A photographic autobiography, a testimony to history.

South African photographer Ernest Cole was the first to expose the horrors of apartheid to the world. Having fled South Africa in 1966, he published House of Bondage in New York at the age of twenty-seven. A powerful testimony to apartheid, House of Bondage was banned in his own country.

In New York, Ernest Cole lived a solitary existence, and felt constrained to document black life only. His professional and personal life gradually unraveled until its premature death at 49.

In 2017, over 60,000 of his mostly unpublished negatives and photos were mysteriously “discovered” in the vaults of a Swedish bank. Through these extraordinary photographs of Africa and America, Raoul Peck recounts Ernest Cole’s wanderings, torments as an artist and anger at the silence or complicity of the Western world in the face of the horrors of the apartheid regime and racial segregation in the United States.

Click here to purchase this book with us.

A critical and celebratory counter-narrative to what we know of Japanese photography today.

In 1976, the world of Japanese revolution experienced a significant revolution: the first all-woman photo exhibition — One Hundred Flowers In Bloom — took place in Tokyo, organized by Japanese and feminist photographer Ischiuchi Miyako. In many ways, Femmes photographes Japonaises, des années 50 à nos jours (Happy You are Here) is a pursuit of this political act, as it presents a much-needed counterpoint, complement, and challenge to historical precedents and the established canon of Japanese photography.

Through a wide range of photographic approaches brought to bear on the lived experiences and perspectives of women in Japanese society, editors Pauline Vermare and Lesley A. Martin, curator and writer Takeuchi Mariko, and photo-historians Carrie Cushman and Kelly Midori McCormick provide a solid foundation for a more thorough conversation about the contributions of Japanese women to photography—and an indispensable resource for anyone interested in a more robust history of Japanese photography.

Femmes photographes Japonaises, des années 50 à nos jours addresses directly ideas of sexual agency, the role of women in Japanese society, the male gaze, representations of political protest, and the complexities of diversity in Japan.

Additional context is provided by an in-depth illustrated bibliography by Marc Feustel and Russet Lederman, and a selection of key critical writings from leading Japanese curators, critics, and historians such as Kasahara Michiko, Fuku Noriko, and others, many of which will be published in translation for the first time.

Femmes Photographes Japonaises: des années 50 à nos jours, Pauline Vermare Lesley A. Martin, Takeuchi Mariko, Carrie Cushman and Kelly Midori McCormick

Click here to purchase this book with us.

At home with Marguerite Duras -Neauphle-le-Château, Les Roches Noires in Trouville, etc.- “remain in the wake of the woman who occupied them, ‘like souls, to be remembered, to be waited for, to be hoped for’, not as icy mausoleums, but as spiritual quiverings, bearers of an ever-intact grace (…) Duras absent but infinitely present in the evocation of these places she loved.”

Catherine Faux’s eye, long familiar with the world of Duras, has captured these things, unspeakable and immaterial. The rooms that Catherine Faux has photographed, the nooks and crannies, the details, and the windows that open onto the garden, manage to retain Marguerite Duras’s nocturnal and luminous story, sovereign in any case.

Emotion arises with each photograph because it manages to reach the true core of what Duras always reported and entrusted to us: her voice is captured in the stripped-down, the tenderness of faded fabrics, and perhaps even the trace of her body on the little occasional sofa…

Chez Marguerite Duras, by Catherine Faux, forword by Alain Vircondelet

Click here to purchase this book with us.

The French Museum Le Jeu de Paume honored the life and work of photographer Tina Modotti, who lived successively in Italy, the US, Mexico City and Moscow, while creating a fascinating archive of the social inequalities and political movements of her time.

Born in Italy, Tina Modotti immigrated to the US when she was 16. In 1920 she met photographer Edward Weston, who mentored her and exerted great influence on her subsequent work. In 1923 they moved together to Mexico City, which had become a cosmopolitan center in the interwar years. There, cultural and political expatriates like Weston and Modotti, Sergei Eisenstein, and Leon Trotsky moved in bohemian circles with Mexican intellectuals and artists such as Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Modotti and Weston opened a portrait studio in the city.

With her camera, Modotti captured Mexico’s sights and people. She took its folk art and landscapes as the starting points for her most abstract images. “Telephone Wires, Mexico” isolates taut stretches of wire against a pale sky, finding gridded linearity in the skyscape. “Staircase and Stadium, Mexico City” record repetitions of stairs and shadows, creating complex images that push these architectural features toward abstraction.

Modotti’s social concerns emerge in photographs such as Worker’s Hands, a quiet celebration of a laborer’s dignity. Mella’s Typewriter reveals her leftist leanings and carries a subtle social heft. Modotti met Julio Antonio Mella, a Cuban revolutionary who was a hero among other Latin American radicals, in 1928, at a demonstration in Mexico City against the execution of the anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. The following year, Mella was assassinated as he walked home with Modotti by his side. Her photograph of his typewriter, his instrument for recording his beliefs, is a symbolic portrait of Mella’s life and work, and an emblem of her own Communist sympathies—which ultimately led to her exile from Mexico in 1930.

Combining an analysis of Tina Modotti’s work with the historical movements through which she moved, and study of the distribution of her prints in the illustrated magazines of the time, this catalogue aims to break away from the romanticized narrative that some biographies have conveyed about her, to reveal the pioneering vision of this citizen of the world engaged in the struggles of her time.

Tina Modotti, Collectif, Flammarion.

Click here to purchase this book with us.

Artist and muse to the Surrealists, Lee Miller trained alongside Man Ray, and together they perfected the solarization technique. She worked as a fashion and portrait photographer in Paris, New York and London. In 1942, a rare feat for a woman, she managed to get accredited by the American army and captured images of the Blitz in London, where she had taken over the photo department of British Vogue.

In the summer of 1944, she became one of only five known female photojournalists during the Second World War. Her photos and articles were published in the American and British editions of Vogue magazine.
She landed on Omaha Beach on August 12, 1944, and arrived in Saint-Malo on the 13th to report on the Civil Affairs department, as the city was under siege. In around five days, equipped with her Rolleiflex, Lee took some 300 photos of Saint-Malo, as well as of Cancale, Dinard, Dinan and Rennes, and wrote accompanying texts, thus constituting an exceptional record of the city’s history.

Lee Miller, Saint Malo Assiégée, Aout 1944, Hazan.

Click here to purchase this book with us.