Ann Massal’s latest photobook presents her vision of beauty, blending images of rotten fruit with splatterings of nail polish, drawings of genitalia, and collages made from pornographic magazines
Tag: Kehrer
Laia Abril, Nina Berman, Sohrab Hura, and Carmen Winant are all in the running for the prestigious Paris Photo/Aperture Foundation Photobook of the Year Award, which will be announced on 09 November at Paris Photo.
In total ten books have been shortlisted for the award; in addition, 20 books have been shortlisted for the First Photobook, and five for the Photography Catalogue of the Year. All the shortlisted books will go on show at Paris Photo and at the Aperture Foundation in New York, then tour to various venues across Europe, as well as being featured in the Autumn 2018 issue of The Photobook Review. In addition the Photobook of the Year winner will receive $10,000.
Between 1993 and 2010, Harvey Stein visited Mexico 14 times, which makes every year bar three. Fascinated by what he found, he photographed communities in small towns and villages, mostly during festivals such as Day of the Dead, Easter, and Independence Day.
In his new book, Mexico – Between Life and Death, Stein explores the disparities of a culture he became fascinated by, showing Mexico as a country of contrast – where life meets death, deep-rooted tradition meets creeping progress, and religious belief meets worldly corruption.
Ute is a daydreamer, Martin only talks about his vacation. Monika gets along on her own very well, but Heike is lonely. Sabine adores going dancing, and Helga likes techno music. To German photographer Frederik Busch, these office plants have personalities just like any other co-worker. “Plants have feelings too,” he says. “They are social beings, just like us humans.”
In 2008, whilst working on a corporate assignments, Busch noticed a row of plants in an office hallway. “It looked like an art space. It was so clean and sterile, and the plants looked like sculptures,” he says. “I have always been interested in how humans adapt to office-life, so I decided to apply portrait photography to plants to discover how they adapt too.”
Every so often there is an opus that challenges received wisdom not just on a single subject, but on a range of them. An Autobiography of Miss Wish, the collaboration between Noor photographer Nina Berman and Kimberly Stevens, the protagonist, published by Kehrer, is one of them. The book reads many ways: as a memoir, a commentary on justice systems and social services, an indictment of our disregard for the less fortunate and a reflection on documentary photography.
The hefty volume is, first and foremost, the story of a black woman who once went by the name of Cathy Wish, who Berman met on the streets of London’s West End in 1990 while studying the legacy of Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberal policies. “I noticed her banging on a door, headphones in her ears and cigarette in hand,” the US photojournalist says.
Modern working life is so frenetic, we often don’t get the chance to dwell on how it’s evolving, how secure it is, or how we’d cope if our jobs came under threat. Who are the people, or groups of people, fighting this seemingly inevitable trend? The people who see something noble and worthy of protection in work?
Noel Bowler provides a possible answer in his series Union, which is on show at Impressions Gallery from 04 July – 22 September. Taking us inside the meeting rooms and head offices of industrial unions, it introduces us to the people who try to safeguard labour rights.
“I am just obsessed by the beauty of botanical drawings,” says Kenji Toma, describing his new book, The Most Beautiful Flowers. It’s a homage to Pierre-Joseph Redouté’s celebrated book of watercolours, Choix des plus belles fleurs [The most beautiful flowers], which was first published in France back in 1827 – long before colour photography was available. “His images were illustrated with the purpose of replicating the botanic subject as close to reality as possible,” says Toma. “I’m more interested in doing the exact opposite with photography.” His series shows hyperreal, unrealistically perfect images of flowers, each shot with the same lens, angle, and lighting, and delicately arranged with pins and armature wire. Going one step further than nature, they put a contemporary spin on the concept of the botanical encyclopaedia.
Chrystel Lebas has won the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation Photography Book Award, beating off the two other shortlisted photographers – Stephen Gill and Dayanita Singh. Lebas won the prize for Field Studies: Walking through Landscapes and Archives, which she published with Dutch outfit FW: Books. Field Studies is framed by the work of 20th century botanist Sir Edward James Salisbury, particularly his glass plate negatives from the 1920s, retracing his steps and making new images in the same Scottish landscapes. Gill was shortlisted for Night Procession, which he self-published through his imprint Nobody Books; Singh was shortlisted for her multi-book project Museum Bhavan, which was published by Steidl.
You may not know it, but you’re probably familiar with Emily Shur’s celebrity portraits, from Helen Mirren and Will Farrell to Lupita Nyong’o and Larry David. Her active, vibrant and playful commissions have been seen on posters and screens the world over, and have helped her become one of LA’s most sought-after photographers when it comes to shooting comedians, actors and musicians in their most natural – or unnatural – habitats. But in Super Extra Natural!, her new book published with Kehrer, Shur trades in the digital camera and studio lighting to take us on a journey through Japan.
The founder and director of the African Artists’ Foundation and curator of this year’s Lagos Photo picks out his top books, exhibitions and Instagram feeds of 2017