Compiled by DOUG Spowart & VICTORIA Cooper

This list is the fourth year in which we asked representatives of the Australian and New Zealand photobook discipline to nominate photobooks that were published in 2022.

Once again we have continued to use the term ‘Selected’ as this compilation does not attempt to present a definitive selection of the ‘Best’ photobooks published but rather a list that represents a view of members the Antipodean photobook discipline who have responded to our invitation.

This list continues to give an opportunity for these Australian and New Zealand photobooks, and the stories that they contain, a wider recognition in the larger world of photobooks.

.

THIS YEAR’S LIST  INCLUDES BOOKS BY: Tim Veling, Odette England, Anton Maurer,  Ying Ang, David Cook and Wendy Catlin.

.

.

.ENTOURAGE

BOOK TITLE: Entourage – AKA Physical Distance Theory or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Videogames

AUTHOR: Tim J. Veling

DESIGNER/PUBLISHER: Self

.

ABSTRACT – From the author’s essay: My initial intentions for this booklet were not so grandiose and serious. After having exhibitions and projects cancelled. I simply wanted to gather some recent images together and send a kind of Christmas calling card out to people I admire and care about, or might have come in contact with had it not been for travel and social restrictions. Safe to say things spiralled out of control pretty quickly. I ended up editing together two otherwise disparate bodies of work-in-progress. printing fifty copies and writing some kind of convoluted mini-essay. This booklet is not intended as the definitive presentation of this work as it’s all part of an ongoing, multi-faceted project that has no end in sight. I do, however, feel it a fitting time to send it out into the world, in the hope it might build some (Sam) bridges. At the very least, with the tenth anniversary of the Christchurch earthquakes rapidly approaching, it might contribute something of worth to the discussion around how far, or not, the city has come.

 .

NOMINATED BY ALLAN McDONALD

At first glance a photographic record of the rebuilt of quake damaged Christchurch, this reading doesn’t quite add up. The images transition between the hard edged trope of so much documentary photography towards images that have a more fractal reality. Sometimes the screen based character appears to be digital noise and probably is, and other times what you initially thought was pixel blocking is actually the fabric of the real world. The screens and nets of capitalised urban construction rendered hi-res.

With the inclusion of a beautifully produced text the project takes on other, more personalised dimensions. Veiling describes the backdrop to the project which is not only the rebuild of his beloved city but also the covid lockdowns of 20 through 21 and the mental emotional schisms they created.

In this discombobulated state he describes an experience of finding an image, a doppelganger of himself in the idealized and corporate world of the ubiquitous billboards everywhere selling the rebuild. This find sets off a chain of questions regarding his identification with the city he used to call home and the photography an attempt in his words to ‘recalibrate myself in relation to it’.

..

OTHER INFORMATION ABOUT THE BOOK:

FORMAT: Codex, full colour book, 21.0 × 29.7cm + 12pp text insert, 18.0 × 23.5cm and Munken Print (text insert)

NUMBER OF PAGES:  60

EDITION:  Artists Book edition of 50

PRINTING TECHNOLOGY: Ricoh Digital Press on Silk Matt (photographs)

PRICE:  The physical book is Sold Out – See online edition link below

.

SEE A DIGITAL VERSION OF THE BOOK on ISSUU: HERE

READ THE ESSAY on ISSUU: HERE

ENDEAVOUR

 

BOOK TITLE: Endeavour

AUTHOR: Anton Maurer  (NZ)

PUBLISHER: Bad News Books

DESIGNER: Thomas Johnson

ABSTRACT – From the publisher’s website:  Anton Maurer’s Endeavour is a series visualising the impacts of capitalism and colonisation on Aotearoa. Made from 2012–2017 the works challenge viewers to question their perception of this land and the narratives most commonly associated with it.

.

NOMINATED BY DAVID COWLARD

Anton Maurer’s Endeavour is a book that focusses on land use. His photographs have a formal organization which allows a for sustained view of everything from suburban housing and scrap yards through to tourist sites and extraction industries. The result is a counter positional book that unravels the typical and picturesque.

There is also a sense of Maurer working through the images, not only to show how things are within the late-capitalist landscapes of Aotearoa, but his own personal stock taking of the impact of a land that is bound in the problematics of a colonial past.

..

.

OTHER INFORMATION ABOUT THE BOOK:

FORMAT: Codex, 20.0 x 25.0 cm upright, case-bound, saddle-stitched printed hard cover, 92 pages, 35 plates

THIS EDITION:  100

PRINTING TECHNOLOGY: Digital press

Previous Edition:  A sold out limited print run of 15 books of the same title was self-published in 2013

PRICE: NZ $ 75.00

.

PURCHASING INFORMATION: HERE

A REVIEW by David Eggleton, PhotoForum: HERE

DIARY CHARACTER

.

BOOK TITLE: Diary Character

AUTHOR: Odette England   (UK/Au/USA)

PUBLISHED BY: Saint Lucy Books

ABSTRACT – From the Saint Lucy Books website:  Dairy Character is a loose chronicle of Odette England’s experience growing up on a rural dairy farm in southern Australia. Combining recent photographs, family snapshots, archival images, and autobiographical short stories, England examines the male-dominant farming community in which she was raised and the gendered repression that rural females experience. Her images and texts evoke a girl introduced to reproductive labor at an early age. A girl who wanted a pink room. A girl fenced in by interconnecting forms of vulnerability. A girl who had a cow named after her.

.

NOMINATED BY HARRIET TARBUCK

Dairy Character is set in a male dominated world of dairy farming and yet it is the female energy that flows through the pages of this book, and in fact beautiful contradictions such as this, that makes this book so intriguing to move through.

The pastel colors, the pinks and greys calm the heavier subject matter of England’s story. The sturdiness of the book itself, with its textured cover and satisfying blunt edges sit heavy in your hands and creates a further intimacy that the book already exudes. As you move through the imagery that builds up such a sense of place and nostalgia, the captivating amount of text in the middle adds layers and knowledge of what seems like this very distant and yet very real world.

In a delicately measured way, England displays complex feelings of growing up in a place where the men and women have such specific gender defining roles, as well as such a love and longing for her childhood home.

.

OTHER INFORMATION ABOUT THE BOOK:

FORMAT: Codex, 22.7 × 17.0 cm, hardcover, 188 pages.

ISBN: 978-0-578-87587-3

PRICE: USD$ 35.00

.

ODETTE ENGLAND exhibition at CCP in Melbourne: HERE

BUY THE BOOK: HERE

.

NIGHTSHADE

BOOK TITLE: Nightshade

AUTHOR: Wendy Catlin

DESIGN: Kim Mumm Hansen

PUBLISHER: M.33

.

ABSTRACT – From the M.33 website: Nightshade is a restrained and poetic exploration of a particularly difficult and confronting subject – domestic violence and coercive control. Wendy Catling examines her mother’s experiences during her 20-year relationship with Catling’s father.

The publication which traverses the many addresses lived at by the artist and her parents and uses a mixture of archival and contemporary imagery interspersed with brief snatches of memories related by Catling’s mother, has been sensitively designed by Kim Mumm Hansen to form a darkly moving and compelling personal narrative with universal resonance.

NOMINATED BY  MELISSA MILES

This delicate balance of silences, images and words speak to some of the complexities of speaking truth to experience. They embody the meaning of bearing witness as both seeing and testifying to what is seen.

You can buy this book simply because it is a beautiful book, and an example of what can only be said and done in photobook form. The bonus is that it provides a safe place to pause and think – a prompt to talk about family violence and coercive control, and bring it to light in a way that doesn’t cause further shame or shock.

.

OTHER INFORMATION ABOUT THE BOOK:

FORMAT: Codex, 28 x 21 cm, exposed section sewn, soft cover

NUMBER OF PAGES:  192pp

EDITION:  150

PRINTING TECHNOLOGY: Offset printed

ISBN: 978-0-6482588-5-8

PRICE: A$50 (plus GST in Australia)

BUY THE BOOK: HERE

MORE INFORMATION ABOUT WENDY CATLING: https://wendycatling.cargo.site/Home

.

BLEDISLOE & JELLICOE

BOOK TITLE: Bledisloe & Jellicoe

AUTHOR: David Cook  (NZ)

PUBLISHER:  Rim Books with the support of PhotoForum Inc.

ABSTRACT – from the publisher: When David Cook moved to Hamilton East, he was drawn to the colourful and creative lives of his neighbours. With camera in hand, he explored everything from front-yard mechanics to Sunday roasts, creating an intimate documentary of a State Housing suburb in the 1990s, moments before gentrification set in. In this energetic photobook, we look back twenty-five years to see burgeoning issues of relevance today: housing, bi-cultural relations, social welfare, and freshwater quality, all brought to us through the lens of daily life.

.

NOMINATED BY HARRY CULY

Bacon frying in a greasy pan, a circular saw grinding through the roof of a car, a man whistling to his song birds, locals bombing into the river, Public Enemy blaring out of tinny speakers from the neighbours garage, fireworks exploding into the suburban night sky. Photography is a still and silent medium, so it’s a wonder that David Cook has squeezed so much sound and life into the photographs in Jellicoe & Bledisloe.

There has been a recent rise in photographers mining their archives to produce exciting contemporary photobooks. Working in this vein, David Cook has created a joyous book that brings to life his old neighbourhood and community in vivid colour, proving you don’t need to travel to far-flung places to make interesting and energetic pictures, that still manage to address issues that are hugely relevant to today’s world.

.

OTHER INFORMATION ABOUT THE BOOK:

FORMAT: Codex 24.5 x 20.0cm, hard cover

NUMBER OF PAGES: 108 pages
EDITION: 750
PRINTING TECHNOLOGY: Offset
SPECIAL FEATURES: Includes two foldouts and a text by David Cook.

ISBN: 978-0-9951184-8-5
ISSN: 0111-0411

PRICE:  NZD$ 50.00

BUY THE BOOK: HERE

.

THE QUICKENING: A MEMOIR ON MATRESCENCE

A note about this nomination – The nominator has requested consideration of this book for the 2022 year.  Though The Quickening was published in the previous year it was not until the early part of 2022 that the book was locally launched at an event in Naarm/Melbourne.

BOOK TITLE: The Quickening: A Memoir on Matrescence

AUTHOR: Ying Ang  (Au)

PUBLISHER: Self-published

IMAGES + TEXTS: Ying Ang

EDIT: Ying Ang + Teun van der Heijden

CONCEPT + DESIGN: Heijdens Karwei, Amsterdam

TEXT EDITORS: Ashe Davenport + Jessica Friedmann

PRINTER: Joss Morree Fine Books, Netherlands

BINDING: Fopma Wier

.

ABSTRACT from the author’s website:  The Quickening explores the transformation and lived experience of a woman in her motherhood/matrescence and postpartum depression/anxiety. The work interrogates the under-represented transition of biological, psychological and social identity during a complex and yet ubiquitous phase of life.

The Quickening details the claustrophobia, myopia, paradoxical loneliness and luminance of new motherhood and the postpartum period.

.

NOMINATED BY HELEN FRAJMAN

Before writing these words I’ve just re-read The Quickening. My mind is filled with the images and words that are presented to me through the turning of the book’s pages. In my reading I enter the intimate space of the author’s deeply personal life experience. I observe, I feel, I become emotionally involved in the self-reflection that Ying Ang discloses in the work.

The book is Ang’s introspective view of the often hidden or invisible physical, psychological and emotional aspects of childbirth and rearing from the mother’s perspective as defined by the term matrescence. The book is a complex vessel for telling this story through texts; images of all origins and contents are coalesced by a thoughtful and considered design process. The Quickening discloses Ang’s transition into motherhood with all the intensity and rawness of emotions ranging from melancholy to warmth, despondency to joy.

As I close the book and place it on the table before me, it calls me to pick it up again and continue my read – there is still so much more to understand and to empathise with Ying Ang in what she has shared through The Quickening.

OTHER INFORMATION ABOUT THE BOOK:

FORMAT: Codex, 22.0  x 28.0 cm, softcover with linen sleeve French fold with Japanese stab stitch, combination of offset and riso print on various uncoated papers

PAGES: 90 pages with 116 images

PRINTING TECHNOLOGY: Offset / Riso

SPECIAL FEATURES: Riso and offset printed, hand stitched as a uniquely handmade book

ISBN: 978-0-646-83323-1

PRICE: Both Special Editions with Collector Prints SOLD OUT
US$180 // *150 Euros // *AU$230 inc. postage
*indicative exchange rate

First Edition SOLD OUT – though DISTRIBUTORS may have copies available
US$120 // *100 Euros // *AU$155 inc. postage
*indicative exchange rate

.

A COMMENTARY BY DANIEL BOEKER-SMITH: Lensculture Magazine

ENQUIRE ABOUT THE BOOK: HERE

*Shortlisted for the 2020 Lucie Foundation Prototype Book Prize, the Perimeter x PHOTO2021 International Book Prize and awarded with the silver award for the 2020 BIFA Documentary Photo Book Prize, an Honorable Mention for the Tokyo International Foto Awards, Official Selection for the London International Creative Competition 2020, a winner of the Belfast Photo Festival 2021, bronze medal for the Documentary Book Prize at the 2021 Moscow International Foto Awards and Honorable Mention at the PX3 Paris Photo AwardS

.

ABOUT THE 2022 BEST PHOTOBOOK NOMINATORS

In late 2022 we contacted key contributors to the photobook discipline in New Zealand and Australia for their Selected Book nominations. Their responses culminate with the publishing of this Blog post.

We thank the supporters of this initiative and look forward to, at the end of this year – calling again for nominations for ANZ photobooks published in 2023.

.

Our 2022 nominators

.

Dr MELISSA MILES

Who/what I do: Dr Melissa Miles is a Professor in the Art History and Theory Program, Monash University Art Design and Architecture in Naarm/Melbourne.

.

.

HARRIET TARBUCK

Who/what I do: Harriet Tarbuck is a photographic artist, curator and educator. Through her work, she specialises in the areas of portraiture and documentary photography. While living in Naarm / Melbourne, Harriet has spent her time fostering inclusive and diverse community engagement projects. She is a Co-Creative Director behind Photo Collective, an organisation dedicated to finding meaning and knowledge through photography. Photo Collective operates Australian Photography Awards, Stories and Australian Photobook Awards, alongside producing a biannual publication (Photo Collective Magazine), photobook publications, commissioned articles, exhibitions, public talks and educational programs.

.

DAVID COWLARD

David Cowlard is Programme Leader for Photo Media at Whitecliffe in Auckland and is also the Co-Director of PhotoForum NZ.

.

HARRY CULY

Who/what I do: Born in Wellington 1986, Harry holds a Master of Fine Arts from Massey University. He is an artist, and book designer based in Pōneke. Harry is represented by Jhana Millers Gallery and also runs the small publishing company Bad News Books. In 2021 he received an Arts Foundation Laureate award receiving the Marti Friedlander Photographic Award.

.

.

HELEN FRAJMAN

Who/what I do: Helen Frajman is an independent editor and curator of photography and since 1994 the Director and Publisher at M.33, a small arts business based in Naarm/Melbourne.

.

.

ALLAN McDONALD

Who/what I do: Allan McDonald is a lecturer in photography at Unitec, Te Whare Wānanga o Wairaka in Auckland. He works with an archive of images spanning more than 50 years from which he curates narratives of social history and place. These sometimes appear as small publications, most recently The Holding 2020. Another, Carbon Empire won the New Zealand Photobook of the Year Award in 2017. He is represented by the Anna Miles Gallery in Auckland

.

.

DOUG SPOWART

Who/what I do: Dr Doug Spowart’s research on Australian and New Zealand Photobooks was featured at the Vienna Photobook Festival and he was commissioned by TATE Britain to select a collection of ANZ photobooks. His photobooks/artists books are in major rare books and artists’ book library collections in Australia and overseas. Spowart’s PhD research dealt with self-publishing in the digital age with subequent work addressing the co-existence/separateness of the artists’ book and the photobook.

He is the founder of The Antipodean Photobook social entities.

I live and work on Bpangerang Country in Benalla, Victoria

.

.

.PLEASE – Let us know about your experience in viewing this page…

UNTIL NEXT YEAR ……

.

.

.