Monographs & Art Books / K

When considered as an object the photograph exists physically in the world, it belongs to someone; it gets held, it has weight, value. I've been interested in this concept for some time. It was this interest plus the recurrent use of my images online without my permission that motivated the creation of the series Little Romances. I have always made very personal work, my current emotional state and interests get translated directly into my images. Most all these images reflect questions and anxieties about being a woman, navigating what that means; what is expected of me as a mother, daughter, wife or lover versus what I'm capable of. In sharing my work online, sometimes it is treated with respect, but more often not. Not being asked for its use, and/or not being credited; it's upsetting being treated that way especially with such personal images. In Little Romances I photograph prints of my photographs and they become a physical object; my object. I surround them with elements from my garden or other personal items not to evoke nostalgia or sentimentality but to deepen my physical connection/claim to these images and distance them from the viewer. The object-image becomes obscured, repurposed, diverted, so that its original intent remains safe from viewing and at the same time it explores a new narrative.

49Nadav Kander (born 1961) is an Israeli-born, London-based artist, director and photographer, internationally renowned for his landscapes and portraiture. His latest photographic series, Bodies, consists of nudes painted white against a black backdrop, their faces tuned away from the viewer. Accessories are minimal, as is the aesthetic; yet, at the same time, the arrangement makes the sitters' mostly voluptuous bodies seem baroque. Despite the abundance of flesh on display, however, the images lack a superficial sense of the erotic; the white makeup and lack of eye contact function as barriers, and the massiveness of the limbs recalls the work of Hans Bellmer and Lucian Freud. Like Bellmer and Freud, Kander presents us with a simulacrum of sensuality, questioning our images of the human body as well as the concept of beauty itself.

49Nadav Kander (born 1961) is a recipient of the renowned Prix Pictet and one of today's most successful photographers. Upon learning of the existence of two "closed" cities on the border between Kazakhstan and Russia, he decided to visit them. For Dust he photographed the desolated landscapes of the Aral Sea and the restricted military zones of Priozersk and Kurtchatov, which did not appear on any map until well after the end of the Cold War. Long-distance missiles were secretly tested in Priozersk, and hundreds of atomic bombs were detonated in the so-called Polygon near Kurchatov, until the program ended in 1989. The bombs were exploded in a remote but still populated area, and covert studies were made of the effects of the radiation on the unsuspecting inhabitants. Kander describes how the ticking of the Geiger counter on his belt while he photographed served as a foil against the aesthetic allure of the ruins.

49Nadav Kander's work is a varied interplay of influences. His restrained and articulate compositions have a clarity and calm that draw the viewer into zen-like states. The London-based photographer's exceptional talent has been rewarded with major success, and his work is featured in the Sunday Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, and Esquire among other publications. His unique skill is especially manifest in his spare and muted landscapes and his straight portraits. The Yangtze, The Long River work was awarded the second Prix Pictet. His Obama's People feature--which he created for The New York Times Magazine in 2009 -- have a haunting complexity few contemporary photographers could equal.

49Regardless of his sitter-whether family member or influential celebrity-the portraiture of London-based photographer Nadav Kander (born 1961) shows what makes that particular individual human. His aim is to move beyond capturing an accurate likeness-to access the emotions within, the uncertainty, the shadow as much as the light, the complex sense of self that otherwise lays hidden. "Revealed and concealed, beauty and destruction, ease and disease, shame and shameless," explains Kander, "These paradoxes are essential to all my work and represent what is common to all my varied subject matter." This collection, the first book dedicated to his portraiture, shows the range and nuance of Kander's work. His enigmatic depictions of actors, artists, musicians, authors, sports icons and political leaders-from Barack Obama, John le Carré and Alexander McQueen to Tracey Emin, Robert Plant and Prince Charles-are layered and penetrating, revealing unexpected moments of reverie and vulnerability.

49The Yangtze river flows 4,100 miles across China, traveling from its furthest westerly point in the Qinghai province to Shanghai in the east. The river is embedded in the consciousness of the Chinese, and plays a significant role in both the spiritual and physical life of the people. Using the river as a metaphor for constant change, Nadav Kander (born 1961) has photographed the landscape and people along its banks from mouth to source. "After several trips to different parts of the river, it became clear that what I was responding to and how I felt whilst being in China was permeating into my pictures," he records; "a formalness and unease, a country that feels both at the beginning of a new era and at odds with itself."

Art Kane was one of the most profoundly influential photographers of the twentieth century. A bold visionary, his work explored a number of genres - fashion, editorial, celebrity portraiture, travel, and nudes with an unrelenting and innovative eye. Like his contemporaries, Guy Bourdin (1928-1991) and Helmut Newton (1924-2004), Kane developed a style that didn't shy away from strong color, eroticism and surreal humor. In 1958 Kane assembled the greatest legends in jazz and shot what became his most famous image, Harlem 1958. In the 1960s and 1970s, Kane photographed, among others, the Rolling Stones, The Who, Cream, Janis Joplin, The Doors and Bob Dylan. While the battle for civil rights in America and the Vietnam War raged, Kane was refining a conscientious response to the period with his editorial work that was powerfully accessible and populist in its desire to communicate to a large audience. This is the first time Kane's work has been collected into one, breathtaking volume. Beautifully curated, it is a fitting tribute to one of photography's most original and creative forces.

313During his remarkable life, Yousuf Karsh, who was born in Armenia in 1908, traveled the globe to photograph subjects ranging from historical figures to anonymous farmers to steelworks. Karsh: A Biography In Images is a full revision of the 1996 60-year retrospective of his work and brings that popular catalogue back into print in an affordable paperback format. This new edition covers the photographer's career with greater breadth than its previous incarnation, adding works from his early experiments and his photojournalism commissions in Canada. Karsh's reputation as one of the most sought-after portrait photographers of the twentieth century is well established. A roll call of his subjects is a veritable who's who of the modern age--Winston Churchill, Jacqueline Kennedy, Pablo Picasso, Walt Disney, Elizabeth Taylor and Albert Einstein, to name just a few--and this book features many of these figures, in some of the most recognized images of our time. But added to the portraits are a number of lesser-known or previously unpublished photographs--early figure studies, atmospheric views of the Ottawa theatre and scenes of wheat fields, city streets and factories across Canada. With its long autobiographical essay and extensive captions for each photo, many of them new to this edition, Karsh: A Biography In Images is both an elegant celebration and an indispensable overview of a life lived in photography.

287Curse of the BlackGold: 50 Years of Oil in the Niger Delta takes a graphic look at the profound cost of oil exploitation in West Africa. Featuring images by world-renowned photojournalist Ed Kashi and text by prominent Nigerian journalists, human rights activists, and University of California at Berkeley professor Michael Watts, this book traces the 50-year history of Nigeria’s oil interests and the resulting environmental degradation and community conflicts that have plagued the region. Now one of the major suppliers of U.S. oil, Nigeria is the sixth largest producer of oil in the world. Set against a backdrop of what has been called the scramble for African oil, Curse of the Black Gold is the first book to document the consequences of a half-century of oil exploration and production in one of the world’s foremost centers of biodiversity. This book exposes the reality of oil’s impact and the absence of sustainable development in its wake, providing a compelling pictorial history of one of the world’s great deltaic areas. Accompanied by powerful writing by some of the most prominent public intellectuals and critics in contemporary Nigeria, Kashi’s photographs capture local leaders, armed militants, oil workers, and nameless villagers, all of whose fates are inextricably linked. His exclusive coverage bears witness to the ongoing struggles of local communities, illustrating the paradox of poverty in the midst of plenty. The publication of Curse of the Black Gold occurs at a moment of worldwide concern over dependency on petroleum, dubbed by New York Times journalist Thomas Friedman as “the resource curse.” Much has been written about the drama of the search for oil—Daniel Yergin’s The Prize and Ryszard Kapuscinski’s Shah of Shahs are two of the most widely lauded—but there has been no serious examination of the relations between oil, environment, and community in a particular oil-producing region. Curse of the Black Gold is a landmark work of historic significance.

287Ed Kashi is an award-winning photojournalist, filmmaker and educator dedicated to documenting the social and political issues that define our times. A sensitive eye and an intimate relationship to his subjects are signatures of his work. As a member of the prestigious photo agency VII, Kashi has been recognized for his complex imagery and its compelling rendering of the human condition. For his contribution to the JGS series 'Witness', Kashi has delivered a powerful and deeply moving view into his world and career. 'As a photojournalist who travels extensively around the world, home for me has always been a shifting term, with shifting people and shifting objects vying for my attention. Upon meeting Julie Winokur in 1992, that dynamic was forever altered. When we married in 1994, a pattern of recording journals addressed to Julie was already firmly established. In keeping with the changing times, what began as paper journals was replaced with daily emails by 2000. Encompassing nearly 20 years, this book is a selection of these journal entries from various locations around the world written for my wife. (...) The very act of creating this book touches upon my desire to reach out to others and to report on issues throughout the world. I am constantly looking for ways to expand the conversation of my work and the medium of photojournalism; to ultimately broaden the ways in which we tell stories and share our personal feelings. In a sense, this book is a different way to look at the world using both internal and external impressions, words and images. The depth of my feelings, touched so deeply and so often by the realities I witness, are the testimony I want this collection to reveal.' Ed Kashi.

Rinko Kawauchi has gained international recognition for her nuanced, lushly colored images that offer closely observed fragments of everyday life. In her latest work, she shifts her attention from the micro to the macro. The title, Ametsuchi, is composed of two Japanese characters meaning "heaven and earth," and is taken from the title of one of the oldest pangrams in Japanese-a chant in which each character of the Japanese syllabary is used. Translated loosely as "Song of the Universe," it comprises a list that includes the heavens, earth, stars and mountains. In Ametsuchi, Kawauchi brings together images of distant constellations and tiny figures lost within landscapes, as well as photographs of a traditional controlled burn farming method (yakihata) in which the cycles of cultivation and recovery span decades and generations.

In recent years, Rinko Kawauchi's exploration of the cadences of the everyday has begun to swing farther afield from her earlier photographs focusing on tender details of day-to-day living. In her series and resulting book Ametsuchi (Aperture, 2013), she concentrated mainly on the volcanic landscape of Japan's Mount Aso, using a historic site of Shinto rituals as an anchor for a larger exploration of spirituality. In Halo, Kawauchi expands this inquiry, this time grounding the project with photographs of the southern coastal region of Izumo, in Shimane Prefecture, interweaving them with images from New Year celebrations in Hebei province, China―a five-hundred-year old tradition in which molten iron is hurled in lieu of fireworks―and her ongoing fascination with the murmuration of birds along the coast of Brighton, England. Cycles of time, implicit and subliminal patterns of nature and human ritual, are mesmerizingly knit together in these pages. Contemporary Japanese photography has not often been concerned with the natural landscape; the seemingly ever-expanding cityscape of Tokyo was more of a preoccupation up until 2011, a moment when the presumed order of things―natural, civic, and otherwise―was upended by the combined disasters of tsunami, earthquake, and human miscalculation. Kawauchi's most recent work is not a commentary on natural disaster and unnatural aftermath. It is, however, an acknowledgment of larger forces at play.

Fair Witness presents the humorous and sometimes unsettling street work of New York City-based photographer David Lykes Keenan, whose black-and-white photos, taken with a Leica rangefinder, recall Frank, Winogrand, Friedlander and particularly Erwitt.

125Seydou Keïta was born in Bamako, Mali in 1921, then part of the colony of French Sudan and a bustling transportation hub on the route to Dakar. With a Kodak Brownie given to him by his uncle, Keïta took up photography at the age of fourteen, going on to establish what would become Bamako's most successful portraiture enterprise of the 1950s and 60s. Photographs, Bamako, Mali 1949-1970 draws on an expanded archive to offer over 400 portraits, mostly unpublished, from the height of the photographer's productivity in downtown Bamako. Providing lushly patterned backdrops and props that now serve to date distinct periods in his career, the artist often styled his subjects but also encouraged their active participation, hanging sample portraits around the studio as inspiration. Migratory youth, government officials, shop owners and Bamako's cultural elite all make appearances here, and while Keït''s photographs served as both family record and cultural status symbol for the clients who commissioned them, these images have become a lasting visual record of Mali at that time

125What began as simple curiosity blossomed into an object of national pride; when Seydou Keita bought a camera to take pictures of his family, neighbors assumed his services were for hire and enlisted him to take portraits of themselves and their homes, turning a carpenter into a photographer and a hobby into artistic expression. In such a way did the self-taught Keita become the official photographer of Mali from 1962 to 1977, based almost solely on his impeccable reputation for quality and originality that developed by word of mouth. This stunning collection of 206 black-and white-portraits illustrates Keita's pride in his country and his gift for capturing the personalities of his subjects. His aim was to create the most natural settings and poses for the people in front of the lens, putting them at ease and gently nudging them into surrendering their inhibitions. Keita utilized a wide variety of props to further this goal, including bicycles, telephones, radios, and musical instruments. He also kept a variety of clothing on hand--both traditional and European--to help his subjects achieve a desired look or style. What comes across most clearly in these photos is the beauty of the people; Keita brilliantly exposes their essence by focusing on their images.
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51This beautiful book presents a meditative, arresting, and dazzling collection of 240 black-and-white images of Japan, made over almost 30 years by the internationally renowned photographer Michael Kenna. A rocky coast along the sea of Japan; an immense plain of rice fields in the snow; Mount Fuji towering over misty wooded hills; silent temples devoid of people but brimming with Buddhist deities; a Torii gate mysteriously emerging from moving clouds and water--these are a few images from this remarkable collection of photographs by Michael Kenna, whose black-andwhite work is highly renowned. Forms of Japan, brilliantly designed by Yvonne Meyer-Lohr, is organized into chapters simply titled, "Sea," "Land," "Trees," "Spirit," and "Sky." The quietly evocative photographs, often paired with classic haiku poems of Basho, Buson, Issa, and others, provide a contemplative portrait of a country better known for its energy and industry. Gorgeously reproduced to convey the enormous subtleties that exist in Michael Kenna's traditional black-and-white silver prints, the photographs in this book include both well-known and previously unpublished images from all corners of Japan: Hokkaido, Honshu, Kyushu, Okinawa, and Shikoku.

51Nazraeli Press is thrilled to announce Michael Kenna's long-anticipated monograph on France. Kenna first visited France in 1973 and has been photographing there since the early 1980s. He has produced thousands of photographs on subjects such as Mont St Michel, Le Notre's Gardens, the Calais Lace Factories and Chateau Lafite Rothschild. 'France' encompasses work from these projects and many others. Comprising 275 duotone plates, this gorgeous new book was edited by the artist himself, who selected both well-known and previously unpublished material from his own archive.

51Huangshan is the name given to a whole range of mountains in Anhui province in eastern China. Also called Yellow mountain, the range is particularly known for its uniquely-shaped granite peaks, ubiquitous pine trees that literally grow out of the rock faces, and the ever changing configurations of flowing clouds as seen from above. Huangshan has been a source of inspiration and a muse for Chinese painters and poets throughout history. It continues to inspire artists today, including Michael Kenna. These forty-six photographs, which Kenna made over a period of three years, capture both the sublimity and grandeur of these peaks, and quietly reflect on our human interaction with nature. Kenna has written a brief introduction which describes some of his experiences on Huangshan.

51This book is a wonderful introduction and overview of the career of Micheal Kenna. Kenna's long-lived exposures and unusual eye for his subject material are unmistakably unique It is no wonder he is considered one of the world's most collectible photographers and apppeals to collectors just beginning to develop an interest in photography.

51Published as a companion book to the artist's Twenty Year Retrospective, Michael Kenna: Retrospective Two presents an overview of Kenna's landscape photographs made between 1994 and 2004. Michael Kenna is arguably the most influential landscape photographer of his generation. The subject of over 20 books and hundreds of solo exhibitions throughout Asia, Australia, Europe and the United States, Michael Kenna often works at dawn or during the night. He concentrates primarily on the interaction between the ephemeral atmospheric conditions of the natural landscape, and human-made structures and sculptural mass.

106Since 1995, Hendrik Kerstens has been photographing his daughter, Paula, creating moving portraits in the spirit of Vermeer. Born in The Hague in 1956, Kerstens is a self-taught photographer whose work has been shown in more than 40 exhibitions across Europe and the United States. His work is in major museum collections and is frequently featured in the New York Times magazine, and has inspired tastemakers as diverse as Elton John and Alexander McQueen. (McQueen used Kerstens’s now-iconic portrait Bag as the invitation for his fall 2009 collection.) Here, Kerstens lovingly portrays Paula as a self-possessed young woman (with a sense of humor), as well as projecting onto her his fascination with the Dutch Master painters of the 17th century. The resulting portraits seem at once contemporary and timeless. Kersten’s beautiful, haunting images, filled with “Dutch light,” express both paternal love and a deep respect for craft. Essays by photography curators Martin Barnes and Deborah Klochko examine the Paula images, considering them as an ongoing, three-way dialogue between photographer and sitter, and photographer and audience, and also discuss Kerstens' influences his larger body of work.

23This comprehensive book accompanies a major retrospective exhibition of Kertész’s work at Paris’s Jeu de Paume Museum (also visiting several other European venues including Winterthur, Berlin, and Budapest). The text is organized around the three main periods of Kertész’s seventy-year-long career: Budapest, 1914–25; Paris, 1925–36; and New York, 1936–85. Each section of the text includes an illustrated historical analysis, a portfolio of works, and notes on particular elements of Kertész’s style and practice. Many rare vintage and period prints produced under the photographer’s control are reproduced to highest standards in this beautiful book, reflecting the visual quality of this exceptional body of compelling and poetic images.

23This classic―both playful and poetic―is reissued with striking new duotone reproductions.
André Kertész (1894-1985) was one of the most inventive, influential, and prolific photographers in the medium's history. This small volume, first published in 1971, became one of his signature works. Taken between 1920 and 1970, these photographs capture people reading in many parts of the world. Readers in every conceivable place―on rooftops, in public parks, on crowded streets, waiting in the wings of the school play―are caught in a deeply personal, yet universal, moment. Kertész's images celebrate the absorptive power and pleasure of this solitary activity and speak to readers everywhere. Fans of photography and literature alike will welcome this reissue of this classic work that has long been out of print. 68 duotone photographs.

23His combination of Modernist vision and poetic wit defined a vocabulary that generations of photographers have continued to use. Kertész's iconic images of 1920s Paris, such as "Chez Mondrian" and "Satiric Dancer" and his later images from New York "Melancholic Tulip," "Washington Square" have seeped into contemporary culture, and yet Kertész maintained that the real roots of his work were in Hungary. This book, the first completely dedicated to Kertész's early Hungarian prints, offers a unique window on the origins of genius. Ninety images, selected from more than 1,000 contact prints in the artist's estate, are meticulously reproduced to actual size, revealing the explosive cultural context of early twentieth-century Hungary. A treasured addition to any photography library, André Kertész: The Early Years is a rare opportunity to witness the beginnings of a great artist. 90 duotone photographs

23After the death of his wife, André Kertész consoled himself by taking up a new camera, the Polaroid SX70. As with earlier equipment, he mastered the camera and produced a provocative body of work that both honored his wife and lifted him out of depression.

With artists around the world enduring difficult times, Open Doors Gallery and Setanta Books are proud to announce a new collaborative project looking to highlight the work of emerging and unpublished photographic artists from all over the world. This exciting new zine series will feature a new artist bi-monthly.
The first artist to be featured is Luka Khabelashvili. A self-taught photographer from Gori, Georgia. Shooting mainly digital, Luka is not afraid of tools like Photoshop to enhance his work. Luka manipulates his scenes and subjects often creating something abstract or surreal. Luka talks about Derealization or distorting our reality.

264Late in 2016, British photographer Chris Killip's (born 1946) son discovered a box of contact sheets of the photos his father had made at the Station, an anarcho-punk music venue in Gateshead, Northern England, open from 1981 to 1985. These images of raw youth caught in the heat of celebration had lain dormant for 30 years; they now return to life in this book.
The Station was not merely a music and rehearsal space, but a crucible for the self-expression of the subcultures and punk politics of the time. As Killip recollects: "When I first went to the Station in April 1985, I was amazed by the energy and feel of the place. It was totally different, run for and by the people who went there ... nobody ever asked me where I was from or even who I was. A 39-year-old with cropped white hair, always wearing a suit, with pockets stitched inside the jacket to hold my slides."

264The photographs that Chris Killip (born 1946) took in Northern England between 1973 and 1985 were first published by Secker & Warburg as In Flagrante in 1988, a volume that quickly established itself as the most important 1980s photobook on England and a classic of the genre. Compassionate but unwavering in its gaze, In Flagrante documented industrial Northern England in decline, suffering from the aftershocks of neoliberal economic strategies most brutally embodied in the policies of Margaret Thatcher. "The objective history of England doesn't amount to much if you don't believe in it, and I don't," reflects Killip. "And I don't believe that anyone in these photographs does either, as they face the reality of deindustrialization in a system which regards their lives as disposable." Chris Killip: In Flagrante Two revisits the classic photobook with a beautifully produced, radically updated presentation: each double-page spread features a single image on the right side. Strident in its belief in the primacy and power of the photographic image, In Flagrante Two allows for and embraces ambiguities and contradictions arising from the unadorned narrative sequence, completely devoid of text--forcing viewers to truly look, to witness.

264British photographer Chris Killip was born at his father's pub on the Isle of Man in 1946; 18 years later he left his post as a trainee hotel manager to pursue photography full time, photographing the island's beaches. He moved to London shortly thereafter, but decided to return to the Isle of Man early in the 1970s to document its inhabitants, landscapes and disappearing traditional lifestyles. The series was first published in 1980. Thirty years after the publication of Isle of Man, Killip found himself reexamining the negatives from the series in preparation for an upcoming retrospective in Germany. "I hadn't had an occasion to think about this work since the first edition of the book was published," writes Killip. "Going through these negatives again I found new images that I now liked, but at the time had overlooked or had not used for reasons that now mystify me." These alternate Isle of Man images--some 250 in total--became what Killip terms his "Isle of Man archive." Chris Killip: Isle of Man Revisited, a lavish, large-format, clothbound volume, maintains the order of the classic 1980 photobook but with some key changes: some of the original photographs have been replaced by unseen ones from Killip's "Isle of Man archive," and 30 new images have been added.

264Chris Killip (born 1946) began photographing the people of Lynemouth seacoal beach in the north east of England in 1982, after nearly seven years of failed efforts to obtain their consent. During 1983 to 1984 he lived in a caravan on the seacoal camp, and documented the life, work and the struggle to survive on the beach, using his unflinching style of objective documentation. Fifty of the 124 images published here were first shown in 1984 at the Side Gallery in Newcastle and others were an important element of Killip's groundbreaking and legendary book In Flagrante, published four years later.

299Born in New York in 1929, William Klein is one of the leading photographers of the postwar era, as well as an influential filmmaker, painter, and graphic artist. This astonishing book, selected and designed by Klein himself, offers a visual survey of his long and varied career. It includes his poetic street photography of New York, Moscow, Rome, Tokyo, and Paris; his exciting fashion photography; stills and posters from his bitingly satirical films; and his graphically powerful painted contact sheets. Klein, whose achievement puts him on a level with Robert Frank, Richard Avedon, and Irving Penn, lives in Paris and is revered in Europe. This is the first comprehensive book on his work published in the United States in 20 years.

299Sixty years after Life is Good and Good for You in New York, his first book and one of the most important in the history of photography, William Klein takes on a new challenge: shoot Brooklyn in digital. This technique becomes a way for the master of the aesthetic of chaos to refresh his approach to the New York borough. "No rules, no limits, no holding back." Such is his motto. What is important is to capture the exuberance and impertinence of life. For many weeks, the artist wandered the streets, worked days and nights, shot from the window of his car, and roved the beaches of Coney Island and Brighton. With these images, Klein creates a kaleidoscope of Brooklyn.

299The first book on the fashion work of the legendary photographer William Klein, to be published in conjuction with a major exhibition at the International Center of Photography in New York.

299William Klein always dreamed of living in Paris, like Henry Miller, Gertrude Stein, and other like-minded artists and writers. In 1948, stationed by the United States Army in Paris, he stayed--and fled his family and America to become a painter. He quickly found another family and recognition for his talent. Today, one is tempted, like critic Anthony Lane, to say that he is "the American in Paris." PARIS + KLEIn gathers together hundreds of photographs shot by Klein from the time he first picked up a camera in the 1960s until he put it down, momentarily, to put together this book. In his signature color and black-and-white compositions, jostled to the brim with more information than a single camera lens was ever expected to take in, we find: men in the street, celebrities, demonstrations, fashion, the police, politics, races, the m tro, soccer, death. . .The whole life of a capital seen through the lively, acidic, melancholic, humorous, irnoical, and moving eyes of William Klein.

299In 1956, a 28-year old William Klein arrived in Rome, fresh from the debut of his now classic monograph Life Is Good & Good for You in New York, to assist Federico Fellini on his film Nights of Cabiria. Filming was delayed, and so Klein instead strolled about the city in the company of Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Alberto Moravia and other avant-garde Italian writers and artists who served as his guides. It was on these walks that Rome, a pioneering and brilliant visual diary of the city, was born. First published in 1959, Klein's Rome features the quirky extended captions that distinguished his New York book, interspersed with observations about the city by Stendhal, Michelet, Mark Twain, Henry James and others. Today it is one of the most celebrated photography books of the twentieth century. To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Rome's publication, Aperture (in close collaboration with Contrasto) has produced a revised edition, which includes previously unseen fashion pictures made in Rome and an updated text by the photographer. Redesigned to encompass two volumes in a special PVC slipcase, this new edition offers audiences another chance to celebrate one of the great photobooks. As Fellini said, "Rome is a movie, and Klein did it." After graduating from university, William Klein (born in New York, 1928) settled in Paris and became a painter. He returned to New York in 1954, and made a photographic logbook which was published two years later, and which won him world-wide acclaim: Life Is Good & Good for You in New York (Prix Nadar, 1956). Later, he produced books dedicated to Tokyo, Moscow and Paris. Painter, photographer, moviemaker and graphic designer, Klein currently lives in Paris.

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34This collection of pictures by an acknowledged master of photography, now updated to include 11 new images, forms a document of the spiritual and physical state of exile. The sense of private mystery that fills these photographs - mostly taken during Koudelka's many years of wandering through Europe and the United States since leaving his native Czechoslovakia - speaks of passion and reserve, of his "rage to see". The images here interrogate and penetrate, and reflect the nature of alienation. The accompanying essay by Robert Delpire invokes the soul of man in search of a spiritual homeland. Josef Koudelka's photographs of the Warsaw Pact armies' intervention in Prague won him the Robert Capa Gold Medal in 1969. In 1970 he left Czechoslovakia for asylum in England and became a member of Magnum Photos.

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34Josef Koudelka's Wall comprises panoramic landscape photographs made from 2008-2012 in East Jerusalem, Hebron, Ramallah, Bethlehem and in various Israeli settlements along the route of the barrier separating Israel and Palestine. Whereas Israel calls it the "security fence," Palestinians call it the "apartheid wall," and groups like Human Rights Watch use the term "separation barrier," Koudelka's project is metaphorical in nature--focused on the wall as a human fissure in the natural landscape. Sometimes blocks of concrete define the panoramas; at other times displaced olive trees--a lifeline for one man, collateral damage in another's claim for territory--subtly emerge. As in his Black Triangle project, made in the Bohemian foothills of the Ore Mountains in the early 1990s, Wall conveys the fraught relationships between man and nature and between closely related cultures. A chronology, lexicon and captions provide context for the photographs.

These photos tell my mother's story of isolation, loneliness, abuse, connection, compassion, forgiveness, family, humanity, grace, joy, inspiration and love. It's the story of a mother-daughter reconciliation. My mother is a symbol of perseverance.

New York over the top is the first published monograph on Max Kozloff's activity as a photographer. Max Kozloff walks down the streets of New York and offers to the viewer his particuliar vision of a colorful, multi-ethnic, and multi-faceted city. A series of pictures that can surprise and drive the viewer in a curious path in one of the most photographed places in the world. Kozloff photographs his fellow citizens with an urban eye. He does not see them as legendary creatures, but he often makes them out to be fabulous presences, glimpsed at carnivals and festivals. He is especially enchanted with that he has called "the music of faces", a spectrum of moods at variance with the consumerism or ethnicity of circumstance. Statues, effigies, or teddy bears seem to offer internal witness to what he calls New York Over the Top.

In a remote landscape near Bordeaux, Mona Kuhn owns a little house: simple, bare and even without electricity. Kuhn travels here each year to entertain family and friends as they drop by. Bordeaux Series contains portraits of these people dear to Kuhn made over the last four years, as well as landscape photographs. Kuhn photographs her subjects in the same room with a red fabric backdrop and a chair, so that the nudity of each sitter is the only indication of his or her idiosyncrasies. A sequel to Kuhn's Native (2009), Bordeaux Series is a sensual exploration of the contemporary nude.

Critics have observed that Mona Kuhn's subjects seem "nude but not naked…. Completely relaxed before the camera, they give the impression that nothing could clothe them better than their own skin." Kuhn, who photographs in the naturist or nudist community, often in domestic interiors, weaves together gestures from the traditional iconography of nude studies with the comfortable body language of her subjects, creating a visual patois at once classical and contemporary. And beneath the mellow surfaces of her photographs lies an explosive energy: the artist's controlled play with the power of sensuality. Tension and uneasiness coexist with all that sunlight and soft flesh. The subjects and their gestures are suggestive but ultimately ambiguous. Tenuously held planes of focus provoke the imagination. Kuhn works very close to her subjects, often with a depth of field of only a few inches. Real world and image world seem to blend together as her figures unite the reality of human complexity with the blissful essence of nature. With only sparse reference to physical surroundings, they appear to float in an idyllic picture space, part of a dreamlike narrative just beyond the viewer's comprehension. These exceptional photographs exist in a space created by the artist and subject alone--the viewer is given a single fascinating glimpse, suspended in time, and then an enduring sense of the resilience and vulnerability of the human body.

"This work started as a personal journey. Metaphorically, I was thinking of a bird that flies back into the forest, searching for its childhood nest. The images here are a creation of my abstracted wishes and dreams. As I was searching, instead of home, I found an empty past, just traces of it. Yet, my journey was filled with new friendships and discoveries made along the way," writes Los Angeles-based photographer Mona Kuhn about her journey back to her native Brazil after 20 years. Her third photobook, Native unfolds slowly, as a dreamy narration of this adult exploration of her childhood home. Photographed in the rainforest and surrounding city area, the images are suffused with a deep green, gold and pink palette. Native is accompanied by an essay from critic Shelley Rice.

Color photographs of portraits and nudes.

For her fifth book with Steidl, Mona Kuhn has entered the heart of the American desert and returned with a sequence of pictures that is seductive, enigmatic and a little unsettling. Private proposes a world in which concrete reality and the imaginary are one. Plants and animals on the edge of survival, sun-drenched landscapes and wind-sculpted earth are intercut with a series of nudes that push Kuhn's renowned sensitivity to human form into unexpected directions. The result is a book somewhere between the poetry of T.S. Eliot, the cinema of Robert Altman and a lucid dream.

Acclaimed for her intimate nudes, Mona Kuhn takes a new direction into abstraction in her latest series, Acido Dorado. Photographed at a golden modernist structure on the edge of Joshua Tree National Park, architectural lines, light reflections and a single figure have been carefully balanced against the backdrop of the Californian desert. The human figure in these images--Kuhn's friend and collaborator Jacintha--emerges like a surrealist mirage, fragmented and indistinct, at times submerged in shadows or overexposed. The building's facades of glass and mirrors serve as optical planes, an extension of the artist's camera and lens. Light is split into refracting colors, desert vegetation grows sideways, inside is outside and outside in. Kuhn pushes a certain disorienting effect by introducing metallic foils as an additional surface, at times producing purely abstract results. Acido Dorado marks Kuhn's increasing use of techniques that appear to merge the figure, abstraction and landscape into one.

Mona Kuhn (born 1969) is best known for her large-scale, dreamlike photographs of the human form. Her pictures often reference classical themes with a light and insightful touch. Kuhn's approach to her work is distinguished by the close relationships she develops with her subjects, resulting in images of remarkable naturalness and intimacy. Born in São Paulo, Brazil, Kuhn lives and works in Los Angeles.

Though artistic and ambitious, Paul Kwilecki (1928-2009) chose to remain in Bainbridge, Georgia, the small Decatur County town where he was born, raised, and ran the family's hardware store. He had always been interested in photography and taught himself how to use a camera. Over four decades, he documented life in his community, making hundreds of masterful and intimate black-and-white prints. Kwilecki developed his visual ideas in series of photographs of high school proms, prison hog killings, shade-tree tobacco farming, factory work, church life, the courthouse. He also wrote eloquently about the people and places he so poignantly depicted, and in this book his unique knowledge is powerfully articulated in more than 200 photographs and selected prose.