Photography

BILL 3 a special archival issue, features unpublished Martin Margiela lookbook photographs, a horse, street style from the 90’s, vases of Japan, a silver story, a flash forward and back, tennis, an icecube tray, more Margiela, Hysteric Glamour and a bunch of frivilous images.

The stories are sourced from the book collections of RareBooksParis and Julie Peeters.

Printed in 2020, bound in 2021.

fanta for the ghosts by Elisabeth Molin

2021, English
46 pages, 120mm x 210mm
edition of 500

Co-published with OneThousandBooks and Elisabeth Molin

The racist term "play-white" comes from the apartheid era, when it connoted a black or mixed race person who lived as a white person: “So and so is a play-white.” South African artist Bianca Baldi draws from studies of biomimicry and her own family history, as well as literary precedents—such as Nella Larsen’s novel Passing (1929)—to reflect on racial passing and the instability of racial identities. Play-White alternates between layers of visualization and moments of discretion in order to explore questions of presence and evasion beyond their representation in black and white.

With contributions by Bianca Baldi, Mika Conradie, Shoniqua Roach, Amy Watson, and others; design by Katharina Tauer & Wolfgang Hückel in collaboration with K. Verlag.

Published 2021

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's landmark essay in decolonial thought is animated for a new generation with art by Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza.

In 1985 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's seminal essay, 'Can the Subaltern Speak' transformed the analysis of colonialism. In a deeply divided world Spivak's text interrogated the historical and ideological factors that, by obstructing the potential for certain subjects to be heard, maintained the degraded status of those subjects on the world's peripheries. The text remains, in the third decade of the twenty-first century, as compelling as ever, and affirms the continuing relevance of Marxism to contemporary decolonial thought.

In this Afterall Two Works edition, the essay is given new life in dialogue with especially commissioned artwork by Ecuadorian artist Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza. Loaiza's preoccupation with questions of visibility and occlusion, the need for and absence of the image, has guide the creation of a mesmerising set of works. These form a visual vocabulary that echoes and refracts Spivak's central terms, bringing new inflections to an enduringly important text.

In 1979, JEB self-published her first book, Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians. In a work that was revolutionary for its era, JEB made photographs of lesbians from different ages and backgrounds in their everyday lives—working, playing, raising families, and striving to remake their worlds. The photographs were accompanied by writings from acclaimed authors including Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Joan Nestle, and others. Various women pictured in the book also shared their personal stories. Eye to Eye signaled a radical new way of seeing, moving lesbian lives from the margins to the center, and reversing a history of invisibility. More than just a book, it was an affirmation of the existence of lesbians that helped to propel a political movement. Reprinted for the first time in forty years, Eye to Eye is a faithful reproduction of a work that still resonates today. This edition features additional essays from artist and writer Tee Corinne, former World Cup soccer player Lori Lindsey, and photographer Lola Flash.

100+more is het resultaat van een beelden dialoog tussen Jelle Martens en Tim Bruggeman in het voorjaar van 2021. Beide verzamelden ze de voorbije jaren een uitgebreid digitaal archief met beelden van het internet, film stills, schermafbeeldingen, reproducties van kunstwerken en zelfgemaakte beelden. Deze publicatie brengt een selectie van 302 zwart-wit beelden samen vanuit een weloverwogen willekeurigheid.

100+more is the result of a visual dialogue between Jelle Martens and Tim Bruggeman in the spring of 2021. In recent years, both have collected an extensive digital archive with images from the internet, film stills, screenshots, reproductions of artworks and images they created themselves. This publication brings together a selection of 302 black-and-white images from a chosen randomness.

Offset
304 pages
Edition of 250
14 x 20 cm

This artist's book presents a set of photographs made by Belgian artist Sophie Nys during her stay in Zurich. It features each of the modernist fountains produced by designer Alfred Aebersold in the 1970s and scattered throughout the Swiss city. The images are associated with amusing and clever captions written by Leila Peacock, a Scottish artist living in Zurich.

In 1973, Alfred Aebersold won the competition organized by the Water Supply Department of Zurich for the design of a fountain. It was to be the visible part of a vast, autonomous and secured water supply system of 89 identical fountains distributed throughout the territory of the city. The context was that of the cold war. The threat, invisible but permanent, was the contamination of the public water supply network by an external agent. Aebersold—trained as an interior designer and founder, together with Jörg Hamburger and Herbert Merz, of studio Gruppe 3 in 1961—was representative of a Swiss design that followed the formal vocabulary of Max Bill. Bill contributed from the 1940s onward to the dissemination of ways of living and Western values to question those of Soviet ideology. Designed in the 1970s but recalling through its formal vocabulary a modernist, stable, and reassuring sculptural language expressed in the organicity and solidity of its forms, this fountain presents itself as a historical paradox of sorts. But it also presents itself as a visual symptom, set within the public space, of a necessity for a continued, ahistorical defense. The context changes, but the threat remains. And the fountain, masking its purpose in the functionality of its bowels—according to a Duchampian modus operandi, in which the sense one could assign to forms is obscured and diverted—, tirelessly spurts the purity of its liquid.

A long-awaited facsimile of Michael Snow's legendary artist's book, a classic of conceptualism

For years an out-of-print rarity, Canadian artist, filmmaker and musician Michael Snow's (born 1928) classic 1975 artist's book Cover to Cover is available once again, in this facsimile edition. Unconstrained by discipline, Snow famously remarked that his sculptures were made by a musician, his films by a painter. Flipping through Cover to Cover, which is composed entirely of photographs in narrative sequence, one might describe it as a book made by a filmmaker. Each individual page features a distinct moment, seen from one perspective on the front, and from a diametrically opposed angle on the back, occasionally pivoting between interior and exterior spaces. Midway through the book, the images are inverted such that the volume must be turned upside-down to be looked at right-side up. The result is an elegant, disorienting study in simultaneity. With this work, wrote Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, "Michael Snow has challenged the reader's/viewer's notion of a book, indeed one's very notion of perception."

‘Hotel Bellevue’ is a photo book and a vocabulary centered around border trees, Celtic historical facts and visual speculation. This book is a manifesto for love, anger, the non-human, a wish to connect, to suggest, and to study. Only things from the heart deliver.

Published 2021. 

Sasha Phyars-Burgess’ first monograph, Untitled. Spanning three bodies of work, this 200-plus page monograph includes poems by Ser Alida and Aurora Masum-Javed, a conversation between Sasha Phyars-Burgess, Juliana Huxtable and Carolyn Lazard, and essay by Bill Gaskins. Designed by Studio Lin.

As recipient of the second annual Capricious Photo Award, Sasha is a vital, emerging voice in contemporary photography, engaging the charged line between documentary and fine art. Her work ranges from affecting studies on diaspora, family and place to revolving social phenomenons in which energy, beauty and power meet.

The second annual jury panel was helmed by Capricious Founder and Publisher Sophie Mörner and Associate Publisher Anika Sabin alongside Lauren Cornell, Katherine Hubbard, JOFF, Matt Keegan, Guadalupe Rosales, Ka-Man Tse, and Lyndsy Welgos.

wild wild Wild West / Haunting of the Seahorse by Jonathan Lyndon Chase, part of a new book series of experimental narratives. This release of non-linear storytelling illustrates black queer bodies moving through fluid states of love, grief, and desire within the canons of science fiction, fantasy and horror. Like a love letter, Jonathan employs multi-sensory entanglements, a blending of the abstract and physical, to draw out complex histories of blackness, meditations on mental health, and queer futurity.

Jonathan Lyndon Chase is an interdisciplinary artist principally working in modes of painting, video and sculpture depicting queer black love and community amid the backdrop of urban and domestic spaces. This is their second book with Capricious Publishing—a debut book Quiet Storm was released in conjunction with Company Gallery in 2018. Chase was born in 1989 in Philadelphia, PA where they currently live and work.

Throughout the 1970s, filmmaker Barbara Hammer toured the United States, Africa, and Europe, making film after film about women and the lesbian experience, both of which had seldom been seen by a woman, for women on screen before. She made a slew of now-legendary experimental films, including Sis­ters! (1973), Dyketactics (1974), Multiple Orgasm (1976), Sappho {1978), and Double Strength {1978), more or less inventing lesbian cinema at a time when such material had largely been relegated to the pornographic imagination of male artists and filmmakers. During this prolific period, Hammer photographed her travels, her lovers, moments of community and kinship between her collaborators on set, private and public performances, friends, strangers. Through these photographs, Hammer explodes traditional notions of female sexuality by showing it for what it is: complex, messy, abstract, human.

Barbara Hammer is an experimental filmmaker whose work has pioneered feminist and lesbian cinema for five decades. She has had film retrospectives at the Jeu de Palme (Paris), Museum of Modern Art (New York), Tate Modern (London), National Gallery of Art (Washington, Dq, Kunsthall (Oslo, Norway), Toronto Film Festival, and Pink Life Queer Festival (Ankara and Istanbul, Turkey). Her work was included in the 1985, 1989, and 1993 Whitney Biennials and is included in the perma­nent collections of the Australian Center for the Moving Image, the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Centre Georges Pompidou, and elsewhere. She is the author of Hammer! Making Movies Out of Sex and life (Feminist Press 2009). An exhibition of her notebooks was presented at Company Gallery in Fall 2014. A fol­low-up exhibition at Company, Truant: Photographs, 1970 – 1979, featuring unseen photographs from the 1970s, opened in October 2017.

Se Te Subió El Santo is a collection of self – portraits taken by the artist directly after she awoke every morning while away on a week-long residency in Iowa City, IA at the Center for Afrofuturist Studies in Spring 2016. This daily practice confronts notions of the artist’s interests in rendering a full self implicit of gender, race, sexuality, and spirituality while challenging and collapsing the intersections of each identity as well.

The title of the work is taken from Ana Mendieta, the Iowa Years: A critical study, 1969 through 1977 where Julia Ann Herzberg writes in the dissertation:

Ana and Raquelin Mendieta’s vocabulary contained many Afro-Cuban idiomatic expressions. For example, they would often respond to a friend who was acting in an unruly or hyperactive manner by asking” “Se te subió el santo? (“Are you in a trance?”) In the Afro-Cuban context, the expression “subirse el santo” is used in religious ceremony when the orisha/saint takes possession of the believer.

The monograph also includes an essay by author Akwaeke Emezi.

First edition, 94 page, black and white, leather bound hardcover with white foil embossment 

TIONA NEKKIA MCCLODDEN is an interdisciplinary research-based conceptual artist, filmmaker and curator whose work explores, and critiques issues at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality and social commentary. McClodden’s interdisciplinary approach traverses documentary film, experimental video, sculpture, and sound installations. Themes explored in McClodden’s films and works have been re-memory and more recently narrative biomythography.

The first book of Melanie Bonajo’s new series, Matrix Botanica.

Non-Human Persons explores our relationship with Nature photography, animals and the Internet. It is a 140+ page, softcover, full-color, magazine-style artist book designed by Experimental Jetset.

Can we send funny animal pictures to space for aliens to discover the Earth’s ecosystem? Our enormous access to animal pictures on the Internet tramples our awareness that only humans possess self awareness, language, culture, land and customs. But when does a lion stop being a lion? How are typical Nature photography categories designed by the hands of science replaced by the images of amateurs who document the disappearing surroundings of wildlife by ever expanding urbanization? As a result, do we need complete revised scientific categories for these images?

For 10 years, Melanie Bonajo has collected thousands of animal pictures online, this book is her exploration of these questions.

This publication tells of the journey of a photographic research of the origins of cumbia music along the lower Magdalena river in Colombia.

The Magdalena river marks the birthplace and distribution system for cumbia music, which in its beginnings, dating back to the colonial era, was a prohibited ritual dance and one of the ways in which the indigenous and African populations interacted. Musically, it is made up of a combination of African rhythms, indigenous instruments, and Spanish lyrics. Since the 1950s cumbia has spread beyond Colombia to the working-class neighbourhoods in Latin America, adapting and picking up local specifics at each place. 
The Magdalena river also stands for one of many rivers in the world that acted as distribution channels. It speaks of water cultures, which, located along rivers, have absorbed very different influences from the interior of the countries and the world – making them multifaceted and thoroughly mixed. This becomes evident in the music as well. 

The publication includes photographs, recordings of conversations with cumbia musicians, and short texts about the journey.

Mirjam Wirz (born 1973) is a photographer and artist based in Zurich.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Reynaldo Rivera took personal photos of the Los Angeles that he lived in and knew: a world of cheap rent, house parties, subversive fashion, underground bands, and a handful of Latino gay and transvestite bars: Mugi’s, The Silverlake Lounge, and La Plaza. Most of these bars are long closed and many of the performers have died. But in Rivera’s photographs, these men and women live on in a silvery landscape of makeshift old-style cinematic glamour, a fabulous flight from unacceptable reality. 

As a teenager, Rivera took refuge in used bookstores and thrift stores, where he discovered old  photo books of Mexican film stars and the work of Lisette Model, Brassai, and Bresson. Inspired, he bought a camera and began  photographing people at his hotel. In 1981 he moved to Echo Park and began taking photos for the LA Weekly. 

This book is an ensemble of almost 200 images selected by Hedi El Kholti and Lauren Mackler spanning more than two decades in Los Angeles and Mexico. The  book also includes Luis Bauz’s story, “Tatiana,” about one of the  subjects of these photographs; a critical essay on Rivera’s work by Chris Kraus; and a novella-length conversation between Rivera and his  friend and contemporary Vaginal Davis about their lives, work, fantasies, and collective histories.

Edited by Hedi El Kholti and Lauren Mackler
With Luis Bauz, Vaginal Davis and Chris Kraus

FUGUES is a study of objects. Elements repeat and imitate one another like a polyphonic canon of voices narrating stories of domestic confinement in looped time.

With images by photographer Nicole Maria Winkler & texts by artist Issy Wood, writer Ella Plevin, model Freja Beha Erichsen and curator Elaine Tam.

Real state is the first publication by artist Asta Meldal Lynge, a visual essay with text by Eleanor Ivory Weber, that takes a critical stance towards the subjects of housing, urban development and image production. Employing video-stills, photographs and found images, Lynge explores the social and political value of the image, in a specifically urban context, emphasising the fictions present in the (re)production of space.

In particular, Real state investigates the ramifications of architectural renderings within the public sphere, documenting building site hoardings, symbolic points at the threshold of construction, where a yet-to-exist everyday and a predicted image of the city meets the real one.

Processing this documentation through layering, editing and retouching, Lynge highlights (and challenges) both the intensifying tendency of ‘image-building’ or the production of buildings as icons and the subsequent transformation of public space into an infinite extension of image surfaces.

As the content is framed and re-framed, trackpad gestures are overlaid, ultimately bringing the stability of any image surface into question. This destabilising approach is mirrored in Weber’s text which combines excerpts from e-mail conversations, with differing registers of fiction, expanding on the disconnection between the idea of housing as a basic human need and its position within market logic and neoliberal ideology.

The book’s title alludes to these systems at play, both the power structures of governed entities and the business of real estate; whilst troubling the promise that there is something real or true to be revealed.

Diaries of an avatar: a Bible-style artist's book of writings by Martine Syms

A new artist's book by California-based artist Martine Syms (born 1988), Shame Space explores the possibilities of narrative and identity, collecting journal writings by the artist from 2015 to 2017 in which she attempts to capture her shadow self, alongside image stills from the video project Ugly Plymouths. The text entries form the voiceover of Mythiccbeing (pronounced "my thick being'), a "black, upwardly mobile, violent, solipsistic, sociopathic, gender-neutral femme" digital avatar who has iterated across several of Syms' recent exhibitions. In Syms' installations, Mythiccbeing manifests variously in video, audio and as an interactive chatbot that responds to the viewer's communications with messages and animations.

In Shame Space, the character's autofictional, diaristic commentary is gathered into 15 chapters. Its design updates the Bible format with its A5 size, embossed leather-textured cover and silver edge painting. The Ugly Plymouths still-image selection was coded using a programming script, such that the design, like the chatbot's SMS responses, is an exercise in machine automation.

Published Dec 2020

Born out of her fascination for shop displays, Lisa Sudhibhasilp imagined an exhibition in a hardware store. Improvising a series of sculptural interventions in situ, the artist played with existing display structures, proposing the hardware store as a place where the display of materiality can be contemplated like works of art in exhibition spaces. Photographer Johannes Schwartz documented the artist’s ephemeral installations and the existing fixtures and fittings, creating a portrait of the store. Accompanying the visual journey, a series of texts written by Sudhibhasilp, illustrated by Rudy Guedj, provides insight into her research through anecdotal stories and other miscellaneous facts on materials and exhibition design. Shifting between the form of the artist book and the exhibition catalogue “No thanks, I’m just looking” stands as the sole remaining document of the event.

During their residency at Est-Nord-Est in Saint-Port-Joli, Quebec, Elvia Teotski and Jérémy Laffon stumble upon a small shed that seems inhabited but find no trace of its resident Bottle Joe. The artists start to investigate the building and create a series of sculptural yet functional wooden prostheses for its abandoned furniture. Through a drunk photographic journey and a series texts written from the perspective of the mysterious Joe, the publication keeps on zooming in and out of the building and its surrounding environment to account of the temporary monumentalisation of the place and its former inhabitant.

The first book in a series of four explores a connection between images taken as part of a larger series in Japan over one summer and one winter. Each book has been lovingly hand-constructed.

The presence of self doubt is deeply felt when trying to compile a collection of photographs that have endured an endless process of revision and recompilation.

Scouring every inch of each image to find microscopic relations between subject, composition and colour until eventually something shifts and that 'everything in its right place' feeling soothes the throbbing head.

It's not an easy thing to articulate. It's a sort of subterranean relationship between each frame, as if a mysterious past or conspiracy that links everything together is identified, but still not understood.

It's as if the book always intended to exist and that you had been entrusted with the task of giving it life. (As you had possibly already done before?)
There's a certain term of phrase for someone who does the same thing repeatedly and expects different results.

So what is it to the person who stares at the same collection of images over and over and starts to see something different?

After such intense scrutiny nearly all memory associated with the photograph deteriorates. All that remains are hazy fragments of the original memories that seem like they're trying to tell you something but can't quite remember what it was.

And sandwiched around those memories are the new ideas that you've completely made up to talk yourself into sending this all off to the printers and moving on with your life.

Poetry has never been my strong suit, all attempts to metaphorically circumvent feeling or intention merely end up being interpreted as either the metaphor itself or something else entirely.

So perhaps we can sum this up very simply.

This is a book about red things.

Red has a way of implying a behind the scenes existence, a warning, distance, communication.

Or maybe, just overdue.

19 pages, 26.9 x 19 cm, softcover, Out of Office (Melbourne)

Brush Fires in the Social Landscape began in collaboration with the artist before his death in 1992 and first published in 1994, engaged those who Wojnarowicz would refer to as his tribe or community.

Now, on the twentieth anniversary of Brush Fires, when interest in the artist's work has increased exponentially, Aperture has expanded and redesigned this seminal publication to be even more inclusive. It is the only book that features the breadth of Wojnarowicz's work with photography.

The contributors, from artist and writer friends to the lawyer who represented him in his case against Donald Wildmon and the American Family Association, to the next generation of artists who were influenced by Wojnarowicz's sensibility, together offer a compelling, provocative understanding of the artist and his work. 

Contributors include: Vince Aletti, Barry Blinderman, Cynthia Carr, David Cole, Shannon Ebner, Leonard Fink, Karen Finley, Nan Goldin, Félix Guattari, Wade Guyton, Melissa Harris, Elizabeth Hess, Tessa Hughes-Freeland, Peter Hujar, Fran Lebowitz, Lucy R. Lippard (introduction), Sylvère Lotringer, Carlo McCormick, Henrik Olesen, Wendy Olsoff, Adam Putnam, Tom Rauffenbart, James Romberger, Emily Roysdon, Marion Scemama, Gary Schneider, Amy Scholder, Kiki Smith, Andreas Sterzing, Zoe Strauss, Marvin J. Taylor, Lynne Tillman, and Wolfgang Tillmans.

The book groups Lore Stessel's photographic research on dance and movement of the past six year. It can be read as a choreography in which the rhythm of the dance is accompanied by the pace of turning each page.