2021

From March 12, 2021 to June 6, 2021, UCCA presents “Cao Fei: Staging the Era,” the artist’s first major solo show in China. In conjunction with the exhibition, UCCA published a Chinese exhibition catalogue. The book features high-quality reproductions of all exhibited works in dialogue with preparatory sketches, personal photographs, and other documentary materials, comprising a comprehensive and detailed overview of Cao Fei’s artistic career since the 1990s. Contributors include Hou Hanru, Venus Lau, Wang Hongzhe, Chris Berry, and Yang Beichen, writing on a range of topics that includes popular culture, systems of production, filmic media, science fiction, and the influence of China’s South. The catalogue also features an exhaustive dialogue between Cao Fei and UCCA Director Philip Tinari. The publication is designed by PAY2PLAY, who have collaborated with the artist for years.

2021

The book is split in two parts. The first part, bound to the front cover & wrapped in a sunny yellow foil, is a trouble-less view of the family, its front and bright side, as it were, yet with a melancholic touch.

The second part, bound to the back cover & featuring many more images, including some of those in the first part, is a much more comprehensive view deep down. Something that is hardly ever seen to the outsider’s eye. Black lists of wounds, drawings, archival pictures, ironic cut outs from retro magazines – all give a broader context to the relationship of the three women in one family and help re-contextualize familiar scenes in a different way.

2021

Dayanita Singh’s Zakir Hussain Maquette is a three-part book object: A facsimile of the original maquette built in 1986 as a student at the National Institute of Design; a reader with Singh in conversation with Gerhard Steidl on the art of book building, a text by Shanay Jhaveri; and yet another new format, the ‘poster as book’.

The book is well known as Dayanita Singh’s primary medium, one she explores to create new relationships between photography, publishing, the exhibition and the museum. But where did her passion for the book as the ideal vessel for her photos, for the stories she tells, begin? The answer lies in Zakir Hussain, a handmade maquette Singh crafted in 1986, her first project as a graphic design student. The protagonist of Singh’s photo essay is the Indian classical tabla virtuoso Zakir Hussain, whom she captured on the stage and at home with his family. Surrounding the photos are handwritten texts gleaned from interviews

Singh made with her sitters.
This Steidl facsimile edition is scanned from Singh’s original maquette and reproduces all its “imperfections” and idiosyncrasies including her pencilled notes about the book’s construction—indications of the influential bookmaker to come. Shanay Jhaveri’s accompanying essay discusses how Singh came to “make” the original, referring to her student notes and exploring how she intuitively assembled the book, from editing the images to design, setting the ground for the book objects and photo architectures of her later practice.

2021

Deana Lawson, the first scholarly publication on the artist Deana Lawson, surveying fifteen years of her photography, will be published to accompany the first comprehensive museum survey exhibition featuring Lawson’s artwork. A singular voice in contemporary photography, Lawson has been investigating and challenging conventional representations of black identities in the African American and African diaspora for over fifteen years. Her work samples numerous photographic languages, including the family album, studio portraiture, staged tableaux, documentary pictures, and found images, creating narratives of family, love, and desire. Lawson’s photographs are made in collaboration with her subjects, who are sometimes nude, embracing, and directly confronting the camera, destabilizing the notion of photography as a passively voyeuristic medium. Whether in posed photographs or assembled collages, Lawson’s works channel broader ideas about personal and social histories of black life, love, sexuality, family, and spiritual beliefs.

2021

What She Said takes its title from a song by The Smiths: “What she said was sad / But then, all the rejection she’s had / To pretend to be happy / Could only be idiocy.” The work originates in portraits Deanna Templeton made on the streets of the US, Europe, Australia and Russia, in which she captured women in their adolescence: punks and outcasts whose ripped jeans and tights, tattoos, and hairstyles stand as testament to this transitional moment in their lives as they navigate the intensity of teenage life. Templeton grew up in an ostensibly different environment in 1980s youth, but she recognised in them something of the universality of female adolescence, as they struggled with similar disappointments and challenges she encountered as a young woman. The book combines these modern portraits with gig flyers and Templeton’s own teenage journal entries from the mid to late 80s, in which the familiar experience of growing up is laid bare in all its antagonism,

humour and pathos.

2021

Come Closer is about my love for a woman, her name is Paola.
We fell in love four years ago. Ever since, I have felt the urge to photograph her every day. As part of this series you will find mostly colour and black-and-white 35mm pictures accompanied by polaroids, notes and contact sheets, but it also features videos.
The work feels like an intimate conversation between her and me. I am an observer trying to grasp every playful moment, every moment of connection. Seeing someone so versatile and constantly changing, I tend to overload her with my presence. And then there is her, my subject, someone who feels more like a muse to me. Loving me like no one ever did. In Come Closer you get to see the love between two women from up close.

2021

A photographic account of an extended solo performance in irradiated Fukushima between 2014 and 2019

2021

Helen Sear reflects on the current ecological crisis and our shared responsibilities across countries and borders. It is a call for human collaboration to avert the permanent loss of other species, in an era that biologist E O Wilson has suggested might be

named “The Age of Loneliness”.

In 2018 and 2019 Sear spent several weeks in Durham North Carolina inside the vast warehouse premises of The Scrap Exchange, an organisation dedicated to re-diverting surplus materials from landfill and creating environmental awareness and community through reuse. It is a microcosm for something global, namely our human relationships with, and impact on the environment

and our immediate surroundings.

Constructing a makeshift studio on the shop floor she invited visitors to have their portraits taken, photographed hands holding chosen objects, sometimes recording brief conversations. Photographing strangers in the formal style of studio portraiture enabled a momentary stillness and connection amid the agitation of peripheral vision overload and the direct eye contact between subject and artist heightens the sense of a moment shared.

2021

On the islands in the Strait of Hormuz, off the southern coast of Iran, there is a common belief that the winds can possess a person, bringing illness and disease. The existence of similar convictions in some African countries suggests that the cult may have been brought to Iran from southeast Africa through the Arab slave trade. This history is rarely spoken about but these winds and the traces they have left on the islands and their inhabitants are the touchstone for Hoda Afshar's Speak The Wind. Through her subtle and perceptive images of the extraordinary landscapes, the people and their rituals, Afshar's beautiful and complex book attempts to picture the wind and its psychic entanglements, to form a visible record of the invisible.

2021

‘We Were Farmers’ is a 12-year photographic project documenting the author’s family, who worked as farmers in Singapore from the 1960s until 2020. Beginning in 2008, the work traces their resilience and eventual transition away from agriculture, culminating in June 2020 with their final succumbence to urban development. Through this intimate record, the project serves as a visual commentary on the profound shifts in Singapore’s agricultural landscape and urban environment. Beyond documenting external change, the project evolved into a deep, self-reflective inquiry. The photographer began to question their role, exploring the tension between being a family member and a documentary observer. This blurred line challenged the notion of objectivity, transforming the family into a medium for investigating identity, relationships, and the impact of economic and political forces on

multi-generational legacies.

2021

‘One Hundred Years: Portraits of a community aged 0–100’ by Jenny Lewis. 224pp hardcover, cloth spine, gold foiled, 139 x 199mm

100 people, 100 years, one community.

This intimate collection of portraits and stories of Hackney residents at every age from birth to 100 reveals not just a neighbourhood, but the deep sorrows, fierce joys and many contradictions

that all our lives contain.

2021

‘I am trying to answer the question; how much can you take away of yourself without disappearing? How close can you get before the closeness becomes a distance?’ - Katinka Goldberg

“Bristningar (Rupture) is the middle part of Katinka Goldberg's trilogy of works, in which she is ‘exploring the tension between closeness and distance’, trying, no less, to locate herself both within herself and within the world. The trilogy began with her book Surfacing (2011) which examined the relationship between herself and her mother, in a complex and highly poetic way. In Bristningar, she is making collages, which, like Hans Bellmer's, deconstruct and reassemble the body, but do so with a very different aim, a healing rather than a destructive or pathological purpose. And also a process of add and subtracting, or rather, of adding in order to subtract.

2021

A collection of works by Liu Silin aka Celine Liu, an artist based in Beijing, China. Through herself, Liu Shirin has created a character that crosses history, culture, politics, and identity: Celine Liu. But "Celine Liu" isn't really anyone, the author says. Anyone can be Celine Liu, and everyone can be Celine Liu. In an age of image overload, Celine Liu uses herself as a medium to push the boundaries between reality and fiction, everyday and ritual, private and public, and between the individual and the world. We have made it possible to distribute and spread characters in the virtual world of the Internet,

as well as "consume" them.

2021

“At first the focus of my project was my gender transition, but along the way I found out that it’s about an ongoing search for myself: being a human with feelings, who is continuously developing.” — Marvel Harris
MARVEL describes the journey of Marvel Harris’ personal battles with mental illness, self-love, acceptance, and gender identity, all told through a searing collection of self-portraits spanning the course of five years. These photographs present a new-found visual language; a tool with which Marvel was able to express those emotions that, on account of his autism, he previously struggled to make sense of. The process of making these portraits allowed him to connect to the world around him at the time he needed it most.

2021

As a woman brought up in China, I used to think I could only love someone who is older and more mature than me, who can be my protector and mentor. Then I met my current boyfriend, Moro. Since he is 5 years younger than me, I felt that the whole concept of relationships changed, all the way around. I became a person who has more authority & power. One of my male friends even questioned how I could choose a boyfriend the way a man would choose a girlfriend. And I thought, "Damn right. That’s exactly what I’m doing, & why not!" I started to seriously think about the significance of this relationship, and start experiments with photographs. My photos explore the alternative possibilities of heterosexual relationships. Moro made me realize that heterosexual relationships don't need to be standardized. Depending on the individuals, every two people will have a different type of relationship. Even if the relationship is not the type we are familiar with, it still exists and has its own benefits. The purpose of this experiment is to break the inherent relationship model and reach a new equilibrium. Over time, the project also reveals my changing understanding about relationships.

2021

"Being in public, the relationship and distance between people get delicate. Before eye contact or any intuitive conversations, we all own individual universes. There are numerous random possibilities. Most times, I would not break those forever-stranger relationships. Occasionally I would take a snapshot as if I owned them from that moment. So they will be mine."

2021

She Never Rode That Trishaw Again tells the story of Loo Ngan Yue, a woman widowed by the British war against anti-colonial forces in Malaya — a 12-year conflict that became a template for other counter-insurgency campaigns around the world, including Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. Artist and author Sim Chi Yin juxtaposes vacation photographs of Loo — her late paternal grandmother — with oral history excerpts on the family’s trauma. This intimate volume, using vernacular photographs to create a filmic experience, takes us inside the emotional world of a family shattered by geopolitics. It is the first in a trilogy of books Sim is making around the “Malayan Emergency” of 1948 to 1960, and its colonial and post-colonial representations, painting a picture of anguish, loss and, amnesia — an allegory for Southeast Asia’s lingering traumas as

a Cold War battleground.

2021

In 1981 Sophie Calle took a job as a chambermaid for the Hotel C in Venice, Italy. Stashing her camera and tape recorder in her mop bucket, she not only cleans and tidies, but sorts through the evidence of the hotel guests' lives.

Working as a chambermaid for the Hotel C. in Venice, Italy, Sophie Calle stashes her camera and tape recorder in her mop bucket, so that as she cleans and tidies, she can also sort through the evidence of the hotel guests’ lives. Assigned twelve rooms on the fourth floor, she surveys the state of the guests’ bedding, their books, newspapers and postcards, perfumes and cologne, traveling clothes and costumes for Carnival. She methodically photographs the contents of closets and suitcases, examining the detritus in the rubbish bin and the toiletries arranged on the washbasin. She discovers their birth dates and blood types, diary entries, letters from and photographs of lovers and family. She eavesdrops on arguments and love-making. She retrieves a pair of shoes from the wastebasket and takes two chocolates from a neglected box of sweets, while leaving behind stashes of money, pills, and jewelry. Her thievery is the eye of the camera, observing the details that were not meant for her, or us, to see.

2021

In 2000, Tomoko Sawada’s ID400—a series of 400 self-portraits, all different, taken at a public ID photo booth—marked her debut as an exciting new force in the world of photography. She won the Kimura Ihei Award and the ICP (International Center of Photography) Infinity Young Photographer Award in 2004, and she has since achieved international distinction through exhibitions around the world and publications including Omiai, School Days, Kawaii, Facial Signature, and a picture book about faces for children. This official catalogue to Sawada’s first-ever retrospective, To Be Bewitched by a Fox, at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum covers the major works of an artist who focuses on self-portraiture to consistently explore the links between appearance and internality.

2021

Ba & Dada were paired together by their parents in Gujarat when they were 3 & 5 years old respectively. Now aged 94 & 96 , their relationship is still evolving albeit the limbo that a long and healthy life leaves you in.

Dori (thread) looks to bind questions on love and family by observing an important relationship that the author grew up with as a child within a joint family, that of her grandparents. Incorporating her images with family archives and conversations, the book stands testament to a life shared between two strangers who met as children, and of their love through the ages.
Editions Jojo

2022

24 Slides examines personal photographic archives and overlays them with childhood memories of a time of war. Growing up for a brief time in Iraq has left a deep impression on my sister and I, and we often think of the place and the people, the futility of war and its impact on people’s lives. Through the zine I look back into history through a tourism booklet from the 1970s and attempt to read the images and text as evidence and offer counter perspectives through my own experiences. - Aparna Nori

2022

Kitchen Table Series tell a story of one woman’s life, as conducted in the intimate setting of her kitchen. The kitchen, one of the primary spaces of domesticity and the traditional domain of women, frames her story, revealing to us her relationships―with lovers, children, friends―and her own sense of self, in her varying projections of strength, vulnerability, aloofness, tenderness and solitude.

2022

Walking in the Way: Performing Masculinity catalogues a 12 year performance art project between the artists Pauline Cummins and Frances Mezzetti : a collaborative performance series by established artists Frances Mezzetti and Pauline Cummins. They explore control of space, stereotyping, masculinities, movement and presence.

2022

Inspired by the energy and tension from the members of the St Paul’s Marching Wolves, Fumi Nagasaka started to photograph them in May 2017.
First time she met them, they appeared and started to perform in front of her and instantly caught her eyes. She travelled back to New Orleans in 2018, and 2020 to photograph these kids on different parade routes, and also in their private life for some of them.

2022

In this volume of The Photography Workshop Series, Graciela Iturbide—known for her portraits and landscapes imbued with poetic ambiguity and documentary truth—explores photographing in ways that employ a deeply personal vision, while also reflecting subjects’ rich cultural backgrounds.
Aperture works with the world’s top photographers to distill their creative approaches, teachings, and insights on photography—offering the workshop experience in a book. Our goal is to inspire photographers of all levels who wish to improve their work, as well as readers interested in deepening their understanding of the art of photography. Through images and words, Iturbide shares her creative process and artistic inspirations, and discusses a wide range of issues, from the importance of surprise and recognizing what speaks to you, to capturing symbolism and meaning in the everyday.

2022

‘There is Nothing New Under the Sun’ is Geibl’s first monograph. Carefully planned images are mixed with stream-of-consciousness texts. A poetic approach emerges through allegories, personal short stories and image pairs. The project deals with the rampant individualism that underpins our contemporary social, political, and economic system, and in particular, the environmental impact that it has. Geibl’s aim with the series is not to lecture, or to lay down a strict story, nor to interpret economic issues. She takes the viewer on a journey. There are no clear answers but instead ambiguous questions. Which we have to ask sooner or later as we are not only heirs of the system but also suffer under it.

2022

'On Rape' is a visualisation of the origin of gender-based stereotypes and myths, as well as the failing structures of law and order, that continue to perpetuate rape culture.

Abril collates and interweaves compiled testimonies, political proclamations, historical archives, popular and traditional beliefs, as well as society's structural failures to deal with sexual violence. To avoid feeding the systemic victim-blaming society, Abril switches the visual narrative from the survivors to the institutions, allowing her opportunity to address transgenerational trauma and social accountability.

'On Rape' is the second chapter of Laia Abril's long-term project 'A History of Misogyny', a visual research through historical and contemporary comparisons of the systemic control of women in the world.

2022

When we talk about “Ba ling hou” (born after the 1980s) in China, we are actually talking about the first generation born under the one-child policy and raised during the reform and opening up led by Deng Xiaoping after the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). This generation grew up together with the Internet and social media, melting into a consumer society that is totally in rupture with the preceding generations. Luo Yang, a photographer born in 1984, is also one of them.

In 2007, at the age of 23, Luo started the series Girls, which brought her international recognition. For ten years, Luo Yang followed more than a hundred of women from her generation, recording changes to their bodies and their lives, observing and capturing their delicate transition to adulthood. It's as if the photographer was capturing their (her) emotions as a young woman by holding a mirror up to her own growth and evolution alongside those of her models.

Now, Luo Yang is in her late 30s. In the new series Youth that she started in 2019, Luo shifts her focus to a younger generation born in the late 1990s and early 2000s. She continues to explore through Generation Z the changes of contemporary China now globalized and reached on a new scale and tries to preserve a photographic trace of these “atypical characters” in a social context.

From Girls to Youth, Luo Yang keeps “documenting” the post-teenagers and young adults that she met in her everyday life, using her works to tell the "story of youth" across generations. She depicts an emerging Chinese youth culture through her work that defies imposed expectations and stereotypes, showing evidence of her subjects’ individuality and personality. It is a personal account at femininity, gender, and identity that reflects the profound and ongoing changes taking place in our society.

2022

Rika Noguchi’s work is guided by the miraculous power of photography to inspire and guide her curiosity. Published on the occasion of her solo exhibition at the Tokyo Photographic Museum, Small Miracles presents her past and recent series, documents the exhibition and contextualizes her work through essays

and personal information.

2022

A personal project which explores the notion of belonging and the interconnectedness between people and land that shapes this notion.
A collaboration over a span of 10 years with the Sinai Bedouin community in Egypt. The community are participants in the creative process, they’ve contributed with their traditional mediums such embroidery, poetry, storytelling and plant foraging. The result is a dance, a visual conversation on the continuous human process of searching for home and a celebration of the indigenous experience that has long been seen through a romanticized gaze. I believe it’s a common human emotion to seek a definition of one’s identity, yet its complexity is often ignored, creating flattened labels and othering. The project challenges past colonial, orientalist and exotic narratives told of the Bedouins specifically and of the indigenous

communities at large.
The project was published in book form in early 2023. The book is a contemporary Bedouin archive woven by the people themselves and my opportunity to reconnect to my indigenous Bedouin ancestry by collaborating with the existing community. The book is universal as much as it is personal, it essentially questions what it means to belong, what is this indescribable connection to the land that we all long for and the indigenous experience that is filled with both sorrow and celebration. It invites readers to examine their own idea of belonging while acknowledging the community’s voice, consent and collaboration in the process.

2022

From 2007 until 2015 photographer Serena Chopra navigated through Majnu Ka Tilla, a Tibetan refugee neighbourhood in Delhi, conversing and building relationships with its inhabitants, many of who had made this place home since their exodus from Tibet in 1959. While understanding the complexities of identity, nationhood and faith with the people residing there, she always had a diary by her side. Slowly her portraits of the people found themselves on its pages and those she photographed became a part of these diaries by sharing their words and writing on the same pages.
This book is a fragment of the voices that shaped Serena’s own relationship with the community, taken from the diaries she built over the eight years of visiting Majnu Ka Tilla and has been presented as a replica of the three journals that have stayed with her since.

2022

'Torikumo' is an ambitious work where photographer Haruka Fujita captures the landscapes of her hometown Tohoku, portraying the traditional themes of natural beauty in Japanese aesthetics. Using images of sliding screens gilded with gold and silver leaf as a base, she then layered other images on top, incorporating the characteristic of blank spaces in sliding screen paintings. Containing nuances in contrast and textures, each piece was created on-the-spot and hand-printed by Fujita in the darkroom. This unique book is bound in an accordion style with all pages are connected to each other, similar to a picture scroll that is also a traditional Japanese art form.

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Another Online Pervert derives from a series of conversations between artist Brea Souders and a female online chatbot. These real-time conversations are interspersed with entries from rom Souders’ diary spanning twenty years, unfolding with a surprising and improvisational quality in combination with photographs from Souders’ archive. With this personal and provocative book, we are guided through a unique exploration of how a machine and a human can learn from one another and build a shared story from pieces of themselves.

2023

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Through 38 workshops over nine months, we’ve collectively challenged the typical media narrative of menopause, which often excludes those identifying as LGBTQ+, working class or from the global majority. We’ve talked about and created work on themes including invisibility, positivity, anxiety, trans menopause, being a glitch, language, sleep deprivation, irritability, herbal remedies and so much more.

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'My father, Atsushi Sasaki was a portrait photographer; he owned a photo studio in Onagawa, Miyagi prefecture. For Japanese people, it is an important custom to take a photo for memorial family events, for example, weddings, the birth of a new baby, graduation etc. .....

Two weeks after the tsunami, I went back to Onagawa for the first time with my sister.
70% of the town was destroyed by the massive tsunami. I couldn’t believe that many buildings were crushed, all of the houses were gone. I saw that part of our house was still standing, only the darkroom was left. -Mayumi Suzuki/ Reminders Project

Photo© 2017 Mayumi Suzuki / The Restoration Will