Please Note: Stock levels for these titles are extremely low. In most cases only one or two copies remain.
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By Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse
Steidl
"Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse worked at Ponte City, the iconic Johannesburg apartment building which is Africa's tallest residential skyscraper, for more than six years. They photographed the residents and documented the building-every door, the view from every window, the image on every television screen. This remarkable body of images is presented here in counterpoint with an extensive archive of found material and historical documents. The visual story is integrated with a sustained sequence of essays and documentary texts. In the essays, some of South Africa's leading scholars and writers explore Ponte City's unique place in Johannesburg and in the imagination of its citizens. What emerges is a complex portrait of a place shaped by contending projections, a single, unavoidable building seen as refuge and monstrosity, dreamland and dystopia, a lightning rod for a society's hopes and fears, and always a beacon to navigate by. This long-term project obtained the Discovery Award at Les Rencontres d'Arles in 2011."—the publisher
Selected as a Best Book of 2014 by:
Laia Abril
Sarah Bradley
Eric Miles
Manik Katyal
Mark Power
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By Tim Smyth
Bemojake
"Defective Carrots is a typology of carrots that have been deemed unfit for consumers' eyes. Mechanically scanned, thousands of 'optically deficient' carrots are singled out each day and promptly removed from the conveyor belt. Some are grotesquely deformed and understandably rejected on behalf of the consumer. Others have morphed in to humorous shapes referential of phallic abnormalities, human body parts and various imagined creatures. However, many other defective carrots have only the slightest irregularity, encouraging one to question the extent to which the retailer and the consumer is willing to privilege perceptions of 'the norm' over basic nourishment values. "—the publisher
Selected as a Best Book of 2014 by John Gossage
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Camera Era
By Barbara Levine and Martin Venezky
Project B
"This pocket sized, limited edition book, by collector Barbara Levine and graphic designer, Martin Venezky is a meditation on the camera and its complicated hold on our lives. Found and staged photos, ephemera, and all sorts of unexpected relationships are brought together and set in motion by design. The result is an expressive mysterious album and a document of our complex relationship to both the camera and the photographic images it leaves behind."—the publisher
Selected as a Best Book of 2014 by Andy Adams
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By Barbara Levine and Martin Venezky
Project B
"This pocket sized, limited edition book, by collector Barbara Levine and graphic designer, Martin Venezky is a meditation on the camera and its complicated hold on our lives. Found and staged photos, ephemera, and all sorts of unexpected relationships are brought together and set in motion by design. The result is an expressive mysterious album and a document of our complex relationship to both the camera and the photographic images it leaves behind."—the publisher
Selected as a Best Book of 2014 by Andy Adams
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By Andy Sewell
Self-published
"Something like a Nest explores how our idea of the countryside intersects with the stuff of contemporary culture. Creating, I hope, something that pulls with and against the pastoral symbolism we attach to this landscape." —the publisher
Selected as a Best Book of 2014 by Eric Miles
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By Ken Schles
Steidl
"Dodo is the catalogue of an exhibition of the same name by artists Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin. The exhibition originated with the discovery of unreleased material from the motion picture Catch-22 (1970) in the storerooms of Paramount Picture.
Twenty-five years after the printing of his seminal 1988 book, Invisible City, Ken Schles revisits his archive and fashions a narrative of lost youth: a delirious, peripatetic walk in the evening air of an irretrievable Downtown New York as he saw and experienced it. Night Walk is a substantive and intimate chronicle of New York's last pre-Internet bohemian outpost, a stream of consciousness portrayal that peels back layers of petulance and squalor to find the frisson and striving of a life lived amongst the rubble. Here, Schles embodies the flâneur as Sontag defines it, as a "connoisseur of empathy," "cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes." We see in Night Walk a new and revelatory Ulysses for the 21st century: a searching tale of wonder and desire, life and love in the dying hulk of a ruined American city." —the publisher
Selected as a Best Book of 2014 by Markus Schaden
