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.
As our passports continue gathering dust, we look to the photobook to See the World! Capsule #14 collects some of our favourite photography titles that capture the essence of different locations from around the globe – exploring the mood, the architecture, the landscape or the people, often through unfamiliar eyes. Each photobook in this collection embodies the curious spirit of the traveller in vastly different ways.
Each of these titles are available for individual purchase via the web store, or as a specially priced bundle ($595 with free domestic shipping). For more images or to purchase individual titles, follow the title link.
Xiaoxiao Xu – Watering my Horse by a Spring at the Foot of the Long Wall
Xiaoxiao Xu embarks on a journey of 25,000 kilometres to document the lives of the people along the foot of the Great Wall of China. Contrary to popular belief, the wall is not a single, continuous structure, but rather a collection of walls and fortifications built during various Chinese dynasties. Her images show that, despite its decline in some of these parts, a lively relationship remains between the wall and local populations who honour and protect it. In the process, Xu attempts to discover the impact of fast-growing China on this historic site. The villages along the Great Wall still live by ancient traditions, but these are gradually disappearing. She captures this visual transformation. (The Eriskay Connection)
In Plain Air is a lyrical portrait of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park as seen through Irina Rozovsky’s studies of its visitors, each seeking escape from the din of the city beyond. The seed of the idea for the work was planted ten years ago when Rozovsky took a small motorboat around the park’s southern lake. Floating by the tree-lined shore, she saw what first felt like a mirage — families, lovers, friends, a multitude of cultures and ethnicities, all sharing the same land and moment. The quintessential American melting pot that stretched like a panorama in this equalising space was a visible reality. (MACK)
Veronika Spierenburg – Oya-ishi — Oya Stone
For three months, Veronika Spierenburg moved from Japan’s south to it’s north. Photography has become an obsession in Japan where only a few unspoiled spots can be found. From this, Spierenburg created an artist’s book which shows the richness of textures, artifacts, traditional as well as modern architecture in an idiosyncratic mood. The photographs shed light on how Japanese culture manifests itself in its craftsmanship. (Art Paper Editions)
Emmanuelle Andrianjafy – Nothing's in Vain
In 2011, Malagasy photographer Emmanuelle Andrianjafy arrived in the port city of Dakar, situated on the westernmost African coast, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. Nothing’s in Vain is Adrianjafy’s response to the experience of uprooting to the Senegalese capital, a city as vibrant as it is disorientating. Embracing the chaos of an unfamiliar world, she takes us on an exploratory journey through a metropolis in constant flux between construction and deconstruction. The sequence of images careens between street scenes, portraits, landscapes, and close-up details, recreating her fluctuating experience of the multiple faces of the city. (MACK)
Georg Gatsas – Signal the Future
Swiss-based photographer Georg Gatsas' Signal The Future unpacks many layers of an important musical era in London. Through portraits, candid shots of clubbers, and architectural investigations of the city, a narrative unfolds of how music both shapes and is shaped by its immediate urban environment. Dating from 2008 – shortly after the British club phenomenon of dubstep received international acclaim – we’re introduced to a music scene in the flush of fame. Ethnically diverse, largely working class, surprisingly close-knit, and a world apart from the country’s acclaimed indie and guitar rock history, the people in this book are united by the city and their love of the music. (Loose Joints)
David Rothenberg – Roosevelt Station
Drawing on a series of photographs made between 2019 and 2020 in the Jackson Heights–Roosevelt Avenue/74th Street train station in Queens, New York, Roosevelt Station proves at once mundane and almost ethereal in its tenor. Here, New York photographer David Rothenberg captures his subjects – commuters, airport-bound travellers, panhandlers, missionaries and others – awash in the radiant, cathedral-like light of the station’s concourse, these otherwise candid, rush-hour images assuming an otherworldly theatrical guise. (Perimeter Editions)
Zin Taylor – Ambient Visions of a Dot
In Zin Taylor’s Ambient Visions of a Dot, the artist records a day spent walking around the coastal village of Shimoda, Japan. Captured in black and white, using an old Sony Cyber-shot camera, the high contrast photographs explore a landscape rich with allegorical content. As a process of creation Taylor uses the camera as a skillful travel companion, one that is particularly adept at teasing out the sublimated influences embedded within this bucolic environment. The resulting images, along with a text written by the artist, address the abstract, surreal, uncanny, and sometimes hallucinogenic transformations of one thing into another. A series of ambient visions that document a landscape’s whimsical metamorphosis into a language of chromatic form. (Art Paper Editions)
Giovanna Silva captured the long gone glory of Palmyra, a legendary hotel in Baalbek, Lebanon. She leads us through old and charming rooms that breathe out the once decadent soul of the hotel. Pale colours, wall cracks, the smell of old wooden furniture and Persian rugs take you on a journey into the past. At the same time, we feel the current presence of war and decay. Out of the windows of the Palmyra one can see the ruins of the ancient Roman temple of Heliopolis. For this reason lots of tourists and academics visited the hotel since its opening in 1874. The hotel has not closed for a day since that time. Its popularity attracted international figures such as Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Jean Cocteau and Charles de Gaulle, but due to impact of the war on the border with Syria and an economic depression in general, the hotel now stands empty. (Art Paper Editions)
Mike Slack – Walking in Place 2: Berlin
In Walking in Place 2: Berlin, Los Angeles-based photographer Mike Slack offers a meditative, if not psychic, expansion on the threads underpinning the first title in his series of standalone books, Walking in Place 1: New Orleans. While his meanderings through the Big Easy saw him piece together a playful dialogue of architectural gestures, cats, flora and street ephemera – all rendered in the almost impossibly vibrant hues unique to the famed city – his strolls through the German capital shimmer with a very different palette, syntax and philosophic hue. Here, deep foliage, fungus and soft, refracted European light assuage concrete, steel and geometrics – as if the grand themes of the picturesque and the sublime were shrunken to microcosmic proportions. But this sequence of images defies its individual referents; this is not a book about bike seats, brutalist buildings, leaves and ladybugs. Rather, Walking in Place 2, like its predecessor, is about the simple act of seeing, and its relationship to both our outer and inner selves. (Perimeter Editions x The Ice Plant)
Ari Marcopoulos – Boarding Pass
Air travel has informed Ari Marcopoulos’ life more than most. Beyond a necessary mode of transport, the passenger plane has proved something of quiet point of obsession for the Amsterdam-born, New York-based photographer and filmmaker. Boarding Pass, Marcopoulos’ new book for Nieves and Perimeter Editions, takes the experience of flight, and the machines that make it possible, as its defining motifs. Photographed over the last year while in transit, the characteristically intuitive, off-the-cuff images that populate this volume offer countless vantages – near and far – of airplanes on the tarmac or in flight, rerouting our gaze from the pragmatic and economic towards the poetic. Here, Marcopoulos appeals to the notion that flying – for all its supposed monotony – is still something close to a miracle. (Perimeter Editions x Nieves)