Monday, May 21, 2007

Jonas Bendiksen


Satellites
Photographs from the Fringes of the Former Soviet Union. Photographs and text by Jonas Bendiksen. Aperture, New York, 2006. 152 pp., 62 color illustrations, 7¼x9¼".
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History is written in the margins. Several of the six regions depicted in Satellites used to be strategic hinterlands of the sprawling Soviet empire, but upon its dissolution, regional conflicts played out like mini-apocalypses. Amazingly, three of them are self-perceived sovereign states: Transdniester, Abkhazia and Nagorno-Karabakh. We may not see their nameplates at the UN very soon however, for they are still caught up in the grumble of geopolitical interests. Magnum photographer Jonas Bendiksen has traversed them for years, in which time the center of the former Soviet system reconfigured its stratagem even further afield. Left on their own, with arbitrary borders leftover from Stalinist control and ethnic and religious tensions still unresolved, these territories each charted its own peculiar trajectory. Bendiksen tells their stories through atmospheric and enigmatic interiors of bars and small homes, or painful vistas of decimated towns, stripped to rebuild the victors' town nearby. Like pessimistic versions of Calvino's Invisible Cities, these regions are lyrical in their histories, and yield hallucinations of everyday existence. The Jewish Autonomous Region, a chilly border province with China, hosted no Semitic history until the 1920s. On a frozen street there, two anonymous figures struggle or play. From Abkhazia, a former resort town bombed into its own dusk, comes a magnificent tableau involving a peacock, a stuffed bear and a slouching man, each seeming to ask a poignant and absurd question of the viewer. The structure of the book is punctuated by stills of Soviet rocket launch, which projects us into what seems like a dreamlike tomorrow, especially in the final section. In the Kazakh Steppe region, Soyuz boosters and other hulking spacecraft detritus land amidst villages and farmlands. Residents salvage what they can for tools and resale, despite the corrosive fuel that also lands there. The cover image, suffused with white butterflies, captures the near-future irreality as no other shot in the book. Like most important international photojournalism, this work introduces most of us to the people who are left in the wake of much larger global influences. And this is also the conundrum of such compelling projects: to us they are the forgotten exotic ones; for them, this is their lives. ALAN RAPP
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Estimate: Hardbound [Signed] $35.00

Matthew Monteith

Czech Eden
Photographs by Matthew Monteith. Text by Ivan Klima. Aperture, New York, 2007. 80 pp., 58 color illustrations, 11x9½"
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Publisher's Description
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When he first visited the Czech Republic in the 1990s, the rising photographer Matthew Monteith was taken by the details of ordinary life in this country in transition. Captivated by the ineffable-a mood, a sense of place-he made repeated visits, and from 2001-2003 traveled throughout the country with his camera, in hopes of creating a contemporary allegory that would reflect the ideals he had observed in old postcards and in Czech photography from the 1920s and 30s. Combining restraint, brilliant color and a certain thoughtful attention to the uncanny within the everyday, Monteith's photographs parallel a venerable tradition staked out by masters like Joel Sternfeld, and embodied in contemporary work by younger photo-documentarians like Alec Soth. Though at times foreboding, an energetic optimism and humor pervades Monteith's work. His meticulously composed and beautifully produced images focus on individuals, landscapes, oddly stilled cityscapes and the worn traces of the country's long and complex history. Czech Eden, Monteith's first monograph, is not a literal description or documentation, but rather a parable in which the viewer encounters individuals and environments that are cohesive yet contradictory, beautiful but unsettling.
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Estimate: Hardbound [Signed] $40.00

David Maisel


Oblivion.
Photographs by David Maisel, with a poem by Mark Strand and essay by William Fox. Nazraeli Press, Portland, 2006. 48 pp., 15 black-and white illustrations, 12x12".
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A palpable sense of dread runs through David Maisel's aerial photographs of Los Angeles in Oblivion, the sprawling geography of that megalopolis rendered as an impersonal circuit board, a coldly calculating machine. Following on the heels of his work with polluted lake beds in The Lake Project - some of which were created by Los Angeles' insatiable thirst for water - these images reinforce the social concerns of Maisel's work, with the physical features of the land standing as both literal maps and symbolic constructs.
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Estimate: Hardbound [Signed] $60.00

Henry Wessel

Henry Wessel.
Photographs by Henry Wessel. Edited by Thomas Zander. Text by Sandra Phillips. Steidl, Gottingen, 2007. 184 pp., 14 color and 118 tritone illustrations, 12x11".
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Publisher's Description
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This retrospective look at the career of Henry Wessel, one of the late twentieth century's most original and dryly funny photographers, tracks his contribution to the New Topographics movement of the 1970s and continues through more than 30 years of incisive observations on the American social landscape. In 133 photographs, it offers up a range of work from the earliest in the 1960s to a recent series on Las Vegas, made between 2000 and 2004. Throughout, Wessel not only chronicles the idiosyncrasies and anomalies of Southern California and the American West, but demonstrates over and over that photography can surpass its documentary role to speculate and to suggest narratives within and beyond the frame. Ultimately, he challenges not only our expectations of his medium, but our ways of seeing and our preconceptions about the familiar. Sandra Phillips, Curator of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, writes of his emergence from the era's pack, 'Wessel's remarkable work, witty, evocative and inventive, is distinctive and at the same time a component part of the great development of photography which flourished in the 1970s. The pictures continue to grow and evolve and the work is now regarded as an individual and important contribution to twentieth-century American photography.' Published with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Estimate: Hardbound [Signed] $60.00

Thursday, March 22, 2007

Photoshop CS2 Bible by Deke McClelland and Laurie Ilrich Fuller


Photoshop CS2 Bible
by Deke McClelland and Laurie Ulrich Fuller (Paperback - 22 Jul 2005)

Buy new: £24.99 £16.49 59 Used & new from £13.89
You save: £8.50 (34%)
Get it by Saturday, Mar. 24, if you order in the next 21 hours and 44 minutes.
Eligible for FREE Super Saver Delivery.

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Product details
Paperback: 1080 pages
Publisher: Hungry Minds Inc,U.S.; Completely Rev. and Updated edition (22 Jul 2005)
Language English
ISBN-10: 0764589725
ISBN-13: 978-0764589720
Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7.4 x 2.4 inches