shashasha 写々者

"Pelči Manor" by Sarah Walker
36 pages, 30.5 x 20cm, Unbound softcover with elastic cord, Edition of 250, 2019

Shot over three days in the attic of Pelči Manor – a grand,19th-century, art nouveau structure in the small Latvian town of Kuldīga – the latest book by young Australian photographer Sarah Walker offers an ominous, curious and claustrophobic vantage on this historically loaded building. The site where Latvia ceded independence to Nazi occupation during World War II, today the building is used as a school for disabled children.

"Tabriz to Shiraz" by Sarah Pannell
64 pages, 27 x 21.5cm, Singer-sewn with hardcover, Edition of 600, 2019

"Tabriz to Shiraz" is the debut book project by Melbourne-based photographer Sarah Pannell. The publication draws on a vibrant series of photographs taken during her travels through Iran in 2016 and 2017, which saw her navigate vast stretches of the country. On her first visit, she travelled from the capital, Tehran, north to Qazvin and west to Tabriz, south to Isfahan and Shiraz, and east to Kerman and Yazd, while on her second trip she explored regions such as the Gilan Province, which borders the Caspian Sea, and Kurdistan in the mountainous region bordering Iraq.

"Footnotes, backgrounds, sheds" by Hugh Strange, Max Creasy & Elizabeth Hatz
72 pages, 29 x 24 cm, Saddle stitch with dust jacket, 2018

It is the seemingly peripheral details and gestures that come to anchor this collection of images. Like the building they document, these photographs of the Drawing Matter Archive at the working Shatwell Farm in Somerset, UK, find their bearings in the backgrounds, the contextual minutiae and the footnotes. Taking the form of a three-way conversation between the Archive’s architect, Hugh Strange, Norwegian-Australian photographer Max Creasy, and Swedish academic, architect and writer Elizabeth Hatz, this book not only offers a subtly poetic and expansive vantage on the Archive, the collection it houses and its place in the surrounding farm, but also forwards a wider précis on the built form; one in which architecture is layered, living and lived.

"Variations for Troubled Hands" by Steve Carr ＊角若干傷み有り＊
28 pages, 21 x 14.8 cm, Perfect bound softcover, Edition of 700, 2017

Leveraging the long history of hands in art and film – from the fetishistic symbolism of Surrealists Man Ray, Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel, to the nonchalant minimalism of choreographer and experimental filmmaker Yvonne Rainer – prominent New Zealand artist Steve Carr's Variations for Troubled Hands lifts its title from an imagined technical manual for ballerinas. Featuring more than 200 photographs of Cadence – a teenage ballet prodigy apprenticed to the Royal New Zealand Ballet – Carr's debut book presents a serial composition in 12 parts, choreographed and performed by fingers, forearms, tendons, palms, wrists and thumbs. At once an interactive object and a performance space, Variations for Troubled Hands manifests the dynamics of movement, and invites us to dance with it.

"Into Dust" by James Tunks
44 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm, Saddle stitched softcover, Edition of 300, 2017

Photography represents a mode of conceptual, material and historical enquiry for Melbourne-born, Frankfurt-based artist James Tunks. An expansion from his 2017 solo exhibition Elsewhere at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (Melbourne), his debut book Into Dust sees Tunks construct fake astronomical photographs using found and accumulated materials – crushed and pulverised to mimic interstellar nebular. While these sweeping vistas are immersive and engulfing in their aesthetic scope, their associated lists of materials come to form fascinating abstract texts, which echo the history of astrophotography and its pioneers (Edwin Hubble and EE Barnard among them) as adroitly as they tease out evidence of Tunks' day-to-day. As such, Into Dust forges an ode to the genre and sketches an indirect self-portrait in the same breath.