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The Mennonites
‘In 1989, I discovered them in my own back yard, landhungry and dirt poor. They came looking for work in the vegetable fields and fruit orchards of Lambton, Essex, Kent and Haldimand-Norfolk Counties. I liked them a lot because they seemed otherworldly and therefore completely vulnerable in a society in which they did not belong and for which they were not prepared. Because I liked them, they liked me, and although photography was forbidden, they let me photograph them. That’s all there was to it.’
Larry Towell photographed the Old Colony Mennonites in rural Ontario and Mexico between 1990 and 1999. The resulting black and white photographs—accompanied by an extensive text drawn from diary notes and ‘the silt of the memory’—formed Towell’s landmark book, The Mennonites, first published in 2000. This revised and updated second edition revisits the project and includes 40 previously unpublished photographs.
Signed by Larry Towell.
Cherry Blossom
Bruce Gilden first set foot in Japan in 1995. On this trip, the first of several, he explored a hidden side of a country that had long fascinated him; from Tokyo to Osaka, he uncovered a Japan that is little-known to Westerners and captured it in his own inimitable photographic style.
In Bruce Gilden: Cherry Blossom, Gilden tells the story of these travels and the ties he maintains with Japan in a rare introductory text. Every photograph portrays a close and powerful encounter. There are no cherry blossom trees or geishas on these pages; Gilden’s camera points toward the darker sides of Japanese life—the gangsters, the dispossessed, and people experiencing homelessness. As ever, the Magnum photographer’s work is tough and unflinching, his portrait of Japanese society unconventional and compelling.
The stories told alongside these photographs—thirty-four of which are published here for the first time—create a book that’s hard to forget.
Signed by Bruce Gilden.
Songbook
Known for his haunting portraits of solitary Americans in Sleeping by the Mississippi and Broken Manual, Alec Soth has recently turned his lens toward community life in the country. To aid in his search, Soth assumed the increasingly obsolescent role of community newspaper reporter. From 2012-2014, Soth traveled state by state while working on his self-published newspaper, The LBM Dispatch, as well as on assignment for the New York Times and others. From upstate New York to Silicon Valley, Soth attended hundreds of meetings, dances, festivals and communal gatherings in search of human interaction in an era of virtual social networks. With Songbook, Soth has stripped these pictures of their news context in order to highlight the longing for connection at their root. Fragmentary, funny and sad, Songbook is a depiction of the tension between American individualism and the desire to be united.
Signed by Alec Soth.
