8 minute read
PHOTOGRAPHY
Rising Among Ruins, Dancing Amid Bullets
By Maryam Ashrafi, with texts by Allan Kaval, Mylène Sauloy, Carol Mann and Kamran Matin Photographs taken in Iraqi and Syrian Kurdistan explore war for civilians, fighters, and the women in their ranks.
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Maryam Ashrafi is a social documentary photographer who believes in long term projects, choosing to stay behind the front lines and observe the daily lives of combatants. Above all, she is involved in documenting the everyday life on the Kurdish front. Her work puts a face on a widely commented war which remains perceived mainly by the West in terms of the number of refugees. Maryam documents the war in her own way, stressing its complexities and the actual building of a new social model based on equality where women occupy the same roles as men, which is remarkable in this area of the world. This is why, over the years, she has returned to the same places, from Kobane to Tabqa, to show the unique power of the resilience of the population and the will to live and change. The book is built on the chronology of the events as documented by Maryam Ashrafi, to understand the evolution of the conflict and its consequences on the populations and their living environment. It is a body of images which highlights very important topics as immediate consequences of war, from the sheer destruction to the refugee camps, as they evoke the foundations of the culture and the identity of the Kurdish people – from the ceremonies in honour of martyrs, dances around fires, to New Year celebrations. Finally, Maryam Ashrafi’s work is also about empathy and about invisible wounds; it is obvious that one could not witness a conflict without being caught up in the daily suffering, especially children and women. Maryam finds emotions and feelings, in simple gestures, smiles and dances, these moments of intimacy. The presence of the photographer is forgotten, there remains only the reality of their fight and the resilience of a people. In these moments, she captures expressions that speak so much more than long speeches.
HEMERIA Hardback • 9782490952168 • October 2021 • £65.00 304 pages
By Isabelle Boccon-Gibod and Daniel Mendelsohn
Reinvents the family portrait and provokes us to reflect on family as the fundamental cell on which every society is based. From 1839 when it was invented, photography has served to create portraits of individuals, and soon thereafter portraits of families. What can photography show us to day of the visible and invisible aspects of family sociology? By creating this corpus of fixed black and white images, each composed in a large 5'x7' frame, the photographer has produced a work of anthropological scope, reaching beyond representation by placing the subject at palpable distance, thereby objectifying it.
HEMERIA Hardback • 9782490952052 • September 2021 • £59.00 88 pages
Sagas
Iceland By Olivier Joly
Photographer Olivier Joly has visited Iceland for over ten years to capture its landscapes and its faces. Photographer, journalist, author and speaker Olivier Joly has always been drawn to Iceland. This volume explores how he found this ‘promised land’, with twenty trips and a year on the spot making him one of Iceland’s most knowledgeable connoisseurs. His photographs examine Iceland in beautiful black and white.
HEMERIA Hardback • 9782490952205 • October 2021 • £65.00 192 pages
The Sowers of Joy
By Caroline Riegel and Matthieu Ricard
An intimate and rare immersion in the heart of a community of Nuns from a high Himalayan valley called Zanskar. Photographer Caroline Riegel has lived day after day with nuns at a Buddhist nunnery of Zanskar. In this volume, she delivers a luminous tribute, in images and words, to these women who have found, in the heart of the Zanskar mountains, far from the modern world, a balance of life. It is a two-sided journey, showing both the charm of a unique "tribe" with astonishing sorority and the masterful beauty of their territory.
HEMERIA Hardback • 9782490952182 • October 2021 • £59.00 208 pages
By Éric Antoine and contributions by Bruno Patin
A collection of Éric Antoine’s photographs using his distinctive collodion process. By using an older form of technology, French artist Éric Antoine strips away modern-day conceits in the quest for simplicity, solitude, and core truths. The works speak to the passage of time but also to a sense of timelessness; nothing in the photographs dates them. And yet, his framing and cropping are entirely modern, subverting any suggestion of nostalgia. These are not attempts to replicate nineteenth-century photographs but rather forays into unchartered territory that use the past to draft new stories.
HEMERIA Hardback • 9782490952212 • October 2021 • £59.00 196 pages
Sublime Napoli
By Jean Luc Dubin and Florian Villain
An extraordinary photographic journey in the city of Naples (Italy). Fascinated by the primitive beauty of reality, French photographer Jean Luc Dubin apprehends the social world without interpretation or spirituality, guided by what Florian Villain calls "a gaze without a glance". In Naples as in New York, his street photos are shaped like a social precipitate, triggered by the magical moment of the click. Beyond the social world, Jean Luc Dubin also tackles received ideas about human nature, which is akin to a standardised construction.
HEMERIA Hardback • 9782490952045 • November 2021 • £65.00 128 pages
Elephant
By Laurent Baheux
An homage to elephants through photography. This book offers an incomparable spectacle, that of an intimate face-to-face with elephants, here treated as a subject in their own right, on an equal footing with man. As an extension of his militant commitment and his anti-speciesist discourse which seeks to break down the psychological barriers linked to the categorisation of animals according to their degree of utility or their "nuisance" power, Laurent Baheux provides new proof of the need to save elephants and protect their environment.
HEMERIA Hardback • 9782490952229 • October 2021 • £59.00 128 pages • b/w illus.
Elegy for the Santa Maria Valley By Brett Kallusky
A collection of eye-opening photographs in California's historic Santa Maria Valley, one of the world’s great wine-growing areas. Addressing the current, human-centred epoch known as the Anthropocene, the quiet but powerful imagery of Kallusky's Landfill examines important questions of how the land is used and regarded. The landscape reveals who we are, as he brings these invisible spaces into visibility, showing how the earth supports our food needs on a massive scale, fuelling a massive engine of consumption. What is left in the wake of that system to which we all belong?
GEORGE F. THOMPSON Hardback • 9781938086878 • October 2021 • £25.00 96 pages • 46 illus.
Paris Park Photographs
By Michael Kolster and contributions by Michelle Kuo
Michael Kolster renders Paris’s parks like no one since photographer Eugène Atget a century ago. Features spectacular images from a dozen public parks and gardens in and near France's capital city, exploring many of the same places that photographer Eugène Atget (1857–1927) made famous a century ago. These intimate yet inherently expansive views of Paris’s parks invite closer scrutiny of the encounters awaiting us at the edges of the well-worn paths defining our daily lives. Presented in a bilingual English/French edition and concludes with an afterword by Michelle Kuo.
GEORGE F. THOMPSON Hardback • 9781938086885 • October 2021 • £30.00 120 pages • 52 illus.
Iceland
Wintertide Photographs by David Freese and afterword by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir
A unique rendering of Iceland in winter by a renowned photographer and writer. David Freese's profound, ongoing concern for our environmental predicament is once again manifested in his photographs of Iceland. By showing us what humankind is on the brink of losing, his images share and preserve his vision of this unique and special place. A small jewel of a book, Iceland Wintertide becomes a powerful coda to David Freese's Trilogy of North American Waters as the threats and ramifications of a warming climate steadily increase before our eyes.
GEORGE F. THOMPSON Hardback • 9781938086830 • October 2021 • £25.00 88 pages • 57 colour illus.
From the Holocaust to Symphony Hall By Daniel Levin and Franz Welser-Möst
A visual chronicle of the the story of how violins from the Holocaust now sing in symphony halls. Amnon Weinstein, an Israeli master luthier (violin maker), began a project to restore violins that survived the concentration camps and the ghettos, even when their owners often did not. Here, Daniel Levin has made the most compelling and beautiful series of photographs documenting Weinstein’s collection of violins, his workshop in Tel Aviv, and his processes for restoration.
GEORGE F. THOMPSON Hardback • 9781938086861 • July 2021 • £30.00 136 pages • 75 colour illus.
Imagine: Reflections on Peace
By Jonathan Powell, Samantha Power, Jon Swain, Gary Knight, Philip Gourevitch, Martin Fletcher, Anthony Loyd, Jon Lee Anderson, Robin Wright, Ron Haviv, Don McCullin, Stephen Ferry, Gilles Peress, Jack Picone and The VII Foundation
Photographic essays take us into societies that have suffered searing conflict – and survived. In 2018, the VII Foundation asked more than a dozen renowned reporters and photojournalists to revisit countries with which they had become achingly familiar during times of brutal conflict. The task was to see peace through the prism of their journalistic experience. The result is Imagine: Reflections on Peace – a curation of searing images and trenchant essays that show both micro and macro views of peace, with its uneven degrees of economic success, political stability, and social harmony.
HEMERIA Hardback • 9782490952090 • October 2020 • £39.00 408 pages • 200 b/w & colour illus.
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