Search

Title:
Teju Cole: Pharmakon

Actions:

• Buy book

Price:
$68.00
(available to order)

Summary:
Bringing together a sequence of subtle and disquieting photographs with a dozen compact short stories, ''Pharmakon'' is a surprising new work from the singular mind of Teju Cole. The photographs were taken across the globe and extend the oblique point of view he developed in ''Fernweh'' (2020). Interspersed among the images are texts that emerge like intimate signals from our age of crisis, mining further the exquisite linguistic control that characterizes Cole’s novels ''Open City'' (2011) and ''Tremor'' (2023). The result is a work of strange beauty that startles and consoles in equal measure.

Title:
Teju Cole: Golden apple of the sun

Actions:

• Buy book

Price:
$68.00
(available in store)

Summary:
In the period leading up to the November 3, 2020 elections in the United States, Teju Cole began to photograph his kitchen counter in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Working in the still life tradition of Chardin, Cezanne, and the Dutch masters, as well as such contemporary photographers as Laura Letinsky and Jan Groover, he photographed every day over the course of five weeks. Unlike those illustrious forbears, Cole left his arrangements entirely to chance, 'the bowls and plates moving in their unpredictable constellations.' What emerges is a surprising portrait, across time, of one kitchen counter in one home at a time of social, cultural, and political upheaval. Alongside the photographs is a long written essay, as wide-ranging in its concerns — hunger, fasting, mourning, slavery, intimacy, painting, poetry and the history of photography — as the photographs are delimited in theirs. The text and photographic sequences are interspersed with an anonymous handwritten eighteenth century cookbook from Cambridge.

Title:
As we rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic

Actions:

• Buy book

Price:
$65.95
(available to order)

Summary:
This publication presents a compilation of photographs from African diasporic culture. With over one hundred works by Black artists from Canada, the Caribbean, Great Britain, the United States, South America, as well as throughout the African continent, this volume provides a timely exploration of Black identity on both sides of the Atlantic. Drawn from Dr. Kenneth Montague’s Wedge Collection in Toronto—a Black-owned collection dedicated to artists of African descent—this book looks at the multifaceted ideas of Black life through the lenses of community, identity, and power. Artists such as Stan Douglas, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Barkley L. Hendricks, Texas Isaiah, Liz Johnson Artur, Seydou Keïta, Deana Lawson, Jamel Shabazz, and Carrie Mae Weems, touch on themes of agency, beauty, joy, belonging, subjectivity, and self-representation. Writings by Isolde Brielmaier, Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, Mark Sealy, Teka Selman, and Deborah Willis among others provide insight and commentary on this monumental collection.

Title:
Teju Cole: Fernweh

Actions:

• Buy book

Price:
$62.00
(available to order)

Summary:
The picturesque vistas and apparent stability of Switzerland have made it an elusive subject for contemporary photography. Over a five-year period (2014 – 2019), Cole found a distinctly new way to look at a country that has been the quintessence of tourist experience for almost two centuries. Fernweh muses on the German word for a longing to be elsewhere. Cole’s meditative and scrupulously composed work, made with colour film, is evocative of the hidden history of the Alpine nation as well as of its highly curated terrain. Returning to Switzerland year after year, Cole shares the patience and mild palette of luminaries of contemporary European photography — but the constructivist tension in these images is all his own. With photographs shot in every corner of the country — from Vaud to Graubu¨nden to Lugano — Fernweh creates a vision of Switzerland that, though largely devoid of human presence, is rich in human traces; none more so than Cole’s own distinct way of seeing.

Title:
Black paper : writing in a dark time

Actions:

• Buy book

Price:
$33.95
(available to order)

Summary:
'Darkness is not empty,' writes Teju Cole in ''Black Paper,'' a book that meditates on what it means to sustain our humanity—and witness the humanity of others—in a time of darkness. One of the most celebrated essayists of his generation, Cole here plays variations on the essay form, modeling ways to attend to experience—not just to take in but to think critically about what we sense and what we don’t. Wide-ranging but thematically unified, the essays address ethical questions about what it means to be human and what it means to bear witness, recognizing how our individual present is informed by a collective past. Cole’s writings in ''Black Paper'' approach the fractured moment of our history through a constellation of interrelated concerns: confrontation with unsettling art, elegies both public and private, the defense of writing in a time of political upheaval, the role of the color black in the visual arts, the use of shadow in photography, and the links between literature and activism. Throughout, Cole gives us intriguing new ways of thinking about blackness and its numerous connotations. As he describes the carbon-copy process in his epilogue: 'Writing on the top white sheet would transfer the carbon from the black paper onto the bottom white sheet. Black transported the meaning.'

Title:
Giovanni Chiaramonte: Realismo infinito

Actions:

• Buy book

Price:
$80.00
(available in store)

Summary:
''Infinite realism'' brings together 99+1 photographs, many of them never published before, taken over a period of two decades from 1980 to the early 2000s. This volume forms an organic overview of Giovanni Chiaramonte’s complex work on the representation of the landscape and the urban view, developed after a long period of theoretical reflection. In this exploration, Italy offers a privileged vantage point: its territory, which appears as a stratification of cultures and civilizations, tells the story of the whole of the West at a glance. Italy is therefore a ''contemporary space,'' as it encompasses different eras that are visible simultaneously. The Italian landscape serves as the matrix for reading and understanding the West as a whole—its culture and destiny. It is the lens through which Chiaramonte explores.