ZZYZX – Fourth Printing
The early settlers dubbed California The Golden State, and The Land of Milk and Honey. Today there are the obvious ironies–sprawl, spaghetti junctions and skid row–but the place is not so easily distilled or visualized, either as a clichéd paradise or as its demise. There’s a strange kind of harmony when it’s all seen together–the sublime, the psychedelic, the self-destructive. Like all places, it’s unpredictable and contradictory, but to greater extremes. Cultures and histories coexist, the beautiful sits next to the ugly, the redemptive next to the despairing, and all under a strange and singular light, as transcendent as it is harsh. The pictures in this book begin in the desert east of Los Angeles and move west through the city, ending at the Pacific. This general westward movement alludes to a thirst for water, as well as the original expansion of America, which was born in the East and which hungrily drove itself West until reaching the Pacific, thereby fulfilling its “manifest” destiny.
Signed by Gregory Halpern.
Postcards from America IV: Swap Shop Florida Magazine
During the eight weeks surrounding the 2012 election, eleven photographers gathered in Florida, twelve years after the disputed vote that arguably changed the course of the 21st century. Although the photographers worked independently, they moved towards some common themes: The stunning number of disenfranchised voters in Florida, the complicated processes through which realms of inclusion and exclusion are defined there, the difficulty of initially discerning deep political and philosophical divides among neighbors. Looking back at their work as a group, the photographers came to see both Florida and the American political process as a kind of swap shop: Places where ideas and identities are traded in, recycled, and acquired secondhand; open-air markets for consumption, garbage and reuse. This publication is the result.
With: Bruce Gilden, Jim Goldberg, Susan Meiselas, Paolo Pellegrin, Gilles Peress, Mark Power, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Alec Soth, Zoe Strauss, Mikhael Subotzky, Donovan Wylie. 88 pages
The Way it Was. Road Trips USA
Thomas Hoepker was 27 years old when he set out on his ambitious journey across the United States—one that took him from coast to coast and back again over the course of three months and resulted in thousands of photos. The year was 1963 and Hoepker had been commissioned by the German magazine Kristall to “discover” America through his camera. The photo reportages he made, published in five issues of the magazine across dozens of pages, revealed Hoepker’s complex, skeptical and sometimes melancholy view of the American everyday, in big cities, small towns and all in between. His was an unromanticized vision in which the decadent existed alongside the desolate, the glitter with the grit.
As much as Hoepker recognized that the problematic American dream could go unfulfilled, he was fascinated with the country (settling in New York in 1976), and in 2020—at the age of 84 and after a successful career as a photojournalist and president of Magnum Photos—he once again set out on a road trip throughout the US. The Way It Was. Road Trips USA juxtaposes Hoepker’s color photographs from this trip with his original black-and-white images, taking us on a journey both through his changing sense of America and through time.
Signed by Thomas Hoepker.
Gathered Leaves Annotated
Following on from the bestselling box set Gathered Leaves, published to accompany Alec Soth’s touring exhibition which opened in London in 2015, this unique publication brings together five of Soth’s major books in their entirety in a single, compact, and densely detailed volume. Across more than 700 pages of newsprint, Soth updates and reimagines the original version of Gathered Leaves by reproducing every spread from these five books with detailed annotations in the form of notes, text extracts, and additional photographs. This new roadmap through Soth’s oeuvre also includes a new introduction by the artist.
Soth’s meteoric rise to international acclaim began with his first book, Sleeping by the Mississippi (2004), an elegiac road trip down the ‘third coast’ of the United States, which has since has sold through numerous print runs and is widely acknowledged as a classic. The success of his subsequent volumes Niagara (2006), Broken Manual (2010), and Songbook (2015) elaborated Soth’s lyrical but unflinching approach and reinforced his position as a master of the book form. His most recent work, A Pound of Pictures (2022), brings a new, poetic perspective to the idiosyncrasies of American life and the practice of image-making, broached once again through Soth’s now-distinctive road trip format.
Signed by Alec Soth.
