Christopher Burtscher

My Father Is The Boss
Early Photographs

“My father is the boss.” When Austrian photographer Christoph Burtscher was eight years old, in 1974, he began a school writing assignment with those words. In this two-part work, he has created a unique and engrossing photographic memoir, combining snapshots he took during the 1970s with facsimiles of school compositions. Truly from the child’s point of view, these works show the roots of the adult artist in the not-so-naïve photos and essays of young Christoph; as he wrote about his father, “He sells curtains. They are not all nice … My father has so many keys he doesn’t know which ones are which. He also sells nappies.” With a lucid essay on “The Little Photographer” by Anton Holzer.

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CLAUDIO CAMBON

Shipbreak

The unique and entangled relationship between Bangladesh ship-breakers and U.S. oil tanker S.S. Minole’s longtime crew is chronicled in this photographic essay by documentary photographer Claudio Cambon. Over 80 color and black-and-white images document the story of the merchant vessel’s last voyage, dismantling and recycling in Bangladesh in 1998—a process that signaled both an end and a beginning for two cultures. For the Americans, it meant the close of a long and productive life navigating crude oil around the world; for the Bangladeshi, an opportunity to develop jobs and income for a struggling country. The photographs speak to the ways in which the ship became a touchstone for her American shipbuilders, the seamen who worked on her for almost 40 years, the Bangladeshi ship-breakers who took the vessel apart more or less by hand and the people who incorporated the ship’s raw materials into their daily lives.

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Claudio Cambon

Shipbreak

Shipbreak tells the story of the last voyage, dismantling, and recycling of an American merchant vessel in Bangladesh in the late 1990s. Through both words and images, it describes how the ship becomes a touchstone for many groups of people across the world: from the American shipbuilders who built her in the early 1960s and the seamen who worked on her for almost four decades all the way to the Bangladeshi shipbreakers who took the vessel apart, more or less by hand, and the many people who incorporated the ship’s raw materials into their daily lives as part of their country’s effort to develop its infrastructure and economy.

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H.H. CAPOR

Verena

In the year 2000 Austrian photographer Hermann Capor began photographing his collaboration with Verena, a young woman who, shortly before she was due to take her final school exams, had to undergo a life-altering surgery. She awoke from the anesthesia to discover that her body had a long scar and a colostomy bag. At Verena’s initiative, Capor documented the course of her disease over the next three years until her recovery. Inspired by Modigliani and other role models, the artist created intimate stage settings for the young woman, addressing the discrepancy between the erotic figure and the visible signs of serious illness, transcending the taboo of gazing at physical defects and their depiction. The comprehensive documentation is accompanied by diary-like sequences of entries penned by both the protagonist herself and the artist. A handsome production and an elegant, if voyeuristic, por- trayal of a young woman with a life-changing illness.

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Luciano Castelli

Self-Portrait 1973-1986

When the painter Luciano Castelli began posing for the camera in the early 1970s, he adopted a variety of roles, acting out every conceivable facet of himself. In utter disregard of gender distinctions, he variously transformed himself into an androgynous mythical creature and a glam rock diva. His virtuoso, surreal self-portraits, so far published only in limited form, are of an undiminished vibrancy in their playful eroticism and darkly narrative thrust. They reveal a hitherto underrated aspect of Castelli’s ouevre, which now, several decades later, could well be seen in an entirely new light. Very much in the spirit of the French psychoanalyst and art critic Jean-Michel Ribettes, who already in 2001 read Castelli‘s expressive theatricality as a timeless phenomenon and critique of a puritan society: “Castelli‘s expressive theatricality is there to protest at the confusion of a gregarious, prudish, vilely mercantile period.”

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CATHERINE CERESOLE

Beauty Lies in the Eye

An exciting and atmospheric photographic document of the New York punk, no-wave and avant-garde music scene during its heyday. With her keen eye for drama, Catherine Ceresole captures them all on black-and-white film: David Byrne, John Zorn, Sonic Youth, The Beastie Boys, Nick Cave, Black Flag, Lou Reed, Lydia Lunch, Glenn Branca, Christian Marclay and others. Additional photographs from the 1990s through 2013, an essay on the period, and conversations between Catherine Ceresole, Emmanuel Grandjean, Nicolas Ceresole and Francis Baudevin.

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PHIL CHANG

Four Over One

An unusual artist’s book from Los Angeles-based artist Phil Chang explores ideas of economy and obsolescence. Created with designer Jonathan Maghen, this oversized, hard-cover volume is structured around Chang’s interest in how new outcomes arise from an antagonism between perceived and actual forms of value. The photographs that appear in the book were created using expired photographic materials exposed by an “out of date” archival book scanner – some observers might say they were all blank. Through a sparse display of color, black and white, and half-tone photographs, in conjunction with a restrained typographic treatment – that is, no words at all – the artist considers the roles of abstraction, methods of art production, rapidly changing technology and modes of distribution in our contemporary culture.

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Chinese Portraits

Diane Droin-Michaud, Anais Martane, Jacques Penhrin

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CIRCUS

The Photographs of Frederick W. Glasier

Peter Kayafas and Deborah Walk

The circus is in town! This exciting new volume showcases the thrilling circus photography of the American photographer Frederick W. Glasier, who photographed the circus during its 1890-1925 heyday. Now considered as masterful a chronicler of time and place as his contemporaries Atget and Sander, Glasier made photos which bring the three-ring pageant of the circus to life with an irresistible narrative rhythm. With 73 gloriously reproduced images from the 1,700 glass plate negatives from the collections of the John & Mable Ringling Museum of Art at Florida State University, informative anecdotal captions by the circus historian (and co-editor of this volume) Deborah Walk, and a fascinating essay by Luc Sante.

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The Clown and the Show Girl

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