Dear friend of Beyond Words,

Things are very busy so this newsletter comes out in haste. Thanks to those of you who are already making my life more hectic with orders. Beyond early December, it would be advisable to check with us that we have stock of items that you particularly want for Christmas. Latest posting dates are available on the Royal Mail’s website.

Steidl’s autumn schedule includes two works by UK photographers, the first well-known. Donovan Wylie’s Outposts documents military installations built by NATO forces in Afghanistan. It constitutes “the latest phase in Wylie’s interrogation of the architecture of modern conflict.” Click here for a preview.

Steidl have also picked out two young photographers Absalom and Bardsley, from Bridgend, South Wales, who, in 8Xs document the local landscape dominated by the remains of an ammunitions storage site.

Fashion photographer Mario Sorrenti’s Draw Blood for Proof presents a series of montages of collected snapshots, contact sheets, prints, Polaroids and ephemera drawn from over fifteen years of personal work. The result is” a free-associative experience like memory or dreams." You can view photographs of the installation at the Andrew Roth Gallery website.

Equally impressionistic is Jerry Spagnoli’s American Dreaming of which you can see a selecton of images on the photographer's website.

The final Steidl selection is a massive collection (448 pages) of contemporary African landscape photography that steers clear of the rather clichéd presentation that can tend to dominate Western publications. Contributors to Appropriated Landscapes include David Goldblatt and Guy Tillim.

Mack Books are reprinting Julian Germain’s extremely successful For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness, a series of photographs made over eight years, capturing the quiet, contemplative existence of an old man living alone in a small house on the south coast of England. Julian Germain’s website contains images from this series.

Mack also publish a new collection by Bertien van Manen based on travels over 20 years across Asia and Eastern Europe with a small, analogue camera, learning the local language and engaging with the people. Let's sit down before we go features photographs from Russia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Siberia, Tatarstan and Uzbekistan. Edited by Stephen Gill.

Superlabo, the Japanese publisher specialising in small books in editions of only 500, have four new titles, two of them volumes of The Matatabi Library by Koji Onaka, black-and-white photographs of everyday life in Tokyo in the 1980s. Images can be found on the Super Labo site here and here.

Superlabo also feature two titles by leading American photographers. Jim Goldberg’s 134 Ways to Forget is drawn from his autobiographical series 'Coming and Going'. John Gossage’s Eva’s Book is described as a “Portrait of an artist and a dreamer in Berlin". The Super Labo website features a selection of images from the book.

Reaktion continue to show commendable commitment to the market for serious critical analyses of photography.  Firstly, Justin Carville's Photography and Ireland “tells us a great deal about the way in which the Irish have been perceived and the example of Ireland is employed to ask questions of photography. Carville demonstrates why his subject matters. There can be no doubt that photography in Ireland has found its historian.” (Steve Edwards, Open University). 

Taschen has three Wolfgang Tillmans books packaged together as a ridiculously cheap 556-page special set: Tillmans, Tillmans Burg, and Truth Study Centre.

Pilgrimage took Annie Leibovitz on a series of journeys to places of significance for American and British cultural history. They include Emily Dickinson's house in Amherst, the houses of Virginia Woolf and Darwin in the English countryside and Freud's final home in London, the site of Thoreau's cabin at Walden Pond, Orchard House, where Louisa May Alcott and her family lived and worked, and Julia Margaret Cameron’s studio on the Isle of Wight.

Artist Robert Rauschenberg’s photography is the least considered aspect of his art work. Robert Rauschenberg: Photographs 1949 – 1962 puts that right. It includes portraits of friends such as Cy Twombly, Jasper Johns, Willem de Kooning, Merce Cunningham and John Cage, studio shots, photographs used in the Combines series, silkscreens, photographs of lost works and works in progress.

A triple dose of good news for Michael Kenna fans. Huangshan has reprinted, having sold out its first print run of 1000 very quickly. There’s also to be a second printing of The Philosopher’s Tree from Gallery Kong. And the same gallery have announced that they will shortly be producing a companion publication in the same format. It’s to be called Tranquil Morning. I have no further details, other than that its working title was ‘Meditation’ and that we’re unlikely to be able to sell it for less than £50. If you would like to reserve a copy of this, or have your interest noted, please email us.

As always if you would like to order any of the titles listed or would like more information concerning anything mentioned in our newsletters please contact us by phone or at the email address at the bottom of this message. You may also order any of these books at www.beyondwords.co.uk.

Best Wishes,

Beyond Words

Tel: (01620) 895985

Email: info@beyondwords.co.uk
Web: www.beyondwords.co.uk

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