Publisher's Description

Los Angeles–based contemporary artist Ed Ruscha is celebrated for his paintings, drawings, prints, and artist’s books, receiving widespread critical acclaim for more than half a century. Capturing the quintessential Los Angeles experience with its balance of the banal and the beautiful, his photobooks of the 1960s—such as Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, Some Los Angeles Apartments, and Thirtyfour Parking Lots—are known for their deadpan cataloguing of the city’s functional architecture.

This publication features thirty-eight Ruscha plates and an essay that traces the evolution of the artist’s thinking about his photographs initially as the means to the end of his self-published photobooks and eventually as works of art in and of themselves. Virginia Heckert contextualizes Ruscha’s photographs within the history of photographic documentation of vernacular architecture, using examples by such important photographers as Carleton Watkins, Eugène Atget, and Walker Evans, as well as contemporary photographers, many of whom have acknowledged Ruscha as an influence in their own depiction of the built environment.

Publisher: Getty Publications

Size: 8 x 10"

11 colour and 56 b/w illustrations

Overseas deliveries  Please note that, as this is a heavy item, overseas postage will be charged at twice our standard rates.

Publisher's Description

Presented here in 140 haunting duotone images that could have been made at any time in the past century and a half, David Plowden gives us a remarkable portrait of the barn as an icon of our agricultural heritage and also a touchstone of something essentially American. His images depict barns set in landscapes of vast farmland, revealing minutely details of interior woodwork, painted advertising weathering away, and intricate stone- and brickwork rarely duplicated today. From the round-roofed Gothic barns of Michigan to the gambrelled dairy barns of Wisconsin, these vernacular structures still embody the purpose of their construction and the traditions of their builders.

David Plowden's website

Publisher: Norton

Size: 11.25 x 11.8"

160 pages

Publisher's Description

Lucien Clergue (*1934 in Arles) is one of the most notable photographers of our time. The themes of his pictures—traveling artists, gypsies, war ruins and graves, plants in the swamps of the Camargue, tracks in the sand, bullfighting scenes—testify to his deep connection to his homeland. He became famous for his photographs of nudes, whose aesthetic, sensual play of light and water enthralled Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau so much that they remained Clergue’s mentors until their deaths. This is the first book to feature Clergue’s architectural photographs of Brazil’s newly built capital of Brasilia, taken in 1962–63, which until just recently were believed to be lost. Blinded by the cool beauty of this metropolis, the eye is seduced into following the curves of a confident, optimistic type of architecture.

Publisher: Hatje Cantz

Size: 287 x 288 mm

204 pages, 102 illustrations

Photographs from Luckenwalde, Germany 2009 till 2012 documenting the architectural details of the Hat Factory and reflecting Gerry Johansson's wanderings around the city, where he also found places and buildings that reflect the history of the factory and the tumultuous political periods from the 1920s to the present.

Publisher: Johansson & Jansson

Size: 270 x 170 mm

144 pages, 76 photographs

Publisher's Description

This publication is made up of a series of photographs taken inside the abandoned Conservative party headquarters at 32 Smith. Award-winning artist Lisa Barnard, was granted access to the abandoned site in 2009 and documented the building and found objects.

32 Smith Square was Conservative Central Office from 1958 to 2004.The building is synonymous with Margaret Thatcher smiling and waving out of the window on the 2nd floor after winning the elections of 1979, 1983 and 1987. However, by 2004 the building became known as ‘Chateau Despair’ to its inhabitants, prior to the Conservatives’ move to Victoria Street. They left behind a mausoleum containing nearly 50 years of their political history, etched on its surfaces and discarded in its corners.

This book features previously unseen photographs of the interior documenting the dulled shades of corporate blue, stained carpets, peeling paintwork and discarded iconography of past alliances. Carefully choreographed portraits of a smiling Thatcher, unearthed in an old cupboard, punctuate the book, jarring with the shabby interior. The book also includes photographs of the objects, or remnants, Barnard found in the building including a blue rosette, an internal envelope, an ornate silver spoon, a balloon and a strip of film negative.

‘Barnard’s project offers an archaeology of the period of Thatcher’s reign from 1979 to 1990, and an autopsy of the theatre and props which helped direct and shape Tory campaigns as they led Britain into an age of banking, individualism and the free market that has defined politics and reconfigured culture since the 1960s. ... Welcome to Chateau Despair... Do you believe in Britain?’ - Sarah James - Lecturer in the History of Art at University College London.

‘For anyone with a passing interest in the connection between politics and space, this apparent eradication of architecture in the presentation of politics at Smith Square may come as a surprise... The photographs show an undignified assembly of thrown-together partitions, botched repairs and a complete lack of even the most basic aesthetic sensibility’ - Jeremy Till - Head of Central St Martins College of Arts and Design.

Limited edition of 500 copies

Publisher: Gost

Size: 220 x 160 mm

96 pages printed four colour

Overseas deliveries  Please note that, as this is a heavy item, overseas postage will be charged at twice our standard rates.

Publisher's Description

Ezra Stoller's iconic photographs of 20th-century architectural masterpieces, such as Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater and Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building, are often cited in aiding the rise of modernism in America. Stoller (1915–2004) elevated architectural photography to an art form, capturing the mood of numerous buildings in their best light.

Living and working in New York from the early 1940s to the mid-1970s, Stoller photographed buildings by such architects as Alvar Aalto, Eero Saarinen, Marcel Breuer, Paul Rudolph, and Louis I. Kahn. His striking images earned him the admiration of critics and contemporaries, but few people are aware of the stunning breadth of his oeuvre, which also included domestic and industrial spaces and important editorial depictions of American labor in the 1950s and 1960s. Ezra Stoller, Photographer, a long-awaited and lavishly illustrated survey of Stoller's artistic accomplishments, examines the photographer's full range with a fresh eye and unprecedented scope, offering a unique commentary on postwar America's changing landscape.

Publisher: Yale University Press

Size: 9 x 12"

288 pages, 59 colour & 217 b/w illustations

Publisher's Description

The response to why he robbed banks "That's where the money is" often misattributed to renowned bank robber Willie "the actor" Sutton provides the backdrop for this series of photographs of saving institutions by John Gossage. A book of view camera, photographs of banks from 1975, presented these many years after they were shot. For Gossage 2012 provides a perfect moment to review the conceits of vernacular bank architecture and the concept of thievery. A book dedicated to the artist's father.
 
This book made from the original 4 x 5 inch B&W contact prints, has been printed on yellow pages. John Gossage is a 2012 recipient of a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship.

Publisher: Loosestrife Editions

Size: 10 x 8"

96 pages, 43 duotone images

Edition of 1,000

Publisher's Description

No one captured the midcentury modernism of the Mad Men era better than Balthazar Korab. As one of the period's most prolific and celebrated architecture photographers, Korab captured images as graceful and elegant as his subjects. His iconic photographs for master architects immortalized their finest works, while leaving his own indelible impact on twentieth century visual culture. In this riveting illustrated biography, the first dedicated solely to his life and career, author John Comazzi traces Korab's circuitous path to a career in photography. He paints a vivid picture of a young man forced to flee his native Hungary, who goes on to study architecture at the famed École des Beaux-Arts in Paris before emigrating to the United States and launching his career as Eero Saarinen's on-staff photographer. The book includes a portfolio of more than one hundred images from Korab's professionally commissioned architecture photography as well as close examinations of Saarinen's TWA Terminal and the Miller House in Columbus, Indiana. The photos documenting finished buildings and architects at work include iconic images of Mies van der Rohe's S. R. Crown Hall, Le Corbusier's Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, Louis Kahn's Kimbell Art Museum and Salk Institute, Minoru Yamasaki's World Trade Center, Richard Meier's Douglas House, Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, and Jørn Utzon's Sydney Opera House, among many others.

See here for samples of Korab’s work

Publisher: Princeton Architetural Press

Size: 203 x 254 mm

192 pages, 20 colour illustrations, 200 b/w illustrations

Publisher's Description

Egypt is one of the most densely populated countries in the world and has a colonial history that stretches back centuries. From 1882 until 1952 it was under British rule although nominal independence was granted in 1922, with the exception of four “reserved” areas: foreign relations, communications, the military and the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan.

Between 1860 and 1940, Cairo and other large Egyptian cities witnessed a major construction boom that gave birth to extraordinary palaces and lavish buildings. These incorporated various architectural styles, such as Beaux-arts or Moorish Revival, with local design heritage influences and materials. Today many lie empty and neglected, with no legislation protecting historic buildings less than a hundred years old from demolition.

In 2006, Russian born photographer Xenia Nikolskaya began the process of documenting these extraordinary structures. She has gained exceptional access and has photographed at some thirty locations including Cairo, Alexandria, Luxor, Minya, Esna, and Port Said. Sadly, the state of Egypt’s colonial architecture is now rapidly succumbing to time, real estate frenzy, and an ongoing overpopulation crisis. Since she began the project a number of these spaces have been demolished, whilst others have gone through a process of regeneration and modernisation.

Publisher: Dewi Lewis

Size:245 x 295mm

128 pages, 70 colour plates

"Dust to Dust" draws inspiration from early still life painting and recent discoveries in
quantum physics both of which tell us, metaphorically and scientificaly respectively, that
we are a small part of a vast interconnected cosmos and part of that infinite expanse
resides inside each and every one of us. Drawn from an archive of 8 years work in the
Western Isles of Scotland, "Dust to Dust"  juxtaposes images of former dwellings slowly
being decomposed by the elements with images of found books in various states of
Disintegration.
Adrian Tyler

"Tyler enjoys a considerable visual return from photographing the remains of this “bookwreck”...
Nonetheless, he gains an even greater symbolic return from this catastrophe,
as from the wounded memorials that are these now almost illegible books, mere objects
whose substance has withered, Tyler manages to express a moral lesson, which
transforms his photographs into true Vanitas, one of the primary intentions of this artistic
genre that would later be called the still life. In my opinion, precisely at this time of moral
gravity, Tyler’s photography achieves its most profound beauty and above all, or if you
wish, more so, his most complete understanding of what this art has become in our
days, so defined by time; so, indeed, “dust to dust”, “only time will tell”. Is this not
perhaps the finest testimony to our beauty"
from the text by Francisco Calvo Serraller

Jacqueline Hassink is a Dutch-born conceptual artist, originally trained as a sculptor. She first picked up a camera in 1994, beginning successive series of photographs dealing methodically and precisely with the themes of globalisation and economic power. Her series include Table of Power (1996), for which she photographed the boardroom tables of Europes 40 largest multinationals, Female Power Stations: Queen Bees (2000) about the business and domestic environments of the worlds leading women executives, and Car Girls (2007) about the manifestations of power in the world of the global car fairs. The Power Book, the first survey of Hassinks photography, takes the form of a travelogue the best of her photographs from America, Europe, the Middle East and Japan are presented chronologically along with illuminating diary notes and sketches and is published to accompany her major exhibition The Power Show (opening in Amsterdam, Rotterdam and New York before touring internationally).

Restricted Areas brings together the results from a nine year project looking at some of the key military bases in Eastern Germany that lie abandoned following the fall of the Iron Curtain and withdrawal of the Soviet Armed forces. For the first time, this publication includes colour images and film stills by Angus Boulton alongside comprehensive textual analysis by Simon Faulkner, John Schofield and Angela Weight. The photographs survey the varied structural and material remains representative of this legacy. The films interrogate various aspects of recent history and the Cold War, researching the visual culture of such sites and inhabiting the growing field that exists between strict documentary work and artist film and video.

“Spaces are always bound to the people who live in them ... These lives are strongly connected to the political situations in each country. So a personal history reflects the history of a country.” (Beatrice Minda)

Since 2003, Beatrice Minda (*1968 in Munich), formerly a pupil of Katharina Sieverding at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin, has been working on a series of photographs that carefully explores questions regarding the relationship of homeland, exile, and (collective) identity, of the personal and political histories of a country. The first photographs of interiors were taken in Romania and reflect, as the artist says, the “atmospheres of the spaces in my childhood.” Other photographs were taken in Paris, Munich, and Berlin, which were the preferred destinations of twentieth-century Romanian migrants. In a third section, Minda photographed the shacks of Romanian migrant workers in the suburbs of Paris, where she also discovered a lovingly staged piece of her homeland.

This volume is the first to present this wonderful series, along with a text by Ulrich Pohlmann and a literary essay by German-Romanian author Richard Wagner.

The churches in this book reflect a wide and diverse range of denominations and sects that form what is often referred to as the ‘charismatic evangelical movement’. Materially and architecturally the buildings display an almost protestant ascetism quite in keeping with a spiritualist church movement reacting against secular material rationalism and consumerism. In these churches the holy spirit pervades, faith is instrinsic and god is personally experienced. They feature none of the monumental architecture or symbols of status and power of the historically dominant denominations. In these churches the architecture is contingent. The buildings were never designed to be churches and this random collection of architectural structures has come about as the result of numerous acts of faith. Often temporary, semi-permanent or unconsecrated, they are sometimes anonymous and almost invisible. They are located where we would least expect to find them, in industrial estates, shopping parades, houses, garages, cinemas, above pubs and commercial properties.

In an era of globalisation and migration in which religion is the subject of complicated political debates and the focus of many conflicts, it is often forgotten how religious beliefs offer a sense of community and support for those experiencing the displacement of urban existence. Spero’s work acknowledges that the divine may exist in the most unlikely places and testifies to our enduring need to seek out a state of grace.

Publisher's Description
It is as though human beings - in an age increasingly dominated by photography - have taken on the attributes of the camera... 'We now see the world in terms of the "snapshot", and according to the mechanism of the camera itself.' Neil Leach

German photography has led the world in the reassessment of our relationship to the urban and man-made environment. Themes such as the way we move through space, and our alienation from the world around us, are explored by artists including Bernd & Hilla Becher, Gosbert Adler, Laurenz Berges, Mona Breede, Johannes Bruns, Susanne Brügger, Michael Danner, Thomas Demand, Christine Erhard, Andreas Gursky, Matthias Hoch, Candida Höfer, Thomas Ruff, Heiner Schilling, Matthias Schmidt, Michael Schmidt, Heidi Specker, Petra Wunderlich and Ulrich Wüst. The artists' portfolios are supported by a series of essays that set the work in a theoretical and historical context.

Publisher: AA Publications
Size: 270 x 240 mm
196 pages

Publisher's Description
In 1949 the photographer Lucien Hervé took photographs of Unité d’Habitation, an innovative apartment building in Marseille. He sent them to the building’s architect, Le Corbusier, who immediately realised that after forty years of searching he had finally found a photographer with an ‘architect’s soul’.

Their seminal collaboration is extensively documented in this album of 1200 of Hervé’s carefully edited, sequenced and labelled contact prints.

Originating as a vehicle for dissemination of the architect’s work and as a commercial venture for the photographer, these contact sheets, housed at the Fondation Le Corbusier, now form an extraordinary archive of modernist architecture and photography in the mid-twentieth century.

Quentin Bajac and Béatrice Andrieux describe the two men’s collaborative process and the productive – if occasionally stormy – dynamic of their relationship, which was grounded in a shared belief that the moral and aesthetic virtues of modern architecture are inseparable.

Jacques Sbriglio presents sixteen of Corbusier’s most iconic buildings, using Hervé’s contact sheets as visual references. The architect’s innovative structures and materials are highlighted by Hervé’s dynamic and expressive perspectives, sharp contrasts of black and white, and frequent close-ups of structural details and textures. The viewer’s eye, moving across the sheets, gradually discovers forms, defined spaces, and the play of light and shadow – the cinematic dimension inherent in Le Corbusier’s architecture.

Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Size: 250 x 348 mm
296 pages, 224 illustrations

Publisher's Description
Dan Graham, one of America's most important contemporary artists, is best known today for his sculptural works and installations. His photographic works are generally not so well known, despite the fact that he first became famous for his photographic series, Homes for America, pictures of typical American suburbia. To this day the theme of architecture and its surfaces represents an extremely important facet of his work, as does the question of what role it plays in postmodern society and in the context of everyday culture. This publication presents new photographs by Dan Graham, taken in the context of a study trip with the architecture faculty of Columbia University, together with a selection of original photographs from the Homes for America series. The new images exhibit stark similarities to the old pictures, because they were taken in the same locations, in the same deserts of suburban streets and housing that Graham had photographed in the 1960s. This creates a fascinating reference system of repetitions and differences, in terms of both the temporal and the spatial, that asks questions of the viewer about architecture, public space, and their function in society.

Publisher: Lars Muller Publishers
128 pages

Publisher's Description
New York-based photographer Stanley Greenberg has long entranced viewers with his stunning black-and-white photographs that provide unparalleled access to objects and places ordinary people might otherwise never see—from New York’s century-old water system to the hidden infrastructure of some of the world’s most impressive architectural works. In his new book, Greenberg trains his lens on the unfailingly strange world of nuclear and particle physics.

From Fermilab to neutrino hunting in Antarctica to ongoing attempts to re-create the conditions of the Big Bang using the world’s largest atom smasher in Switzerland, Greenberg has over the course of five years traveled to—and photographed—many of the most important experiments in modern physics. Greenberg is a self-described science nerd, and the taking of these photographs led him inside mountains, thousands of feet below ground into mine shafts, and miles above sea level in his quest to photograph some of the most high-tech gadgetry and equipment science has to offer. The result is this breathtaking volume in which hulking detectors and accelerators are revealed to be structurally interesting objets d’art. Stanley Greenberg: Time Machines takes readers deep into the world of muons, neutrinos, and quarks, a place where scientists mount ever-larger experiments in hopes of finding ever-smaller particles. And while it’s a world few of us will ever experience firsthand, the eighty photographs here will leave readers in awe.

Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Size: 10 1/4 x 11"
131 pages, 80 halftones

Publisher's Description
This book is an elegant overview of Binet’s career, bringing together black & white and color work. It is divided into thematic sections, each highlighting specific architects and designers as well as a particular aspect of their work that Binet’s dramatic photographs draw out and present. Interludes of more personal work, primarily abstract landscapes, show a different aspect of Binet’s work. Accompanying texts and conversations will highlight the ideas that inform Binet’s work, including abstraction, the importance of materiality and light, the experience of space, and the emotional power of architecture.

• Limited edition of the only monograph on the work of Hélène Binet, the contemporary photographer of choice for today’s major architects
• Compelling and evocative, Binet’s photographs of details, materials and light and shadow constitute a powerfully abstract and emotional body of work
• Features the work of architects such as Peter Zumthor, Zaha Hadid, Peter Eisenman, Le Corbusier and Alvar Aalto

For Previews of this book visit the Phaidon website

Publisher: Phaidon
Size: 290 x 233 mm
224 pages, 10 colour illustrations, 170 black and white illustrations