lamdha books -
Catalogue of books on photography

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88248 Acebes, Hector & Isolde Brielmaier and Ed Marquand Hector Acebes: Portraits in Africa 1948-1953 Sunbird Publishing, Cape Town South Africa, 2004. Quarto hardcover; beige cloth boards with black upper board and spine titling, illustrated endpapers; 23pp., and 73 monochrome plates at rear. Mild wear to dustwrapper edges with small chip on head of spine. Near fine and professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Photographing with the box camera his father had given him, Hector Acebes noticed as a teenager in the 1930s that his pictures of friends and family were consistently sharper and more carefully composed than those taken by his schoolmates. This innate talent, combined with solid training in engineering and an attraction to adventure, eventually grew into a long and productive career as a documentary and industrial filmmaker. It is Acebes's still photographs from his travels in the late 1940s and early 1950s throughout Africa and South American, however, that may become his most important legacy. With the respect they command for the individuals who appeared before his lens., these recently rediscovered images attest to Acebes's photographic gift. They offer a valuable resource for scholars and students of local societies and cultures in Africa and South America, yet their importance reverberates far beyond the classroom. Today, Acebes's images are recognized as fine art - works of beauty and grace that showcase the photographer's technical ability and masterful compositional skills. Even more evident are the confidence and respect he established with his subjects - qualities that shine through to elevate his work beyond the documentary. Acebes's portraits offer our jaded imaginations a fresh look at people, cultures, and experiences that have changed dramatically over the past fifty years. We see individuals, families, and communities set among monumental architecture, busy markets, and broad landscapes, all viewed from the passionate perspective of a young man, curious and captivated by the vigorous energy and beauty of what he saw. This book presents the exquisite work of Hector Acebes for the first time in monograph form. Over ninety striking images are richly reproduced in duotone. Ed Marquand, director of the Hector Acebes Archive, introduces Acebes in a brief biography. Isolde Brielmaier, a noted art historian of African photography, places Acebes's African work in the context of other photographers shooting in Africa at the time. She also discusses the qualities of Acebes's work that distinguish his photographs today. Click here to order $60

206059 Annear, Judy The Photograph and Australia The Art Gallery of New South Wales, The Domain Sydney NSW, 2015. Quarto; hardcover, with illustrated boards; 308pp., with many monochrome and full-colour illustrations. Clear plastic dustwrapper. Remainder. New. Click here to order $50

93015 Arbus, Diane Diane Arbus An Aperture Monograph Aperture, London, 2012. Quarto hardcover; illustrated white boards; unpaginated with monochrome illustrations. A few tiny bumps on lower board edges. Near fine in white illustrated dustwrapper with tear on upper front corner. Fortieth-anniversary edition. Diane Arbus was born on March 14, 1923, in New York City. An artistic youth, she learned photography from her husband, actor Allan Arbus. Together, they found success with fashion work, but Diane soon branched out on her own. Her raw, unusual images of the people she saw while living in New York created a unique and interesting portrayal of the city. She committed suicide in New York City in 1971. Born Diane Nemerov on March 14, 1923, in New York City, Diane Arbus was one of the most distinctive photographers of the 20th century, known for her eerie portraits and off-beat subjects. Her artistic talents emerged at a young age, having created interesting drawings and paintings while in high school. In 1941, she married Allan Arbus, an American actor who fostered her artistic talent by teaching her photography. Working with her husband, Diane Arbus started out in advertising and fashion photography. She and Allan became quite a successful team, with photographs appearing in such magazines as Vogue. In the late 1950s, she began to focus on her own photography. To further her art, Arbus studied with photographer Lisette Model around this time. During her wanderings around New York City, Arbus began to pursue taking photographs of people she found. She visited seedy hotels, public parks, a morgue and other various locales. These unusual images had a raw quality, and several of them found their way into the July 1960 issue of Esquire magazine. These photographs proved to be a spring board for future work. By the mid-1960s, Diane Arbus had become a well-established photographer, participating in shows at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, among other places. She was known for going to great lengths to get the shots she wanted. She became friends with many other famous photographers, including Richard Avedon and Walker Evans. While professionally continuing to thrive in the late 1960s, Arbus had some personal challenges. Her marriage to Allan Arbus ended in 1969, and she later struggled with depression. She committed suicide in her New York City apartment on July 26, 1971. Her work remains a subject of intense interest, and her life was the basis of the 2006 film "Fur", starring Nicole Kidman as Arbus. Click here to order $50

91585 Bailey, David (ed.) & Martin Harrison The Naked Eye: Great Photographs of the Nude Amphoto, New York NY, 1987. Quarto hardcover; black boards with silver gilt spine titling and black endpapers; 192pp., colour and monochrome illustrations. Owner's name. Faint spotting to upper text block edges. Near fine otherwise in like dustwrapper. Profusely illustrated with photographs of male and female nudes by a wide range of photographers including Helmut Newton, Man Ray, Alfred Stieglitz, Bruce Weber, Bill Brandt, and Edward Weston, as well as those of photographers whose work is completely unknown or rarely seen. The book is divided into four sections entitled Early Nudes, Modern Nudes, Eroticism & Glamour, and Nude Narratives. Click here to order $40

93303 Berg, Stephan & Luminita Sabau (ed. Alexander Sairally) Marc Luders: Invention of Reality Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2010. Quarto hardcover; black illustrated boards with pale gray/blue spine titling, gray endpapers; 175pp., colour & monochrome illustrations. Mild rubbing to dustwrapper with two superficial scratches on rear panel. Near fine and wrapper now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Combining painting and photography, German artist Marc Luders (born 1963) creates complex scenes that challenge viewers' expectations of reality and illusion. Through a painstaking process, the artist transposes painted figures and objects onto photographs of existing landscapes - interventions that are often imperceptible at first glance. This survey publication features the artist's latest series devoted to American supermarkets. Click here to order $45

83314 Bernhard, Ruth The Eternal Body: A Collection of Fifty Nudes Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 1986. Square folio paperback, 50 monochrome plates. Minor wear only; a few slight scratches and scuffing to silver and black covers. Near fine otherwise. Includes 'The Nude - Symbol and Light' and 'Toward the Light - A Biography of Ruth Bernhard' by Margaretta Mitchell. Click here to order $40

88636 Bosworth, Patricia Diane Arbus A Biography Alfred A. Knopf, New York NY, 1984. First edition: octavo; hardcover, quarter-bound in papered boards, with gilt spine-titling and upper board decoration; 369pp., with 16pp. of monochrome photographic plates. Mild wear; somewhat shaken; some marks to the text block edges. Dustwrapper is well-rubbed with a small chip to the bottom edge of the lower panel; now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Very good. Like Frida Kahlo and Georgia O'Keefe, Diane Arbus exerts a fascination rooted in both her art and her life. Her startling photographic images of dwarfs, twins, transvestites, and freaks seemed from the first to redefine both the normal and the abnormal in our lives and they were already becoming part of the iconography of the age when Arbus committed suicide in 1971. Arbus herself remained an enigma until the publication of this first full biography. Patricia Bosworth examines the life behind the eerie, mesmerizing photographs: Diane's pampered childhood; her passionate marriage to Allan Arbus and their work together as fashion photographers during the fifties; the emotional upheaval surrounding the end of that marriage; and the radically dark, liberating, and ultimately tragic turn Diane's art took during the sixties. Bosworth's engrossing book is a compassionate portrait of the woman behind some of the most powerful photographs of our time. Click here to order $30

67177 Bravo, Manuel Alvarez The Eyes in his Eyes Rose Gallery, New York, 2007. Quarto; hardcover; illustrated boards; unpaginated (196pp.), with photographic illustrations, colour and monochrome. Remainder. New. Frida Kahlo leans against a concrete wall, looking sombrely down while an ankle-length skirt flutters around her. Elsewhere, the tight screws of plough blades stack interlocked on a warehouse floor, utilitarian subjects coalescing into a heady abstract pattern. From his first days as a photographer - with the backing of such greats as Tina Modotti, Edward Weston, Paul Strand and Henri Cartier-Bresson - Manuel Alvarez Bravo worked over a wide range of styles and subject matter - formalist abstraction, architecture, interiors, landscapes, still lifes, and portraits - with a consistent focus on the landscape and social geography of Mexico. In his concise vision of his homeland, it was both a real and symbolic landscape populated with subjects detained in dream world tableaux of desire, solitude, candour and foreboding. Eyes in His Eyes reintroduces some of the artist's overlooked masterpieces, and reveals, for the first time, a broad selection of never-before-seen images from his private archives. In his 80-year career, Alvarez Bravo printed, published and exhibited only a thousand images. This portfolio, culled with the help of the artist himself, and completed after his death, is full of unfamiliar abstractions, portraits, landscapes and street photography. It provides an invaluable re-entry into the visual poetry of one of Mexico's most gifted artists and a modern master of photography. Click here to order $35

201801 Callahan, Harry M. (ed.) Ansel Adams in Color Little Brown & Co., Boston MA, 1993. Quarto hardcover; red cloth boards with gilt spine titling and orange endpapers; 131pp., colour plates. Minor wear only; fine in like dustwrapper, now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Click here to order $40

97320 Cartier-Bresson, Henri (Introduction by E.H. Gombrich) Tete a Tete Portraits by Henri Cartier-Bresson Little Brown & Co., Boston MA, 1998. First US edition: hardcover, quarto; blue boards with gray spine titling and gray endpapers; 134 monochrome plates. Minor wear; faint spotting to upper text block edges and small black spot on lower edges. Near fine in like dustwrapper now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Over the last seven decades, Henri Cartier-Bresson has photographed both many unnamed, ordinary people and some of the most famous icons of the Twentieth Century. "Tete-a-Tete" is a remarkable selection of Cartier-Bresson's most memorable portraits, juxtaposing his anonymous subjects with such diverse personalities as Robert Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, Truman Capote, Pablo Picasso, Lucian Freud, William Faulkner, Coco Chanel, Martin Luther King Jr., Che Guevara and the Dalai Lama. A selection of pencil drawings, a self-portrait among them, is also included. Click here to order $40

214138 Chatwin, Bruce Photographs and Notebooks Jonathan Cape Ltd./Random House, Milson's Point NSW 1993. First edition. Landscape quarto; hardcover, full cloth with gilt spine-titling and decorated endpapers; 160pp., with maps and many full-colour and monochrome illustrations. Minor wear; some mild rubbing to the boards. Dustwrapper a little rubbed and edgeworn; now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Very good to near fine. "The pictures, many in colour, are surprisingly good - simple, direct and graphically striking - and together with the extracts from his travel notebooks, provide, in the words of Francis Wyndham, the book's editor, 'a luminous glimpse of how he saw the world'. Tempting though it is to see this latest Chatwin discovery as yet another media hype (are these really any better than the average holiday snap?) Chatwin had, in fact, acquired a reputation for his 'infallible eye' whilst working as Head of Antiquities and then Impressionist Paintings at Sotheby's in the 1960s. When he gave it all up to travel, he put his 'eye' to good use, firing not only delightfully eccentric descriptive prose, but an undoubtedly imaginative (if not technically brilliant) use of photography. The least interesting images, if informative, are the standard panoramas - an abandoned fort in the Sahel, dwellings in West Africa - but they are also the least characteristic. He naturally leant towards an abstract form of expression, much in the style of his prose, his eye effortlessly drawn to strong colours and natural formations - particularly wood, rock and iron. And he had a particular talent for spotting picture potential in the most unlikely situations - the side of a boat becomes an abstract study in colour, a window a proscenium arch, an array of Nepalese prayer flags could pass for a delicate watercolour, and the cracks and mould that overlay a 19th-century fresco add to its charm. And who would have thought that a pile of painted planks or a mass of corrugated iron had such artistic potential?" (Jane Richards in The Independent). Click here to order $40

74921 Claxton, William Photographic Memory Powerhouse Books, New York NY, 2002. Folio hardcover, 153pp., monochrome illustrations. Black boards, no dustwrapper. Minor wear; near fine. 'In the early 1950s, while still in school at UCLA, Claxton began photographing musicians on the flourishing Los Angeles jazz scene. His subsequent history in jazz is well known. While still a student, he founded the record company Pacific Jazz with producer Richard Bock and went on to photograph (and often design) hundreds of album covers. His quintessential images of jazz musicians appeared in scores of magazines and have been shown in galleries and museums around the world. The body of work he created chronicles a whole trajectory of postwar American jazz, from its early years to bebop, West Coast Cool, and the flowering of free-form improvisation. When shooting in Los Angeles and San Francisco, he often photographed his subjects outside, bringing an intimacy to his images that said as much about his friendships with these artists as it did about the California light. He brought this same fresh approach to his photographs of musicians in New York, Chicago, New Orleans, and other cities around the country. Less well known is the fact that throughout his career Claxton has just as assiduously photographed people from all walks of life, both the famous - writers, actors, directors, composers, artists, and fashion designers - and the family and friends to whom he has been closest. Often there has been little distinction between the two. In a sense, he has always been a kind of neighborhood photographer, though later his neighborhood became the world. Many of the photographs shown in the gathering of pictures featured here - whether shot in a recording studio, on a Hollywood sound stage, or in the living rooms of his subjects - were taken within a few miles of Claxton's home at the top of Benedict Canyon above Beverly Hills. A Pasadena kid who went to high school in Glendale, Claxton has been an insider in the world of L.A. art and entertainment for most of his adult life. He has always moved easily between jazz clubs, recording studios, the art scene, film sets, and the homes of the artists who became his friends. Above all, this work is about friendship. ...Style? It's all they've got. And if this book is first and foremost about friendship, it is next about style. Although genuinely too modest to admit it, Claxton is universally considered as gracious, funny, elegant, and stylish a man as you are likely to meet, and with enough charm and wit to have been at home in any Noel Coward play. He has always admired these qualities in others, especially in those who seem to have them effortlessly and in abundance, and it shows in the photographs - in the beauty of Gloria Swanson shopping with Claxton in an antique store, on the set with the eternally hip Steve McQueen, or in the image of a dapper Vincent Price at home with his renowned collection of art' (Garrett White). Click here to order $40

89693 Cock, Liliane de (Foreword by Minor White) Ansel Adams New York Graphic Society, Boston MA, 1981. Square quarto hardcover, unpaginated, 117 duotone plates. Very minor wear only; near fine in slightly yellowed dustwrapper (now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film). "Ansel Adams" edited by Liliane De Cock shows the growth and range of Adams' career across the decades since 1920. Here, little-known images are brought together with many of Adam's most famous pictures to provide a treasure for photographers, collectors, and those who cherish the American scene. Contains 117 of Ansel Adams photos plus chronology and selected bibliography. Click here to order $35

86293 Crewdson, Gregory Beneath the Roses Essay by Russell Banks Abrams/Harry N. Abrams Group Inc., New York, 2008. Landscape folio; hardcover, with upper board title; 140pp. with many full-colour photographic illustrations. Flyleaf has been cut out; a small red mark to the contents page. Very minor wear to the dustwrapper. Very good. Best known for his elaborately choreographed, large-scale photographs, Gregory Crewdson is one of the most exciting and important artists working today. The images that comprise Crewdson's new series, 'Beneath the Roses,' take place in the homes, streets, and forests of unnamed small towns. The photographs portray emotionally charged moments of seemingly ordinary individuals caught in ambiguous and often disquieting circumstances. Both epic in scale and intimate in scope, these visually breathtaking photographs blur the distinctions between cinema and photography, reality and fantasy, what has happened and what is to come. 'Beneath the Roses' features an essay by acclaimed fiction writer Russell Banks, as well as many never-before-seen photographs, including production stills, lighting charts, sketches, and architectural plans, that serve as a window into Crewdson's working process. Click here to order $60

93621 Crewdson, Gregory (Deborah Aaronson, ed.; Essay by A.O. Scott) Sanctuary Abrams/Harry N. Abrams Group Inc., New York, 2010. Landscape folio; hardcover, with blind-stamped spine and upper board title and black endpapers; 96pp. with many monochrome photographic illustrations. Very minor wear. Dustwrapper very lightly rubbed. Near fine. "Known for capturing the alienation and anxiety of small-town America in series such as 'Beneath the Roses', Crewdson photographed 'Sanctuary' at the Cinecitta studios, Rome, producing a body of work outside of the US for the first time. When Crewdson first visited Cinecitta he found the labyrinthine lots of the legendary studio devoid of human presence, in a state suspended between grandeur and ruin. The site was haunted by the architectural ghosts of ancient Rome, historical New York, and medieval Italy, among other settings and places, all remnants of past productions. Abandoned by the actors and crews that brought the sets to life, each building and street was eerily quiet, a network of ephemeral facades and dead ends that was so evocative it scarcely needed the artist's intervention. 'In these pictures', comments Crewdson, 'I draw upon the inherent quietness and uncanny aspects of the empty sets.' Crewdson has in previous series used locations and characters in order to create pictures charged with narrative portent, but for 'Sanctuary' Crewdson decided to make the film sets themselves the subject of the photographs. Despite this change of direction, the artist's vision persists: 'As with much of my work', suggests Crewdson, 'I looked at the blurred lines between reality and fiction, nature and artifice, and beauty and decay.' A photograph might depict what appears to be the corner of a Roman structure, topped by the statue of a proud emperor, and yet a network of scaffolding supports this supposedly timeless ruin. In another picture, a series of large wooden buildings stretches across the horizon like the background to a cartoon western, yet they are all marked by gaping holes, as if an entire townscape were about to collapse. Nature seems to overcome the sets in some pictures, with trees, vines and weeds engulfing the majestic vistas and brittle buildings. The cool monochrome and intimate scale of the prints lend the pictures an ageless and elegiac intensity, and yet in these empty studio lots Crewdson has found a poignant symbol of our persistent longing for permanence." - White Cube Click here to order $45

93298 Davidson, Bruce Circus Steidl, Gottingen, 2007. Large quarto hardcover; brown cloth boards with red and black front board and spine titling with upper board illustration pasted on, brown endpapers; 101pp., monochrome illustrations. Minor wear only; near fine. No dustwrapper. One of the world's most influential photographers, Bruce Davidson, takes readers inside three midcentury big tops in images that are poetic, realistic and profound. He reveals not only the swiftly vanishing cultural phenomenon of the circus, but what might be called the eternal human circus. At a three-ring show in 1958 he climbed to the top of the tent to view the performances of the famous liontamer Clyde Beatty and human cannonball Hugo Zacchini. His deeper interest lay in the daily lives of circus performers and producers - the roustabouts and riggers, and the pretty girl who rode an elephant in what was called the "spec." He also made an intimate series of a dwarf clown. In 1965 at a huge multi-ring coliseum show, Davidson took a more critical look at performances under a steel-and-concrete environment; continuing behind the scenes, his vision became sharper and more surreal. And in 1967, Davidson caught the elegant exuberance of an Irish one-ring circus. He photographed the kinds of performances that are the essence of the medium, including a face-to-face encounter with an exceptional trapeze artist. Most of these pictures are published here for the first time. Click here to order $175

87631 Doyle, Peter, with Caleb Williams City of Shadows: Sydney Police Photographs 1912-1948: signed copy (Doyle) Historic Houses Trust, Sydney NSW, 2006. Reprint. Quarto hardcover, illustrated boards and endpapers; 239pp., monochrome illustrations. Minor wear; signed in ink by Peter Doyle. No dustwrapper as issued. Near fine. In the late 1980s, a vast collection of forensic crime photography, created by the New South Wales Police between 1912 and 1960, was rescued by the Historic Houses Trust from a flooded warehouse. This book draws on Peter Doyle's extensive research into these fascinating and often eerily beautiful images of everyday misadventure in Sydney between 1912 and 1948. Reproduced here to stunning effect, the reader is struck by the power of the photographs to transcend their provenance in police investigation and crime scene recording, to offer breathtaking historical revelation, and to come alive in their own right. Click here to order $150

89453 Drew, Marian & Geoffrey Batchen (fore.) Marian Drew: Photographs + Video Works Queensland Centre for Photography, Bulimba, 2006. Quarto hardcover; illustrated boards and endpapers; 100pp., colour and monochrome plates and CD in rear pocket featuring video works and documentaries. Minor wear only; near fine. No dustwrapper. "This book presents my research over a twenty year period publishing yet unseen works and video as an accompanied DVD. Four writers as well as myself contributed in responding to the developments of my practice with key contextual references to relevant theory and the practice of other historical and contemporary artists. Documentations of the production of work takes the form of 2 video documentaries. This 100 page hard cover book has 80 colour illustrations, five essays, 2 documentaries, 5 art video works and a curriculum vitae. This book involved five internationally recognized writers researching 25 years of my research practice. The book was published by the Queensland Centre for Photography and funded both by Arts Queensland ($40,000) and the Queensland Centre for Photography ($30,000). In conjunction with this book I presented a solo exhibition of over forty large scale photographs curated and reinterpreted through new technologies in printing to reveal and clarify research interests. The exhibition titled 'Marian Drew' at the Queensland Centre for Photography was opened by the former State Minister for the Arts, Matt Foley. The monograph recognized twenty-five years of research and linked bodies of work that examine ideas of the local in terms of landscape, the domestic and family, assertively hybridizing the theories and practices of drawing and photography. The cross-disciplinary approach of my research through images that are an amalgam of drawing and photography have made a unique contribution to this discipline. The cross-disciplinary, highly inventive nature of my research has also resulted in a DVD-Rom of selected video art works, documentaries and a video interview. This research publication provides a valuable visual, theoretical, historical context for past and future work. This has increased the number of national and international publications and invitations to exhibit my research, for example in Art and Australia, Art Monthly, Photofile, Luminous Lindt (a specialist web site on fine art photographic practice published in the UK), Large Format magazine (published in the United States) several curated shows in Australia, LA Photo, and further gallery representation of my work in Adelaide, New Zealand, Los Angeles and New York." - Marion Drew Click here to order $35

217361 Ennis, Helen (intro.) Cazneaux: The Quiet Observer National Library of Australia, 1997. Reprint. Quarto hardcover; illustrated boards, blue endpapers; 80pp., monochrome illustrations. Binding very slightly cocked; one or two spots on text block and small bump on heel of spine panel. Very good to near fine. No dustwrapper. Click here to order $35

95246 Evans, Walker with Andrei Codrescu & Judith Keller Walker Evans: Cuba J Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 2001. Square quarto hardcover; orange/brown cloth boards with orange gilt upper board and spine titling, orange endpapers; 95pp., monochrome plates. Minor wear; faint spotting to upper text block edges and mild toning to page edges. Otherwise fine in like dustwrapper now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. "Published to coincide with the J. Paul Getty Museum exhibition, 'A Revolutionary Project: Cuba from Walker Evans to Now,' Walker Evans' Cuba is a striking window into the eye of a future master. The work in Cuba is uneven. Some shots reveal the preoccupations and talent that would later make Evans a world-class artist. Others aren't much better than vacation snapshots. But for people who want to see how a photographic genius develops as well as those simply interested in Cuba's pre-revolutionary people and architecture, this is a valuable work. Walker Evans is a major figure of 20th Century photography, cited by many other giants as an influence. Henri Cartier-Bresson, for example, told Charlie Rose that Evans was one of his photographic 'fathers.' More than any other body of his work, the images Evans created during the Great Depression for the Farm Securities Administration cemented his reputation as a keen observer of people and their spaces. This series, taken a few years before the FSA work, is not as widely known. In 1933, Evans went to Cuba on assignment for the publisher of progressive crusader Carleton Beals's then-forthcoming book, The Crime of Cuba. He was to document the conditions under the dictator Gerardo Machado. Beals and his publisher likely wanted imagery wrought with emotion and designed to evoke outrage at the conditions of the poor. Evans, already somewhat of a non-conformist, went for something more subtle: storytelling that was more journalistic and less overtly opinionated than that of his colleagues. While in Cuba, Evans befriended Ernest Hemingway, and perhaps Hemingway's ability to artfully depict a moment or interaction with simple and unadorned prose inspired the young photographer... Evans is often credited with the ability to simply record what appeared in his viewfinder in an objective and unembellished way. These early pictures indicate that Evan's 'simplicity' is smokescreen for a complex vision. It's no easy feat to compose a scene in a graphically pleasing way while capturing a poignant moment or a richly informative living space. The work of a rare talent is evident in his ability to do so in a manner that, upon first glance, seems hardly more than straightforward documentation, but that continues to feel fresh and new upon repeated viewing. For Walker Evans fans, or for anyone who wants to see a major photographer capturing Cuba at very specific place and time, Walker Evans Cuba is a fascinating and engaging book." - Adam Koplan Click here to order $40

74915 Fahrmann, Tom Beyond the Image Nieswand, 1997. Quarto hardcover, unpaginated, monochrome illustrations. Board edges and corners worn; faint spotting to upper text block edge; edgewear and chipping to dustwrapper. Very good and professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. For this project, noted photographer Tom Fahrmann sought to get beyond the usual approach to the traditional nude. His subjects were almost a hundred ordinary people of different ages and various backgrounds, whom he pictured individually or in pairs. No clothes, no make-up, and only a chair were the qualifications. The result is a simple yet intense study which authenticity prevails over society's camouflage. Click here to order $40

63843 Fowles, John, & Frank Horvat The Tree Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1980. First Australian edition. Oblong quarto hardcover; brown cloth boards with gilt spine titling, brown endpapers; unpaginated, colour illustrations. Inscription. Minor wear; scattered spotting on half-title and title page with random spotting throughout; mild spotting on text block edges; very good to near fine in like slightly rubbed dustwrapper and professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. When these hauntingly beautiful studies of trees were first exhibited in France they were hailed as 'an achievement in the realm of photography that makes his work equal the highest moments of painting', and they attracted the novelist John Fowles with their powerful simplicity and their ability to see nature as even paintings could not: 'In many ways painters did not begin to see nature whole until the camera saw it for them; and already in this context, had begun to supersede them'. Click here to order $35

65725 Frizot, Michel (ed.) A New History of Photography Konemann, Koln Germany, 1998. Quarto; hardcover, with silver-gilt upper board and spine titling; 775pp., with many monochrome illustrations. Minor wear; faint spotting and one or two marks to the text block edges; a few faint scattered spots on half-title page. Dustwrapper mildly rubbed; now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Very good. 'This book is not an anthology of the lives of the great photographers, nor a collection of the best contemporary photographs, nor a sounding-board for recognized celebrities. It is a book conceived as such - both in its images and its text and readable at two levels: a collection of images chosen to illustrate visual continuity and changes while demonstrating the relevance of the author's viewpoint, combined with texts providing historical and analytical information with which the reader may confront their own knowledge for greater understanding. ' - from the Foreword. Click here to order $75

95279 Galassi, Peter (Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans & Manuel Alvarez Bravo, illus.) Documentary and Anti-Graphic Photographs Steidl, Gottingen, nd. Quarto hardcover; illustrated boards; 191pp., monochrome illustrations. Very minor wear only; fine. No dustwrapper, as issued. "It was in the process of sorting through Henri Cartier-Bresson's archives, brought together for the creation of the Foundation, that we came upon a modest white announcement card bearing a strange pair of eyes and a no less obscure title: 'Documentary and Anti-Graphic Photographs'. Everything about it was enticing: the names of three artists of no small renown which formed the eyes - Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Walker Evans, Henri Cartier-Bresson - , the date, April 1935, and the name of the dealer, Julien Levy. As for the significance of the 'anti-graphic photography', it was open to a variety of interpretations which anyone curious about photographs would feel duty-bound to explore. Julien Levy was one of the most influential collectors of the 20th Century. His gallery, which opened in 1931 in New York, played an essential role in avant-garde cultural exchanges between France and the United States of America, and especially, it was the first in the United States to promote Surrealism. Gathered together again for the first time since, these period prints represent an exceptional set of essential and sometimes unknown images. This historical exhibition assembles the original early works of three masters of photography. Julien Levy did not live to see photography arrive on the art market as he had sought, and when people spoke to him about his talent as an exceptional discoverer, he claimed a 'state of grace'. But the freedom of his choices and the quality of his eye have marked the evolution of photography with incontestable milestones. This selection places us face to face with the history of the medium in the making." - from the Introduction. Exhibition catalogue. Click here to order $30

93076 Gibson, Ralph (Peter Weiermair, ed.) Light Years Edition Stemmle, Zurich Switzerland, 1996. Quarto hardcover; black boards with white spine titling, black endpapers; 199pp., monochrome illustrations. Very mild spotting to upper text block edges. Near fine otherwise in like black and white dustwrapper now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. This volume presents the 92 most significant pictorial compositions of Ralph Gibson. His raw materials are the lines and shapes of seemingly mundane objects - a streetlamp, the back of a chair, a wine bottle, a human silhouette against the light. Based upon an unusual black-and-white technique, his photography is metaphorical rather than documentary. The contents of Gibson's pictures are difficult to grasp, often even mysterious. Some compositions seem characterized by unusual control, structure and clarity, while others are opulent, seductive and full of hidden meaning. Gibson celebrates what he sees. The human form is generalized far beyond the concrete-associative representational approach of portraiture. In deliberately overlooking the signs and props of specific locale, Gibson raises individual figures to an abstract level of human existence. His often fragmentary figures draw the viewer's attention to the design and composition of the pictorial details. The organic structure of such pictures clearly suggests that their origins are by no means random. With great precision and without sentimentality he succeeds in making his message comprehensible. Click here to order $80

89641 Gibson, Robin & Pam Roberts Madame Yevonde: Colour Fantasy and Myth National Portrait Gallery, London, 1990. Quarto paperback; 119pp., colour and monochrome illustrations. Mild scuffing and wear to cover edges and corners. Very good to near fine otherwise. Born in 1893, Yevonde set up her first studio in London in 1914. She was one of the first photographers to make a successful use of colour technology in Britain and her work, particularly some of her magazine and publicity shots, could be seen to have been influenced by her childhood visits to the theatre and costume parties, in their use of lighting, colour and the models' poses. Her society portraiture included theatrical and literary names as well as eminent figures from the aristocracy. In 1935 Madame Yevonde invited a number of leading society ladies to be involved in a project on the theme of Goddesses, some of which are included in this work. Her baroque approach to the treatment of her subjects combined with her interest in the issue of female identity and gender roles created a new contemporary audience of her work. Click here to order $40

94724 Goldin, Nan (David Armstrong, Hans Werner Holzwarth, et al., eds.) I'll Be Your Mirror Whitney Museum of American Art, New York NY, 1996. Quarto; hardcover; 492pp., with many monochrome and full-colour illustrations. Moderate wear; shaken; softening to the spine extremities and some bumps to the board edges; faint offset to the endpapers; some repeated indentations to the half-title page with accompanying marks and transferring to the next few pages. Dustwrapper lightly rubbed and edgeworn; now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Very good to near fine. "Nan Goldin is the impassioned historian of love in the age of fluid sexuality, glamour, beauty, violence, death, intoxication and masquerade. An uncanny attention and attraction to the drama and the commonplace of life structure her photographs. In front of her camera women weep in bars; couples make love on unmade beds in messy apartments; beautiful, naked male torsos lie atop cars; women stare into bathroom mirrors... By capturing the present, Goldin instinctively knew that the record would ultimately deliver a past. Out of the flux of experience, she captures moments that cumulatively tell stories of love, friendship, desire and their aftermaths. Her camera freezes the comings and goings of the social experience of desire: love and hate in intimate relationships; moments of isolation, self-revelation, and adoration; the presentation of the sexual self freed from the constraints of biological destiny. Nor is Goldin's an abstract history. It is recounted through the lives of people who are part of her life" writes Elisabeth Sussman. The book presents the first twenty-five years of the artist's work, beginning in the early 1970s with the party years in Boston and New York and moving on to the euphoria and despair of widespread drug abuse, the burgeoning AIDS crisis, the collective will to survive and the inevitable passage of time. These pictures tell a personal story about relationships and identity, chronicling Goldin's search for community and her struggle against death and loss. Click here to order $200

93301 Greenough, Sarah Harry Callahan National Gallery of Art, Washinton/ Little, Brown and Co., Boston, 2001. Quarto gatefold paperback; 199pp., colour and monochrome plates. Very minor wear; faint spotting to upper text block edges; mild scuffing and edgewear to card covers. Near fine. Throughout his career, Harry Callahan quietly but consistently explored new ways of looking at and presenting the world in his photographs. His nature and landscape photography were influenced by Ansel Adams; however, Callahan was boldly innovative and experimental with the technical side of photography, using double exposures and extreme contrast, wide-angle lenses and colour to create lyrical, highly personal photographs. He was celebrated as a photographer of nature, the city and women, often with his wife as a model. This book first accompanied Callahan's National Gallery of Art exhibition and it traces the numerous experiments Callahan made throughout his career through 119 reproduced photographs. Click here to order $45

91074 Guillemin, Laetitia Thomas Jorion - silencio Deluxe Version Editions de la Martiniere/La Martiniere Group, Paris, 2013. Landscape quarto; hardcover, with tipped-on upper board decoration; unpaginated, with many full-colour photographic plates. Fine, in a silver-gilt titled slipcase. Laid in: a limited edition numbered photographic print. Thomas Jorion's collection of images taken of abandoned and deserted buildings across the planet is a striking compendium of stark photography, demonstrating that the silent places of the world have a hidden power and a forlorn charm. Click here to order $300

83444 Haas, Ernst (Gisela Minke text) Himalayan Pilgrimage Thames and Hudson, London, 1978. Oblong quarto hardcover; blue cloth boards with gilt spine titling and publishers insignia on front upper board, in gilt; 159pp., colour illustrations. Minor wear; mild wear to board edges and corners; light offsetting to endpapers with a few scattered spots and faint toning and spotting to text block edges. Very good to near fine in like dustwrapper now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Click here to order $60

88484 Hanzlova, Jitka Female Diechtorhallen, Hamburg, 2000. Quarto hardcover; illustrated boards and green endpapers; 128pp., colour illustrations. Introductory text in German. No dustwrapper. Mild rubbing to boards. Near fine otherwise. In her photographs Jitka Hanzlova perceives everyday and incidental events. For this series she photographed women she met on her various travels to European and American cities. The images often arose spontaneously at the place of the meeting, or by appointment the next day. The women are portrayed as individuals with specific irregularities and facial features, which do not allow for stereotypical classification. The people we meet in these portraits are anonymous. In most cases the title only mentions their first name, in some instances even this has been left out. The identity, the profession and the living conditions of these models remain unknown to us. Even when Hanzlova seemingly reveals some biographical details about the subjects she observes, her images never become voyeuristic. On the contrary, as an artist she has the utmost respect for the women she portrays and cautiously tries to capture their self-assertion on film. Though the emphasis is on the women, they are always related to mostly urban surroundings, its colours and atmospheres. Subject and background interact directly. This synthesis gives each of Hanzlova's photographs a unique expression. Click here to order $100

93304 Herzog, Fred (texts. Felix Hoffmann; Claudia Gochmann & Stephen Waddell) Fred Herzog Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2011. Quarto hardcover; black cloth boards with upper and lower board illustrations and white titles, black endpapers; 191pp., colour and monochrome illustrations. Very minor wear only; near fine. No dustwrapper, as issued. In 1952, Fred Herzog (born 1930) emigrated from Germany to Canada, and quickly found work as a medical photographer in Vancouver. But outside the lab, Herzog also devoted himself to what was, at the time, an unusual and even frowned-upon medium, at least artistically: colour photography. Labouring away as a virtually anonymous pioneer in this field, some 20 years before William Eggleston's watershed show at the Museum of Modern Art, Herzog was quietly documenting in rich Kodachrome the streets of Vancouver: its supermarkets, gas stations, bars, urban scenery and above all its working class culture. Herzog used slide film to make his photographs, which limited his ability to exhibit them and further marginalized his work; but in recent decades, happily, this colour pioneer has drawn great acclaim, and this volume, the largest Herzog monograph yet published, does marvellous justice to his rich oeuvre. Click here to order $200

203807 Hill, John T., & Heinz Liesbrock (eds.) Walker Evans Depth of Field Prestel, New York NY, 2015. Quarto hardcover; 406pp., with monochrome illustrations. Dustwrapper. Remainder, new. This resplendent volume is the most comprehensive study of Walker Evans's work ever published, containing masterful images accompanied by authoritative commentary from leading photography historians. The name Walker Evans conjures images of the American everyman. Whether it's his iconic contributions to James Agee's depression-era classic book, "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men", his architectural explorations of antebellum plantations, or his subway series, taken with a camera hidden in his coat, Evans's accessible and eloquent photographs speak to us all. This comprehensive book traces the entire arc of Evans's remarkable career, from the 1930s to the 1970s. The illustrations in the book range from his earliest images taken with a vest pocket camera, to his final photos using the then new SX-70 because his regular equipment became too heavy to carry around. The book includes commentary from three of Evans's longtime friends, photographers Alan Trachtenberg, Jerry Thompson and John T. Hill. Their insight and first-hand experience give depth to their critical writings on Evans's work. In addition to offering a broad perspective on Evans's work, the book also clarifies the photographer's "anti-art" philosophy. Eschewing aesthetic hyperbole, Evans wanted his pictures to resonate with a wide audience. At the same time, his natural curiosity made him one of the most inventive photographers of all time. What these photographs and writings attest to is a huge and timeless talent, which came not from a camera, but from Evans's uniquely hungry eye. Click here to order $65

92471 Holborn, Mark Beaton Photographs Jonathan Cape Ltd., London, 2015. First edition. Large quarto hardcover; grey cloth boards with embossed pink spine titling and embossed grey upper board titles, grey endpapers; 354pp., monochrome plates. Minimal wear; fine in like illustrated dustwrapper now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Accomplished illustrator, painter, writer and diarist, set designer and one of the most distinguished photographers of the twentieth century, Cecil Beaton is renowned for his portraits of well known faces from the worlds of fashion, literature, and film. His long and varied career and his ability to attune himself to changing fashions enabled him to capture a diverse range of subjects on camera, from the Sitwells to the Rolling Stones, from Salvador Dali to Francis Bacon, from Audrey Hepburn to Marilyn Monroe. This book includes portraits of Beaton - self portraits and portraits by other artists - and provides a comprehensive look at both the photographer and his work. Click here to order $75

94989 Hsieh, Pei-ni Beatrice (ed.) John Thomson - Window to the East The Journey to Formosa, China and Southeast Asia, 1865-1871 Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Kaohsiung Taiwan, 2012. Quarto; paperback, six stitched signatures without a wrapper, with a DVD on a spindle mounted on the last page; unpaginated (230pp.), bilingual text (Chinese and English), with many monochrome illustrations. Minimal wear. Fine in a printed folding slipcase with a printed ribbon tie. One of only 1200 copies printed John Thomson (1837-1921) was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. He was one of the most important photographers in the 19th century and also a topographer, explorer and writer. As one of the earliest Western photographers travelling to the Far East, Thomson faithfully recorded what he saw of the Eastern world in the 19th century through his lens. His photographic works have become the most important social and cultural records and made Thomson one of the pioneers of documentary photography. The 19th century is a period of history marked with frequent exchanges and interactions between West and East. It is also a period full of surprises, excitement and shocks amidst cultural collisions. Each photograph taken by Thomson illustrates how a Westerner back then perceived and interpreted the mysterious Oriental world. Demonstrating his keen observations and unique interpretations of social and geographic characteristics of a place, Thomson's photographs mix the different aesthetics of Western and Eastern portraits, while combining the perspective and composition in Eastern landscape paintings. On his glass plate negatives, Thomson captured micro specimens of the tranquillity and profoundness of the Oriental world cultivated over thousands of years. Click here to order $200

217370 Hurley, Frank Australia: A Camera Study Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1966. Revised edition. Quarto hardcover; blue boards with gilt upper board and spine titles, blue endpaper maps; 224pp., colour & b&w plates. Mild rubbing to board edges and corners; faint spotting to upper text block edge; light foxing to prelims. Illustrated dustwrapper with scraping along edges and front fore-edge, now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Very good. Click here to order $45

87380 Klein, Mason Alias Man Ray: The Art of Reinvention Contributions by George Baker, Lauren Schell Dickens and Merry A. Foresta Yale University Press, 2009. Quarto hardcover; illustrated boards, no dustwrapper; 240pp., colour and monochrome illustrations. Remainder. New. Click here to order $34

202886 Kurtz, Ron, & Hank O'Neal Berenice Abbott - Paris Portraits 1925-1930 Steidl/Commerce Graphics, Gottingen Germany, 2016. Quarto; hardcover, quarter-bound in cloth with upper board titles and tipped-on upper board decoration, with a grey ribbon; unpaginated (368pp.), one page keyhole cut, with many monochrome plates. Very minor wear; boards mildly rubbed and edgeworn. No dustwrapper as issued. Very good to near fine. This is one in a series of books to be published by Steidl that will explore Berenice Abbott's oeuvre. Abbott began her photographic career in Paris in 1925, taking portraits of some the most celebrated artists and writers of the day, including Marie Laurencin, Jean Cocteau, Peggy Guggenheim, Coco Chanel, Max Ernst, Andre Gide, Philippe Soupault and James Joyce. Within a year her work was exhibited and acclaimed. Paris Portraits 1925-1930 features the results of Abbott's earliest photographic project and illustrates the philosophy of all her subsequent work. For this landmark book, 115 portraits of 83 subjects have been scanned from the original glass negatives, which have been printed in full. Click here to order $100

93296 Marcus, Caleb Cain (foreword, Robert Frank) The Silent Aftermath of Space Damiani, Bologna, 2010. Landscape folio hardcover; black cloth boards with embossed spine and lower front board titling, black endpapers; unpaginated monochrome glossy plates. Very minor wear only; near fine in like dustwrapper. "Caleb Cain Marcus' book 'The Silent Aftermath of Space' shows us where the light is - on the other side of the darkness. The spaces Cain Marcus records are lit in a way that the lightness is distant, or trapped in another space. He uses the stillness of night to record these scenes, which serve as a meditation on life in transitory places. Windows and doorways also play a prominent role in the book. Windows are lit, or covered over. Doorways are closed, or behind fences. One of the few open doorways in the book shows a lit window. Life might be where the light is, but it is not present in any of the images. Cain Marcus has chosen transitory spaces in which to create a number of his pictures. Parking lots, construction sites, the post office and rail lines are just some of places where he has frozen an empty moment, the stillness after the busy day. This book reads like a nocturnal journey that the photographer takes regularly, like he is looking for the light in the darkness. The images suggests he might be finding what he is looking for, but it is not certain. The most jarring moments in this night travels are when he steps into the light of the churches. In two instances, Cain Marcus shows us empty churches, rows of seats are vacant and the light rises above the spaces giving off a brightness that is absent in the remainder of the book. These images help clarify the metaphor of the light and dark and adds weight to it. The transition to the light is jarring, but clearly intentional. As an object the book is large, which serves the images well. It is a book that demands your attention while reading. The location of each image is all the reader is given in the captions that whisper beneath bold images. The thin gray type is subtle and manages to balance out the design. Robert Frank's short introduction serves the purpose of adding Cain Marcus to his photographic lineage. Ralph Gibson is also thanked at the end of the book. Both of these influences can be seen in the quiet, dark and thoughtful pictures. With multiple readings the work comes alive. At first glance the stillness of the pictures is easy to gloss over. The large images offer many different entry points giving a variety of readings, but this book requires more from the reader because of the stillness. This stillness shouts at the reader; 'Look here, what is it that you see?' " - Tom Leininger Click here to order $35

83231 Metzner, Sheila Color Twin Palms Publishers, Altadena, CA, USA, 1991. Quarto; hardcover; green cloth boards with black upper board decorations and titles; unpaginated (176pp.) with colour and monochrome illustrations. Near fine in lightly rubbed dustwrappe now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. The first woman photographer to collaborate with the Vogue magazine on an ongoing basis, Metzner has amassed a portfolio that encompasses fashion and advertising shoots, portraiture, still lifes, and landscapes. "Photography...in its most basic form is magic...This image, caught in my trap, my box of darkness, can live. It is eternal, immortal," she has said. Her photographs are developed with the labor-intensive, time-honored Fresson and platinum printing processes and possess a softness and depth aptly suited to her sensitively framed subject matter. Click here to order $50

83448 Michaud, Roland and Sabrina Afghanistan Thames & Hudson, London, 1980. Oblong quarto hardcover; light brown cloth boards with black spine titling and publishers upper board insignia; 98pp., colour illustrations. Minor wear; light offsetting to endpapers and spotting to preliminaries with toned and faintly spotted upper text block edges. Very good to near fine in like dustwrapper now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Click here to order $50

83449 Michaud, Roland and Sabrina Caravans to Tartary Viking Press, New York, 1978. Oblong quarto hardcover; light brown cloth boards with gilt spine titling; 77pp., mainly colour illustrations. Minor wear; light offsetting to endpapers and spotting to preliminaries with mildly toned and faintly spotted upper text block edges. Very good to near fine in like dustwrapper now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Click here to order $50

83447 Michaud, Roland and Sabrina (intro. Daniel Farson) Turkey Thames & Hudson, London, 1986. Oblong quarto hardcover; dark red cloth boards with gilt spine titling and publishers upper board gilt insignia; 83pp., colour illustrations. Minor wear; fine in like dustwrapper now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Click here to order $40

213345 Muybridge, Eadweard Muybridge's Complete Human and Animal Locomotion - Volume I Dover Publications Inc., New York NY, 1979. Quarto; hardcover, full cloth with gilt spine titles on a navy blue label; 629pp. with many monochrome illustrations. Moderate wear; a little shaken; light offset to the endpapers. Dustwrapper a little rubbed and edgeworn; now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Very good. Click here to order $80

217315 Newton, Gael (with essays by Helen Ennis and Chris Long) Shades of Light: Photography and Australia 1839-1988 Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 1988. Quarto paperback; 218pp., colour & b&w illustrations. Inscription. Minor wear; toned and spotted text block edges; creasing and bumping to head of spine panel with small cut across the spine at the letter 'S'; slightly sunned spine panel and adjacent. Very good. Shades of Light traces the history of photography as an art in Australia from 1939 to the present. A selection of over 150 photographs show the range of subject matter and techniques favoured throughout the decades - from tiny daguerreotypes, Holtermann's panorama of Sydney in 1875, album photographs and early colour works, to the dynamic works of the 1980s. Gael Newton records the reaction in this country to the developments in photography around the world from its debut in Paris and London in 1839, and surveys the work of the finest Australian photographers. Click here to order $50

93160 Nobuyoshi Araki (contributions by Ian Jeffrey, Akiko Miki, Yuko Tanaka & Jonathan Watkins; bibliography by Kotaro Iizawa) Araki Self-Life-Death Phaidon, London, 2006. Reprint. Quarto; hardcover, with black upper board titling and black endpapers; 719pp., colour and monochrome illustrations. Minor wear only; near fine in white dustwrapper with mild wear to edges; now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Near fine. "Araki's art overflows with life, and his life is awash in images. They are good, bad, indifferent; posed, random, accidental; prurient, erotic, anarchistic, touching, vulgar, lascivious, lurid, sentimental. The cumulative effect is overwhelming. For some, Araki is utterly beyond the pale, especially because of his depictions of women: women in Kimonos bound and suspended in Japanese rope bondage, women's bodies smeared with what appears to be blood (in fact, it is paint), women masturbating, women with lipstick and cigarettes, women with Araki's bestiary of plastic dinosaurs and lizards. The women look at the man behind the camera, and their gaze reaches us. Often it is a look of severity, as if the spectator was really the one being objectified. What we are watching is the complicit menage-a-trois of photographer, model and camera, a kind of ritualised theatre of objectification. Araki has been described as a pornographer, a monster, a genius, a 'dirty uncle' and much else besides. He has called himself most of these things, too, and makes much of his persona as a somewhat cartoonish, priapic little devil, as though he were himself a character in an erotic 18th-century drawing of the Floating World. His mischievous and wanton energies, his scurrilous, libidinous images are driven by subjectivity and desire; so too are those images that go to the bone of bereavement, nostalgia and loneliness, their pathos being all the more affecting for being set at the heart, as it were, of a body of work - not to mention a work of bodies - full to the brim with life's pleasures and excesses....One must take Araki and his view of the world entire, or not at all; we find ourselves at one moment in the sado-masochistic sex club Tokyo Lucky Hole, the next in the anonymous streets of the modern city. In the bed, in the bathroom, eating a meal. The walls of a side room are entirely covered with Polaroids, a relentless procession of sex, poached eggs, glimpses of bodies, couples, foodstuffs and anything else his eye floated across. It is like being inside the camera obscura of someone's head, on whose walls everything is projected. .. Araki has had much to say about the photographer's relation to the camera - as eye, as a sort of body extension - and Phaidon's book includes a marvellous compendium of his aphoristic, often funny and provocative thoughts. .. The book is in many ways his preferred form, on account of the intimacy, the sequential development, the novel-like structure. Life, he believes, is made up of a succession of moments rather than a great big drama. His books have been described as an equivalent to the genre of the Japanese I-novel, a first-person autobiographical fiction. All this would count for nothing if Araki's photographs did not match up to all the words. Those who detest him, for ideological reasons, or for his spending so much of himself working on porn, and on sometimes cheap shots, won't be persuaded. They probably want to lock him up in some oubliette of the unseen and unacknowledged, or to parade him as a living example of the unconscionable. A bowdlerised Araki would be meaningless. Araki's art cheers me up. Quite often, it turns me on. It is delightful and sad and truthful, and its playfulness is a great antidote to self-pity. It is an injunction to make more of the things in life that matter; love of life and its complexity most of all, in the knowledge that one day it will all end. The shutter stops time, but only for a moment. At best, he makes one appreciate what is both in front of one's eyes and in the back of one's mind. If not a genius, at the very least Araki might be described as a genie, not with a lamp, but a camera." - Adrian Serle Click here to order $200

30617 Outerbridge, Paul Paul Outerbridge Jr: Photographs 1921-39 Thames & Hudson, London, 1980. Hardcover, square quarto; brown cloth boards with gilt spine titling and upper board publisher's insignia, blue endpapers; 159pp., 59 colour and 81 duotone illustrations. Minor wear; faint spotting to upper text block edges and dustwrapper spine very slightly faded. Very good to near fine otherwise and now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Legendary American photographer Paul Outerbridge is perhaps best known for his pioneering work in colour photography and his avant-garde use of compositional space. Outerbridge was a fashion and commercial photographer whose style of formal arrangement drew from Cubism and Modern abstract painting. His photographic still-lifes of objects and various commercial products defined the twentieth-century's advertising aesthetic. Outerbridge also created a series of erotic nude photographs that were unable to be shown publically during his lifetime due to censorship laws. Born in New York City in 1896 Outerbridge spent his life between New York City, and Los Angeles. Against the wishes of his father, an influential surgeon in New York City, Outerbridge turned from a university education and began classes at the Art Students' League in New York. It was here that he met and assisted theatrical stage designer Rollo Peters. This experience, as Outerbridge suggests, was formative to his photography, writing 'I worked out a theory of my own for the painting of scenes with light alone'. - Bruce Silverstein Click here to order $50

95255 Parmiggiani, Sandro & Robert Pledge (eds.) Don McCullin: The Impossible Peace: From War Photographs to Landscapes, 1958-2011 Skira, Milan, 2012. Quarto hardcover; red boards with white spine titling and black endpapers; 250pp., monochrome plates. Minimal wear; fine in like illustrated dustwrapper now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. An exhibition catalogue that features an impressive retrospective, covering the last fifty years in chronological order. Don McCullin (born 1935, London) is one of the most important photographers of our time. For more than fifty years, his uncompromising black-and-white photographs have shaped our awareness and understanding of modern conflict and its consequences. His images tell the remarkable story of his life and work, including his most famous assignments in Berlin, Vietnam, Cambodia, Biafra, Bangladesh, and the Middle East. Key periods in McCullin's life, including his early experiences of evacuation and the Blitz, his commissions from Berlin in 1961 and Cyprus in 1964, and his most famous work for the Sunday Times are here explored alongside more recent projects with Christian Aid, his photographs of last tribes in the Omo River Valley, South Kenya, and Irian Jaya, New Guinea, and, in the last few years, those of still-life and English landscapes at his home in Somerset. A photographic journey across the ruins and landscapes of the boundaries of the Roman Empire completes the volume. Click here to order $200

71319 Pillsbury, Matthew Time Frame Actes Sud/ Fondation HSBC Pour La Photographie, 2007. Quarto hardcover, 99pp., monochrome illustrations. Text in English and French. Slightly scuffed black boards, no dustwrapper. Minor wear only; very good to near fine. 'Matthew Pillsbury is fascinated by the spaces in which his compatriots live today, inhabited solely by television or computer screens, small growing rectangles in an often grandiose urban space perceived through windows. Human presence is barely perceptible, diminished by the long exposure time to the status of uncertain shadows.' - Alain Sayag. Click here to order $32

94712 Polidori, Robert Havana Steidl, Gottingen, 2001. Oblong folio hardcover; green cloth boards with embossed spine titling, decorated endpapers; 123pp., colour illustrations. Very minor wear; lower board corners slightly frayed. Otherwise near fine in like dustwrapper. In the January 26, 1998 issue of the magazine, Paul Goldberger reported on the declining state of Havana's architectural heritage, as well as on the Cuban preservationists who were attempting to salvage it. Robert Polidori, The New Yorker's staff photographer at the time, accompanied Goldberger to Cuba. The two men travelled around Havana in a red-and-white 1953 Chevrolet and knocked on the doors of the city's crumbling mansions. Polidori's photographs of the buildings' interiors, which he shot with a large-format camera, are vivid depictions of Goldberger's observation that decay had not yet destroyed the 'majestic presence' of Havana's grand villas. He began exploring the city's dynamic architecture - from the elegant colonial to the exuberant Modern, which appeared arrested in time, reflecting years of economic and political turmoil. He returned four more times, continuing his study of the astonishing range and scale of Havana's buildings. The results are a remarkable interpretation of the city's magnificent architectural legacy. Polidori refers to himself as a 'habitat photographer' rather than an architectural photographer. His images of Havana's buildings reveal a complex history of a sophisticated, vibrant culture and its expression through art. The fragile state of the city's architecture is brought to light, as is the enduring spirit of its residents. Polidori boldly presents his subjects without apology for their condition, a departure from most commissioned architectural photography, which aims to present buildings as beautiful, even glamorous, objects. These powerful, highly personalized images invite us to look beyond the formal surfaces of great buildings to the inhabitants who invest them with life and meaning. This stunning book, the large format and fine printing of which, gives proper due to the photographer's work, the details and rich complexity. Click here to order $250

74917 Prince, Len (Introduction by Dominick Dunne) About Glamour Simon & Schuster Inc., New York NY, 1997. Folio hardcover, unpaginated, monochrome illustrations. Minor edgewear to dustwrapper. Otherwise near fine and professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. In these smouldering black-and-white virtuoso portraits, Len Prince has created a modern day golden era and a startling photographic tour de force. Introducing readers to Len Prince's ninety hypnotic, quadratone photographs is writer Dominick Dunne. Evoking the allure of this retro glamour era of Prince's photographs, Dunne recounts his early fascination with movie stars like Paulette Goddard and Jean Harlow; his firsthand account of Hollywood parties with Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland, and Spencer Tracy; the end of the studio system and the decline of Hollywood royalty; and his 1996 photo shoot for Vanity Fair in Len Prince's studio. Click here to order $35

72299 Richter, Gerhard (Dietmar Elgar, ed.) Landscapes Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern-Ruit Germany, 1998. Landscape quarto; hardcover, with upper board title; 127pp., with many monochrome and full-colour illustrations. Mild wear; some light scraping to the spine heel; text block top edge spotted lightly. Dustwrapper is mildly rubbed and edgeworn (now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film). Very good. "I see countless landscapes, photograph barely 1 in a 100,000, and paint barely 1 in 100 that I photograph. I am seeking something quite specific." - Gerhard Richter. This volume presents landscapes by Gerhard Richter spanning 35 years: outstanding, large format reproductions and two major essays elucidate the artist's working methods and his 'philosophy' - at the same time demonstrating that Richter's landscapes and abstract works, far from being artistic opposites, are closely related aspects of the painter's unique appropriation of reality. Click here to order $50

88357 Ritts, Herb Men / Women Twin Palms Publishers, San Francisco CA, 1989. Fourth limited edition: two volumes quarto; hardcover, with gilt spine titles, tipped-on upper board decorations and black endpapers; unpaginated (192pp. [96pp. + 96pp.]), with many monochrome photographic plates. Spines lightly sunned and gilt tarnished. Near fine in like, gilt-titled, slipcase. This boxed set of two books contains images selected by Herb Ritts from the first decade of his work in photography. Taken for his own pleasure, many of these pictures were rejected for publication in popular magazines which judged them either too eccentric or erotic for their readers. The pleasure of the artist at work is felt in these photographs, which do not compromise the artist's individual vision for the sake of popular acceptance. The beautiful men and women who populate these pages are familiar for their work in commercial modelling, but Herb Ritts' camera shows them in a new and unfamiliar light. 1 of only 5,000 copies issued. Click here to order $200

74916 Roberts, Pamela A Century of Colour Photography From the Autochrome to the Digital Age Viking, 2007. Large quarto hardcover; illustrated boards and decorated blue endpapers; 256pp., colour illustrations. Some creasing on dustwrapper and wear to edges and corners. Very good otherwise and wrapper professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Pamela Roberts, a former Curator at the Royal Photographic Society, has gathered together an outstanding collection of colour photography from the last 100 years, from works in autochrome and other early processes whose freshness and clarity are still stunning, through the glamour of the 1930s, the social documentation of the 1940s and the magazine-led explosion of colour in the 1950s, to the popularization of colour photography in the 1960s, experimentation in the 1970s and 1980s, and the new directions in which photography has developed around the world in the years preceding and following the turn of the millennium. This comprehensive, informed and visually arresting collection of images is fascinating to anyone with an interest in photography, but it also grounds the different images in their time, showing how changes in society were often just as influential as technological developments in steering colour photography in new directions. Click here to order $34

87490 Schles, Ken Invisible City Twelvetrees Press, Pasadena CA, 1988. Octavo; hardcover, with blind-stamped spine and upper board titles and illustrated endpapers; unpaginated (80pp.) with many monochrome illustrations. Near fine in like dustwrapper, now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. For a decade, Ken Schles watched the passing of time from his Lower East Side neighbourhood. His camera fixed the instances of his observations, and these moments became the foundation of his invisible city. Friends and architecture come under the scrutiny of his lens and, when sorted and viewed in the pages of this book, a remarkable achievement of personal vision emerges. A penetrating and intimate portrayal of a world few had entrance to - or means of egress from - Invisible City stands alongside Brassai's "Paris de Nuit" and van der Elsken's "Love On The Left Bank" as one of the 20th century's great depictions of nocturnal bohemian experience. Documenting his life in New York City's East Village during its heyday in the tumultuous 1980s, Schles captured its look and attitude in delirious and dark style. Click here to order $500

207731 Siegel, Alan One Man's Eye Photographs from the Alan Siegel Collection Word Wise Press, New York NY, 2000. Folio; hardcover, with blind-stamped upper board and spine titling and black endpapers; 176pp., with many colour and monochrome illustrations. Minor wear. Dustwrapper now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Near fine This large, elegantly produced volume reflects the eclectic tastes and ardent enthusiasms of one man, Alan Siegel, whose illustrious private collection of photographs rivals that of many museums. Truly one of the stunning volumes of photography to appear in recent years, One Man's Eye features 120 masterworks by Diane Arbus, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Man Ray, Robert Mapplethorpe, Robert Adams, Ezra Stoller, Robert Frank, Irving Penn, Walker Evans, Erwin Blumenfeld, Edward Weston, and many important contemporary photographers, including Jan Groover, Tina Barney, Zeke Berman, Tom Baril, Lynn Davis, and Michael Spano. Many of the images shown here have never been published before. The texts include an introduction to the collection by noted photography historian Robert A. Sobieszek, a discussion of how the Siegel collection was formed over the past 25 years, and commentaries on the individual works by the man whose singular eye gives this work its focus. Click here to order $60

65817 Skolnick, Arnold Love Song The Erotic Photographs of Arnold Skolnick Quantuck lane Press, New York, 2008. Quarto hardcover; 128pp., 85 monochrome illustrations. Dark blue cloth boards in slip-case. Remainder. New. Limited edition of 3,000 copies. Commissioned in the early 1970s for a book on sexual love these photographs were deemed "too sophisticated to be included in the book for which they were taken". One critic writes that these photos "give the forms of two people making love the grandeur and power of sculpture (one is, of course, reminded of Rodin)." Click here to order $50

96193 Smoliansky, Gunnar (Marie Lundquist & Gerry Badger, eds.) One Picture at a Time Photographs, 1952-2008 Steidl Publishers, Gottingen Germany, 2008. Quarto; hardcover, with silver-gilt spine titles; 315pp., with many monochrome illustrations. Very minor wear. Near fine in like dustwrapper professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. "Born on the Swedish island of Gotsby, Smoliansky was obsessed with the camera from the age of eighteen when he bought his own Rolleiflex. Inspired by his homeland, his location was exclusively the subject of his work. Shooting images of everyday objects, gloves suspended from a window, a cloud passing over water, the silhouette of a tree like an ink spill on a white page; his works carry an aesthetic beauty and cinematic suspense. Although Smoliansky's work demonstrates a Swedish melancholy, it is also part of a broader European photojournalistic tradition. Very much like the practice of Andre Kertesz, his eye distils its subject. Form and line are used economically while unorthodox camera angles and aerial views render the subject abstract. In an age of destination photography where the exoticism of the subject often defines the photographer, Smoliansky seeks to find the extraordinary within the everyday."- Saltsjo-Boo Click here to order $200

201784 Stillman, Andrea G. Looking at Ansel Adams The Photographs and the Man Little Brown & Co., New York NY, 2012. Quarto hardcover; white illustrated boards with gray endpapers; 254pp., monochrome illustrations. Minor wear only; near fine in like dustwrapper. Click here to order $50

201788 Stillman, Andrea G. (ed.) Ansel Adams 400 Photographs Little Brown & Co., New York NY, 2007. Oblong quarto hardcover; white illustrated boards with gray endpapers; 440pp., monochrome illustrations. Minor wear only; near fine in like dustwrapper. Click here to order $50

201783 Stillman, Andrea G. (ed.) Ansel Adams in the National Parks Photographs from America's Wild Places Little Brown & Co., New York NY, 2010. Oblong quarto hardcover; white illustrated boards with gray endpapers; 344pp., monochrome illustrations. Minor wear only; near fine in like dustwrapper. Click here to order $50

86243 Szarkowski, John Ansel Adams at 100 The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust/Little Brown and Co., London, 2001. Landscape quarto; hardcover, full-cloth, with tipped-on upper board title; 192pp., with many monochrome illustrations. Minor wear. Near fine in a like slipcase. In commemoration of the one-hundredth anniversary of his birth, Ansel Adams at 100 presents an intriguing new look at this distinguished photographer's work. The legendary curator John Szarkowski, director emeritus of the Department of Photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art, has painstakingly selected what he considers Adams' finest work and has attempted to find the single best photographic print of each. Szarkowski writes that "Ansel Adams at 100 is the product of a thorough review of work that Adams, at various times in his career, considered important. It includes many photographs that will be unfamiliar to lovers of Adams' work, and a substantial number that will be new to Adams scholars. The book is an attempt to identify that work on which Adams' claim as an important modern artist must rest." Click here to order $100

74909 Tenneson, Joyce & Vicki Goldberg (intro.) A Life in Photography 1968 - 2008 Bulfinch Press, New York, 2008. Quarto hardcover, 159pp., Black mark on upper text block edge; minor edgewear to dustwrapper. Very good to near fine and professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Tenneson's portraits go beyond a surface recording of her subject's likeness. Her signature - style images attempt to show the inner person who hovers behind the facade. Says Tenneson: 'I want to allow others to reveal and celebrate aspects of themselves that are usually hidden. My camera is a witness. It holds a light up for my subjects to help them feel their own essence, and gives them the courage to collaborate in the recording of these revelations." Click here to order $40

9687 Thompson, Jerry L The Last Years of Walker Evans Thames & Hudson, London, 1997. Hardcover, octavo; red cloth boards with gilt spine titling and upper board publisher's insignia, blue endpapers; 127pp., monochrome and colour illustrations. Minor wear; light spotting to upper text block edges. Near fine in slightly rippled dustwrapper (now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film). "Thompson, a close friend to Walker Evans, in the last four years of his life, has become a valuable source on the American photographer. Known for his essay in the 1982 Walker Evans at Work, Thompson here presents more of his recollections, fleshing out information on Evans's working habits with details on the shape (or shapelessness) of the famed photographer's final days. Although the book adds little of substance to the literature on Evans's life and work, it nonetheless provides a sensitive portrait of one of America's most popular photographers in the throes of old age. 'Die knowing something,' Evans wrote in mid-life. Yet, Thompson reveals how little his professional idol knew about old age. Ill-prepared financially, in rapidly deteriorating health, separated - and eventually divorced - from his second wife, he relied increasingly on his Yale University graduate students for companionship. Most poignantly, Thompson isolates the sources of Evans's frustration, especially the physical frailties that robbed him of his capacity to photograph. The book's previously unpublished Polaroid photographs by Evans - no match for his best work - will probably interest only scholars. But the writing is lovely, other photographs of and by Evans are arresting and Thompson's critiques of Evans's work are a pleasure to read. Ultimately, the text reveals much about old age broadly, especially its need for friendships and the leavening force of wit." - Publishers Weekly Click here to order $30

212148 Van Haaften, Julia Berenice Abbott A Life in Photography WW Norton, New York, 2018. Octavo hardcover; 634pp., b&w illustrations. Dustwrapper. Remainder. New. Berenice Abbott is to American photography what Georgia O'Keeffe is to painting or Willa Cather to letters. Abbott's sixty-year career established her not only as a master of American photography but also as a teacher, writer, archivist and inventor. A teenage rebel from Ohio, Abbott escaped to Paris - photographing, in Sylvia Beach's words, "everyone who was anyone" - before returning to New York as the Roaring Twenties ended. Abbott's best known work, "Changing New York", documented the city's 1930s metamorphosis. She then turned to science as a subject, culminating in work important to the 1950s "space race". This biography secures Abbott's place in the histories of photography and modern art while framing her accomplishments as a female artist and entrepreneur. Click here to order $30

201161 Various Gerhard Richter - Katalog der Ausstellung. Exhibition Catalogue/ Texte / Werkubersicht. Catalogue raisonne 1962-1993: three volumes in slipcase Hatje Cantz Verlag, 1993. Three quarto hardcovers; grey cloth boards with black upper board and spine titling; 195 + 112 + 234pp., colour and monochrome illustrations. Some scattered spotting to pastedowns and a few spots on text block edges. Mild wear to dustwrapper edges. Very good to near fine. Text in German and English. Encased in matching gray slipcase. Click here to order $300

207730 Ventura, Paolo, & Eugenia Parry Winter Stories Aperture, New York NY, 2009. Folio; hardcover, with blind-stamped upper board and spine titling; 119pp., with many full-colour and monochrome illustrations. Minor wear. Dustwrapper professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Near fine. In Winter Stories, internationally acclaimed artist Paolo Ventura presents scenes from the memory bank of a fictional circus performer as he looks back on his life during his final moments. Using his own childhood memories, beautiful miniature figures, and extraordinarily detailed sets constructed from props purchased at flea markets, Ventura creates a fictional Northern Italian town where a travelling carnival has stopped. Ventura's work evokes a simpler time from Italy's past, but with a dark twist - shadowy backdrops and retreating figures remind us that this is not quite Eden. A master of narrative staged photography, Ventura brings his imagined stories to life by building three-dimensional sets in miniature. With an essay by Eugenia Parry, Winter Stories showcases the ink drawings and watercolours that Ventura uses as a starting point for his stories, and images of the handmade album of Polaroids of works in progress that he creates as guides to his elaborate sets. Edition limited to 2,000 copies. Click here to order $70

95258 Westerbeck, Colin (ed.) Irving Penn A Career in Photography The Art Institute of Chicago/ Little, Brown and Co., New York NY, 1997. Quarto hardcover; black cloth boards with black gilt spine titling and black endpapers; 192pp., mainly monochrome plates. Mildly rubbed black illustrated dustwrapper with tiny scratch on upper edge. Near fine and wrapper now professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. One of the most important photographers of this century, Irving Penn has excelled in many different genres, producing a body of work that has had a major impact on fashion, portraiture, nudes, still life, advertising, and ethnographic photography. He began his career as a graphic artist, and in the mid 1940s went to work at Vogue, where Alexander Liberman was art director. It was not long before Penn turned to photography using his graphic sense to make stylish images and his sensitivity to create arresting portraits of celebrities. The photographs he has produced have become documents of our era, from his portraits of native peoples of Peru, New Guinea, and Morocco to those of actors, artists, politicians and writers; from his sharply rendered fashion editorials to evanescent nudes; from skilful still lifes of street trash to gravity-defying still lifes of Clinique cosmetics. This book provides a unique record of Penn's achievement. Click here to order $100

89445 Weston, Edward (Susan Morgan, ed.; Foreword by Cole Weston) Edward Weston - Portraits Aperture, New York NY, 1995. First edition. Quarto hardcover; dark red buckram boards; 95pp., monochrome plates. Mild toning to text block edges; wear and a few scrapes to dustwrapper edges and corners, tiny tears at spine panel extremities. Very good to near fine otherwise and professionally protected by superior non-adhesive polypropylene film. Weston spent the greatest part of his towering career setting a standard of photographic portraiture. Included are images of Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Tina Modotti, and James Cagney. Together these photographs create a powerful volume that demands a fresh look at this central endeavour of his life's work. Click here to order $35

74897 Williams. John (ed. & intro.) Ingeborg Tyssen: Photographs 1974 - 1992 T&G, Sydney, 2006. Oblong quarto paperback in slipcase, 205pp., colour and monochrome illustrations. Fine in slightly scuffed slipcase. Ingeborg Tyssen was one of the great Australian photographers of her generation and generally overlooked by critics during her lifetime in favour of her male counterparts. This book spans 20 years of creative output from 1974-94, and shows Tyssen to be a highly original observer of modern life. Shaune Lakin of Monash Art Gallery remarked that "Tyssen's story is one of the great stories of Australian photography. Her arrival in Australia at the age of 12 as an immigrant from her native Holland and her struggle with displacement and new language and landscape is one that many Australians are familiar with. Being one of Australia's first street photographers, she made a significant contribution to the history of Australian photography. Her experience of migration gave Tyssen a rare ability to observe people in their environment. Her earliest photographs, taken in the city streets, fun parks, and suburbs of 1970s were acute depictions of the urban isolation she felt in her new homeland. Her experience and pictures certainly remain relevant to contemporary Australia." Tyssen studied photography under John Williams, who became her husband. She was a co-founder of the Photographers Gallery in South Yarra in 1975. Click here to order $60