In Toy Soldiers, Simon Brann Thorpe blurs the boundaries between document, landscape and concept-based photography to explore this conflict. He examines the impact and potential consequences of the stalemate. Through real soldiers - posed as toy soldiers - he reveals the current situation in Western Sahara, a nation in waiting trapped in an historic cycle of colonial conflict, displacement and endless non-resolution. The work is a unique collaboration between Thorpe, a military commander and the men under his command. Shot entirely on location in the isolated and hauntingly beautiful territory known as 'Liberated Western Sahara' it is influenced by the historic works of photographers such as Mathew Brady, Roger Fenton and Edward Curtis. Toy Soldiers provides a contemporary archive on the issue of non-resolution and the paradigm of post colonial cycles of violence within modern conflicts.

'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. Jan 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.

These photographs are not about the t-shirt per se. The messages are combinations of pictures and words that reveal much about the identity of the wearer. They tell who these people are and who they aren't, who they want to be and what they want us to know about them. They advertise their hopes, ideals, political views, and personal mantras.

Begun in 2009, "TEE" has taken Susan Barnett to cities and tourist spots throughout the United States and Europe to record the ever-changing messages.

Ren Hang, who took his life February 23, 2017, was an unlikely rebel. Slight of build, shy by nature, prone to fits of depression, the 29-year-old Beijing photographer was nonetheless at the forefront Chinese artists' battle for creative freedom. Like his champion Ai Weiwei, Ren was controversial in his homeland and wildly popular in the rest of the world. He said, "I don't really view my work as taboo, because I don't think so much in cultural context, or political context. I don't intentionally push boundaries, I just do what I do." Why? Because his models, friends, and in his last years, fans, are naked, often outdoors, high in the trees or on the terrifyingly vertiginous rooftops of Beijing, stacked like building blocks, heads wrapped in octopi, body cavities sprouting phone cords and flowers, whatever entered his mind at the moment. He denied his intentions were sexual, and there is a clean detachment about even his most extreme images: the urine, the insertions, the many, many erections. In a 2013 interview VICE magazine asked, "there are a lot of dicks ... do you just like dicks?" Ren responded, "It's not just dicks I'm interested in, I like to portray every organ in a fresh, vivid and emotional way." True though that may be, the penises Ren photographed were not just fresh and vivid, but unusually large, making one wonder just where he met his friends. In the same piece, Hang also stated, "Gender isn't important when I'm taking pictures, it only matters to me when I'm having sex," making him a pioneer of gender inclusiveness. Young fans still eagerly flock to his website and Facebook, Instagram, and Flickr accounts. His photographs, all produced on film, have been the subject of over 20 solo and 70 group shows in his brief six-year career, in cities as disparate as Tokyo, Athens, Paris, New York, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, Vienna, and yes, even Beijing. He self-published 16 monographs, in tiny print runs, that now sell for up to $ 600. TASCHEN's Ren Hang is his only international collection, covering his entire career, with well-loved favorites and many never-before-seen photos of men, women, Beijing, and those many, many erections. We take solace remembering Ren's joy when he first held the book, shared by his long-time partner Jiaqi, featured on the cover.

Sylvie Huet rediscovered her own childhood teddy at the age of 49 in a Paris fleamarket. Until then he had lived only as a memory and in family photographs. Her discovery began a trail of exploration, revealing childhood memories and family secrets. The bears that feature are aged between 44 and 103 years old - worn, stitched, and scarred, yet seemingly indestructible. Mostly they are anonymous, but several have celebrity status. Amongst those included are Nana, Jean Paul Gaultier's bear with the cone bra; Grayson Perry's 'personal god' Alan Measles; Tomi Ungerer's bear, who inspired his famous children's book Otto; and Jubilee, a stuffed chimpanzee and the childhood companion of Dame Jane Goodall, now considered the world's foremost expert on chimpanzees. Sylvie Huet's portraits give the bears a dignity that befits their status in the eyes of their owners. Included are archive photographs, stories from the past, accounts of meetings and literary extracts.

Fred Herzog is known for his unusual use of colour in the fifties and sixties, a time when art photography was almost exclusively associated with black and white imagery. The Canadian photographer worked almost exclusively with Kodachrome slide film for over 50 years, and only in the past decade has technology allowed him to make archival pigment prints that match the exceptional color and intensity of the Kodachrome slide. In this respect, his photographs can be seen as a pre-figuration of the New Color photographers of the seventies.This book will bring together over 230 images, many never before reproduced, and will feature essays by acclaimed authors David Campany and Hans-Michael Koetzle. Fred Herzog will be the most comprehensive publication on this important photographer to date.

Francesco Radino (Bagno a Ripoli, Florence, 1947) is one of the masters of contemporary Italian photography. Participating in the developments of research photography on the contemporary landscape, over the course of fifty years he developed an intimate way of exploring reality in its profound economic, historical, social and cultural transformations. The volume contains the most significant works of his rich production, accompanied by numerous critical interventions and writings by Radino himself. Contributions by: Roberta Valtorta, Giovanni Arpino, Giovanna Calvenzi, Paolo Cognetti, Eleonora Fiorani, Antonella Pelizzari, Urs Stahel, Fabrizio Trisoglio, Mauro Zanchi, Francesco Radino. Text in English and Italian.

The fascination we have as humans with our ability to do evil, witness the evidence of horror and stare fixedly at photographic, filmic or artefacts connected with death, is at the heart of the phenomenon known as 'Dark Tourism'. These images are about much more than tourism and the visiting of such sites, they challenge the nature of our behaviour, our history and our societies' relationship with evil and mortality. They are a testament to our past, to our inability to move beyond it and our curious relationship with tragedy and death." - from the introduction by J.J. Lennon Ambroise Tezenas has visited over a dozen major sites of dark tourism across the world - from Cambodia to Rwanda, Lebanon to Lithuania, Ukraine to the United States. These are sites developed for tourism and linked to death, assassination, incarceration, mass killing and tragedy. Yet dark tourism is not a new phenomenon and similar sites have attracted human interest for many years. From the gladiatorial combats of ancient Rome through to attendance at public executions in London of the 1600s, it seems that death and disaster have maintained a lasting appeal.

This striking book shows the world's most beautiful libraries through Candida Hoefer's mesmerizing photographs. No one photographs spaces quite like Candida Hoefer and no one has captured better the majesty, stillness, and eloquence of libraries. Traveling around the world, Hoefer shows the exquisite beauty to be found in order, repetition, and form--rows of books, lines of desks, soaring shelves, and even stacks of paper create patterns that are both hypnotic and soothing. Photographed with a large-format camera and a small aperture, these razor-sharp images of the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, the Escorial in Spain, Villa Medici in Rome, the Hamburg University library, the Bibliotheque Nationale de France in Paris, and the Museo Archeologico in Madrid, to name a few, communicate more than just the superb architecture. Glowing with subtle color and natural light, Hoefer's photographs, while devoid of people, shimmer with life and remind us again and again that libraries are more than just repositories for books. Umberto Eco's essay about his own attachment to libraries is the perfect introduction to an otherwise wordless, but sublimely reverent journey.

At the dawn of the 1950s, a promising and dedicated young painter named Helen Frankenthaler, fresh out of college, moved back home to New York City to make her name. By the decade's end, she had succeeded in establishing herself as an important American artist of the postwar period. In the years in between, she made some of the most daring paintings of her day and came into her own as a woman: traveling the world, falling in and out of love. Fierce Poise is an exhilarating ride through New York's 1950s art scene and a brilliant portrait of a young artist through the moments that shaped her.

As a small boy, John Comino-James stood in school cap and Sunday suit to have his snapshot taken under flags put up for Queen Elizabeth's Coronation. The resultant photograph resonates with an England long since disappeared, yet still fertile in the imagination. That sense of how that England has changed is the focus in John Comino-James' new book as he explores our everyday landscape of sign and symbol, from roadside verge to traffic-free shopping centre, to high-rise cityscapes. Art is in action ahead, and with a friendly corporate Hello, we are offered No Deposit Deals on Half Price Dreams. We are thanked for shopping, and offered free cash withdrawals. A Money Shop is at hand and woodlands are for sale - just visit the website. If we drop litter CCTV may catch us, and we are warned that if we leave something valuable on show in our car we can expect it to be stolen. Reminders of the valour and necessity, the sacrifices, the folly and the tragedy of war are never far away. Earthquakes may strike, stores may close but we can still buy artisan ice-cream. But if opportunity is the moment you have been looking for, where is salvation to be found if not in moments of direct relationship with others?

'Mother and Father', is a moving journal of the final years of a sixty-year marriage. For ten years, from 1997 to 2007 Paddy Summerfield photographed his parents, reflecting on the bond between them, which even the effects of Alzheimers could not break. They become symbols in a drama of balance and tension, which is both domestic and epic. As he says: "I recorded my mother's loss of the world, my father's loss of his wife and, eventually, my loss of them both." The images are primarily taken in their garden, though the central section shows holiday visits to the Welsh coast, where the raven, a Celtic symbol of death, frequently appears alongside their world. Finally, the once cultivated garden becomes a neglected wilderness, in the absence of the two people who spent long days there, who cared for it, and for each other. These thoughtful, often melancholy, images form a personal piece which is simultaneously universal.

Volumes have been written by and about Patrick Leigh Fermor, but his wife Joan is almost entirely absent from their pages. Now Simon Fenwick, the first archivist to see the Leigh Fermor papers, reveals a woman hitherto only fleetingly glimpsed. A talented photographer, Joan defied the social conventions of her times and, though she came from a wealthy and well-connected family, earned her own living. Through her lover, and later editor of the TLS, Alan Pryce-Jones, she met and mingled with the leading lights of 1930s bohemia - John Betjeman, Cyril Connolly, Evelyn Waugh, Maurice Bowra (who adored her) and Osbert Lancaster, among others. She featured regularly in the gossip columns, not only for her affairs and her fashionable clothes, but for her intrepid travels to Russia and America. In 1936 she met and subsequently married the journalist John Rayner, but her belief in open marriage was not shared by her husband and their relationship foundered. Then, in 1944 in Cairo, where she was a cypher clerk, she met Paddy Leigh Fermor, lionized for his daring kidnap of the Nazi General Kreipe in Crete. They would remain together until her death in 2003. In this riveting biography, written with full access to Joan's personal archive, Simon Fenwick reveals the extraordinary life of a woman who, until now, has been defined by the man she married and their famous friends. Here, at last, Joan is placed at the centre of her own story. It is also a riveting portrait of a marriage and a milieu, revealing the sexual and intellectual mores of that wartime generation who lived life at full tilt, no matter what the consequences.

Since the early 1970s, when he hit the streets of Los Angeles with a 35mm camera and the basic technical knowledge he had acquired in darkroom classes at East Los Angeles College, photographer Anthony Hernandez has consistently challenged himself by adopting new formats and subject matter. Moving from black-and-white to colour, from 35mm to large-format cameras and from the human figure to landscapes to abstracted detail, Hernandez has produced a varied body of work united by its arresting formal beauty and subtle engagement with social issues. At first largely unaware of the formal traditions of the medium, Hernandez developed a style of street photography uniquely attuned to the desolate beauty and sprawling expanses of L.A. Published to accompany the photographer's first retrospective, Anthony Hernandez offers a comprehensive introduction to Hernandez's career of more than forty years, including many photographs that have never before been exhibited or published. The catalogue fully represents the range and breadth of Hernandez's work, with an extensive plate section sequenced in collaboration with the photographer.