Image-Text Staff Picks

Sophie Calle: Suite Vénitienne

Published by Siglio.

After following strangers on the streets in Paris for months, photographing them and notating their movements, Sophie Calle ran into a man at an opening whom she had followed earlier that day. "During the course of our conversation, he told me he was planning an imminent trip to Venice. I decided to follow him," she writes at the beginning of Suite Vénitienne, her first artist's book and the crucible of her inimitable fusion of investigatory methods, fictional constructs, the plundering of real life and the composition of self. Over the course of almost two weeks in Venice, Calle notates, in time-stamped entries, her surveillance of Henri B., as well as her own emotions as she seeks, finds and follows him through the labyrinthine streets of Venice. Her investigation is both methodical (calling every hotel, visiting the police station) and arbitrary (sometimes following a stranger—a flower delivery boy, for instance—hoping someone might lead her to him). This Siglio reissue is a completely new iteration of Suite Vénitienne (first published in 1988 and long out of print), designed in collaboration with Calle to be the definitive English-language edition. Printed on Japanese paper with a die-cut cover and gilded edges, this beautiful new Siglio edition allows readers to devour this crucial and compelling work.

Sophie Calle (born 1953) is an internationally renowned artist whose controversial works explore the tensions between the observed, the reported, the secret and the unsaid. She has mounted solo shows at major museums around the world and represented France at the Venice Biennale in 2007. Her most recent US exhibition was the acclaimed Rachel, Monique at the Episcopal Church of the Heavenly Rest in Manhattan in 2014.

PUBLISHER
Siglio

BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 5.5 x 8 in. / 96 pgs / 4 color / 56 bw.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 5/26/2015
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DISTRIBUTION
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Catalog: SPRING 2015 p. 45   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9781938221095 TRADE
List Price: $34.95 CDN $45.95 GBP £30.00

AVAILABILITY
In stock

Obstinacy of Things

Still Life in Photographic Concepts of the Present

Published by Spector Books/ Kunst Haus Wien.
Edited with text by Bettina Leidl, Maren Lübbke-Tidow. Preface by Bettina Leidl. Text by Harun Farocki, Martin Prinzhorn.

Showing how the still life has been renewed by recent developments in photography, Obstinacy of Things includes work by Moyra Davey, Tacita Dean, Harun Farocki, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Annette Kelm, Elad Lassry, Zoe Leonard, Laura Letinsky, Sharon Lockhart, Barbara Probst, Lucie Stahl, Andrzej Steinbach, Ingeborg Strobl, James Welling and Christopher Williams, among others.

PUBLISHER
Spector Books/ Kunst Haus Wien

BOOK FORMAT
Paperback, 7.75 x 9.5 in. / 248 pgs / 65 color / 39 bw.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 2/19/2019
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DISTRIBUTION
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Catalog: SPRING 2019 p. 205   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9783959052610 FLAT40
List Price: $35.00 CDN $49.95

AVAILABILITY
In stock

Nicholas Muellner: In Most Tides an Island

Published by SPBH Editions.

Nicholas Muellner’s most recent image-text book journeys through shifting tableaux of exile and solitude in the digital age. Seductive, disorienting, informative and allegorical, In Most Tides an Island is at once a glimpse of contemporary post-Soviet queer life, a meditation on solitude and desire, and an inquiry into the nature of photography and poetry in a world consumed by cruelty, longing, resignation and hope.

This work emerged from two very different impulses: to witness the lives of closeted gay men in provincial Russia, and to compose the gothic tale of a solitary woman on a remote tropical island. Along the way, these disparate pursuits – one predicated on documentation, the other on invention - unexpectedly converged. Shot along Baltic, Caribbean and Black Sea coastlines, distant landscapes met at the rocky point of Alone. From that vista, they ask: what do intimacy and solitude mean in a radically alienated but hyper-connected world?

In Most Tides an Island challenges photographic and literary conventions, collapsing portraiture and landscape, documentary and fiction, metaphor and description into the artist’s distinct form of hybrid narrative. This shape-shifting work is threaded together by the voice of the wandering narrator and the unexpected visual echoes between these far-flung landscapes. A mysterious stream of faceless but expressive online profile pictures further links the divergent stories. These anonymous figures serve as an emotional semaphore, signaling across genres and geographies and between language and image.

Nicholas Muellner is an artist who operates at the intersection of photography and writing. Through books, exhibitions and slide lectures, his projects investigate the limits of photography as a documentary pursuit and as an interface to socio-political and personal narratives. Often focused on a queer experience of the post-Soviet world, his work transforms descriptive accounts into literary dramas, autobiographical reflections, and philosophical inquiries. He received a BA in comparative literature from Yale University and an MFA in Photography from Tyler School of Art, Temple University. Muellner is Associate Professor of Photography and Co-Director of the Image Text MFA at Ithaca College and the ITI Press.

PUBLISHER
SPBH Editions

BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 6.5 x 9.5 in. / 344 pgs / 81 color / 71 bw.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 5/30/2018
Active

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
PUBLISHER BACKLIST

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9781999814427 SDNR40
List Price: $50.00 CDN $67.50

AVAILABILITY
Out of stock

The Fae Richards Photo Archive

Zoe Leonard & Cheryl Dunye

Published by Artspace Books.
Artwork by Zoe Leonard. Contributions by Cheryl Dunye.

This book is part of Zoe Leonard and Cheryl Dunye's film project "The Watermelon Woman" (1996) for the Whitney Biennial. The staged photos used as documentation for the film are presented here as an intimate photo album.

PUBLISHER
Artspace Books

BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 6.75 x 8.25 in. / 34 pgs / 73 bw.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 6/2/1997
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DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: SPRING 1998

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9780963109583 TRADE
List Price: $15.00 CDN $21.50 GBP £13.50

AVAILABILITY
In stock

Seth Lower: The Sun Shone Glaringly

Published by The Ice Plant.

Seth Lower’s second photo book, The Sun Shone Glaringly, explores an observation he made upon moving to Los Angeles in 2011: "It isn’t always easy to differentiate between what is spontaneous, or real and what’s mediated. Nothing is ever one or the other." Throughout the book, while repeatedly announcing the thoughts and actions of our generic "hero," Lower combines various elements--photographs of oddly familiar filming locations; portraits of aspiring actors he contacted through Craigslist; dialogue and screenplay notations lifted from Hollywood blockbusters; and his own fabricated narratives--to suggest a story at once sordid and hilarious. Like a neo-noir film script referencing works as diverse as Mulholland Drive and Crocodile Dundee IV, Lower’s book evokes all the tropes of the Los Angeles myth to address an essential question: how do popular representations of Los Angeles affect the everyday experience of the city, and how do people negotiate the slippage between their real lives and their potential selves?

PUBLISHER
The Ice Plant

BOOK FORMAT
Paperback, 7.5 x 9.5 in. / 80 pgs / 39 color.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 5/31/2014
Active

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: SPRING 2014 p. 102   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9780989785907 TRADE
List Price: $29.95 CDN $39.95 GBP £27.00

AVAILABILITY
In stock

Rick Myers: A Bullet for Buńuel

Fragments of a Failed Bullet

Published by Primary Information.

British-born artist Rick Myers' (born 1974) A Bullet for Buńuel has taken many forms—a video work, a multiple, a performative lecture—all of which are represented in this publication. Myers' writing, research, correspondence and photographs are also included in the book, a singular meditation on the poetics of failure.

PUBLISHER
Primary Information

BOOK FORMAT
Paperback, 6 x 9 in. / 112 pgs / 56 bw.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 5/23/2017
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DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: FALL 2017 p. 192   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9780991558544 FLAT40
List Price: $18.00 CDN $25.50

AVAILABILITY
In stock

It Is Almost That

A Collection of Image & Text Work by Women Artists & Writers

Published by Siglio.
Edited by Lisa Pearson.

A marvelously bold interdisciplinary anthology, It Is Almost That collects works by women artists and writers who have constructed hybrid environments that merge image and text. The works in this collection are supremely imaginative in both form and content: from the semi-autobiographical novel painted by a young artist who died in the Holocaust (Charlotte Salomon) to Alison Knowles' computer-generated chance operation for "imagining" houses and their inhabitants; from the pseudo-scientific examination of a conversation between a mother and a daughter (Eleanor Antin) to the dark, comic interrogation of violence against women (Sue Williams); from the transformations of newspaper headlines (Suzanne Treister) to the probing of animal consciousness (Cole Swensen & Shari De Graw); from the body maps drawn by South African women with AIDS (Bambanani Women's Group) to the alchemical transformation of the pregnant body into an evolving landscape and philosophical meditation (Susan Hiller). Other contributors to It Is Almost That include Fiona Banner, Louise Bourgeois, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Cozette de Charmoy, Ann Hamilton, Jane Hammond, Dorothy Iannone, Bhanu and Rohini Kapil, Helen Kim, Ketty La Rocca, Bernadette Mayer, Adrian Piper, Charlotte Salomon, Genevičve Seillé, Molly Springfield, Erica Van Horn & Laurie Clark, Carrie Mae Weems, Hannah Weiner and Unica Zürn.

PUBLISHER
Siglio

BOOK FORMAT
Clth, 8.25 x 10.25 in. / 296 pgs / illustrated throughout.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 5/31/2011
Active

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: SPRING 2011 p. 171   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9780979956263 TRADE
List Price: $45.00 CDN $60.00 GBP £40.00

AVAILABILITY
In stock

The Subversion of Images

Notes Illustrated with Nineteen Photographs by the Author

Published by Wakefield Press.
By Paul Nougé. Edited by Marcel Marien. Translated by Michael Kasper. Afterword by Xavier Canonne.

This classic surrealist photobook pioneered the imagery of the domestic uncanny

First edited and published by Marcel Marien in 1968 in a limited edition of 230 copies, half a year after Paul Nougé’s death, The Subversion of Images is a miniature classic in both the photobook and surrealist canons. It collects Nougé’s notes and photographs from 1929–30 to form a guidebook to the surrealist image. Nougé here outlines his conception of the object and the surrealist approach to it, while also offering an accompaniment to the visual work of his colleague, René Magritte, whose paintings he sometimes titled. How might a tangle of string elicit terror? How might the suppression of an object move one to sentimentality? What is the effect of a pair of gloves on a loaf of sliced bread?

Nougé’s accompanying photographs explore these notions, and feature a number of his Belgian surrealist colleagues. This translation is presented as a facsimile of the original edition, with an afterword by Xavier Canonne, director of the Musée de la Photographie.

A biochemist by trade, Paul Nougé (1895–1967) was a leading light of Belgian surrealism and its primary theorist, as well as a decisive influence on such Lettrists and Situationists as Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolman, who would take inspiration from his conception of plagiarism for what would come to be termed “détournement.” Nougé steered the Brussels surrealist group toward a more rational approach to visual and verbal language that discarded the Parisian surrealists’ proclivity for irrationality and occultism.

PUBLISHER
Wakefield Press

BOOK FORMAT
Paperback, 4.5 x 7 in. / 58 pgs / 19 bw.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 1/21/2020
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DISTRIBUTION
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Catalog: FALL 2019 p. 33   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9781939663474 TRADE
List Price: $14.95 CDN $19.95 GBP £12.99

AVAILABILITY
In stock

Bertrand Fleuret: Landmasses and Railways

Published by J&L Books.
Edited by Jason Fulford.

A photograph of an image of a woman with a triangular slice where her eyes should be, a two-page aerial shot of a forest, a train coming straight at us: Bertrand Fleuret's artist's book Landmasses and Railways juxtaposes such enigmatic and striking black-and-white images to create a pleasantly unsettling, difficult-to-decipher narrative. Edited by photographer Jason Fulford, whose own influential publications are helping to define a new generation of photobooks, this exquisitely designed 200-page volume is dreamlike, taking us on a journey through rural and urban landscapes, construction and decay, chaos and clarity.

Bertrand Fleuret, currently based in Berlin, was born in Versailles in 1969. His first book, The Risk of an Early Spring, was published by Artimo in 2004 and described thus by photo critic and publisher Darius Himes: "From the minute you open the book, you are the eyes and mind of Fleuret, a participant in a tightly edited stream-of-consciousness exercise."

PUBLISHER
J&L Books

BOOK FORMAT
Clth, 7 x 9.75 in. / 208 pgs / 150 duotone.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 2/9/2009
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DISTRIBUTION
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Catalog: SPRING 2009 p. 83   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9780979918834 TRADE
List Price: $33.00 CDN $45.00 GBP £29.00

AVAILABILITY
In stock

Ellie Ga: North Was Here

Published by Ugly Duckling Presse.

After a 2006 residency at the Explorers Club in New York, artist and writer Ellie Ga (born 1976) became the sole artist-in-residence aboard The Tara––a research vessel lodged in the ice of the Arctic Ocean, and the second boat in history built to drift indefinitely in pack ice, where it collected scientific data on Arctic ice conditions. From this extraordinary adventure arose Ga's acclaimed performance lecture The Fortunetellers, which she has delivered at the Kitchen, the Guggenheim Museum and the New Museum, among other venues.

North Was Here is the first publication based on Ga's polar residency. It includes three arctic booklets made during the continuous polar night as the boat was drifting, as well as a new piece that juxtaposes Polaroids and documentary footage stills that the artist used for a related video piece, At the Beginning North Was Here.

PUBLISHER
Ugly Duckling Presse

BOOK FORMAT
Paperback, 5.25 x 7.5 in. / 96 pgs / 48 color / 3 duotone / 32 bw.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 11/20/2018
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DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: FALL 2018 p. 154   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9781946433145 TRADE
List Price: $25.00 CDN $34.50 GBP £22.00

AVAILABILITY
In stock