MACK - New books for 2017

 
MACK have just announced their new titles due for release soon. They say this: We are excited to announce the titles we will be publishing in the next few months, including the first books of Sam Contis, Kevin Lear and Cesare Fabbri, new publications with Anthony Hernandez, Ron Jude and Mårten Lange, Richard Mosse’s new video installation as a 575 page artist book, and new editions of two of the defining books of photobook history - Larry Sultan’s Pictures from Home and Masahisa Fukase’s Ravens. And we have our annual First Book Award which will be launched in May with an exhibition at Photo London.

In particular it's great to see new books from two of my favorite photographers Ron Jude and Anthony Hernandez. Also a new-look reprint of the seminal Larry Sultan book Pictures from Home.

Ron Jude, Nausea - taken from the title of Sartre’s 1938 existential novel—is a body of photographs that registers the interiors of public schools in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and Atlanta, Georgia from 1990-92 by American pho- tographer Ron Jude. Departing from mere documentation, however, Jude lures us into peering through windows, doorways and crevices of walls into empty classrooms and corridors, as we become increasingly conscious of the perils of our own gaze. Rousing, rather than abating, the uncertainty of looking, Nausea established the building blocks for the next twenty-five years of Jude’s photographic output, including Other Nature, Alpine Star, Lick Creek Line and Lago.

At the heart of Nausea lies the premise that philosophical inquiry might be filtered and consumed through photographs, just as it is filtered through Sartre’s work of literary fiction. Taking as his subject the banality of institutional learning, the monotonous spaces and objects captured in Nausea serve as a platform for exploring the nexus between the narrative limitations of photography and consciousness. Employing a distinctive visual language, marked by an acute sense of colour, radical framing and shallow focus, Jude created a world both familiar and uncanny, imbued with a pervasive sense of unease.

To mark the 25th anniversary of the inaugural exhibition of Nausea in 1992 at The Photographers’ Gallery in London, Jude has made an entirely new edit of this work. Many of the photographs in this volume have never before been published or exhibited.

Anthony Hernandez, Forever comprises photographs taken in the downtown area of Los Angeles and the poorer neighborhoods of Compton, Watts and South Central, made between 2007–2012. The work traces the movements of the homeless, in images which take up the point of view of the homeless person. So, rather than photographing the material trace – a chair or bed – Hernandez photographs what might be might seen and observed from the street itself.
The title was drawn from a previous work Landscapes for the Homeless (1996), exhibited at the Sprengel Museum in Hanover. The catalogue included a conversation between Hernandez and Lewis Baltz titled Forever Homeless: A Dialogue. It was Baltz who chose the title, and Hernandez speaks of its prevailing significance, “The title is very important because, as I write this, fifteen years on, the homeless population of Los Angeles has only increased; I could technically keep photographing this subject, making these kinds of pictures, forever.”