Publisher's description

Best known for his surreal camera obscura pictures and luminous black-and-white photographs of books, photographer Abelardo Morell now turns his transformative lens to one of the most common of artistic subjects, the flower. The concept for Flowers for Lisa emerged when Morell gave his wife, Lisa, a photograph of flowers on her birthday. “Flowers are part of a long tradition of still life in art,” writes Morell. “Precisely because flowers are such a conventional subject, I felt a strong desire to describe them in new, inventive ways.” With nods to the work of Jan Brueghel, Édouard Manet, Georgia O’Keeffe, René Magritte, and others, Morell does just that; the images are as innovative as they are arresting.

Publisher: Abrams Books

Size: 10 x 12"

144 pages, 100 colour photographs

Publisher's Description

This lavishly illustrated book features the beautiful and scientifically important photographs by Anna Atkins, whose landmark work combined a passion for botany with remarkable creativity and technical skill.

Anna Atkins (1799–1871) came of age in Victorian England, a particularly fertile environment for learning and scientific discovery. Guided by her father, a prominent scientist, Atkins was inspired by William Henry Fox Talbot to take up photography and was friends with Sir John Herschel, who invented the cyanotype photographic process in 1842. The next year, Atkins began making cyanotypes in an effort to illustrate and distribute information about her herbarium. The result was Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, the first book to be illustrated with photographs. A decade later, she and her friend Anne Dixon expanded their visual inquiry to flowering plants, feathers, and other subjects. This volume is a revised and expanded edition of a long out-of-print monograph that first secured Atkins’s place in the history of photography. It draws upon years of careful research and sets Atkins and her work in the proper context. Supplementary texts shed new light on her productions and on the cyanotype process, which is still used by artists today. The photographs themselves—ethereal, deeply hued, and wonderfully intricate—are brought to life with exquisite reproductions that are certain to win Atkins a new generation of followers.

Publisher: Prestel

Size: 23 x 30.5 cm

176 pages, 120 color illustrations

Publisher's Description

Bushes & Succulents is Mona Kuhn’s artistic response to the ongoing currents in contemporary feminism. Reminiscent of Georgia O’Keefe’s floral paintings, your eyes wander around the graceful lines, not knowing exactly what you are looking at. The images are a celebration of the female essence - confident, raw and elegant, yet confrontational and unapologetic. The solarisation process reveals human imperfections, not only in the metallic brilliance of the skin, but also brings to the surface a woman’s struggles, strengths, and power.

The frame reminded me of early childhood, at age eight or so, when I would jump in the showerwith my mother. It resonates an adoration and child-like curiosity for what it is to be a woman. My intention is not to objectify the body, but to celebrate the female body and its essence.

- Mona Kuhn

Born in Brazil, Mona Kuhn currently resides in Los Angeles. Through intimacy with her subjects, knowledge of traditional iconography, and technical mastery, Kuhn portrays the complexities of human nature, both tempting and provoking our imagination.

Publisher: Stanley/Barker

Size: 29 x 25.5 cm

128 pages, 60 images (Silver + CMYK)

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

Publisher’s Description

From famous locations to the simplest home vegetable garden, from worlds imagined by artists to vintage family snapshots, The Photographer in the Garden traces the garden’s rich history in photography and delights readers with spectacular images. Picture commentaries by Sarah Anne McNear and an informative essay from curator Jamie M. Allen broaden our understanding of photography and how it has been used to record the glory of the garden. The book features photographers from all eras, including Anna Atkins, Karl Blossfeldt, Eugène Atget, Edward Steichen, Imogen Cunningham, Stephen Shore, Robert Mapplethorpe, Nobuyoshi Araki, and Collier Schorr. This sublime and beautiful book brings together some of the most stunning photography in the history of the medium.

Publisher: Aperture and the George Eastman Museum

Size: 245 x 290 mm

256 pages
    




Hardcover 978-1-59711-373-1

Publisher's Descrption

Makoto Azuma’s exceptional floral installations are captured in Shunsuke Shiinoki’s extraordinary photographs.

This sumptuous book is the product of a longstanding collaboration between renowned flower artist Makoto Azuma and botanical photographer Shunsuke Shiinoki. Working together, they have selected hundreds of plant species and arranged them in striking combinations that could never occur in the natural world, so creating a unique floral aesthetic.

Publisher: Thames & Hudson

Size: 29.5 x 22.0 cm

256 pages

This is an edition of only 500 numbered copies.

Publisher's Description

“Gunnar Smoliansky’s (b. 1933, Swedish) studies of trees are social journalism in photographic form, although not from the human world in spite of their occasional traces of humanity. No, people appear to have left the scene. Smoliansky’s depictions of trees are a forestry ranger’s nightmare and at the same time far too vulnerable to please the zealous conservationist. These photographs are about a type of vegetation that may once have been both magnificent and dignified – what remains of growth is both frustrated and defiant. They are not romantic pictures of virgin woods. No, instead they are places that have been consigned to oblivion, pre- or post-profitability. Impediments. Languishing land. Windfallen tree trunks or soon to be windfallen trunks that are nothing but upright poles, trunks that have grown into each other. In these photos we are far from observing from perfect specimens, textbooks and the pleasure of inventing Latin names in the Linnaean spirit. They are mainly trees that remain standing by sheer dint of willpower, knots and twists. Like a neglected case of rheumatism. And yet: in the midst of this solitude, in the midst of this struggle, so difficult to grasp, there is a sense of community among the susceptible.”

 Excerpt from the preface written by writer and poet Gunnar D. Hansson (b. 1945, Swedish)

First edition of 500 copies, numbered.

Sample images

Publisher: Libraryman

Size: 300 x 360 mm

40 pages. 25 duotone plates.

Duotone offset printed clothbound hardcover. Linen thread bound.

Uncoated tip-in frame on front cover, with typography in gold foil and spine text in gold foil.

Publisher's Description

Moon’s exquisite photographs radiate awe. -- Booklist, Starred Review

A project with weight and lasting beauty...Ancient Trees provides the kind of thorough and thoughtful portrait that each of these majestic long-lived survivors deserves. -- Christian Science Monitor

In our age of mass species extinctions, we never know from where, if anywhere, consolation may come. Try looking at Beth Moon's new book, "Ancient Trees: Portraits of Time." -- San Francisco Chronicle

Holiday Gift Guide Selection -- San Francisco Chronicle

Beth Moon’s fourteen-year quest to photograph ancient trees has taken her across the United States, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Some of her subjects grow in isolation, on remote mountainsides, private estates, or nature preserves; others maintain a proud, though often precarious, existence in the midst of civilization. All, however, share a mysterious beauty perfected by age and the power to connect us to a sense of time and nature much greater than ourselves. It is this beauty, and this power, that Moon captures in her remarkable photographs.

This handsome volume presents sixty of Moon’s finest tree portraits as full-page duotone plates. The pictured trees include the tangled, hollow-trunked yews—some more than a thousand years old—that grow in Englishchurchyards; the baobabs of Madagascar, called “upside-down trees” because of the curious disproportion of their giant trunks and modest branches; and the fantastical dragon’s-blood trees, red-sapped and umbrella-shaped, that growonly on the island of Socotra, off the Horn of Africa.

Moon’s narrative captions describe the natural and cultural history of each individual tree, while Todd Forrest, vice president for horticulture and living collections at the New York Botanical Garden, provides a concise introduction to the biology and preservation of ancient trees. An essay by the critic Steven Brown defines Moon’s unique place in a tradition of tree photography extending from William Henry Fox Talbot to Sally Mann, and explores the challenges and potential of the tree as a subject for art

Publisher: Abbeville Press

Size: 11" x 11", 

104 pages, 60 duotones

Publisher's Description

Photographer Beth Moon revisits the world’s oldest trees in the darkest places on earth, using color photography to capture vibrant nighttime skies.

Throughout much of the world, night skies are growing increasingly brighter, but the force that protects the remaining naturally dark sky, unpolluted by artificial light, is the same that saves its ancient trees—isolation. Staking out some of the world’s last dark places, photographer Beth Moon uses a digital camera to reveal constellations, nebulae, and the Milky Way, in rich hues that are often too faint to be seen by the naked eye. As in her acclaimed first volume, Ancient Trees: Portraits of Time, these magnificent images encounter great arboreal specimens, including baobabs, olive trees, and redwoods, in such places as South Africa, England, and California.

In her artist’s statement, Beth Moon describes the experience of shooting at night in these remote places. An essay by Jana Grcevich, postdoctoral fellow of astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History, provides the perspective of a scientist racing to study the stars in a world growing increasingly brighter. Clark Strand, the author of Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age, takes a different tack, illuminating the inherent spirituality of trees.

With Essays by Jana Grcevich and Clark Strand

Size: 11 x 11"

116 pages, approximately 55 colour prints

Publisher's Description

‘The work in this book is an attempt to reconcile some of the conflicting aspects that are of interest to me in the landscape. The images here are an investigation into how the most fragile elements seem to have their very existence challenged and their vulnerability magnified when set against the strength and solidity of their surroundings’.

Valda Bailey is a freelance photographer living in Sussex who first became passionate about photography when she was 14. Her approach to photography is greatly informed by her background in painting and her influences come as much from artists as photographers. She is largely motivated by colour and form and the tension and dynamism that these components can bring to an image.

Her objectives are to portray an interpretation of a scene rather than a literal representation. She makes her images using camera movement and multiple exposure – two techniques which help to create abstract shapes and blur extraneous detail.

She has spent time in New York under the expert tutelage of noted street photographer, Jay Maisel and has been greatly influenced by his teaching about light, colour and gesture.

Her work has been featured in broadsheet newspapers, national and international publications and she has recently been invited to teach for Light & Land Photographic Workshops run by Charlie Waite. She has exhibited most recently in London and last summer was the first woman to be invited to join six other photographers to exhibit at the biennial Masters of Vision in Southwell.

She has images in private collections worldwide and her work has been purchased by notable members of the art and photographic community.

Publisher: Triplekite

Size: 240 x 240 mm

48 pages, 25 plates

Publisher's Description

The forest interior is more architecture than landscape. Amongst the trees, your concept of time is changed. As you move deeper inside, and the outside world disappears, the wind is calmed and noise filtered, temperature is altered, and light is bounced and subdued. Some trees stand like sentinels, others are stolid in ranks, an army of trees appearing out of the dark. This apparent sanctuary of stillness can strangely transform.

It is its own world. Stepping into the forest is always like stepping into the unknown, with the semi-dark concealing much, revealing a little. A place sometimes mysterious, sometimes secretive, but always seductive and always dark.

A prize winner at the 2008 Prix de la Photographie Paris, Paul Hart is fast becoming one of the UK’s leading landscape photographers. His work is used by Ilford-Photo to promote their black and white paper range worldwide.

Born in the UK in 1961, Hart worked for six years in advertising photography, travelling throughout Europe and the USA, before embarking on a freelance career focusing more on the natural world. His images have been used internationally for advertising, publishing and editorial. Since 2000 Hart has concentrated solely on personal projects. Truncated is his first book.

Sample images

Foreword by Gerry Badger

Hardback, 72 pages
34 duotone photos, 295mm x 295mm

full price £125 > special offer £90

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

Publisher's Desription

Robert Mapplethorpe (1946–1989) is one of the twentieth century's most important artists, known for his groundbreaking and provocative work. He studied painting, drawing, and sculpture in Brooklyn in the 1960s and started taking photographs when he acquired a Polaroid camera, in 1970.

Beginning in 1973 and until his death in 1989, Mapplethorpe explored the flower with extraordinary dedication, using a range of photographic processes — from Polaroids to dye-transfer color works. In carefully constructed compositions, he captured roses, orchids, snapdragons, daisies, tulips and other species — both common and rare — and forever transformed the way we perceive a classic and familiar subject. The result — a stunning body of work — is collected in this elegant book, Mapplethorpe Flora: The Complete Flowers.

Sample images

Publisher: Phaidon

Size: 308 x 292 mm

368 pages, 159 colour illustrations, 54 black and white illustrations

Publisher's Description

Pretty as a picture: early color photography from Dutch plant catalogues of the twenties

Leendert Blok (1895–1986) experimented with color photography and the use of the panoramic format. In the twenties, the Dutch photographer worked in close collaboration with flower producers, providing color prints and autochromes for the display catalogues of the various species they cultivated. Blok captured flowers like objects of desire, using the Autochrome Lumière technique.

For Blok, photography relates above all to the gaze. Muted tones and soft bronze hues reveal a timeless world of flora, in which corolla, petals, and buds are sublimated by chiaroscuro. The flowers stand out against a plain dark background, alluding to the famous vanitas of the Dutch Golden Age. Tulips, dahlias, daffodils, irises, hyacinths, and peonies reveal themselves in all their glorious diversity. The photographs of Leendert Blok are reminiscent of botanists’ slides of yore, immersing us in the immanence of plant life, in which each flower becomes sculpture. 

Publisher: Hatje Cantz

Size: 195 x 260 mm

176 pages, 80 illustrations

Publisher's Description

British artist Darren Almond has been known for his works using variety of media, including sculpture, films as well as photography. This The Civil Dawns consists of 2 photographic series. “Civil Dawn@Giverny” is a series of photographs taken in the Claude Monet’s garden at Giverny in the winter and summer, while “Civil Dawn@Mt. Hiei” photographed foggy Mt. Hiei. Images of both series are captured by exposing to the momentary light of the break of dawn. Releasing its brilliance, “Civil Dawn@Giverny” depicts momentary, spontaneous faces of flowers in Monet’s garden at the very moment a day breaks. Those pictures, photographed with large-format Polaroid, which apparatus is discontinued already, seem like homage to the Impressionist.
“Civil Dawn@Mt. Hiei” is a series produced in Japan, where Almond has taken particular interests in its culture and drawn his inspiration to works. He has visited Japan several times since 1990s and created numbers of works adopting the ideas he got through sceneries seen and incidents encountered during his visits. The morning twilight Almond pictured charms us with its gentle lights, recalls our nostalgia, although no humans are appeared in the pictures. Time is unchanging and eternal – while his masterwork, installation of timepieces, symbolically implies accurate passage of time, Almond contrarily sheds light on the twinkling of momentariliness in these series. Coloured with 2 pigments from the original prints, these two series are mingled and presenting another fascination here in this book.

Publisher: The Torch Press

Size: 230 x 300 mm

84 pages

Edition of 500

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

Publisher's Description

The texts and images presented here are part of Blossom, a collaboration between the artist Thomas Demand and writer Ben Lerner. The images relate to a detail from a photograph of Katherine Russell, widow of Tamerlan Anzorovich Tsarnaev leaving her home in Boston, that first appeared in the New York Times on 4 May 2013.

Thomas Demand’s work lures the viewer into a reality that is not what it appears to be. Carefully contrived from paper, these imaginary worlds are sculpted, photographed and destroyed. The traces which remain are events in which the protagonist is removed, scenes that are both familiar and out of reach. Demand’s work has been shown extensively across the world and is included in most of the significant private and institutional collections. Recent books include The Dallies (MACK, 2012) and Model Studies (Ivory Press, 2011).

Publisher: MACK

Size: 310 x 240 mm

64 pages

Publisher's Description

'The Gardener’, is the winning project of the inaugural Syngenta Photography Award. Photographed by Jan Brykczynski, it is an extension of his previous projects in which he travelled to the outer corners of Europe to explore the lives of people in rural areas. This new work looks at how city dwellers try to connect with nature.

The book documents urban gardens in Nairobi, New York, Warsaw, and Yerevan in Armenia. Brykczynski approaches it as if the world were a single village, whose inhabitants seek to meet similar, and very human, needs. His focus is on low-income communities where people respond to a basic need rather than any passing fad. When they create their gardens, improvisation is all. The residents of these neighbourhoods make use of what is available – often re-using materials entirely out of context and in truly original ways.

His particular interest is the way in which these spaces are arranged and in how structures for cultivation are created spontaneously. In some places these are an expression of group collaboration, in others they highlight individual imagination and the inventiveness of their creators. Yet there are surprising similarities across different continents, evidencing a collective consciousness and a common humanity.

Publisher: Dewi Lewis Publishing

Size: 290 x 200 mm

88 pages, 43 colour plates

Publisher's Description

"Except for painting and garden­ing, I’m useless", Claude Monet wrote to a friend, preferring a life in Giverny, 3 km away from ­Vernon on the Seine downstream from Paris. He went there in 1883, initially remodelled the home and garden complex and made an ­ornamental garden out of Clos Normand. Later, in 1893, he bought a large area across the street, now the Chemin du Roy, where he could create his famous water lily pond and the Japanese bridge, which would be the key motif in his work from 1897 until his death on 5 December 1926. The street is partly the reason why there was no other view of the bridge for Monet, and it is said that he had his gardeners wiped the dust of the lilies every day, until he finally had the road asphalted at his own expense. Darren Almond, born in 1971, now lives in London and works mostly on elaborate photographs taken under a full moon. He has progressed through his participation in 1997 at the legend­ary exhibition »Sensation« via the Pavilion at the ­Venice Biennale in 2003 and not least by his nomination  in 2005 for the Turner Price to become one of the outstanding British contemporary artists. After his exhibition at the Villa Merkel and the resulting cassette »Nocturne«, this publication, which contains new photographs of Monet’s garden, emphasises the sculptural floral motifs in Darren Almond’s photographic work. Also, the individual flower photographs can be separated from the book block, which is protected by a translucent plastic cover, in which a small signed picture of a polaroid with the ­famous lily pond has been inserted.

Publisher: Snoeck

Soze: 230 x 185 mm

60 pages with 31 coloured reproductions UV-varnished, glued and plugged in PVC, cover insert 162 x 137 mm signed by Darren Almond

Signed copies

Publisher's Description

Yoichi Watanabe was born and lives in Hokkaido district, very north part with much snow, in Japan. Making use of skills of skiing he has been taking photographs in snow mountains while traveling all over world. His activity based in Niseko area, contributes to cultural development around there. He is one of the leading person in snow sports photography.

• MATCH and Company Co., Ltd.
• 2012 / 24 page / 18 photographs
• 257mm×182mm / softcover
• Limited Edition. 700 Copies.
• MA000_00024

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

Publisher's Description

Dav Thomas is a large format landscape photographer based close to the Peak District Nation Park in The UK. This book showcases Dav’s catalogue of work celebrating his love and connection with trees.

Geoff Wittig gave it a great review in Online Photographer concluding "I’m most reminded of Robert Glenn Ketchum’s work in his book The Hudson River and the Highlands, which is high praise indeed. With Trees leaves me itching to go out and take some forest photographs of my own. It's hard to ask for more from a landscape photography monograph. "

See here for samples.

Publisher:Triplekite Publishing

112 pages

Publisher's Description

In April 2011 the cherry blossoms were blooming beautifully in Japan. Mika Ninagawa’s photographs of that spring are collected here and reproduced in full startling colour.

Publisher: Kawade Shobo Shinsha

Size: 190 x 270 mm

128 pages, 64 colour illustrations

Publisher's price: £27

Publisher's Description

Photographer Takashi Homma takes us on a journey deep into densely wooded areas in search of the many different types of fungus that grow there. More the collection of a curious wanderer than a serious hobbyist, the unidentified mushrooms are photographed against sterile white backgrounds as if recently plucked from the forest floor, with soil, bark and even small creatures still attached. The fungal portraits are interspersed with images of the forest itself, as if providing a natural context – a sense of actually being there – with surroundings of lichen covered trees, dense leafage, and the natural interplay of shadow and light.

Publisher: Blind Gallery

Size: 170 x 260 mm

276 pages

Publisher's price: £72.50