Kinokuniya is thrilled to present our latest guest shelf curator: renowned photobook publisher, Michael Mack.

We’re constantly told there is an excess of photobooks in the market at the moment and yet I regularly come across books which make me think ‘I wish I had published that’. It’s a sign of the extraordinary creative space between photography and the book and this small selection is one version of my own celebration of this moment. 

-Michael Mack

Michael’s curated shelf features selection of our longstanding favourites and also introduces brilliant new titles and publishers to the Kino family. Peruse this spectacular array of books in person in our Art & Design department until February 16^th.

About the curator

Michael Mack is the Director of London based publishing house MACK. Originally established in 2004 under the imprint steidlMACK, MACK was founded by Michael Mack in 2010 and is considered to be one of the world’s leading producers of contemporary and historical photography books.

Allan Sekula: Okeanos
Edited by Daniela Zyman & Cory Scozzari
Published by Sternberg Press

This publication intersperses essays from scholars, historians, and thinkers with a selection of Allan Sekula’s seminal texts and excerpts from his private notebooks. The title is a reference to Okeanos—son of Gaia, the Greek goddess of the earth—who ruled over the oceans and water. Made and written across the decades, Sekula’s sketches and texts focus on maritime space and the material, economic, and ecological implications of globalization.

Rome – Miami
By Ari Marcopolous
Published by ROMA

Photographs taken by Ari Marcopoulos in Rome (February – March 2016), and Malibu (August 2016). With a text contribution by Kara Walker. Rome. (…) Here, no image or structure is complete without symbolic framing devices, which also require framing devices, and so on. Ad infinitum. Malibu. Rockstars and fallen rocks and the edge, here is where the European conquest of the New World meets its fountain of youth endgame. We have reached the end, and it is vast.

Blind
By Sophie Calle
Published by Actes Sud

Sophie Calle returns to the subject of autobiography and to the notion of the Other, revealing in their difference and singularity those who have been blinded to their lives. This publication is a reflection on absence, on the loss of one sense and the compensation of another, on the notion of the visible and the invisible.

Bruises
By Samara Scott
Published by Loose Joints

Bruises is the first book of photographs by the British artist and sculptor Samara Scott. Taken from the artists’ archive of 35mm half-frame images, Bruises unfolds over six years in which Scott used the camera as a form of ‘sampling’ the world, footnotes to feed back into her artistic practice. Much like Scott’s sculptural work, we find in her photographs a hybrid swirling of consumer objects and sensory experiences in flux. These images speak of a suspension or perversion of everyday surfaces and depths, but also of the saturation of images, sounds, and textures in contemporary capitalist society.

Foreigner: Migration into Europe 2015-16
By Daniel Castro Garcia
Published by John Radcliffe Studio

Foreigner: Migration into Europe 2015–2016 is a photography book that documents the lives of people at various stages of their migration to Europe. The book is divided into three sections, focusing on migration to Italy from North Africa, migration to Greece and through the Balkans from the middle east, and the migrant camp in Calais known as ‘The Jungle’.

Hanging on a Wire
By Sophia Klasse
Published by Fourthwall Books

In 1999, Rick Rohde, a Research Fellow of the Centre of African Studies at the University of Edinburgh, joined a long-term research project in the village of Paulshoek in Namaqualand, the aim of which was to understand and record the socio-economic and environmental history of the area. Some residents of Paulshoek were invited to contribute to the project through a photographic documentation of the life of the village. One of these photographers was Sophia Klaase, whose striking images of her family and friends became the subject of an exhibition fourteen years later. Klaase’s images stood out for their intense and idiosyncratic representation of life in a materially impoverished community, and for their frank exploration of Klaase’s own relationship to her environment.

Highway Kind
By Justine Kurland
Published by Aperture

Justine Kurland, known for her utopian photographs of American landscapes and their fringe communities, has spent the better part of the last twelve years on the road. Following in the photographic lineage of the likes of Robert Frank & Stephen Shore, Kurland’s work examines the story of America—and the idea of the American dream juxtaposed against the reality. Her deep interest in the road, the western frontier, and ways of living outside mainstream values pervade this stunning body of work. Since 2004, Kurland and her young son, Casper, have travelled in their customized van, going south in the winter and north in the summer, her life as an artist and mother finely balanced between the need for routine and the desire for freedom and surprise.

Images of Conviction: The Construction of Visual Evidence
Foreword by Jennifer L. Mnookin. Introduction by Diane Dufour. Text by Christian Delage, Tom Keenan, Tomasz Kizny, Luce Lebart, Anthony Petiteau, Eyal Weizman.
Published by Editions Xavier Barral

Images of Conviction show how the photographic image is constructed to become evidence. From the scientific methods developed by Alphonse Bertillon, a criminologist who worked for the Préfecture de Police de Paris in the late 19th century, to the first aerial images of the front taken by the army during World War I, to the shots allowing the victims of Stalin’s Great Purge to be identified–for over 150 years photography has served as proof, testifying to crime and thus seeming to deliver truths. In the 11 cases presented, the question of the status of images is acutely posed.

Imperial Courts 1993 – 2015
By Dana Lixenberg
Published by ROMA

In 1993, Dana Lixenberg travelled to South Central Los Angeles for a magazine story on the riots that erupted following the verdict in the Rodney King trial. What she encountered there inspired her to revisit the area, and led her to the community of the Imperial Courts housing project in Watts. Returning countless times over the following twenty-two years, Lixenberg gradually created a collaborative portrait of the changing face of this community with her 4×5 field camera. Over the years, some in the community were killed, while others disappeared or went to jail, and others, once children in early photographs, grew up and had children of their own. In this way, Imperial Courts constitutes a complex and evocative record of the passage of time in an underserved community.

In Most Tides an Island
By Nicholas Muellner
Published by Self Publish Be Happy

Nicholas Muellner’s most recent image-text book journeys through shifting tableaux of exile and solitude in the digital age. Seductive, disorienting, informative and allegorical, In Most Tides an Island is at once a glimpse of contemporary post-Soviet queer life, a meditation on solitude and desire, and an inquiry into the nature of photography and poetry in a world consumed by cruelty, longing, resignation and hope.

Islands of the Blest
Edited by Bryan Schutmaat & Ashlyn Davis
Published by Silas Finch

These photographs depict various places in the American West, and were taken over a one hundred-year period, from the 1870s through the 1970s. All of the images were sourced from digital public archives.

Kleine Fotoenzyklopädie
By Guadalupe Ruiz
Published by Guadalupe Ruiz

“The idea of this Encyclopaedia comes from my interest in photography books published in the Thirties and Forties and also from my desire to share the photos I produce. For this reason I decided to create my own book, not only to produce the images I need, but also to learn printing the book myself.

Kleine Fotoenzyclopädie (small photo encyclopaedia) corresponds to the iconographic research I did during my artist’s residencies and travels in 2014 and 2015. Each place of residence (Genoa, New York, Detroit, Bogotá, Tirana, Mexico, Chicago) gave me the inspiration to develop my project and collect images of different themes.  As a photographer I want to document and to offer a unique vision of a place, an object, a building or a person.” – GR

L.A. 1971
By Anthony Hernandez
Published by Silas Finch

This sequence of 12 images – all taken in Los Angeles, California on the same day in 1971 – represents some of the earliest black and white work by Anthony Hernandez. Beautifully printed in tritone on McCoy Silk coated paper, the book features cloth end sheets and printed aluminium front and back covers.

Looking for Alice
By Sian Davey
Published by Trolley Books

Looking For Alice is an award-winning project by British photographer Sian Davey, which tells the story of her daughter Alice and their family. Alice was born with Down’s Syndrome, but is no different to any other little girl or indeed human being. She feels what we all feel. Their family is also like many other families, and Sian’s portraits of Alice and their daily life are both intimate and familiar. “My family is a microcosm for the dynamics occurring in many other families. Previously as a psychotherapist I have listened to many stories and it is interesting that what has been revealed to me, after fifteen years of practice, is not how different we are to one another, but rather how alike we are as people. It is what we share that is significant. The stories vary but we all experience similar emotions.”

Paintings
By Harley Weir
Published by Loose Joints

Paintings by Harley Weir presents images made as a form of digression from the artists’ traditional photographic practice. Known for her intimate and striking approach to portraiture, the images in Paintings attempt to erase from the frame her concerns with trust, power and permission that weigh upon the act of photographing others.

Sergio Larrain: Vagabond Photographer
By Sergio Larrain
Published by Thames & Hudson

A notoriously reclusive artist, Sergio Larrain has nonetheless become a touchstone for those who have come to know and love his work, including authors Roberto Bolaño and Julio Cortázar. Celebrated by Henri Cartier-Bresson, his contemporary and a co-founder of Magnum, Larrain’s experimental process yielded images that transformed the fixed nature of the medium. His images have left generations of viewers in awe of the simultaneous serenity and spontaneity that a camera can capture—when placed, that is, in the hands of an artist with such rare meditative passion. “A good image is born from a state of grace,” the artist once explained. Sergio Larrain, a selection of over two hundred images, rectifies Larrain’s omission from the canon of significant twentieth-century photographers, and combines his work in Latin America with photographs taken in Europe.

Sophie Calle And So Forth
By Sophie Calle
Published by Prestel

Throughout her career, the photographer and installation artist Sophie Calle has been creating tableaux that recreate her personal journeys. This new book offers numerous images of Calle’s projects from the last 10 years. Among the projects included are “The Phone Booth, Garigiliano Bridge,” which involved a public phone that Calle called at random to initiate conversations with strangers; “Take Care of Yourself,” which documents the interpretations of more than 100 women of a breakup note Calle received from a former lover; “The North Pole,” a touching tribute to the artist’s mother that imagines her realizing a lifelong dream; and the latest iteration of “What do You See,” which was created in response to one of the most brazen art heists of all time, at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

Stephen Shore: Selected Works 1973-1981
By Stephen Shore
Published by Aperture

Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places is indisputably a canonic body of work—a touchstone for those interested in photography and the American landscape. Remarkably, despite having been the focus of numerous shows and books, including the eponymous 1982 Aperture classic (expanded and reissued several times), this series of photographs has yet to be explored in its entirety. Over the past five years, Shore has scanned hundreds of negatives shot between 1973 and 1981. In this volume, Aperture has invited an international group of fifteen photographers, curators, authors, and cultural figures to select ten images apiece from this rarely seen cache of images.