-> Laura Larson: City of Incurable Women (Saint Lucy, 2021)
Laura Larson is a photographer and writer based in Columbus. Her first book, Hidden Mother (Saint Lucy Books, 2017), was shortlisted for the Aperture-Paris Photo First Photobook Prize.
Book Specs: Hardcover | 9 x 7 inches | 216 pages. Available here.
City of Incurable Women pictures the complex lives of the 19th century women, diagnosed as suffering from hysteria, who were hospitalized at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. Incorporating a broad range of materials, Larson layers archival imagery with her own photographs and texts, speculating through the documented accounts of the women’s illness.….
….Larson imagines the women as a collective, making a claim for their shared knowledge and the pleasures and risks of escape. Embracing photography’s capacity to feel, City of Incurable Women sees these women as unruly spirits that haunt the present, mining the radical possibilities of empathy and resistance.
Publisher’s Info
Further information: https://www.saintlucybooks.com/shop/p/city-of-incurable-women
Video: Artist Talk with Laura Larson and Jennifer Lange by Contemporary Art Matters (Youtube)
-> Teo Becher: Charbon Blanc (Le Bec en l’Air, 2021)
Téo Becher is a French photographer who graduated from the Septante-Cinq School of Visual Arts in Brussels (2014) and holds a master’s degree in photography from KASKA in Antwerp (2020) and since has been exploring documentary and landscape photography.
Book Specs: Format : 24x30cm | Pages : 108 | Design : Lucía Peluffo |Text & images : Teo Becher | Language : French/English | ISBN : 978-2-36744-155-9. Available here.
Maurienne’s mountains are marked with ambiguities, contradictions, oppositions. From the numerous factories that were once scattered along the Arc river, only one is remaining. Even if a few ski resorts dot the summits, the main part of the space in Maurienne stands in the uninhabitable, thus matching the romantic image of a pure and sublime nature.….
….At first, I’ve felt the need of a physical experience of the landscape. Be in the mountain, walk, breath. It became like roaming this uninhabitable, what can be felt only by foot, at the closest to the topography, immersed in the landscape.
Those two layers add and mix, like a recognition walk through the territory, to try and know every corner.
Teo Becher
Further information: https://www.becair.com/produit/charbon-blanc/
-> Antigone Kourakou: Transfiguration (Skeleton Key Press, 2022)
Antigone Kourakou (born November 1979) lives and works in Athens, Greece. Since 2010 her photographic work has been exhibited and published internationally. In addition to being a photographer, Kourakou works as an art conservator/restorer and is internationally recognized for her professional practice of making mosaics.
Book Specs: Published by Skeleton Key Press, April 2022 | ISBN 978-82-692410-3-7 | 19.5 x 28 cm | Hardcover | 120 pages, 80 duotone plates | Edited by Antigone Kourakou and Russell Joslin | Texts by Costis Antoniadis and Erik Vroons | Text in English. Available here.
By recording thoughts, emotions, and other imprints of her reality, Antigone Kourakou explores the universal dynamic between the natural environment and human presence, and the ability of their interaction to transform us. Her photographs—most often shot in her native Greece—strikingly contrast bright light with deep, velvety shadows.….
….Her collaborative subjects, most frequently women, often appear in contorted, twisted, or dancer-like poses, and alternately, in reflective states of longing, struggle, or lucidity. In Transfiguration, these images are thoughtfully arranged and sequenced throughout with depictions of water, stone, trees, plants, fire, and dilapidated interiors quietly assisting the book’s poetic arc.
Publisher’s Info
Further information: https://www.skeletonkeypress.com/transfiguration
