Saint Benedict the Moor, or Binidittu as the Sicilians fondly rechristened him, was an Afro-Sicilian hermit friar, the son of African slaves born in Sicily in the 16th century. Canonized in 1807, he was the Catholic Church’s first Black saint and was made Patron Saint of Palermo. These photographs address the lives of African migrants in the Mediterranean today through the historical figure of Binidittu. This project retraces his improbable life, explores the historical sites of his hagiography, the worship of relics, and the religious and secular practices devoted to him in Sicily and elsewhere in the Mediterranean. This book is part of Lo Calzo’s long-term photographic project, Cham, about the living memories of colonial slavery and anti-slavery struggles.
“Binidittu emerges in this work as an allegory of our time: an encounter between the Mare Nostrum and the world, between oblivion and memory, between racism made commonplace and our shared humanity, between the Sicilian people’s aspirations and African migrants’ hopes of freedom and dignity as they drift towards Europe’s shores.” Nicola lo Calzo
Text in English and Italian.
The 1980s weren’t that long ago, but visually much has changed. Martin Langer’s black-and-white photos illustrate everyday life from the early 1980s in the Ostwestfalen-Lippe region, focusing on the towns of Bielefeld, Detmold, Herford, Gütersloh and Paderborn. Also depicted are the forests and meadows in between, but Langer’s approach to his craft falls into the genre of street photography. So the stage is set for the day-to-day, complimented by subjects photographed at the sidelines of major local events.
Text in German.
Paris – a photographic book with the city as its theme – takes an abstract approach to depicting the city, while retaining a direct relationship with reality. It is part of the tradition of modernist photography, but it distinguishes itself by the perfect appearance of digitally retouched images.
Shadows play a key role in simplifying reality, dissociating locations from their classical visual representation. The economy of form thus created enables the depiction of Paris to be radically transformed, going beyond the customary descriptive task of photography.
At first glance, the viewer perceives the overall contrast of the image, with only the light lines standing out against the shadows. As the eye gradually adapts, the details in the shadows become apparent, introducing a second way of reading the photograph and enriching the way it is perceived. Paris is thus viewed anew, moving from shadow to abstraction.
Text in English and French.
The ancient treasures collected over the past 20 years by Ludovic Donnadieu, hail from a myriad of ancient cultures, famous or obscure, across all five continents. The selection maintains a balanced representation of different geographical areas, ensuring that all regions of the world and all historical or prehistoric periods are accounted for. Through this comprehensive panorama, the viewer is invited on a cultural and anthropological journey through time and space.
The showcased artworks are “miniatures”; few exceed a size of 20 centimeters. Indeed, an artwork doesn’t need to be monumental to evoke profound emotional impact and fascination! Fragility can endure, the minuscule can embody grandeur, and singular detail can convey a universal message.
This selection of 99 works, forming a unique ensemble worldwide, adheres to a triple criterion: authenticity, aesthetic quality, and balance, both among the represented subjects and across different forms, materials, or functions. The period covered spans from 6,000 BC to the early 20th century. Presenting this collection to the public holds a dual significance: in a world threatened by uniformity, it celebrates the richness and diversity of human cultures while also highlighting the beauty and grandeur of small-scale formats and the need to protect what is fragile.
The Donnadieu Foundation was established in 2023, under the aegis of the Foundation for Childhood, by Ludovic Donnadieu, art collector, certified public accountant, and founder of the firm Donnadieu & Associates, which specialized in securing funds entrusted to NGOs. The Foundation aims to enable young people, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds, to broaden their horizons and engage in civic activism, while also raising awareness among the general public and policymakers about the importance of culture for the world’s youth.
Text in English and French.
Driving upwards, the pass seems endless, hairpin turn after hairpin turn winding its way to the top. You change gear, keep your eyes on the road, concentrate on the next stretch. And easily forget about the magnificence around you — the fantastic mountain panorama — in order to focus on roads that combine the pleasure and practicality of a roller coaster ride.
This book presents over 200 breathtaking aerial images by “Curves” magazine photographer Stephen Bogner, capturing stunning mountain passes, hairpin turns, switchbacks, and scenic roads. For the past decade, Stephen Bogner has taken glorious photographs of mountain vistas from a helicopter that a driver focusing on the road cannot stop to appreciate. This book brings together the best images of the past 10 years in one beautifully produced, limited edition, slipcased retrospective, with 4 signed prints. His outstanding photos are accompanied by text by Jan-Karl Baedeker. A must-have for the fans of “Curves”, “Escapes” and “Porsche Drive.”
Text in English and German.
This book of photography is the result of two great loves. A journey through the streets of Florence through a little girl’s eyes, so bright and full of joy.
Windows and shop-windows act as if they were eyes too, capable of reflecting images of buildings and churches, so as to keep them inside, as well as in our memories or in our hearts.
A sort of journey to discover and rediscover aspects, anecdotes and curiosities of this atypical city, where every street, even the narrowest one, tells a story.
Text in English and Italian.
The British landscape is changing. Geographically, politically, even emotionally, the boundary lines of Britain – and what it means to be British – are in flux. This book looks at the new terrains, memories and myths of this contemporary landscape through the eyes of some of the world’s most exciting photographers. Far away from traditional and sometimes predictable images of landscapes, these photographers present Britain in a new and compelling light while celebrating the enduring beauty of its snow-capped mountains and wind-swept isles.
Ever since its invention, the medium of photography has been in competition with the previously dominant genre of painting. Photography as a means of capturing the real world at first seemed to obviate the need for painting. Later, impressionists, cubists, and eventually abstract painters moved away from figurative imagery, until artists such as Richter or Polke transferred photography back into painting.
These conflicting challenges are at the heart of Berit Schneidereit’s work, who creates hybrids through analogue editing of digital images and joins together photographic methods with techniques used in painting, graphic art, and collage. Schneidereit mostly takes photographs in botanical gardens. In the darkroom, she then superimposes a grid or net-like structure over her motifs, which become blurred, ambiguous, and hazy. The artist thus achieves something that is close to painting once again. Like invisible curtains, her manipulations distort or obscure our view of the real image.
Her work in this way questions the relationship between visibility and invisibility (also as a result of the media) and illustrates how the visual media, that are available today, force themselves between our gaze and the world.
Text in English and German.
Gosse Bouma, who is making a name for himself in the world of art photography as a master of light, shares his unique vision of Amsterdam in his first book. In his work, Gosse works under natural conditions, shedding a new light on the city he loves so much. In A New Light on Amsterdam, Gosse takes you through the city in different atmospheres – from the misty old city center to the morning light in Amsterdam’s beautiful parks. Iconic buildings, raucous metro stations and picturesque cityscapes: this large-format book surprises with every photo, showing a serene, sometimes melancholic Amsterdam.
These pages tell the story without words of a journey through Spain in which the author, the photographer Fernando Manso, visited unknown and hidden corners and captured them on the plates of his large-format camera. From the remotest parts of Galicia to those of Almería, he passed through coasts, deserts and mountains, stopping at old churches, ghostly castles or majestic cathedrals, in forests and gorges, at natural pools and salt mines, and at cemeteries, Arab baths and hermitages carved out of the rock.
Fernando has made the light of these places into the leading figure of his journey. His is a different light, as he has relinquished blue skies and brilliant sunshine, often the stuff of clichés, to make way for visions of places that appear to us with such intimate truth that even if we know them, we can barely recognize them. This is thanks to his technique, his art and the patience with which he waits for the light.
Fernando’s luxury is being able to use all the time in the world to draw us into an artistic heritage that is sometimes secret and hard to reach, and which the viewer has to know how to see. He reveals these places, often in danger of disappearing, after detailed investigation. Both architecture and landscape – for he knows that natural scenery is also a major patrimony that has to be affectionately preserved and protected from speculation – belong to all of us, and we are responsible for their care. We must be aware of this.
The result of that trip is this publication, with beautiful images in reproductions of exceptional quality that present us with a vision of Spain in a different light.
“It’s very hard for me to accept that Sukita-san has been snapping away at me since 1972, but that really is the case. I suspect that it’s because whenever he’s asked me to do a session, I conjure up in my mind’s eye the sweet, creative and big-hearted man who has always made these potentially tedious affairs so relaxed and painless. May he click into eternity.” – David Bowie
For Sukita, the creative mastermind behind the iconic cover for David Bowie’s album ‘Heroes’, photography is an expression of a ‘fundamental secret’ shared between artists: a spiritual communication that transcends the minutiae of language. Born and raised in Kyushu, Japan, Sukita’s reverence of American and Western counter-culture lured him to New York and London. He immersed himself in the western music scene which he loved, while his relaxed photo sessions endeared him to many celebrity figures, including David Bowie and Iggy Pop (with both of whom Sukita had a 40-year long professional relationship), Marc Bolan, and Japanese musician Hotei, best known for his work on the Kill Bill soundtrack. His work spans the early US and UK seventies rock scene, the London punk-rock era to the present crop of emerging Japanese rock artists.
This photo book is the first time the photographer has collaborated on a major retrospective of his career and includes some of his early documentary work and his rarely-seen travel and street photography. It introduces the artist through two essays that explore his place within the wider context of both Western and Japanese photography, presented alongside the many iconic shots of both Western and Japanese artists that earned him his eternal reputation.
“Blurring the line between personal research and artistic expression, the book raises complex questions about truth, proof, and what we can and cannot see.” — About Photography
In recent years, photographer Bieke Depoorter developed an overriding interest in astronomy. She sought out amateur stargazers, visited state-of-the-art observatories and researched the history of the field. Gradually, it became clear that her interest in astronomy was linked to lost memories from her past. After all, the night sky is a kind of shared memory; the light of celestial bodies takes hundreds, thousands or millions of (light) years to reach our eyes on earth. In Blinked Myself Awake, photographer Bieke Depoorter explores the power and fragility of memory, the human desire for objectivity and the elusive nature of ‘truth’. She does this by interweaving photographs of amateur and professional stargazers, diary-inspired texts and fragments of astronomical history, in which often-forgotten female astronomers play a role.
On over 300 pages of this high-quality art print, you will encounter the fascinating world of meditation. How does an inner journey begin to take form, manifesting as a silent communication?
In his photographic homage to the beauty and power of meditation, Axel Kirchhoff answers this question simply: by looking. This mindful pause is also the starting point for encountering the 66 protagonists who, in various forms, reveal their process of inner work.
Silent Portraits is a collection of quotes and portraits from a diverse range of protagonists. Alongside the silent yet vibrant black-and-white photographs, the protagonists provide personal descriptions of their approaches and experiences with inner work.
Insights into the effects of mental exercise, drawn from conversations with renowned author and neuroscientist Dr. Ulrich Ott from the Giessen Bender Institute of Neuroimaging (BION), round out the book.
Text in English and German.
Award-winning writer René Balcer is best known for his hit series Law & Order and Criminal Intent. Much less is known about his startling photographic work, shared only with his close friends and colleagues – until now!
This offers 500 photographs showcasing Balcer’s trademark crime scene aesthetic. The stunning images range from West Africa to the Utah desert, from a remote Arctic village to a seedy Brooklyn bar, with photos full of narrative mystery. There is a section on pre-Covid China, a China many say has since vanished. Also included is a unique homage to Balcer’s adoptive city of Los Angeles, and a ground-breaking photo-essay on Buenos Aires’ posh Recoleta neighborhood.
Marked by wry social commentary and breath-taking beauty and framed by insightful essays from noted Contemporary Art expert Robert Hobbs, renowned artist Xu Bing, and bestselling mystery writer Naomi Hirahara, these compelling never-before-seen photos are now presented in a glorious high-quality publication.
All prints have value: instead of fussing over making the perfect gelatin silver print, for example, Bruno V. Roels realized that all printed versions of an image have value, and he decided to not show that one perfect print, but all of them, in one composition. Some of his compositions consist of hundreds variations of one single negative, all printed in the dark room. Photography is a mimetic art, it imitates life. But Roels pushes it further: when printing variants of one image; he creates a mimetic feedback loop. He uses the iconic image of a palm tree to prove his point. All palm trees look alike, and as a symbol the plants are highly recognizable. Because palm trees are so widely recognizable, he’s free to deconstruct his own notions of photography, while trying to get away from the “tyranny of camera viewfinders and rectangular boxes of enlarging papers”. Introduction for the book written by Simon Baker.
Text in English and Dutch.
Refuge is the sixth book by Lara Gasparotto and spans four years of daily photographic practice, in the artist’s immediate environment but also much further away, as far as Guyana, via Quebec and Louisiana.
More than a practice, it is rather a way of looking at the world that drives Lara Gasparotto. A world of outdoors, of flora, fauna, rain, sun, lakes, trees, and her family.
Gasparotto spent a winter and a spring working on the selection for this book. In the end, Refuge delivers a subtle narration without chapters, without page numbers, and where the rhythm is changing.
On the cover is an illustration by her sister Lissa Gasparotto and inside a poetic text by Eva Mancuso. The 200 images are a little more than strictly photography: intuitive and nourished by painting, Gasparotto seeks with pastel, gouache, sometimes even oil, tenuous elements of her photos that she modifies, enhances, underlines and then rephotographs to finally, very subtly, move the image from the mechanical and the chemical to the fleeting expressiveness of the living.
Text in French.
“Architecture that dances. Buildings that deconstruct, reconnect, disected by frames, twisted into unreasonable shapes, reassembled into yet another grid, and then printed with more than a hint of Cubism, trying to take something that is three-dimensional and flatten it onto a two-dimensional plane. Indeed, as we can see, even in this early work Thomas Kellner succeeded at breaking apart space.” Harris Fogel
Thomas Kellner’s artworks are especially known for an intensive interaction of light and color. His works in black & white reflect the beginning of his career as an artist. Kellner’s black & white photography does not only refer to his beginning as an artist, but also to the root of photography. In his early black-and-white images, the observer can see how he focuses on the structure itself. The balance between the object and its visual form are at the center of his creations. Kellner developed his unique visual language of multiple perspectives and the deconstructive approach in a sequence mounted on a contact sheet of 35-mm roll of film.
Text in English and German.
Award-winning writer René Balcer is best known for his hit series Law & Order and Criminal Intent. Much less is known about his startling photographic work, shared only with his close friends and colleagues – until now!
This offers 500 photographs showcasing Balcer’s trademark crime scene aesthetic. The stunning images range from West Africa to the Utah desert, from a remote Arctic village to a seedy Brooklyn bar, with photos full of narrative mystery. There is a section on pre-Covid China, a China many say has since vanished. Also included is a unique homage to Balcer’s adoptive city of Los Angeles, and a ground-breaking photo-essay on Buenos Aires’ posh Recoleta neighborhood.
Marked by wry social commentary and breath-taking beauty and framed by insightful essays from noted Contemporary Art expert Robert Hobbs, renowned artist Xu Bing, and bestselling mystery writer Naomi Hirahara, these compelling never-before-seen photos are now presented in a glorious high-quality publication.
“Sue Flood is one of the elite wildlife photographers working today. Just turn over a few pages of this breath-taking book and you will see what I mean.” – Michael Palin
Penguins are beloved creatures. Witness the success of the 2005 Academy Award-winning documentary, March of the Penguins; or the now famous penguin selfie viewed on YouTube by hundreds of thousands; or the news-making discovery by satellite of a new colony of 1.5 million penguins on an island off the coast of Antarctica.
Emperor: The Perfect Penguin is a celebration of one of the world’s most charismatic creatures. In temperatures that can reach -50°C with 150km/h winds, the emperor penguins’ ability to survive and thrive is nothing short of astounding. Over the past nine years, award-winning photographer Sue Flood has journeyed to remote Antarctic penguin colonies to capture the birds in their native home.
Sue Flood’s respect for her subjects emanates from every page. From the poignant sight of an egg abandoned on the sea ice, to majestic shots of emperor penguins returning from the sea and heart-warming photos of chicks clustering together for warmth, every shot explores a new angle of life in this remote and ice-crusted world.
As well as following the difficult journey of the penguins across the sea ice, Emperor: The Perfect Penguin narrates the hardships that must be endured to catch the perfect photograph. Sue’s behind-the-scenes experiences prove that it is only with patience, endurance, and several thermal layers that one can capture magical moments on Earth’s most inhospitable continent.
Sharing this story was not something that Christopher Capozziello ever set out to do, but, over the years, one picture has led to another and a story has emerged. Capozziello says, “The time I have spent with my brother, looking through my camera, has forced me to ask questions about suffering and faith and why anyone is born with disability. Nick has cerebral palsy. Taking pictures has been a way for me to deal with the reality of having a twin brother who struggles through life in ways that I do not.” Capozziello’s photographs take us on a journey through his worries and inquiries, ending his debut book with a different sort of question: what comes next? Part two of the book is a journey he and his brother take across the United States. The work has been shown throughout the United States and has won 33 national and international awards. “The collection, titled The Distance Between Us, is both a brother’s touching tribute and Capozziello’s attempt to come to terms with the reality his brother lives and one from which he happened to be spared”. The Mail
The Rolling Stones: Icons brings together the greatest photographs ever taken of the greatest rock ’n’ roll band of all time. The result is the most important anthology of The Rolling Stones’ images ever compiled, featuring the iconic, the awe inspiring and the surprising.
Spanning six heady decades, and countless tours and album covers, this thrilling portfolio features imagery from some of the most eminent names in photography, alongside the photographers’ own memories and reflections. From Terry O’Neill’s images of the young, uncompromising new band taken in Tin Pan Alley, through Michael Brennan’s photos of their creative peak in the ’70s, and on to the stadium tours of the 21st-century, as shot by Greg Brennan, The Rolling Stones: Icons captures many of the milestone moments of the band’s remarkable career.
Includes photographs by: Terry O’Neill, Michael Ward, Gered Mankowitz, Linda McCartney, Michael Joseph, “Spanish Tony” Sanchez, Dominique Tarlé, Ed Caraeff, Barry Schultz, Al Satterwhite, Michael Brennan, Ken Regan, Brian Aris, Denis O’Regan, Douglas Kirkland, Greg Brennan and founding member, bassist and photographer, Bill Wyman.
Assembly of the Exalted presents some 50 pieces from the remarkable collection of Alice S. Kandell. The works, dating from the late 13th century to the early 20th, include great masterpieces and emblematic examples of Tibetan Buddhist art. They are all presented here as the constituents of a Tibetan Buddhist shrine. Shrines, both modest and grand, are the primary sites of Tibetan Buddhist practice, whether it be reciting scriptures, performing rituals, saying prayers, or engaging in meditation. The introductory essays thus focus on the Tibetan Buddhist shrine, describing its evolution over the history of Buddhism, its special role in Tibet, and how the pieces in the Kandell Collection came to be assembled and displayed in shrines at institutions across America. Illustrated with vivid photography, forty short essays, each centered on a single work or set of objects, describe the pieces in terms of their importance for the practice of Buddhism, highlighting the many essential functions of Tibetan Buddhist art within the space of a shrine.