Mack Books

Veramente by Guido Guidi

7 May 2020 in Books Comment

Veramente encompasses Italian photographer Guido Guidi’s entire oeuvre, bringing together excerpts of his series from 1959 to the present day to illuminate the distinctive photographic language he has forged over a 40-year career.

Guidi, a pioneer of new Italian landscape photography, was influenced by architectural history, neorealist Italian film, and conceptual art. Using photography as a process and an experience of understanding, Guidi’s body of work frames a visual discourse that revolves around what it means to see, or what it may mean to offer up an image.

Veramente is published to accompany a touring exhibition of the same name opening at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in January 2014, and then moving to Huis Marseille Museum voor Fotografie, Amsterdam in June and the Museo d’Arte della Città, Ravenna in October.

Guido Guidi was born in Cesena, Italy, in 1941. He studied in Venice at the University Institute of Architecture (now IUAV), where he followed the courses of Bruno Zevi, Carlo Scarpa and Mario De Luigi, and at the Advanced Course in Industrial Design with Italo Zannier and Luigi Veronesi.

Paperback with flaps
172 pages
24 x 32 cm
Publication date: January 2014

Mack Books

Thought Pieces: 1970s Photographs by Lew Thomas, Donna-Lee Phillips, and Hal Fischer

23 April 2020 in Books Comment

Thought Pieces: 1970s Photographs by Lew Thomas, Donna-Lee Phillips, and Hal Fischer
Erin O’Toole (ed.)

In the early 1970s, Lew Thomas set out to disrupt photography in San Francisco. Tired of the mystical thinking and emotionalism that had underscored Bay Area photography since the 1940s, Thomas pursued a photographic practice grounded in ideas gleaned from conceptual art and Structuralist philosophy. A cohort of other photographers, including Donna-Lee Phillips and Hal Fischer, embraced Thomas’ mission, joining him in what became known as the ‘Photography and Language’ movement, named after a book and group exhibition of the same title produced by Thomas in 1976.

Thomas, Phillips and Fischer were all extremely active in the mid to late 1970s. In addition to making their own artwork, they published essays, reviewed shows and organized exhibitions. Under the name NFS Press, Thomas published a number of books designed by Phillips, including Structural(ism) and Photography (1978), which featured Thomas’ work; Eros and Photography (1977), which was edited by Phillips, and two books of Fischer’s work: Gay Semiotics (1978) and 18th Near Castro Street x 24 (1979).

Published in conjunction with an exhibition featuring photographs by these three artists that will be on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art January 4 – August 9, 2020, this volume assesses their work, their relationship to one another and their place in the history of photography in the 1970s.

Paperback
23 x 30.5 cm
216 pages
ISBN 978-1-912339-63-1
April 2020

Mack Books

I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating — Alec Soth

17 March 2019 in Books Comment

I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating
Alec Soth

Embossed linen hardback
84 pages, 30 x 33.5cm
Interview with Alec Soth by Hanya Yanagihara

Publication date: March 2019
North American orders will ship from 18/03/19.

ISBN: 978-1-912339-31-0

Coincides with four solo exhibitions in New York, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and Berlin.

Taking its name from a line in the Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Gray Room,” Alec Soth’s latest book is a lyrical exploration of the limitations of photographic representation. While these large-format color photographs are made all over the world, they aren’t about any particular place or population. By a process of intimate and often extended engagement, Soth’s portraits and images of his subject’s surroundings involve an enquiry into the extent to which a photographic likeness can depict more than the outer surface of an individual, and perhaps even plumb the depths of something unknowable about both the sitter and the photographer.

“After the publication of my last book about social life in America, Songbook, and a retrospective of my four, large scale American projects, Gathered Leaves, I went through a long period of rethinking my creative process. For over a year I stopped traveling and photographing people. I barely took any pictures at all.

When I returned to photography, I wanted to strip the medium down to its primary elements. Rather than trying to make some sort of epic narrative about America, I wanted to simply spend time looking at other people and, hopefully, briefly glimpse their interior life.

In order to try and access these lives, I made all of the photographs in interior spaces. While these rooms often exist in far-flung places, it’s only to emphasize that these pictures aren’t about any place in particular. Whether a picture is made in Odessa or Minneapolis, my goal was the same: to simply spend time in the presence of another beating heart.” – Alec Soth

Mack Books

The Island Position — John Lehr

3 March 2019 in Books Comment

The Island Position
John Lehr

Swiss bound paperback with flaps
22 x 29 cm
Includes story by George Saunders
Publication date: March 2019
ISBN: 978-1-912339-32-7

The “Island Position” is an advertising term that describes the premium position of an advertisement surrounded solely by editorial content. In The Island Position, John Lehr explores the facades of American commercial spaces that are threatened by the emergence of e-commerce. In a rush to remain relevant, storeowners emblazon their windows and walls with anything that will grab attention: tessellations of quick-fading ads, floor-to-ceiling decals of fanned money or flowing hair, haphazard product displays, and desperate, hand-scrawled invitations. They repaint, renovate, rebrand, and rearrange, gestures which point to the desires and anxieties of people who are being left behind as our thumbs lead us into the new economy. The work presents a turning point in our cultural landscape: the transition from a physical culture to a virtual one.

Masquerading as a typology of storefronts, the surfaces in The Island Position embody something unseen: the people who constructed them. The signage is not simply an appeal to consumption, but a typography of emotion: vulnerability, ingenuity, distress, and hope—the language of capitalism as a form of public address. Lehr is not interested in what is for sale. He is interested in what is at stake.

Mack Books

Public Matters — Janet Delaney

12 December 2018 in Books Comment

Public Matters
Janet Delaney

OTA bound paperback with jacket
96 pages
21.5 x 28 cm

Publication date: September 2018
ISBN: 978-1-912339-02-0

Capturing the spirit of protest and parade, Public Matters brings together photographs made by Janet Delaney in Reagan-era San Francisco. At this turbulent time in the mid eighties, Delaney was living in the primarily Latino neighbourhood of the Mission District. She would spend the weekends photographing public gatherings, from the annual Cinco de Mayo parade, to the Peace, Jobs and Justice marches, which rallied against the U.S. invasion of Nicaragua. If political governance was regressing, the West Coast city was a place where, as Delaney remembers, ‘progressive ideas would always be upheld.’ Celebrating multiculturalism and collective struggles for social justice, Public Matters surfaces at a juncture when the message of building bridges is needed now more than ever.

In the vintage glow of her sun-drenched images, Delaney leads us in and out of crowds – among demonstrators, fair-goers, cross-dressers, union organisers, beauty pageants, dancers, salesmen, mothers, kids, and market punters – searching for as many intimate moments as she found collective voices. Fearlessly upbeat, her photographs nevertheless intimate a time when, as Delaney recollects, people ‘were reeling from the shift to a conservative government. The demands of the 1960s were addressed in the 70s: the end of the Vietnam war, women’s rights, environmental issues, gay rights, to name a few. Then when Reagan was elected all this came to a halt.’ And as soon as the streets were filled with placards – ‘babies are for loving, not for bombing’; ‘Hatred can never cure the disease of fear, only love can do that’ – Delaney was there, in the middle of the maelstrom, making pictures of public matters.

Mack Books

Showcaller — Talia Chetrit

11 December 2018 in Books Comment

Showcaller
Talia Chetrit

Publication date: January 2019

Showcaller is the first book exploring the work of emerging artist Talia Chetrit. It brings together a broad range of her work made between 1994 and 2018 and is linked to a retrospective museum exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein in early 2018. The title Showcaller is a theatrical term which references the performative aspects of Chetrit’s work, the power dynamic between subject and photographer, and, ultimately, between the photographer and her audience.

The earliest works included were made when Chetrit was a teenager and she adroitly collapses and shuffles images from across 24 years and neutralizes the space between family portraits, teenage friends, intimate sex pictures, self-portraits, staged murder pictures, still-lives, and street photographs, to name just a few of the subjects and genres her work adopts. Regardless of the subject matter or the technique with which the image is made, her focus lies on researching and unveiling the basic social, conceptual, and technical conditions of the genre of photography. Her work is imbued with a desire to control the physical and historical limitations of the camera, to trace its manipulative potential, and to question the relationship between photographer and subject.

Mack Books