(Phaidon, Hardback, February 2006, $49.95) by Richard Woodward, a career retrospective featuring the work of the renowned photographer.  The illustrated book features 105 photographs of key works from the past thirty years, presenting highlights from each of his well-known series including: camera obscura (long exposure photographs in which the outside world is projected upside down along the walls of the room in which the photograph is taken), the large body of work on household objects (distorted as if seen through the eyes of his son), the book of books series, early photographs of his family taken in college, 'money,' the Alice and Wonderland illustrations, and more.

(Phaidon, March 2006, $24.95), This book, with an introductory essay by renowned critic and curator Francesco Bonami, is a beautiful and elegant collection of 56 photographs selected from thirty years of work. Arranged in chronological order, the landscapes and cityscapes wind through the factories of Italy to the seaside of France, Swiss street corners to Belgian ports, the old and new Berlins of Germany to the scarred cities of Lebanon.

(Phaidon, Hardcover, March 2006, $24.95) Recognized internationally for her intimate and compelling images, the American photographer Nan Goldin (b.1953) has lived and worked in Boston, New York, Berlin, Tokyo, Bangkok and in Paris, her current home.  Since the early 1970s Goldin has taken numerous photographs of her friends and 'family', which form an important body of work.  This new title, by Guido Costa, is an accessible monograph that provides the perfect introduction to Goldin's work.  Through its sequence of iconic and lesser-known images, the book illustrates the development of the intimate and raw style for which Goldin has become internationally renowned.

(Phaidon, March 2006, $24.95) by Margaret Hooks, is an accessible and beautiful collection of black and white photographs that showcase the development of Modotti's ideas and work.  Many of her most powerful images, such as Mexican sombrero with hammer and sickle, are modern in aesthetic, but political in content.  She traveled throughout Mexico recording murals, cultural and religious icons, women in Tehuantepec, and workers at their daily tasks.  Modotti was a revolutionary in all matters, from her political activism to her modern and high profile personal life, and her elegant and forthright photography. Despite a brief career in photography (only seven years), she achieved a standard that others took a lifetime to reach.

(Phaidon, Hardcover, $59.95, March/April 2006), features work he has created over the last four years, following his critically acclaimed book Outland (2001).  Roger Ballen built his world-wide photographic reputation portraying people on the fringes of South African society, creating startling images in the 1980s and '90s of isolated, rural white communities.  The result started as documentary photography, but gradually evolved into strange, theatrical scenes.  The characters in the photographs acted out dark and discomforting tableaux, providing images which are exciting and disturbing in equal measure, with flashes of dark humor.

(March 2006, Paperback, $49.95).  
A life-long preoccupation with the people and landscape of his native Italy gives Giacomelli his subject matter; rural townscapes, street-scenes, still-lifes and portraits of everyday Italian life.  Looking through and reading this incredible collection is like taking a guided and intimate tour of a beloved country.  This title is a gorgeous display of the Giacomelli's mastery of form and effect that make his photographs imaginative and cherished works of art.  Giacomelli was intimately involved in the preparation of this book, which was the last major project he undertook and represents the best of his long career as a photographer and artist.  

Essays by William A. Ewing, Nathalie Herschdorfer, Jean-Christophe Blaser
Regular Price $35.00 Available April 2006
What are young photographers up to at the outset of the twenty-first century? How do they see the world? How much do they respect, build on, or reject tradition? Are they busy in the darkroom or the computer lab—or both? reGeneration sets out to discover answers to these intriguing questions, previewing the work of fifty photographers who may well emerge as some of the finest of their generation. This remarkable book, the broadest and most enterprising survey of its kind, showcases the creativity, ingenuity, and inspiration of these up-and-coming photographic artists in over two hundred superb images. Curators at the world-renowned Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne selected the photographers from hundreds of candidates submitted by more than sixty of the world’s top photography schools. The panel’s choice was made with one key question in mind: are these images likely to be known in twenty years’ time? The results show that, as the new century builds momentum, the art of photography is alive and well, and that photographers of extraordinary talent are already making their mark. U.S. publication will coincide with an exhibition of the work that will open at Aperture Gallery in April 2006.

Photographs by Teun Hocks, Essay by Janet Koplos
Regular Price $40.00 Available April 2006
Performer, photographer, and painter, Teun Hocks plays the role of “an innocent Everyman in an always strange and often funny world,” as Janet Koplos recently noted. In scenes that range from burlesque to tragicomic, his lonely Buster Keaton–like persona perseveres through odd and unforgiving environments, struggling to find stable ground in an unstable, often absurd universe. Life’s complications and challenges take the form of impossible Rube Goldbergian contraptions fraught with psychological implications. Each engaging image captures one moment of an implied narrative, triggering inevitable questions about how the protagonist ever got himself into such a fix and what in the world will happen next. Teun Hocks starts by sketching various one-man stories, then poses himself in a carefully plotted setup against his own painted backdrop. After photographing the scene, he paints in oil on top of the resulting oversize gelatin silver print. The wit, elaborate technique, and rich colors of his images combine to form an irrepressibly original oeuvre. In addition to his painted photographs, the book includes drawings, Polaroids, and studio shots, which illuminate his creative process. Though Teun Hocks is widely known and shown around the world, this will be the first English-language volume devoted to the artist.

“Hocks is the master of the short story compressed into a single image.” —Janet Koplos

Teun Hocks lives in Breukelen, the Netherlands, and teaches at the Design Academy in Eindhoven. Trained as a painter and performance artist, he also makes video and Super 8 films in addition to his photographs and drawings. His work, which has been exhibited in numerous international solo and group exhibitions, is represented by P.P.O.W, New York; Torch Gallery, Amsterdam; and Galerie Patricia Dorfmann, Paris.

Janet Koplos, a senior editor at Art in America magazine in New York, is the author of Contemporary Japanese Sculpture and Gyöngy Laky, as well as numerous articles and other writings in the U.S., Europe, and Japan. She has written extensively on contemporary Dutch art, including “The Salve of Humor” in The Low Countries: A Yearbook (1999–2000), in which Teun Hocks’s work figures prominently.

Edited by Sophie Howarth
Essays by Geoffrey Batchen, Mary Warner Marien, Roger Hargreaves, David Campany, Nigel Warburton, Liz Jobey, Val Williams, Darsie Alexander, Dominic Willsdon, Sophie Howarth, Sheena Wagstaff
Regular Price $19.95 Available February 2006
Spanning 170 years, from William Henry Fox Talbot’s first negative to the latest constructed tableau by Jeff Wall, Singular Images is a collection of thought-provoking essays on individual photographs. Each essay focuses on the uniqueness of one particular image—a uniqueness illuminated in highly personal ways by each of the essayists, whether in terms of the artist’s intention, the writer’s response, the work’s technical complexities, its historical context, or a purely formal analysis. All capture a sense of how challenging it is to create a perfect single image. Even though art photography has been well surveyed in recent years, individual works have rarely been written about at length. This seems to be partly because many of the artists using photography since the late 1960s have resisted the appeal of the single image, preferring to explore the serial nature of the medium. And partly this seems due to lingering doubt that a single photograph can command the kind of sustained attention often given to individual paintings or sculptures. Singular Images is a lively inquiry into the possibility and the value of analyzing individual photographs. The book is persuasive in encouraging the reader to engage at length and in depth with one remarkable image at a time. With its broad scope and diverse range of issues, it can also be read as an informal—and thoroughly entertaining—introduction to art photography.

Edited by Ivan Vartanian, Akihiro Hatanaka and Yutaka Kanbayashi
Regular Price $29.95 Available March 2006
Japanese photographers have created a tradition strikingly different from that of their Western counterparts. Their work is based on ideas, rules, and aesthetics that are specific to Japanese culture but often little known in the West. Many photographers throughout the history of the medium in Japan—including master postwar photographers such as Daido Moriyama, Shomei Tomatsu, and Nobuyoshi Araki—have produced substantial bodies of written work that form an essential counterpart to their visual art. Setting Sun is an anthology of key texts written from the 1950s to the present by Moriyama, Tomatsu, and Araki, as well as by other leading Japanese photographers, including Masahisa Fukase, Takashi Homma, Eikoh Hosoe, Takuma Nakahira, and Hiroshi Sugimoto.

The only anthology of its kind to appear in English, Setting Sun makes these texts available in translation to Western readers for the first time and provides a crucial context for photographers who have become increasingly well known and admired in the West. Each chapter in the anthology is devoted to a central idea or theme that is particular to Japanese photography, such as watashi shosetsu (or the “I novel”), the bonds between man and woman, the role of nostalgia, and the shadows of a war lost and of a culture jettisoning its past. These writings vary in form from diary entry to scholarly treatise, but all reflect a clear connection between word and image. This connection is so essential that no comprehensive consideration of Japanese photography can be complete without familiarity with these writings.

Setting Sun is edited by Ivan Vartanian, Akihiro Hatanaka, and Yutaka Kanbayashi. Mr. Vartanian is an editor and author based in Tokyo since 1997. He has written and edited several books on drawing, design, and photography. Mr. Hatanaka has worked as an editor on many major books of contemporary photography and photography history, including the complete writings of Araki (in twenty volumes). Mr. Kanbayashi has worked with many luminaries of the Japanese photo world as both an editor (most notably with Moriyama on Memories of a Dog and Tomatsu’s 1951–60) and as an independent publisher.