected forms he conjured. He did so with a camera that was devoid of a practicable viewing mechanism [a shutterless old Kodak he found in a secondhand shop] and thus reduced him, in effect, to working by blind instinct. ... At close range, his ancient camera yields a Venusian giantism, where sometimes sharply defined, sometimes blurred mountains of flesh loom over the artist/observer." (The Photobook A History Volume I, Parr & Badger)
Bill Brandt, best known for his photographs of London, his landscapes and portraits of celebrities, publishes here, for the first time, a selection of nudes, a subject which has obsessed him since 1945. Brandt used an old wooden camera with a wide angle lens for most of the pictures. Instead of making the camera register what he saw, he let himself be guided by the lens and made use of its acute distortion and unrealistically steep perspective. Thus the camera produced new anatomical images and shapes which his eyes had never observed. The lens helped him 'to get rid of the accepted image and to view his subjects without the cellophane-wrapping of conventional sight'. Chronologically arranged, the photographs record the transition from an early romantic style to more radical themes, ending with the pure form of extreme close-ups, taken on the beaches of East Sussex, Normandy and the Mediterranean. The pictures have fascinated Braque, Picasso, Dubuffet, Henry Moore and Edward Steichen, and had a profound influence on nude photography hence-forth.
Good—Very Good ex-libris copy w. associated markings not affecting content pages. Good dust jacket with light wear and repaired tear, preserved under mylar.
1994, English
Softcover, 236 pages, 23 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Routledge / London
$80.00 - Out of stock
Scarce first 1994 edition of The Female Grotesque by Mary Russo, published by Routledge and long out-of-print.
The cultural associations surrounding the grotesque are deeply embedded in Western consciousness. But what happens when we consider the grotesque from the perspective of gender? Mary Russo explores the idea of the "female grotesque" by embracing a wide array of theoretical, visual, literary, auto-biographical, and performance texts. The "female grotesque" can be found everywhere around-and even above- us, from the "aerial" sublime of Amelia Earhart to the provocative films of Ulrike Ottinger. Emphasizing the relationship between gender and the grotesque, Russo argues that the "female grotesque" is less a category than an operation through which genders and identities are both constituted and de- constituted, excluded or not. Drawing upon Bakhtin and Kristeva, Freud and Žižek, Russo traces the salient connection between abjection, the uncannny, and the grotesque. Exploring the double logic of the grotesque in the works of Angela Carter, David Cronenberg, and Georges du Maurier's Trilby, Mary Russo illuminates the grotesque as a process through which differently gendered bodies are deployed in provocative, new, and possibly transformative ways. The Female Grotesque proposes a new understanding of excess and transgres- sion in the gendered world of Western culture.
Near Fine copy.
1991, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 12 pages, 29 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Australian National Gallery / Canberra
$25.00 $10.00 - Out of stock
Scarce brochure catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition The Life and Work of Wolfgang Sievers, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 1991. This exhibition of Sievers photographs travelled Victoria and New South Wales between 1991—1992. "The Life and Work of Wolfgang Sievers is the first retrospective of Sievers's work; it surveys Sievers's long and productive career and includes photographs taken in Italy, Germany, Portugal and Australia. Since he settled in Australia in 1938 Sievers has made an extremely significant—but still largely unacknowledged—contribution to Australian cultural life." Illustrated throughout, the photographs are accompanied by stories written by the artist.
Wolfgang Georg Sievers, AO (1913–2007) was a well-known modernist photographer who specialised in architectural and industrial photography over a career spanning almost 60 years. Sievers grew up in Germany during a period known as the Weimar Republic, studied photography at the Contempora School for Applied Arts in Berlin, a successor to the Bauhaus, and in 1938, fearing increasing persecution in Nazi Germany, the Sievers family fled and migrated to Australia. Sievers served in the Australia Army from 1942 to 1946. After the war, Sievers concentrated on a career as a photographer, bringing a new vision of crisp and uniform images, showcasing how the modern world was aiming for economy through efficiency. After the Second World War, Australia had been particularly driven to streamlining processes and techniques in the postwar era, sometimes called the ‘golden age’. After the war, Sievers concentrated on a career as a photographer. He worked with other famous modernist photographers in Melbourne, including Axel Poignant and Athol Shmith. In Australia, Sievers took to industrial photography, bringing a new vision of crisp and uniform images, showcasing how the modern world was aiming for economy through efficiency. Sievers documented a postwar Australia, sometimes called the ‘golden age’. In describing his artistic method, Sievers once said: ‘The fundamental Bauhaus idea is purity of line and simplicity of design, both in architecture and industry. To this I added the dignity of man as a worker.’ Many of Sievers works contain images of humans as connected to the machines they work with. These photographs show humans as an important ‘part’ of the technology they are using.
Good copy with storage wear to covers.
1980, French
Softcover (staple-bound), 216 pages, 27.5 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Editions Filipacchi / Paris
$100.00 - In stock -
Scarce copy of France's Lui ("Him") magazine from October 1980 with the cover feature dedicated the island of Ibiza. Profusely illustrated with nude photography from Ibiza shot by Jean-Pierre Bourgeois, Otto Weisser, Frank Gitty, and others, along with many other nude photo shoots, the usual articles, a history of Porsche, humour, reviews, wonderful Aslan artwork and the often missing pin-ups, all present! One of the most collectible issues of Lui.
Lui ("Him") was a French adult entertainment magazine founded in Paris in 1963 by fashion photographer turned publisher and Surrealist art collector, Daniel Filipacchi, with Jacques Lanzmann, a jack of all trades turned novelist, and Frank Ténot, a press agent, pataphysician and prominent jazz critic, with the objective to bring some charm "à la française" to the market of men's magazines. Each issue included in-depth interviews and cultural articles alongside its staple nude photography and erotic cartoons.
Very Good copy. Some light moisture marking to a couple of lower page corners and general light cover wear. Staples still holding and pin-up present.
1985, French
Softcover, 239 pages, 21.7 x 28 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Henry Veyrier / Paris
$120.00 - In stock -
The essential Jane Birkin book, by Gérard Lenne and published by Editions Henry Veyrier, Paris, in 1985. The only French printing of this incredibly in-depth monograph on the great actress and singer, Jane Birkin. Scarce and very sought after today, this book, written by French film critic and writer Gérard Lenne, and made closely with Birkin herself, is both an intimate and revealing biography of her life and an important document capturing her diverse and challenging career as actress (working with Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jacques Doillon, Serge Gainsbourg, Jacques Rivette, to name a few), model, singer, and much more - through countless photographs, film-stills and profiles of each of her films and records. Includes a discography, bibliography and videography (from "Blow Up" to "le Pirate"). A great publication of English/French film history and a must for any Jane Birkin fan.
Very good copy, some age tanning, light wear. Long out-of-print.
1970/1971, French
Softcover, 2 volumes, unpaginated, 28.5 x 19 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Marie Concorde / Paris
$380.00 - Out of stock
Both of the only volumes ever produced of this wonderful French avant-garde journal, published in Paris at the beginning of the 1970s. A visual manifesto against the prudishness of the times, KITSCH presented hundreds of illustrations of mostly erotic, fetish and fantastic/grotesque artwork by artists from all over the world, and spanning generations, with both issues wrapped in the most striking Tom Wesselmann covers. KITSCH 1 includes Toshio Saeki, Guido Crepax, Richard Linder, Robert Crumb, Guy Bourdin, Petr Herel, Hannes Jahn, Roman Cieślewicz, Ben Vautier, Christian Bour, Jacques Sternberg, Roland Topor, Jim, Allen Jones, Thomas Weir, alongside photo essays on upskirt polaroids, Satanik, Diabolik, fashion and more. KITSCH 2 includes Aslan, Roy Lichtenstein, Virgil Finlay, Jim Osborne, Ronald Lipking, Greg Irons, George Grosz, Egon Schiele, Mel Ramos, alongside photo essays on subjects such as "Pop Art", "Human Concern" and Paris' "Pigalle" district, further featuring work by H.C.Westermann, Paul Thek, Edward Keinholz, William Tunberg, Christian Schad, William Weegee, James Rosenquist, Frank Gallo, Tom Wesselmann, and many more.
Very good copies both, light wear.
2024, English
Softcover, 232 pages, 29.8 x 24.8 cm
Published by
Silvana / Milan
Palais Lumière / Évian-les-Bains
$85.00 - Out of stock
Man Ray occupies a prominent place in the history of 20th-century art. A versatile artist, who lived mainly in Paris, he is best known as a photographer. Indeed, he was one of the first to use photography, not as a simple means of reproduction, but as a genuine creative medium, turning the technique into an art form. Some of his photographs, such as Le Violon d’Ingres (1924) and Noire et blanche (1926), have achieved iconic status.
Born in Philadelphia (Pennsylvania) on 27 August 1890, Emmanuel Radnitsky, known as Man Ray (as in a ray of light), actively participated in the intellectual and artistic circles of New York. He discovered the European avant-gardes and befriended Marcel Duchamp who opened the doors of Dadaism to him and welcomed him to Paris in July 1921.
At the heart of Parisian artistic life, he participated in the innovative experiments of the Dadaists and Surrealists, met with painters, poets and intellectuals, and became famous for his portraits. He developed a career as a fashion photographer, notably for designers Paul Poiret and Elsa Schiaparelli. A tireless experimenter, he rediscovered the technique of “photograms” (abstract silhouettes of objects) that Tristan Tzara named “rayographs” and in 1929, with his new partner Lee Miller, developed the “solarization” technique. In 1940, after the fall of France, Man Ray left for the United States and met Juliet Browner, who became his wife and muse. He returned to Paris in 1951 and lived there until his death in 1976.
Man Ray is renowned for having revolutionized the art of photography, but he was also a painter, draughtsman, assembler of objects, sculptor, writer and filmmaker. It is this protean artist that we seek to discover or re-discover, through a true panorama of his works, which will enable us to comprehend Man Ray’s creative process and the importance of his art.
Edited by Robert Rocca, Pierre-Yves Butzbach.
Texts by Robert Rocca, Pierre-Yves Butzbach, Serge Sanchez, Man Ray, Sylvie Gonzalez, Laurence Benaïm, Marie-Pierre Ribère, Jean-Michel Bouhours.
2024, English
Hardcover, 208 pages, 24 x 30 cm
Published by
National Portrait Gallery / London
$75.00 - Out of stock
Enticing, ethereal photographs from two visionaries who used portraiture as an exploration of the “dream space”. Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In draws parallels between two of the most significant practitioners in the history of photography, presenting fresh research, rare vintage prints, and previously unseen archival works.
‘I feel that photographs can either document and record reality or they can offer images as an alternative to everyday life: places for the viewer to dream in.’ – Francesca Woodman, 1980
Living and working over a century apart, Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) and Francesca Woodman (1958-1981) experienced vastly different ways of making and understanding images. Yet the two share more similarities than expected. Both artists had brief careers lasting less than 15 years; while neither enjoyed popularity and success during their lives, they have posthumously received widespread acclaim. Their portraits feature ethereal, experimental qualities that connect them soundly across time.
The beautifully illustrated catalog, accompanying the exhibition of the same name at the National Portrait Gallery, London, includes Woodman’s and Cameron’s best-known photographs as well as less familiar images. The book begins with three feature essays that consider Cameron and Woodman simultaneously and moves on to 10 thematic sections interspersing works by the two artists. Portraits to Dream In makes new connections between the work of two innovative photographers who pushed the boundaries of the photographic medium and experimented with ideas of beauty, symbolism, transformation and storytelling to produce some of art history’s most compelling and admired images.
Edited by Magdalene Keaney. Contributions by Helen Ennis, Katarina Jerinic.
Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–79) took up photography in the 1860s and was soon elected to both the Photographic Society of London and the Photographic Society of Scotland. She photographed her friends and family as well as notable figures of Victorian England, including Charles Darwin, Ellen Terry and Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
Francesca Woodman (1958–81) worked in both the United States and Italy and made her first mature photograph at the age of 13. Her lifetime exhibitions include the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts (1976); Galleria Ugo Ferrante, Rome (1978); and the Alternative Museum, New York (1980). Her artist’s book, Some Disordered Interior Geometries, was published by Synapse Press in 1981.
2016, English
Hardcover, 232 pages, 23.1 x 17.5 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
Moderna Museet / Malmö
$75.00 - Out of stock
On Being an Angel takes its title from a caption the artist inscribed on two of her photographs—self-portraits with her head thrust back and her chest thrust forward. Typical of Woodman’s work in the way they cast the female body as simultaneously physical and immaterial, these photographs and the evocative title they share are apt choices to encapsulate the work of an artist whose legacy has been unavoidably colored by her tragic personal biography and her death, at age 22, by suicide. In less than a decade, Woodman produced a fascinating body of work—in black and white and in color—exploring gender, representation, sexuality and the body through the photographing of her own body and those of her friends. Since her death, Woodman’s influence continues to grow: her work has been the subject of numerous in-depth studies and exhibitions in recent years, and her photographs have inspired artists all over the world. Published to accompany a travelling exhibition of Woodman’s work, Francesca Woodman: On Being an Angel offers a comprehensive overview of Woodman’s oeuvre, organized chronologically, with texts by Anna Tellgren, Anna-Karin Palm and the artist’s father, George Woodman.
Francesca Woodman (1958–81) was born in Denver, Colorado, to an artistic family and began experimenting with photography as a teenager. In 1975 she attended the Rhode Island School of Design, and in 1979 she moved to New York to attempt to build a career in photography. Woodman’s working career was intense but brief, cut short by her death in 1981.
1995, Japanese
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 32 x 27 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Bunkasha / Japan
$140.00 - In stock -
First 1995 hardcover edition of "one, two, three", a gorgeous oversized hardcover collection of nude photography by master Japanese photographer Kishin Shinoyama of award-winning actress Saki Takaoka. Takaoka was born in Kanagawa in 1972 and has appeared in many films, TV dramas, commercials, and musicals. Composed of black-and-white and colour works, this book became a hot topic in society at the time of its publication and recorded an astounding circulation of approximately 470,000 copies, which is unthinkable today. The number of sales and topicality are certainly very high, but the beauty of the photographs, and above all, the beauty of Saki Takaoka, who does not wear a single thread, can be said to be a work of art from head to toe. The atmosphere of monochrome printing is also very wonderful. A stunning book with beautiful, modern, pared back typographic design.
Very Good copy of clothbound 1st edition with Good dust jacket with wear and some chipping to spine/extremities.
1988, Japanese / English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 98 pages, 30 x 30.5 cm
Signed.,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Bundgeishunju / Tokyo
$240.00 - In stock -
Beautiful, rare, signed first edition of this great photobook by Japanese photographer Joji "Geroge" Hashiguchi (b. born in Kagoshima in 1949), the first in his acclaimed collections that also includes Father (1990) and Couples (1992) following Hashiguchi’s same method of portraiture. "Seventeen's Map" is an intelligent sociological typology consisting of documentary black and white portraits of Japanese seventeen-year-olds in the late 1980s. Introductory text in Japanese and English by the photographer.
"From March 1987 to January 1988, I travelled almost the whole of Japan, up north to the Rebun Island in Hokkaido, and down south to the Yona- kuni Island in Okinawa. This is a collection of the pictures of the 17-year olds I met during my travels. As long as they were 17-year olds at the moment when I met them and pressed the shutter of my camera, I did not care who my models were. In return for letting me photograph them, I decided not to pick and choose, but to put them all into this book."—Joji "Geroge" Hashiguchi
In addition to its value as an archaeological record, Hashiguchi's point of view always captures the social landscape behind it. Working as a sociological ethnographer with a survey approach, Hashiguchi produces a unique overview of Japanese society with a sense of considerable sociocultural diversity in light of stereotypic reductions of Japan as a homogeneous entity.
This special copy boldly signed by the photographer and dated (1988) on loose-leaf endpaper stock in silver metallic marker.
Texts in English and Japanese. Cited in Parr / Badger Volume 2.
Very Good copy with tanning to otherwise VG dust jacket.
1990, Japanese / English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket + obi), 120 pages (approx), 30 x 30.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Bundgeishunju / Tokyo
$200.00 - In stock -
Beautiful first hardcover edition of this great photo book by Japanese photographer Joji "Geroge" Hashiguchi (b. born in Kagoshima in 1949), the second in his acclaimed collections that also includes Seventeen's Map (1988) and Couples (1992) following Hashiguchi’s striking method of portraiture. "Father" is a moving sociological typology consisting of documentary black and white portraits of Japanese Fathers taken across Japan at the end of the 1980s. Text in Japanese and English by the photographer. In addition to its value as an archaeological record, Hashiguchi's point of view always captures the social landscape behind it. Working as a sociological ethnographer with a survey approach, Hashiguchi produces a unique overview of Japanese society with a sense of considerable sociocultural diversity in light of stereotypic reductions of Japan as a homogeneous entity.
"The present volume "Father" represents the second in my series. At least since beginning work on "Seventeen" I have come to notice that while mothers in Japan are often talked about by their children, fathers seem to be spoken of very little. And although Japan continues to be called a "male-centered" society, the males referred to in that expression tend to be the men of organizations and companies, not men as individuals. In addition, while one can see many depictions of ordinary wives in the pages of magazines and in other media, descriptions of fathers are strangely absent. As a result, while Japan continues to be viewed as a "man's society," solitary fathers, or individual men in their working prime, are virtually estranged from social consciousness. Value judgements aside, within Japan's current social structure, there exists an image of the father as a dedicated "working warrior," but it seems rebellion begins before we really get to know the existence of our fathers, and we lose the opportunity of confronting them genuinely as individual human beings. At the same time, I am also impressed with the feeling that fathers themselves do not speak their own minds, but bury their real feelings deep within as the years mount.
And this fact holds true not only with respect to relationships within the family, but with regard to the society as a whole. In that respect, I cannot help thinking that the faiure to por tray the genuine human image of those people living the most crucial roles within Japan's social structure is a minus for those of all generations. And it is from these kinds of thoughts that this collection, "Father" began"—Joji "Geroge" Hashiguchi
Texts in English and Japanese.
Very Good—Near Finein VG dust jacket and obi.