The Many Lives of Erik Kessels presents the highly anticipated first illustrated survey of this pioneering and influential curator, editor, and artist whose varied experiments with photography and photographic archives have allowed us to reconsider the medium's vernacular and narrative possibilities in today's inundated image landscape. "People consume photographs," says Kessels, "they don't look at them anymore." This volume is a primer on how to look-and how to better understand the hybrid practice of this artist who defies categorization. Including more than twenty of the artist's series and features essays by Simon Baker, Hans Aarsman, and curator Francesco Zanot, The Many Lives of Erik Kessels is published in conjunction with a major mid- career retrospective at Camera: Italian Centre for Photography in Turin, Italy.

Israel's history can be understood through its vast archaeological heritage. Its past exists not only in the written word but also in its land, in the architecture and ruins, in the stones themselves. Each civilization overwrites another, layer upon layer - a sophisticated palimpsest. A single frame can expose the sediment of thousands of years. The recycling of spaces, from one empire to the next, shows how each sought to conquer and rule the land, all with a similar outcome: eventual failure. Kremer shows the vestiges of this complex multi-cultural saga, testimonies unearthed from the past that show a different perspective. It is landscape as a place of amnesia and erasure, for Israel is a strategic site where the past has been buried and history veiled by natural beauty. Kremer's Israel exists beyond the media headlines and tourist hotspots: it is landscape as cultural force, an instrument in the construction of national and social identity. For Kremer, it is a provocation to critical debate about a country where different perspectives existed, and continue to exist, and where new possibilities can be reflected upon.

How does it feel to leave the safety of home and not be able to return? How do you survive at subsistence level? What is life like for a child who is forced to flee from his home? What is it like to live in constant fear for your life and of losing those close to you? For almost seven years, photographer Espen Rasmussen has travelled the world to document refugees and displaced people. The book TRANSIT tells the stories of some of the 43.2 million people on the run in the world today. From the makeshift camps in DR Congo to the slums of Colombia, the book presents stories of everyday life and the challenges displaced people and refugees meet every day, no matter in which country or which continent they find themselves.

Liz Hingley, the daughter of two Anglican priests, grew up in Birmingham, one of the UK's most culturally diverse cities, where over 90 different nationalities now live. It is hardly surprising therefore that she developed an interest in multi-faith communities and began to explore the complex issues involved, ranging from immigration, through to secularism and religious revival. Between 2007-2009, Hingley focused on the three-mile stretch of Soho Road in Birmingham, one of the most varied and fascinating corners of the country. It is a junction of diverse faith, where Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and Jain, Rastafarian, Christian and Sikh meet. Faith is exhibited in all the shops, shown off as symbols on hats and t-shirts, branded in tattoos,A" says Hingley. It is religion rather than race that now defines the local communities.A" With more than twenty different religions represented in a single road various buildings are used for religious purposes from churches in a school gym hall, to makeshift baptism tents in the local park. And with so many communities co-existing in such close proximity, the boundaries between faiths can, as Hingley has observed, become exaggerated. It was as if these religions were challenging each other,A" Hingley said challenging each other to show themselves off the most.A" Under Gods is a powerful celebration of the rich diversity of these religions and of the reality and intensity of their different lifestyles.

No one uses the camera like the photographer Niko Luoma. He is not interested in capturing the world in front of his lens. He uses light to create his own visual spheres. Using up to a thousand multiple exposures he applies individual elements of color and form to the negative, layer by layer. Meticulous calculations and geometrical skills are the necessary foundation for this. The results are abstract photographs of impressive, colorful intensity and luminosity. This book of photos is based on the series Adaptions, which reproduces famous works by other artists. Luoma presents a fascinating visual game in which the independent charisma of the photographs acts in concert with its reverence toward Bacon, Hockney, Van Gogh, or Picasso. With tongue in cheek, Luoma thus realizes the avant-garde’s desire to liberate photography from reproducing reality, allowing it to become an art.

This richly illustrated book is the first monograph to explore the prolific career of the celebrated photographer Anthony Barboza. Anthony Barboza (b. 1944) is a celebrated artist and writer who has made thousands of photographs in the studio and on the street since 1963. A member of the Kamoinge collective of photographers in New York, Barboza is largely self-taught and has an inimitable, highly intuitive vision that he refers to as "eye dreaming," or "a state of mind that's almost like meditation." Throughout the years he has made countless commercial images, including celebrity portraits, advertisements, and album covers. His personal photographic projects illuminate his deep investment in the art and concerns of Black communities, not only in the United States but also around the globe. This lavishly illustrated volume follows Barboza's prolific career from his youth in New Bedford, Massachusetts, to his formative years in New York in the 1960s, to the present day. An introduction by renowned author and critic Hilton Als underscores Barboza's importance and impact. An essay by curator Aaron Bryant contextualizes Barboza's life and career as they map against major civil rights events in the United States. In an intimate interview between the artist and curator Mazie M. Harris, Barboza offers astute, humorous, and intimate musings on his long career, foundational influences, and artistic legacy. This monograph, the first on the artist, will appeal to aficionados of photography and Black art and culture.

This book is dedicated to the photographer Diego Gonzalez Ragel (1893-1951) whose work is only now being "discovered" and recognised for its photo-journalistic and portraiture qualities. In his time, Ragel turned his lens on the world of sport, politics, war, and commerce. He was Editor of a military magazine during the years of the Spain's Civil War (1936-1939) and a photographer for the Bank of Spain from 1941 until his death in 1951. Ragel's crisp and questioning black-and-white photographs are now highly collectible and this new addition to la Fabrica's acclaimed PhotoBolsillo series is a tribute to his work.

Harald (75) and Mathias (80) had always lived on the small farm in which they were born. Neither had married. Mathias once worked in Oslo for two months, but hadn't like it, whilst Harald spent one night, 'the worst of his life,' he would say, in a hotel in Lillehammer, some three hours away. They'd worked for an electricity company, as loggers and also as carpenters, but now much of their time was taken up just managing firewood for their home. As Harald said, they chopped wood, carried wood and burned wood. At least twice a day, they also fed wild birds in the twenty bird boxes that they monitored. Their days followed a predictable and comforting routine. In their free time they each listened to a radio or read the local paper. In the 1960s they had rented a TV for a one month trial but returned it after deciding that it took up too much time. Little changed from year to year, though Mathias once said that changes were happening the whole time and it would probably end up with them getting an inside toilet with running water. Harald died from an asthma attack while shovelling snow in conditions of -20C. Mathias continued to live alone in the house until he moved into an old people's home. He died in 2007.

Amelia is 14 years old. In many ways, she is your average American teenager: since she was three years old, she has been her mother's muse, and the subject of her photographs. However, not every mom is a world-class photographer with a predilection for photographing animals. And it's not every teenager who has portraits of herself with elephants, llamas, ponies, tigers, kangaroos, chimpanzees and endless dogs, cats, and other animals--portraits that hang in the collections of major art museums around the world. "Amelia and the Animals" is Robin Schwartz's second monograph featuring this collaborative series dedicated to documenting her and Amelia's adventures among the animals. As Schwartz puts it, "Photography is a means for Amelia to meet animals. Until recently, she took these opportunities for granted. She didn't realize how unusual her encounters were until everyone started to tell her how lucky she was to meet so many animals." Nonetheless, these images are more than documents of Amelia and her rapport with animals; they offer a meditation on the nature of interspecies communication and serve as evidence of a shared mother-daughter journey into invented worlds.
Robin Schwartz (born 1957) earned an MFA in photography from Pratt Institute, and her photographs are held in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art, in New York; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Brooklyn Museum; Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia; Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris; and Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany. She is an assistant professor of photography at William Paterson University and lives in New Jersey with her husband, Robert Forman, daughter, Amelia, and five companion animals.

Millennium School is the first book by Krzysztof Zielinski one of the most interesting photographers of the young generation of Polish photographers. The photographs focus on the primary school which he attended as a child in the small Polish town of Wabrzezno. The school itself, Primary School no 3, was built in 1962 as a part of a major government development masterplan - - 'A thousand schools for the thousand years of the Polish state'. This is why these schools were called 'millennium memorial schools'. Essentially a propaganda plan, the new schools were presented as a gift from the Communist party to the nation, even though the post-war demographic boom meant that they were a necessity. Built around standard layouts, usually two or three storeys and constructed from prefabricated concrete, they were designed to be adaptable for military purposes with many having underground shelters and capable of being converted into temporary hospitals. Compared with the standards of the 60s, the schools were modern and well-equipped, and being a student at one was regarded as a sort of distinction. Today, the splendour of millennium schools is long forgotten. Physically, little has changed over the past twenty years, the furniture and equipment are the same, though as if to hide the passage of time and their modest and now outdated facilities, the classrooms have been painted in vivid colours.

David Bailey flew to Afghanistan earlier this year to take photographs for auction to raise money for `Help for Heroes', a charity that aims to help wounded servicemen and women returning from Afghanistan. The result is his latest book of photographs, a fitting celebration of Britain's fighting heroes, showing life inside both inside Camp Bastion and also outside the perimeter, where real danger is ever-present. Dylan Jones, editor of GQ, who accompanied Bailey on the trip, provides a well informed and engaging foreword on life in the camp. All sales of this book will benefit `Help for Heroes'.

'Authentic and fresh - the streets remain the preserve of those who live there - and when photographing the people he is among them, not sneaking a snap from across the street" - Photography Magazine reviewing 'A Few Streets', John Comino-James's first book about Havana. In his second book of photographs made in Havana, John Comino-James has again set out to explore a part of the city not normally visited by tourists. The geographical scope of the photographs is restricted to a single road, the Calzada del Diez de Octubre. The route itself predates the foundation of the Parish of Jesus del Monte in the 17th century and was formerly known as the Calzada de Jesus del Monte. In 1918 the road was renamed in commemoration of one of the most important events in Cuban history - the declaration of the first full-scale war of independence against Spanish colonial rule on 10th October 1868 by Carlos Manuel de Cespedes. Although its once important function as the principal route to the south has been superseded with the construction of new highways, the Calzada still remains a busy urban thoroughfare. Through engaged portraits and candid observation and with an eye for both architectural detail and the imposing facades that stand as testimony to the changing architectural styles of well over a century, John Comino-James creates an intimate and sympathetic record of the Calzada del Diez de Octubre which, through its long history, occupies an important place in the imagination and memory of Habaneros today.

The nature of any society and its future can be read in its entrails - in what is left behind, what is discarded. Each creates, uses and casts aside its wastelands in very different ways and it seems that a proportion of every city is always wasteland. These neglected or abandoned places are fragile and ephemeral, a transient aspect of a changing, living city, yet development appears unable to clear them away for good, only to move them on to a different site. This book explores some of these wastelands that collectively form a sustained and permanent feature of the modern city.

In 2008 Jason Bell undertook a photo assignment for American Vogue in 'Tea & Sympathy', an English tea room in the heart of Manhattan. In conversation with the owner, Nicky Perry, he was astonished to discover that over 120,000 British men and women lived in New York City. As an Englishman, himself living in New York, Jason was inspired by this and decided to investigate further. His latest book An Englishman in New York is the result. The book documents a wide cross-section of English people living in the City. It features cops, taxi drivers, construction workers, divers, helicopter pilots, chefs, burlesque dancers, UN ambassadors and even dog walkers. Jason was also struck by the significant influence that many Brits exercise on New York's cultural agenda, which led to him to include amongst his subjects: writer, ZoA" Heller; director, Stephen Daldry; artists, Cecily Brown and Bill Jacklin; Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Thomas P Campbell; historian, Simon Schama; actor, Kate Winslet; and the musician, Sting. The book offers an extraordinary insight into the British sub-culture which forms an intrinsic part of everyday life in New York City. As Bell says, "I went for a walk in Central Park with Sting, for a cup of tea on Kate Winslet's roof terrace, sat on ZoA" Heller's stoop and watched Stephen Daldry cycle down 8th Avenue. I was given a private tour of both the Metropolitan Museum and Barneys' shop windows. And amidst all the questions about why people had come here and what they had left behind, I learnt a little bit more about what it means to be English, what it means to be a New Yorker, and where the two intersect."

When the Peoples' Republic set up its Special Economic Zones in the 1980s communist China entered into global trade and international capital. The goal was financial but new money also brought new values and new ways of life. Polly Braden's photography is an intimate response to the material and psychological effects of the changes experienced by the country's new urban class. Shot over three years in Shanghai, Xiamen, Shenzhen and Kunming, "China Between" is a revelatory portrait. No longer will images of epic scenes dominate our view of this country. Braden shows how a casual glance, a moment of doubt or a quick trip to the shopping mall can tell us as much about modern China as any image of a dam, a protest or a teeming workforce.

For more than thirty-five years, James Welling has explored the material and conceptual possibilities of photography. "Diary/Landscape"--the first mature body of work by this important contemporary artist--set the framework for his subsequent investigations of abstraction and his fascination with nineteenth- and twentieth-century New England.
In July 1977, Welling began photographing a two-volume travel diary kept by his great-grandmother Elizabeth C. Dixon, as well as landscapes in southern Connecticut. In one closely cropped image, lines of tight cursive share the page with a single ivy leaf preserved in the diary. In another snowy image, a stand of leafless trees occludes the gleaming Long Island sound. In subject and form, Welling emulated the great American modernists Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, and Walker Evans--a bold move for an artist associated with radical postmodernism. At the same time, Welling's close-ups of handwriting push to the fore the postmodernist themes of copying and reproduction.
A beautiful and moving meditation on family, history, memory, and place, "Diary/Landscape" reintroduced history and private emotion as subjects in high art, while also helping to usher in the centrality of photography and theoretical questions about originality that mark the epochal Pictures Generation. The book is published to accompany the first-ever complete exhibition of this series of pivotal photographs, now owned by the Art Institute of Chicago.

The extraordinary fecundity of the photographic medium between the first and second world wars can be persuasively attributed to the dynamic circulation of people, of ideas, of images, and of objects that was a hallmark of that era in Europe and the United States. Voluntary and involuntary migration, a profusion of publications distributed and read on both sides of the Atlantic, and landmark exhibitions that brought artistic achievements into dialogue with one another all contributed to a period of innovation that was a creative peak both in the history of photography and in the field of arts and letters. Few, if any, collections of photography capture the imaginative spirit of this moment as convincingly as the Thomas Walther Collection at The Museum of Modern Art. This volume represents an important chapter in the rich and complex lives of these works, providing ample evidence of the brilliance of the photographers practicing on both sides of the Atlantic in the interwar period.

Almost all his images were produced at night, using the aprons' floodlights, moonlight or long exposures of between ten minutes to two hours. The airports on the Azores are unique. In order that they would not be spotted from the air during wartime they are amongst the very few black-tarred runways in the world, and it is the relationship between the dark tarmac and the fluorescent painted signs and runway markings that lie at the heart of some of Martins' most arresting images. This unusual combination allowed him to produce incredibly abstract images, with a very long depth of field and often with the use of minimal lighting. In some, sky and ground merge in darkness with only the lights and airport hieroglyphics to orient us. Yet even these are hard to decode, for whilst this is a landscape of signs that can be read by the knowledgeable - pilots and air traffic controllers, for instance - it remains perplexing to the uninitiated. This juxtaposition of sign and shape are at the heart of these remarkable images.