
Pages: 128 p.
Photographs: 90
Dimensions: 255 x 325 mm
Weight: 1,4 kg
Ediitions:
Regular edition No. 1 – 500, signed and numbered
subscription price until 31st May, 2012: 200 USD, after May 31st: 250 USD
Special editions numbers I – XXXV, in a separate, hand-made linen-box, include siver-gelatine prints (size 9,5" by 12") signed and nubered by the artist in the following combinations:
Special editions motif – Higashi-jûjô, Tokyo:

Special editions motif – Takasaki Gunma:

Some pages from the book:






When I first encountered works by Issei Suda (born 1940 in Tokyo) several years ago, it was more than the discovery of a photographer I had never heard of before. For me, the names Araki and Moriyama represented the epitome of Japanese post-war photography. I was fascinated by their unique pictorial approaches and treatment of the printed image, above all in contrast to their contemporaries in the West. Presumably it was due to my lack of knowledge that, at the time, I was of the opinion that there were no other photographers marked by such individuality within that spectrum.
Only now do I know that Issei Suda is someone who – on account of his subtle sensitivity and quiet power of observation – deserves to be included among the great names in Japanese photography. My discovery immediately triggered in me a desire to learn more about Suda and his oeuvre. That turned out to be quite a difficult undertaking. An artist hardly known by private galleries and ignored for the most part by the museums and collections, even his publications – numbering approximately a dozen and hitherto published exclusively in Japan – were to be found neither in libraries nor in bookshops.
Long out of print, they were available – at best – from used book sellers at astronomical prices. Only at great expense did I succeed in purchasing a number of them and gaining a more comprehensive impression of Suda's work. The more or less lackadaisical design of his previous publications, my general fascination with Japanese art and culture, and the sensational success of my Takanashi book together planted the idea in my mind of publishing another book on one of Japan's most important photographers.
The new volume was to do justice to the significance of Suda's oeuvre with regard to design, craftsmanship and the selection of photographs. Now, finally, a book containing the most important works in Issei Suda's oeuvre has been produced, featuring five different cover motifs printed on cloth, 128 pages with altogether 90 illustrations, the majority large in scale, and a separate slipcase. Although he is gravely ill, Suda signed all five hundred copies of the standard edition and contributed two different motifs for the forty copies of the special edition, of which three versions are available.
In the year marking Timm Rautert's seventieth birthday, we are very happy to have the opportunity to publish his series on New York and Japan, which he executed almost concurrently. Timm Rautert, for many years one of the most important teachers of young photographers in Germany and professor at the Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts, always produced his own photographic works in serial form.
The most well-known of his series was presumably Germans in Uniform (published by Steidl in 2006). The series on the Amish as well as The Hutterites (forthcoming this year from Steidl), however, have both been published to date only in a few examples in the book accompanying the major retrospective of 2006/07. The same is true of the series featured by our book, New York and Tokyo/Japan.
A representative selection of works from the two series is now being published for the first time in our series of bibliophilic photo books. Here, essentially two books unite to form one (the New York series begins at one end of the book, the Japan series at the other), creating a special kind of tension in the juxtaposition of the two portraits.
The New York images of 1969 seem to have come down to us from a century long past, for the city as we know it today is barely recognizable in them. The large majority of the shots of Tokyo and Osaka, on the other hand – taken for the most part only one year later – show views still to be found there today. The two series thus not only convey suspenseful impressions of two exceptional cities and countries but, in their juxtaposition, also convey a lasting conception of the history and development of two completely dissimilar cultures.
The books with the edition numbers 1 to 35 are special editions in three different separate, hand-made linen-boxes; they include silver-gelatine prints (size 9.5" by 12") signed and numbered by the artist and printed by Wolf Haug, Essen in the following combinations:
Japan,
Osaka, 1970
New York
Bus , 1969
Some pages from the book:




With Bruce Wrighton's «At Home» we now present the first four-colour project in our series of limited edition photography books for collectors. On 128 pages, with 81 images – most of them full size – the book shows the every day life of a little town in the eighties.
«Bruce Wrighton's work spanned a relatively small area, the downtown of Binghamton, New York, and a few nearby cities, and he had only a relatively short time to do it in, for he died in 1988 at the age of 38.
Yet he produced a portrait of a place and time – and a class – in America that brings a segment of history more alive than any textbook and is better to look at than most of them. The place comes through clearly enough in photographs of streets and diners, hotels and storage rooms, but it is in the portraits of people that it is most crucially discovered. You can find Wrighton's subjects today in many small cities, quite likely in more of them in 2010 than in the 1970s because numerous cities have lost their major employers and the burden of economic problems weighs even heavier.
So he has recorded a minor history with major ramifications, a history that is twice alive, once in its current echoes across the nation and once in lasting images. Photography, life, and history keep company everywhere.»
Vicky Goldberg
The books with the edition numbers 1 to 99 are special editions in separate, hand-made cassettes; they include digital pigment prints on Inova smooth cotton, natural white, 315 g/sqm, printed by artificial image, Berlin, in the following combinations:
Woolworth shopper,
Binghamton, NY, 1987
Corner of Chenango and Eldridge Streets, looking southwest,
Binghamton, NY, 1986
Recreation Room, Salvation Army,
Binghamton, NY, 1986
Some more pages from the book:







We are proud that our book has won the
«Author Book Award» at the photography festival
«Les rencontres d'Arles Photographie 2010».
On May 1, 2010 will be published the third volume in our series of bibliophile photo books, which are limited to editions of 500: Yutaka Takanashi, Photography 1965–74. It is the first major monograph by this pioneering Japanese photographer to be published in the West.

Yutaka Takanashi belonged to the small group of photographers who launched the magazine Provoke in 1968/69. The magazine had considerable influence on Japanese photography of that period. He was one of the founding members of this group along with the photographer Takuma Nakahira, the critic and photographer Kôji Taki, and the theorist Takahiko Okada. Daidô Moriyama joined the group during the production of the second issue.
As a member of the small Provoke collective, Takanashi was able to find a new theoretical approach and its visual language. The influence of this group and of the magazine on the photographic scene in Japan was immense. Nobuyoshi Araki described Provoke in retrospect as the trigger of an explosion in Japanese photography. In the following years the Provoke photographers produced major works in terms of photographic history, whereby Yutaka Takanashi defined the high point as well as the end of this era with the publication of his first book, Toshi-e (Towards the City), in 1974.
This two-part book set new standards in terms of design, materials and craftsmanship. In a compartment behind the larger volume, Toshi-e, one finds an earlier series in the smaller format volume, Tôkyô-jin; it seems to have provided the basis for the larger book. The smaller volume is designed to look like a printed notebook on simple paper. This combination is indicative of Takanashi's non-dogmatic treatment of the different visual styles and approaches of the 1960s. While he shows the real Tôkyô on the verge of becoming a modern urban society in Tôkyô-jin and names the concrete location at which each of the photographs was taken, Toshi-e contains a view of an urban landscape that has no defined location.
Our book, Yutaka Takanashi, Photography 1965–74, presents a representative cross-section of these two pioneering photographic series in 35 full-page illustrations and 6 large format plates. An extensive biography, list of exhibitions and a bibliography round off our newest publication. The book will be officially presented on May 7 in conjunction with an exhibition of vintage prints at the Galerie Priska Pasquer and Schaden.com in Cologne.
The limited edition of 500 will be published in three different versions.
Yutaka Takanashi: «untitled», from Toshi-e, gelatin-silver print
Edition: 30
paper dimensions: 302 x 240 mm
image dimensions: 252 x 210 mm








Subsequent to the first publication «City Stills» (published in 1999 by Prestel) and its great monograph «Light Lines» (published in 2008 as a co-production by the Steidl publishing house and the Musée de l’Élysée), AutoMagic is a book dedicated exclusively to Metzker’s photography of the automobile.
Ray Metzker: Philadelphia, 1964
print handmade and
signed by the artist
edition: 15
dimensions: 225 x 152 mm
Frauke Eigen: Maju, 2008
print handmade and
signed by the artist
edition: 15
dimensions: 220 x 220 mm.
(all prices include the German tax on books)