Outstanding (Dutch) PhotoBooks short listed for the 2014 Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards

ANNOUNCING SHORT-LIST FOR THE 2014 PHOTOBOOK AWARDS

Sep 26, 2014

New York and Paris, September 26, 2014.
Todd Hido, photographer and photobook maker greeted an eager crowd at the New York Art Book Fair to announce the thirty-five outstanding photobooks short listed for the 2014 Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards.

THE TEN SHORT LISTED FOR PHOTOBOOK OF THE YEAR ARE:

The Big Book
Photographer: W. Eugene Smith
Publisher: University of Texas Press

Rich and Poor
Photographer: Jim Goldberg
Publisher: Steidl

Disco Night Sept. 11
Photographer: Peter van Agtmael
Publisher: Red Hook Editions

Marrakech
Photographer: Daido Moriyama
Publisher: SUPER LABO

Photographs for Documents
Photographer(s): Vytautas V. Stanionis
Publisher: Kaunas Photography Gallery

Ponte City
Photographers: Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse
Publisher: Steidl

Vertigo
Photographer(s): Daisuke Yokota
Publisher: Newfave

Imaginary Club
Photographer(s): Oliver Sieber
Publisher: Editions GwinZegal/BöhmKobayashi

The Winners
Photographer(s): Rafal Milach
Publisher: GOST

The Arrangement
Photographer(s): Ruth van Beek
Publisher: RVB Books

The Arrangement is a group of images Ruth Van Beek made with a collection of books on flower arranging. She has been collecting books on this subject for years, mostly instructional books dating from the fifties to the seventies. They combine colorful still lifes of flower arrangements with the functional photography of a manual. Ruth Van Beek is specially interested in the translation of the strict rules and symbols of Japanese Ikebana into instructional books for Dutch housewifes.

Ones to Watch: Ruth van Beek

Ruth van Beek has been selected as one of BJP’s 20 photographers to watch in 2013

Author: British Journal of Photography

14 Jan 2013

From cute bunnies folded into weird, anamorphic creatures, to houseplants covered in crudely cut out snow formations, Ruth van Beek’s work covers a wide range of subjects, but is united by the common medium of collage. Taking images from old newspapers, photo albums and books, her work is concerned with “the photograph as an object”.

Born in the Netherlands in 1977, van Beek graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam 25 years later, and in the decade since has completed nearly 50 series of work, most based on vernacular imagery. “I take out the images and free them from their original context, but their origin is still important to me,” she says. “What really attracted me was that their stories had disappeared; the pictures had become anonymous, and therefore totally free for me to use in my own stories. But besides that, the similarity in the albums is striking – all those boring parties and lovely grannies formed the perfect scenery for my own stories.

“The newspaper archive is kind of the opposite of this intimate family life. I collected disaster photos for a long time, especially pictures of plane wrecks. I was always fascinated by the look of a crashed plane, like a huge whale stranded on the beach. Later I began collecting old books and cut them apart. People used to love books, now second-hand shops are full of them because we have the internet, and all this information is always there, at the ready. Books became superfluous. Books on travelling, wildlife, adventures, and instructional books on cooking, gardening and housekeeping – what I like about them is that they are meant to teach stuff to people, instruct them on how to live a good life.”

She thinks of her entire oeuvre as “a big encyclopedic series showing a hidden world within existing photography”; the images reproduced here are taken from a new series called the arrangement, which was made on commission for the Amsterdam Academic Hospital. Given a huge vitrine for which she could make whatever she wanted, van Beek “immediately thought about doing something with flowers, since it is a tradition to bring flowers to a sick person”. The images come from 1950s flower-arranging guides and Japanese Ikebana books, which were popular in The Netherlands in the 1970s, but van Beek has covered parts of the image in painted paper to subvert these stiff bouquets and invent her own kind of still life arrangement. “The more I worked on this, the more they started to become animated,” she continues. “The arrangements became like small beings – for me they are very much alive, they’re there to give comfort.”

As with many of her previous projects, van Beek aims to make the series into a book, which will be published this summer by RVB Books in Paris. She’s also working on a more ambitious, long-term project, “which will function as a kind of manual for my work and archive”. It will take the form of a series of publications, the first of which van Beek will publish herself soon.

Books are an essential part of her practice. She’s previously made limited edition, handmade books, and something more conventional, The Hibernators, published with RVB Books. “A book can be about information as well as stories and fiction. I like to make books that have the suggestion of function and archive, but make no sense and thereby become unfamiliar and mysterious. A book is like a house for a photograph, and the small-edition books are little experiments,” she says. “Most of the images I use in my work come from books – I cut them apart and the books disappear, so I like to give the images back in a new book.”

THE TWENTY SHORTLISTED TITLES FOR FIRST PHOTOBOOK ARE:

everything will be ok
Photographer: Alberto Lizaralde
Publisher: Self-published

Synonym Study
Photographer: Nico Krijno
Publisher: Self-published

Synonymn Study - DUMMY PHOTO BOOK by Nico Krijno from nicokrijno on Vimeo.

The Meteorite Hunter
Photographer: Alexandra Lethbridge
Publisher: Self-published

Father Figure: Exploring Alternative Notions of Black Fatherhood
Photographer: Zun Lee
Publisher: Ceiba

19.06_26.08.1945
Photographer: Andrea Botto
Publisher: Danilo Montanari

Miklós Klaus Rózsa
Photographer: Christof Nüssli and Christoph Oeschger
Publisher: Cpress/Spectorbooks

ED IT: The Substantial System for Photographic Archive Maintenance
Authors: Ola Lanko, Brigiet van den Berg, Nikki Brörmann, Simone Engelen, Sterre Sprengers
Publisher: Self-published

Back to the Future
Photographer: Irina Werning
Publisher: Self-published

Inventio
Photographer(s): Yann Haeberlin
Publisher: Self-published

Euromaidan
Photographer(s): Vladyslav Krasnoshchok and Sergiy Lebedynskyy
Publisher: Riot Books

Silent Histories
Photographer: Kazuma Obara
Publisher: Self-published

Hidden Islam
Photographer: Nicoló Degiorgis
Publisher: Rorhof

Sequester
Photographer: Awoiska van der Molen
Publisher: Fw: Books

Bewitched by blackness: photographing the desolate beauty of the Canaries

Awoiska van der Molen wandered the Canary Islands alone, taking long-exposure shots of the hills at dawn and painstakingly printing them on old-fashioned silver gelatin paper. The breathtaking results form the basis of Sequester, a meditation on the poise and patience of nature

• Sean O'Hagan
• theguardian.com, Friday 26 September 2014

Natural woman … a shot from Awoiska van der Molen’s Sequester. Click here to see full image. Photograph: Awoiska van der Molen/Awoiska van der Molen

In his illuminating book of essays, The Pleasures of Good Photographs,Gerry Badger speaks of “the quiet photographer” who is unusually attentive to “the thereness of things and places”. Badger was referring to the work of Stephen Shore, who once declared photography “an exercise in attention” and “an art that calls forth intelligence, concentration and delicacy”.

These quotes came back to me when I first encountered the Dutch photographer Awoiska van der Molen’s work at a group show calledNatural Order back in June.

#245-18.

Now comes her first photobook, Sequester, which is laden with an inordinate sense of silence. Her monochrome landscapes, made using long exposures at dusk or early morning, alert us in their meditative way not just to the thereness, but also to what James Joyce called the “whatness” of things.

Van der Molen favours out-of-the-way places – the volcanic landscapes of the smaller Canary Islands loom large in her book. She spent long periods of time there alone, honing not just her craft but the sense of isolation needed to “gain access to the stoic nature of the landscape”, as she so memorably puts it.

#212-7.

Here is a photographer that is infinitely patient, and interested in the stubborn core of things. Her images are captured in single exposures of up to half an hour, then painstakingly printed in her darkroom on large format, silver gelatin paper. The methodology is unapologetically old-fashioned, and the results extraordinary powerful.

In one of my favourite shots, a black mountaintop looms out of the slate-grey darkness, two wavy white lines flowing from the peak like moonlit streams. Astonishingly, these are light trails made by two groups of nocturnal hikers, which she managed to capture from a distance thanks to long exposure. You do not need to know this to appreciate its haunting beauty, but it alerts us to the delicacy of her transformative art.

#351-7.

Elsewhere, the flowery braces of tall trees or a mass of feathery fronds emerge from a darkness that is deep spatially and atmospherically. You can almost hear the rustle of the mountain breeze. You often feel you could be looking at a different planet: volcanic rock seems lunar; cliffs give way to ominously dark voids that could be the edge of the world; surfaces look alien with their odd shadows and crevices. In one startling shot, a huge peak rises out of a barren plain, with a single line of grey – a walking track, perhaps – traced as if by hand over its brow.

The book is beautiful, but it is worth trying to see her work in a gallery, where the detail of the silver gelatin prints adds to the palpable sense of emptiness and isolation. She has just won the grand prize of the Japanese Hariban award, which allows her to travel to Kyoto to study colloidal printing with the master craftsmen of the Benrido Collotype Atelier.

#275-4. All photographs: Awoiska van der Molen

One senses that, for Van der Molen, photography is like a metaphysical quest, a journey to the essence of things. Her images take me back to Nan Shepherd’s classic book The Living Mountain, which recounts, in luminous prose, the Scottish writer’s lifelong fascination with the Cairngorms as a physical and spiritual landscape. In it, she writes of her solitary walking and looking: “It is a journey into Being: for as I penetrate more deeply into the mountain’s life, I penetrate also into my own. For an hour I am beyond desire ... I am not out of myself, but in myself. I am. To know Being, that is the final grace accorded from the mountain.” That grace exists, too, in these quiet photographs of a world both desolate and beautiful.

The American Series

Photographer: Oskar Schmidt
Publisher: Distanz

Fractal State of Being
Photographer: Sara Skorgan Teigen
Publisher: Journal

Spasibo
Photographer: Davide Monteleone
Publisher: Kehrer Verlag

Red String
Photographer: Yoshikatsu Fujii
Publisher: Self-published

War Porn
Photographer: Christoph Bangert
Publisher: Kehrer Verlag

Jannis
Photographer: Alma Cecilia Suarez
Publisher: Self-published

Photograph
Photographer: Yuji Hamada
Publisher: Lemon Books

THE FIVE SHORT LISTED TITLES FOR PHOTOGRAPHY CATALOGUE OF THE YEAR ARE:

Photobooks: Spain 1905–1977

Photographers: Multiple
Publisher: Editorial RM

Christopher Williams: Printed in Germany
Photographer: Christopher Williams
Publisher: Walther König/David ZwirnerChristopher Williams: The Production Line of Happiness Photographer: Christopher Williams
Publisher: Art Institute of Chicago

Dark Knees
Photographer: Mark Cohen
Publisher: Le Bal/Éditions Xavier Barral

Tsunami, Photographs, and Then: Lost and Found Project
Photographer: Munemasa Takahashi
Publisher: AKAAKA

The Catalogue Box
Photographers: Multiple
Publisher: Verlag Kettler/The PhotoBook Museum

This year’s short list selection was made by Julien Frydman, director of Paris Photo; Lesley A. Martin, publisher of the Aperture book program and of The PhotoBook Review; Mutsuko Ota, editorial director of IMA magazine; and Anne Wilkes Tucker, photography curator.

The thirty-five selected photobooks will be exhibited at Paris Photo in the Publishers Space. A final jury in Paris will select the winners for all three prizes, which will be revealed on November 14, 2013. The winner of First PhotoBook will be awarded $10,000.

PhotoBook Collectors Unseen Photo Fair 2014 Amsterdam Photography

Eddie Peters
Owner of PhotoQ Bookshop, on the photobooks in his collection he couldn't be without.

Why Mister, Why?
(Iraq 2003-2004)
by Geert van Kesteren and Michael Hirsch

I was lucky to be the photo and text editor of this book. Thanks to the refreshing ideas of the graphic designers Mevis & van Deursen and Geert van Kesteren's guts to leave the traditional path of journalism we succeeded in bringing the documentary photobook to a contemporary level. It was great to feel that so many people were inspired by our approach.

Jesus, make-up and football - Frederik Buyckx from ANI on Vimeo.

Jesus, Make-up and Football
by Frederik Buyckx

A book that gives the reader the first impression that it's misprinted. All the beautiful photographs are folded in the middle in the 'wrong' direction, so you see only half of them. And then, leafing from page to page, you perfectly experience a walk through the narrow streets of a favela in Rio de Janeiro.

Workers
by Sebastidao Salgado

The mother of all photobooks - it was the culmination of huge projects of Salgado's that spanned 25 years.

Jorg Colberg
Educator and editor of Conscientious Photography Magazine, on the photobooks that get his students excited.

The Map
by Kikuji Kawada

This is, for sure, one of my favourite books. I own a copy of the reprint done by Nazraeli, which is now sadly sold out. When I bought it on Ebay, it was just under my price limit - it has since gone up. I look at this book at least once a year, when I show it to the students in a photobook history class I am teaching every summer - part of a photography masters programme at Hartford Art School. The students usually don't know too many photobooks, and they certainly can't agree on which book is a good book. But every time I shows The Map, that's all they talk about for the rest of the day. It's the one book they always remember.

Michael Schmidt "Ein-Heit" from Landscape Stories on Vimeo.

U-NI-TY (EIN-HEIT)
by Michael Schmidt

Michael Schmidt's U-NI-TY is probably also in my top three. Sadly, I don't own a copy of Waffenruhe, but U-NI-TY is great as well. The book attacks the viewer from different angles, using a variety of image sources. It won't reveal itself in one sitting. I probably haven't fully grasped the book in all its complexity - I bought a copy last year in Berlin, and I have been looking through it, on and off, since then.

Holy Bible
by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin

It's not clear to me which book be my third choice. If I picked one today, I'd pick another one tomorrow. Somewhere between Dirk Braeckman, one of Mark Steinmetz's trilogy books, Eikoh Hosoe's Man and Woman, and Nobuyoshi Araki's Erotos lies my choice. For today, Broomberg & Chanarin's Holy Bible will be it. It's a fantastic book, utterly aggressive and smart at the same time, a tour de force of photographic bookmaking.

Michael Mack
Founder of art book publisher Mack, on the current photobook boom.

Michael Schmidt "Ein-Heit" from Landscape Stories on Vimeo.

U-NI-TY (EIN-HEIT)
by Michael Schmidt

It opened my eyes to what a book of photographs could be at its most ambitious level.

Die Regimentstochter from Evil V Z on Vimeo.

Die Regiments-Tochter
by Tacita Dean

It shows the genius of an artist who makes explicit work in every medium she turns her hand to.

Works
by Lewis Baltz

A life's work collected into a set of books. The digital realm has firmly established the primacy of the printed book and is largely to blame for the short-lived photobooks boom we are living through. The furture holds many exciting digital possibilities but he printed book will long prevail in the minds and hands of authors and readers.

Heikki Kaski
Winner of last year's Unseen Dummy Award with his dummy Tranquillity and a juror on the Dummy Award 2014 panel. He talks about one of his most satisfying finds.

Le monde et les bras; Une residence terrestre
by Michel Francois

The way I found Michel Francois'  Le monde et les bras; Une residence terrestre (The world and the arms; An earthly residence) is a very nice story. I was browsing books with a friend in the small photobook section of a bookstore in Los Angeles. What I mostly do in bookstores : I just pick up the ones I've already seen and know are good and look at them again for a bit , to revisited them. But this can get kind of dull sometimes. Out of coincidence I picked up this very externally uneventful - even conventional - appearing book by Francois. The first pictures seemed so, for lack of a better word juicy. It changed the course of my day. I couldn't believe I hadn't heard about the book before, or that this particular bookstore had it because Le monde et les bras is very hard to come by.

Bruno Ceschel
Founder of Self Publish, Be Happy (SPBH), on his personal photobook favourites.

Jason Fulford // The Mushroom Collector from haveanicebook on Vimeo.

The Mushroom Collector
by Jason Fulford

I like books that I can go back to time and time again : ones that still intrigue, excite and puzzle me. The Mushroom Collector is one of those books, and its pleasure is in treating it as un unsolved puzzle.

Surrendered Myself to the Chair of Life
by Jin Ohashi

I am also drawn to books that I enjoy for their physicality. The tactile experience of the photobook as an object, its materiality, and the elements that come together in the form of book are all aspects that add to my enjoyment.

Surrended Myself to the Chair of Life may not have been the most succesful of books, but I admire it because both the publisher  AKAAKA and Ohashi were audacious and even a little crazy in putting something like this together. It´s a book I like to share with people ... it becomes a topic of discussion and creates a social space around it every time I show it.

Grant Willing - Svart Metall from Fourteen-Nineteen on Vimeo.

Svart Metall
by Grant Willing

This beautifully put together newspaper was one of the first submissions we ever received for the very first SPBH event at The Photographers´Gallery in the summer of 2010. It was such abeautiful object  ... black and white images, dark and lyrical ... and it represented the possibility of someone really young making exciting publications thet SPBH has been built on  young practitioners doing it for themselves.

Erik Kessels
Curator and publisher, shares three photobooks that have made an impression.

Kaddish
by Christian Boltanski

Abook that tells the story of the holocaust in images. In hundreds of pages you are slowly drawn into the tragedy that happened. The book is edited with found images that are not always true to the history they explain. This shows once more that an image can have multiple interpretations.

Portrait Louise Anna Kubelka
by Friedl Kubelka

My next one is by Friedl Kubelka, who made a book with many portraits of her daugther Louise Anna Kubelka. It's a large format book that shows Louise growing up through multiple portraits taken almost every day of her life. Once she hits puberty, we begin to see white spaces in the book appearing. Her daugther has lost interest in being photographed and slowly starts her own life.

Regionales Leuchten
by Peter Piller

For many years Piller collected photographs he found in regional newspapers. In one collection we see photographs of firemen and other civil workers taken by regional semi-professional photographers. The photographers used flas for these pictures, but didn't pay attention to the fluorescent stripes on the high visibility clothing they wore. The results make the people look like strange creatures from outer space : a beautiful mistake.

Sybren Kuiper
Founder of design and publishing agency SYB, talks about the staple photobooks of his collection.

The Sochi Project: An Atlas of War and Tourism in the Caucasus
by Rob Hornstra and Arnold van Bruggen

There are quite a few books that are a kind of benchmark for me : Baghdad Calling by Geert van Kesteren, designed by Mevis & van Deursen is one of them.  And I think every publication brought out under the flag of Rob Hornstra and Arnold van Bruggen's The Sochi Project, designed by Kummer & Herrman, are great but the whole project in its totality is amazing. This is mainly because of the extraordinay commitment and integrity of these guys. Not only is it the effort they've put into this project to cover the subject to the fullest, but also the way they have utilised a variety of opportunities for bookmaking that makes this project so special. The books are individually different, but form a cohesive whole at the same time.

Aron Morel
Founder of London-based independent publishers Morel Books, on photography's 'adolescence'

A Season in Hell
by Arthur Rimbaud

There is a plethora of books being published at the moment, and many of them are brilliantly put together, intelligent and well thought out. There's an ever-growing interest in photography and a transformation within the medium is happening; consider the work of Lucas Blalock or Daniel Gordon. I call these times photography's 'adolescence' - a period that is self-referential in its questioning of issues such as the mass-produced image, digital imagery and different platforms. Photography at the same time has positioned itself very happily in the art world. The furture bright from my perspective!

I'm fascinated by the power of the book: its power to disseminate information as well as be an integral part of photography. Just think of the Ancient Library of Alexandria or Gutenberg's press if you want to imagine the power of print! Arthur Rimbaud's self-published Une Saison en Enfer (A season in hell) changed poetry forever with only a dozen copies and William Klein's book Life is Good & Good for You in New York found ist way across the world into the hands of a young Japanese photographer, Daido Moriyama, and gave him a whole new vision. In spite of the Internet, the book is still very relevant today. A good book is both a strong series and also a beautiful object, designed around the work; it essentially becomes part of the work and can at times feel inextricably linked to it.

Shane Lavalette
Editor of Lavalette and director of Light Work, speaks about photobook gifts that keep on giving.

The Afronauts by Cristina De Middel from DEVELOP Tube on Vimeo.

The Afronauts
by Cristina de Middel

I don't tend to buy expensive photobooks, but have had a few books that have skyrock-eted in value after I acquired them. One example that's been talked about a lot recently is Cristina de Middel's The Afronauts. Cristina was kind enough to send a copy my way and just a few months later it was selling for thousands of dollars. Generally I don't pay much attention to the value of things, but really cherish the books that artists send me, including mock-ups and early handmade editions - some of those are priceless.

Paul van Mameren
Director of Lecturis, on the importance of design in the photobook.

Monsters van de Peel
by Martien Coppens

I have a special connection to Monsters van de Peel (1958) by Dutch photographer Martien Coppens. In design and print it was, and still is, unique. When the book was made, it was not common to experiment with design. Graphic designer Herman Rademaker presented Coppens' images next to strong typography. The approach to the relationship between text and image was quite radical at the time. It's funny to that Coppens wasn't happy with the final result at all. Today, the book cab be considered innovative and is a great example of the important role a designer can play in the making of photobooks.

Unseen Photo Fair has produced its very own magazine!

The Unseen Magazine allows you to connect with the excitement and energy of the fair, through artist interviews and critical writing on key trends at the heart of contemporary fine art photography, in a print format.



We have also brought together an impressive array of experts and commentators from the art photography arena to discuss trends and topics that go to the heart of where we currently stand as an industry. The editor of British Journal of Photography Simon Bainbridge speaks about scouting new talent and the Financial Times’ photography critic Francis Hodgson advises collectors on how to navigate the fair successfully.



We have also picked the brains of Lunch Bytes curator Melanie Bühler, Andy Adams, founder of online photographic community Flak Photo, young collector and Vice Photo Editor Matthew Leifheit, as well as Martin Jürgens who is Conservator of Photographs at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, among many others.



Get to know the Unseen 2014 premiering artists and their work and learn more about the photography art market by picking up a copy!

Review Unseen Photo Fair 2014 Amsterdam Photography

Unseen photo fair: the Amsterdam weirdfest jampacked with genius

From barbecued photobooks to inflatable bouncy-castle clouds and the madcap brilliance of Augustin Rebetez, many shades of weird are converging in Amsterdam for the 2014 show

• Sean O'Hagan
• theguardian.com, Friday 19 September 2014

Tasty … Untitled, from the series Arrière-Tête (Mécanismes) by Augustin Rebetez. Photograph: Rebetez/Galerie Nicola von Senger and Festival Images

This year’s Unseen photo fair in Amsterdam is unusally surreal.

In the entrance hall, an escalator takes punters one by one up to a giant inflated cloud, which explodes with light when you leap on it. A picture of every jumping person is instantly loaded on to an ever-growing photographic cloud for the project, Trust the Cloud.

In the main square, a large sculpture is taking shape over the weekend: giant brightly coloured lightbulbs and spools hanging from gnarled branches covered in a fishing net. It is called A Durian Growing a Swinging Sponge on a Fractal Evening and is unmistakably the work of set painter-cum-artist Lorenzo Vitturi. There he is, perched on a crane, drill in hand, adding another bulb. An outgrowth of his Dalston Anatomy project (which saw him take strange, saturated shots of vegetables to show life on east London’s Ridley Road Market), the sculpture is the symbol of this year’s Unseen, which undercuts the commerciality of most art-photography fairs with moments of high mischief.

An installation by Lorenzo Vitturi at Unseen 2014. Photograph: Tsuyoshi Yamada

As night fell on Thursday, smoke filled the air outside the former gasworks. It was wafting from a barbecue bucket tended by London-based artist Melinda Gibson, who was inviting passersby to partake in a performance called The Smoke House. In four small smoke houses, copies of her new book (the latest Self Publish, Be Happy book-club offering) were absorbing wood and coal smoke. Once hot, they were sealed and sold to the public. It was, so the programme says, “a ritual act of defiance” linked to an actual fire that damaged Gibson’s studio recently – but it became a large gathering of revellers drawn to the campfire atmosphere. I went to dinner reeking of smoked photobook.

Earlier on, I had been introduced to Augustin Rebetez with the words, “You should check out this guy’s work. It’s pretty wild.” I did. It is. Rebetez makes photographs, drawings and films obsessively. At the Galerie Nicola von Sanger, his work covers two walls: primitive paintings, collages and photos of strange things that show a singularly dark imagination. Children look like zombies. A bald woman with kohl-rimmed eyes could be their undead mother. The legs of what look like a row of homemade electric chairs sprout shoes.

Another piece by Rebetez. Photograph: © Augustin Rebetez/Galerie Nicola von Senger and Festival Images

On a third wall, a bizarre single-frame animated film plays on loop: a dead crow flies from a wooden case and flutters around a house, in which bodies emerge from drawers, slither across bare floorboards and up a flight of stairs then disappear. Makeshift machine-men whirr frantically as though they are trying to take flight. It is as if Rebetez’s photographs and drawings have come to life in homage to the Quay Brothers. (Watch some of his videos here.)

Over at the book market, RVB books are selling Rebetez’s new bookAnthill Memories, which captures his relentlessly active imagination. Like the films, many of the the photographs were constructed around his house in the Swiss Jura mountains with the help of his friends – many of whom seem to be circus performers. Strangeness abounds: there’s a collapsing caravan, a crumpled house in a field of snow and the outline of Nosferatu on a battered fence. It is hard to know what is real and what created, but the sense of playful pranks is present in all his work. His website he tells us, “My father also publishes my books. My cousin has a brewery. My sister is a dancer and many other stuff ...” The “many other stuff” betokens a strange and singular creative imagination that is one of the highlights of the richest and most surprising Unseens so far.

Todd Hido, born in 1968 in Kent/Ohio, studied at the Boston School of the Museum of Fine Arts and at the Tufts University. He graduated from the California College of Arts and Crafts with his M.F.A. in 1996. Since 2001, when he published his first monograph‚ "House Hunting" he became a rising star of the American art scene. His photographs have been exhibited internationally, and are included in well-known museum collections like the Whitney Museum of Art, Guggenheim Museum, George Eastman House and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama is one of the most important Japanese artists in photography today. His work has had an enormous influence on the development of modern photography. Moriyama (1938) began taking pictures at the age of 21. After moving to Tokyo, he worked with the eminent photographer Eikoh Hosoe. In 1963, he went freelance and began his extensive and now-legendary oeuvre, which continues to expand to this day.

Moriyama generally uses a compact 35mm camera, taking photos on the streets of Japan's main cities. The images betray the speed at which they are made. Often the horizon is crooked and the photo is blurred, or the grain is visible and there is too much contrast. His subjects range from underexposed, obscure bars to strip clubs and dark alleys. He seems to be interested more in the suggestion of form than in a clear, well-delineated figure. His visual idiom is rough and ready, and he often directs the lens at details that are out of context, thereby evoking a fragmented and stifling atmosphere.

For the second year, ING Private Banking presents the New Talent Photography Award to showcase the work of five top talents from Dutch photography- and art academies. The finalists created a photograph according to the theme 'vooruitstrevend' (or 'innovative') under the supervision of Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra (b. 1959). The winner was announced this after at Unseen: Anne Geene (b. 1983, Netherlands).
Five finalists were selected by a jury consisting of Frits Gierstberg (head of Exhibitions for the Dutch Photography Museum in Rotterdam), Marloes Krijnen (director of Foam), Roos van Put (adviser on Visual and Performing Arts for the Council for Culture) and Karien van Gennip (General Manager ING Private Banking & Investments). The finalists this year were Maurice van Es (b. 1984, Netherlands), Anne Geene (b. 1983, Netherlands), Alexandra Hunts (b. 1990, Ukraine), Lana Mesić (b. 1987, Netherlands/Croatia) and Jan Rosseel (b. 1987, Belgium).

The jury selected Anne Geene as the winner of the 2014 New Talent Photography Award. Her work provides us with a different approach to the world around us. She has combined the reality of the street and the stubbornness of nature with a sharp eye and a hint of imagination. 

Michael Wolf (Munich, 1954) grew up in the United States, Europe and Canada, and studied at UC Berkeley and at the Folkwang School in Essen, Germany. Wolf's work has been exhibited extensively in galleries and at art fairs throughout the world since 2005, including shows at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, at the Museum Centre Vapriikki in Tampere, Finland, and at the Aperture Gallery in New York. Michael Wolf won a first prize in the World Press Photo Award Competition in 2005 (Contemporary Issues Series) and in 2010 (Daily Life Single), on both occasions with topics photographed in Asia.

Dana Lixenberg (1964, The Netherlands) divides her time between New York and Amsterdam. She studied Photography at the London College of Printing in London (1984-1986) and at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam (1987-1989).

Lixenberg pursues long-term personal projects, with a primary focus on individuals and communities on the margins of society, such as Jeffersonville, Indiana, a collection of landscapes and portraits of the small town’s homeless population, and The Last Days of Shishmaref, which documents an Inupiaq community on an eroding island off the coast of Alaska.

Her work is part of many corporate and private collections. She has exhibited extensively and her work has appeared in publications such as Vibe, The New Yorker and TIME.

Her books include United States (2011) Jeffersonville, Indiana (2005), The Last Days of Shishmaref (2008), Set Amsterdam (2011) and De Burgemeester/The Mayor (2011).

In spring 2015, Huis Marseille, Amsterdam, will host the first large scale exhibition of Imperial Courts, a series of portraits and landscapes photographed at Imperial Courts housing project in Watts, Los Angeles; a series spanning 20 years, 1993-2013. The show will also include video work and the book of the work will be published by Roma publications.

Petra Stavast - Ramya

17 x 24 centimeter / 224 pages / fc / hardcover / EN / Design: Hans Gremmen / co-published by Roma Publications / €32,00  (excl. verzendkosten) / isbn 978-94-90119-27-0 /

Petra Stavast has brought enormous care and devotion to documenting the life of her former landlady, Ramya. When the photographer moved into Ramya's home in 2001, the camera became their means of communication. The result is a series of quiet, intimate photographs of the house and its inhabitant. Following Ramya's death in 2012, the project gained a new dimension. Stavast delved deeper into her former landlady's life story and discovered not only Ramya's private archive, but also photographs taken from time to time by a neigbor. In her committed photo book, Stavast traces events such as Ramya's membership of the Rajneeshpuram commune, established between 1981 and 1985 by followers of the Bhagwan (Osho) in the no-man's-land of Oregon, USA. Now, as Stavast's photographs reveal, the only on-site reminder of that period is a wide asphalted road. A video shows Ramya, back in Amsterdam, at a workshop given by a new guru. Together, these documents constitute Stavast's biography of ramya: a record of an unusual life.

Theo Niekus