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Joshua K Jackson - Modern Paradox
Setanta Books 2022


Joshua K. Jackson's latest monograph is set against the backdrop of our new chaotic society where we contend with often overwhelming feelings of fear, anxiety and loneliness, whilst simultaneously seeking to draw closer to each other in the hopes of a better world.

Communication is easier than ever. We can reach out to strangers and share our points of view with anyone, anywhere, any time. We scroll through seemingly endless tweets made by people we either admire or despise, espousing views we alternately champion and detest. Everyone has a voice, but at the same time loneliness abounds in overpopulated cities. Love is sought online, and hate flourishes in a virtual world that seems to grow even as the physical one shrinks.

Modernity promised us freedom, but instead we seem to stumble from one crisis to another, at the mercy of invisible threats. We are made afraid by the sinister machinations we hear reported from pundits on increasingly untrustworthy television sets, or the conspiracies proclaimed by even less trustworthy influencers on social media. The more we learn the less we seem to understand and our disconnection makes us feel trapped in an information overload which we cannot escape.

And yet, there are precious real life connections made all the time, and made all the more meaningful for their scarcity. People joining together, whether in protest, fighting for a better future for us all to live in, or gathering in joy, hands touching, celebrating our victories and achievements. Hope is what keeps us from drifting away from each other, it unites us despite the constant background noise in the belief of a better, more connected world.

Jack Garland - waco
Nearest Truth Editions 2024


What is in a name? What is in a date? Jack Garland’s new book, waco, small w noted, is full of cryptic keys, signatures, and clues that open a dialog with the viewer starting with its title. Inside the book, beautiful black and white photographs permeate the pages, a long-distance nod to the pioneering work of Robert Adams, and Lewis Baltz, but with a position more suited toward John Gossage. The photographs sometimes present as formal, but then are given a complexity in their ordering and then finally, their patchwork of clues for the viewer to investigate. It is not an easy book. It does not have one reading, but many, and in this, it makes the premise (s) of the work fluid, open to projection and participation.

Where is waco? Who is waco? When is waco? And what is our taxation? To whose fever dream does the book’s production apply? Is it conditional to the surrendering moment of a country fixated between bliss and oblivion or have I already said too much…let whispers be our guide…for without them, silence would be the victor…

Magdalena Wywrot - Pestka (signed)
Deadbeat Club 2024


Magdalena Wywrot’s Pestka is a gravity-defying, through-the-looking-glass portrait of the life of a mother and her adolescent daughter, a series of time-lapse dispatches seemingly beamed from a hermetic space station suspended high above a planet (and Krakow, Poland) where time is literally standing still. The world outside the windows of Wywrot’s space station/apartment looks both distant and desolate and incredibly beautiful, almost devoid of a human presence. Yet the mother continues to take photos, while the daughter goes about her life and grows up before our eyes. A sort of rapture appears to have taken place outside, while an intimate metamorphosis (and an intimate surveillance) is slowly going on inside. A dreamlike sense of unsettling dislocation pervades the entire work. That sense will likely be familiar to anyone who has lived with a child and experienced firsthand the endless and startling transformations that occur—day by day and year by year—as a child grows into adulthood.

There is a fishbowl quality to Wywrot’s photos, which shapeshift, mercury-like, between Expressionism, Impressionism, and abstraction. The portraits are tender, mysterious, full of sparks of wonder and ecstasy, while the landscapes are disorienting, forbidding, vaguely apocalyptic, and often sublime. You have a sense of an unmistakable consciousness in the work, yet you’re never quite certain where you are, and there’s a moment somewhere in the book when you suddenly feel as if some giant, ambiguous lifeforce or spirit is lurking in the murky streets below, waiting for Wywrot to complete her work and turn her daughter loose on the planet.

Join Gregory Halpern in Berlin, where he will be signing copies of his new book King, Queen, Knave, an idiosyncratic vision of his hometown of Buffalo, New York that defies familiar narratives of post-industrial decline and embraces an enigmatic strain of reality verging on surrealism. The event will include a short talk from the artist, and a drinks reception.



Tuesday 12 November
18:30

Bilband, Berlin
Immanuelkirchstraße 33
10405 Berlin

About King, Queen, Knave

Over two decades, Gregory Halpern has been photographing in and around his hometown of Buffalo, New York, meticulously crafting the series of photographs that forms his latest monograph. King, Queen, Knave is an idiosyncratic vision of a city amidst its contradictions, defying familiar narratives of post-industrial decline and embracing an enigmatic strain of reality verging on surrealism. Halpern’s mesmerising sequence unfurls as a stage across which distinct and unpredictable characters appear in and amongst solitary buildings, snowdrifts, and sun-bleached scenes of everyday transcendence.

The images often locate their subjects within the specificities of the season and balance a historical project with the immediacy of a moment in its individual radiance. Embracing themes of reversal and ascension, Halpern confronts the complexities of his birthplace and of contemporary America at large, seeing beauty intertwined with ugliness and redemption with despair. This lyrical new work is testament to the endless complexity of a place at once familiar and unknown.

We’re in Paris! The shop will be closed Friday and Saturday 8-9.11.

Back on Monday the 11th 🤍

Max Pinckers & Quinten De Bruyn - Lotus
Lyre Press 2016



"‘What is documentary?’ he seems to be asking. ‘And what is staged by me? What is performed by the subjects in frame, consciously or not? How much does our behaviour in front of a camera lens stem from the visual culture that surrounds us?’ These questions help us to understand Lotus as part of an ongoing enquiry, one questioning the roles that the photograph, photographer and subject play when a defining – even decisive – moment is singled out from the many. They serve to remind us that the making of the image is integral to the understanding of the image – that even if we taste the lotus and lose the desire to find our way home, we can still smote the grey sea with our oars." – Tom Seymour, Book Review, British Journal of Photography, July 2017

Elaine Constantine – I'm Com'un Home in the Mor'nun
RRB Photobooks 2024



Photographs of the northern soul scene in the 1990s by Elaine Constantine are the subject of a new book, published by RRB Photobooks, and exhibition at the Martin Parr Foundation. The photographs, many seen here for the first time, were taken in venues including Manchester’s Ritz, London’s 100 Club, alongside smaller venues such as a lad called Steve’s kitchen.

In the early 1990s Constantine had recently moved from Manchester to London for her photography career and had been commissioned to photograph night clubs for The Face magazine. She was asked to make photographs at the 100 Club where they played rare American 60s and 70s soul 45s (northern soul) all through the night. Constantine had been on the northern soul scene herself up until a few years earlier and was curious to see how it had evolved.

Irina Unruh - Where the Poplars Grow
Shift Books 2024

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How does a German village get to Kyrgyzstan? Before the autumn of 1988, Irina Unruh, who was nine years old, left Kyrgyzstan, which was then part of the Soviet Union, with her family. Two decades later, she returned to Telman. her home village, which lies in the valley of the Chui River and is called Grünfeld by the older residents. Like its surrounding ones, the village was founded in the 1920s by refugee German Mennonites. Unruh tells her personal story of escape, displacement and home on the path of the history of Russian-Germans. Unruh’s photographic journey reveals the secrets that have been hidden for generations, the memories that are loudly remembered, and those that are only a whisper. Her photographs capture vast landscapes, intimate family moments, and friendly interactions. “Where The Poplars Grow” combines contemporary history and fragments of a family album. As you turn the pages, you become aware of collective and individual memories and their gaps. Unruh’s desire to track down childhood memories and record them photographically raises many questions about political and family entanglements, language, and how a German village found its way to Kyrgyzstan.

Back in stock!
Cai Dongdong - Passing By Beijing (signed)


Cai Dongdong is a Chinese artist, born in 1978 in Tianshui, China. This book comprises colour pictures over the last 20 years, documenting his move from northwest China to Beijing.

Luigi Ghirri - Viaggi
James Lingwood (ed.)

MACK 2024

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Among the many recurring interests that connect the rich and open-ended oeuvre of Luigi Ghirri, a fascination with travel resonates through his photographs, publications, and writings. This book by curator James Lingwood charts a course through Ghirri’s photography between 1970 and 1991, exploring the manifold ways in which journeys – viaggi – appear: in iconic landscapes in the Dolomites and the lakes of northern Italy; in the mirror-worlds of seaside resorts along the Adriatic and Mediterranean; among museums, archaeological sites, and theme parks; inside atlases and on postcards; and along his own bookshelves, with their evocative titles and mementoes. This vividly curated book maps a route through Ghirri’s work that takes in familiar landmarks and surprising detours, interleaving many of his best loved photographs with unseen discoveries from the Ghirri archive.

Luigi Ghirri: Viaggi introduces an essential artist of the late twentieth century through one of his most enduring and beloved themes, delving into Ghirri’s uniquely playful and profound conception of image-making in an age of popular photography and tourism. It is completed by in-depth essays by Tobia Bezzola, James Lingwood, and Maria Antonella Pelizzari, which situate Ghirri’s work in relation to Italian and international contexts and the wider world of image-making and consumption with which he enthusiastically engaged.

Co-published with MASI Lugano, this book accompanies the exhibition ‘Luigi Ghirri: Viaggi. Photographs 1970–1991’ at Museo d’arte della Svizzera italiana, Lugano, 8 September 2024–26 January 2025.

Hubert Humka - Eternal U
Blow Up Press 2023


Imagine that after death you will become a tree, part of the forest, unlimited and free energy. A lively monument will grow on you.

Eternal U is a story about the so-called good death and eternity. Through photographs of forests being natural cemeteries where the dead are buried in biodegradable urns or coffins, marked only with a previously selected tree, Humka shows a certain way of thinking about us as a code, an immortal chain of some larger universe. During life, we all draw from it, to later give it a part of ourselves:�

“In each of these places, the forest itself, giving eternal rest to the people buried there, was the most important element for me,” - says Hubert Humka. - “There I photographed the soil in which they rested and the bark of the trees they became. I like to think that the roots of these trees, drawing from the people buried under them, include them in their existence, that nothing ends, that it is only our human self that changes. We become a tree, a forest, part of something bigger that reaches beyond us. We connect with the universe, we become infinite.”��

Book Launch & Artist Talk with Joe Dilworth - Everything, All At Once Forever
Please join us for an artist talk with Joe Dilworth & Youvalle Levy about his new book published by Kominek Books.

Starting in 1988, Joe Dilworth worked for the weekly music paper, Melody Maker. At the same time, he was photographing his friends, and his friends bands, and playing drums in Th’ Faith Healers.

It was the start of a scene in between the claustrophobic mid 80s and the early 90s before Britpop, grunge even, and Joe was in a unique vantage point to record it. Set in kitchens, bedrooms, cafes, pubs & gigs, it’s the story of how it happened.



Bildband Berlin
Immanuelkirchstr 33
Thursday 24th October 2024
18:00 – 21:00
*artist talk at 19:00

Träum Weiter - Berlin, die 90er / Dream On - Berlin, the 90



The OSTKREUZ agency was founded in the midst of the upheavals that took place in East Berlin in 1990. For Once Upon a Time ... Berlin, the 90s, nine OSTKREUZ photographers worked together with curators Annette Hauschild (OSTKREUZ) and Boaz Levin (C/O Berlin Foundation) to cast a modern-day eye over their extensive archives as seen from today’s perspective. As documentarists operating at the apogee of photojournalism, they tracked the changes that the city underwent. They observed the shifts in society and the challenges facing a city that had previously been divided by a wall as it grew together, capturing all this in powerful, personal images. The essays reflect this on a variety of levels: Janos Frecot’s examination of the changes in the urban space; Jens Balzer’s description of Berlin’s potential as a centre of creativity and culture; and Anne Rabe’s very personal view, as a young East German writer, of today’s Berlin.

Gerry Johansson - New York 62/63 (signed)
Breadfield Press 2024


"After finishing high school in June 1962, I traveled to the United States to live for a year with my relatives in New Jersey, about an hour west of New York. There I did a bit of odd jobs and took some evening courses but had a lot of free time.


A friend, who worked on the Swedish American Line, transported my enlarger over to New York so I could set one up a simple darkroom. Quite often I took the bus to New York and walked around and photographed street life and went to museums and attended The Village Camera Club meetings.


When I returned home after the year in America, the negatives were lying around for 30 years before I looked at them and started printing them. It was a somewhat strange feeling. Like printing another photographer's work. In any case, I put together a small exhibition and some photos were published in the book Amerikabilder 1962-93.


Now another 30 years have passed before this little book is published. Everything feels, if possible, even more distant and the pictures look rather like they were made in the fifties. I simply have no memory of this being what New York looked like when I was there."

Adam Golfer - Kaddish


Kaddish draws on the contradictions of loss which reside among the mundane and absurd elements of everyday life. The oldest picture in the book is of my great uncle in Rome in 1947. The most recent is of my shadow on a wall in Germany in 2023.

The project gathers images collected and saved over the past 20 years, and functions as an amorphous, ambient scroll of information: pictures from my archive, texts, emails, images from family albums, home movies, screengrabs and iPhone photos. The project probes a pendulum of personal grief, couched among the anxieties of historical memory. It is an unstable, living archive which traces a meandering path from New York to Germany, Israel and Palestine.

We stocked up on so many new titles! Soon online 🤍

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Gregory Halpern - King, Queen, Knave
MACK 2024



Over two decades, Gregory Halpern has been photographing in and around his hometown of Buffalo, New York, meticulously crafting the series of photographs that forms his latest monograph. King, Queen, Knave is an idiosyncratic vision of a city amidst its contradictions, defying familiar narratives of post-industrial decline and embracing an enigmatic strain of reality verging on surrealism. Halpern’s mesmerising sequence unfurls as a stage across which distinct and unpredictable characters appear in and amongst solitary buildings, snowdrifts, and sun-bleached scenes of everyday transcendence.

The images often locate their subjects within the specificities of the season and balance a historical project with the immediacy of a moment in its individual radiance. Embracing themes of reversal and ascension, Halpern confronts the complexities of his birthplace and of contemporary America at large, seeing beauty intertwined with ugliness and redemption with despair. This lyrical new work is testament to the endless complexity of a place at once familiar and unknown.

Sabīne Zoltnere - Sheltering Ballad

Replika Publishing 2024

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Sheltering Ballad is an exploration of the author’s journey through grief following the loss of her father. The book presents a series of black-and-white photographs - still life, self-portraits, and images of nature - that serve as gateways into the author’s inmost experiences, vague memories, and shifting landscape of her emotional world. It’s a journal of her voyage through suffering in the search of peace and acceptance.

The visual narrative is complemented by written interventions by Bogdan Licar, whose meditative reflections open a parallel pathway, probing themes of memory, death, and search for meaning. His words, like the photographs, are marked by a profound sensitivity and awareness of the fragility of life.

Sheltering Ballad is a sanctuary of longing, desperation, sadness and love.