Perimeter's curated Reading Capsules aim to explore some of the store's key points of interest and enquiry. Each capsule, focusing on various themes, mediums and contexts in art and design publishing, features titles available for individual purchase or as a specially priced bundle.
Each of the photobooks in Capsule #15: Surveying the Subject are the result of thorough and often long-term studies of single subjects or contexts. By returning to the same characters again and again, these photographers give readers an opportunity to witness how subjects grow and change over long periods of time (or simply by repetition), while speaking to the unique relationship between those in front of the camera and those behind.
Each of these titles are available for individual purchase via the web store, or as a specially priced bundle ($799 with free domestic shipping). For more images or to purchase individual titles, follow the title link.
For three generations the Fukase family ran a photography studio in Bifuka, a small provincial town in the northern Japanese province of Hokkaido. In August 1971, at the age of 35, Masahisa Fukase returned home from Tokyo, where he had moved in the 1950s. He realised that the Fukase Photographic Studio, which his younger brother managed, combined with the growing family members, constituted the perfect subject for a series of portraits. Between 1971 and 1989, he returned regularly and used the family studio, the large-format Anthony view camera and the changing family line-up as the basis for the series. True to his style, Fukase often introduced third-party models and humorous elements to juxtapose the ineluctable reality of time passing and the dwindling family group. He continued the series through his father’s death in 1987, up until the closure of the Fukase studio due to bankruptcy in 1989, and the consequential dispersion of the family. (MACK – London)
This book presents Alessandra Sanguinetti’s return to rural Argentina to continue her intimate collaboration with Belinda and Guillermina, two cousins who, as girls, were the subjects of the first book in her ongoing series, The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of Their Dreams. In this second volume, The Illusion of An Everlasting Summer, we follow Guillermina and Belinda from ages 14 to 24 as they negotiate the fluid territory between adolescence and young adulthood. Still surrounded by the animals and rural settings of their childhood, Everlasting Summer depicts the two cousins’ everyday lives as they experience young love, pregnancy, and motherhood - all of which, perhaps inevitably, results in an ever-increasing independence from their families and each other. (MACK – London)
One title and 19 donkeys, Paul Kooiker’s statement about surrealism. A limited edition of 700 copies, with a signed and numbered print. (Art Paper Editions – Ghent)
The book’s title reveals the identity of its protagonist: Kathleen McCain Engman has been posing for her son Charlie since 2009. And yet MOM shows us a face we never really get to know: while we soon become acquainted with her freckled complexion and intense gaze, her position in the images becomes increasingly unclear. Engman first began shooting his mother because she was available, ever-willing to meet the demands of one of her children. But what began as a casual, organic process evolved into an intense collaboration. The result is neither a family album nor a filial tribute but a much deeper and far more complex interaction: one that raises questions about the limits of familiarity, the rules and boundaries of roles and representation, vulnerability and control, and what it means to look and to be seen. (Edition Patrick Frey – Zurich)
The 179 passport photos in this book, taken between 1948 and 2012 and compiled by German artist Jens Klein, were included in scholarship applications submitted to the Evangelisches Studienwerk Villigst e.V., a Protestant-run scholarship program founded in Germany in 1948. They show a cross section of the 8,000 or so people the Studienwerk awarded grants to during this period; as well as how the medium of photography has changed over the years: from black and white to colour, from elaborate studio shots to quick photo-booth pictures. In 2012 the Studienwerk introduced an online application process, bringing to an end the era of the analogue passport photo. (Spector Books – Leipzig)
Liv Liberg was 10 years old when she started photographing her four years younger sister Britt. It was a game between two sisters in which fashion, dressing up and photography were in line with each other and in which Liberg was in charge. What started as child play developed into a serious passion and obsession. The archive of images show a girl developing into a young woman, being increasingly aware of herself and the outside world. Liberg directs her sister in different settings, over a timeframe of fifteen years, mostly wearing their mother’s clothes. The work emphasizes the almost obsessive attitude that resulted in an abundance of photos. (Art Paper Editions – Ghent)
Takashi Homma – Tokyo and my Daughter
The complete edition of Takashi Homma's acclaimed 2006 homage to his two great loves: 'I love my daughter very much. I love Tokyo very much.' It reveals the connection between the graceful and intimate sequence of images depicting the girl and the city of Tokyo. The girl, captured in various stages of growing up in everyday locations, stares serenely just beyond the camera lens, unselfconscious and generally appearing more interested in the person holding the camera than the device itself: in one photograph, she peers out curiously from the backseat of a car, while in another she points her own tiny pink camera back at the photographer. Homma’s photography is imbued with a warmth and sincerity that belies his total familiarity with the subjects at hand; he documents Tokyo’s urban landscape with the same tenderness he brings to portraying the girl. (Nieves – Zurich)
Paul Knight – jump into bed with me
The seemingly conflicting qualities of intimacy and distance come to define the work of Australian-born, Berlin-based photographer and artist Paul Knight. Part of a wider, ongoing project titled Chamber Music – which documents the day-to-day life Knight has shared with his partner Peter over the course of their relationship – his first book jump into bed with me considers intimacy as a conceptual proposition. Positioning his 35mm camera on any available surface within the given environment or architecture – a mantelpiece, a log, a coffee table, or a rock at the beach – and setting a timer, Knight and his partner simply make themselves available for the camera to see what it sees. Laundry, breakfast, sex, day trips to the seaside, nights at the pub, moments of domestic calm; here, Knight eschews his diaristic gaze in the same way he loosens photography from notions of time or chronology. (Perimeter Editions – Melbourne)
Yurie Nagashima – Self-Portraits
Self-Portraits by Yurie Nagashima published by Dashwood Books charts the life of this major Japanese figure over a period of 24 years from 1992-2016 – from brazen young artist to a tender portrayal of pregnancy and motherhood.
As Marigold Warner writes in her interview with Nagashima for the British Journal of Photography, 'Reductively labelled a “girl photographer” in the 90s, Nagashima is now a leading voice in feminist photographic discourse. The publication includes a conversation with Aperture Foundation’s Lesley A. Martin, in which the curator and photographer engage in a discussion about the power of self-portraiture as a radical feminist gesture, and the shifting nature of photography and its aesthetic criterion.' (Dashwood Books – New York)