Almost from the moment photography was invented, artists began exploring ways to share their images beyond the walls of galleries and museums. The photobook quickly emerged as a popular form of dissenimation — Anna Atkins’ pioneering 1843 publication, Photographs of British Algae, is widely considered the first of its kind – and its popularity has endured ever since. These publications provide a unique opportunity to study the work of our favourite artists in our own home, returning to them time and time again to appreciate their craft and immerse ourselves in their creative worlds. These five new releases are valuable additions to the genre. From masters of architecture and the American landscape, to lived experiences of wildfires and the realities of queer attraction in the digital age, each one provides a clear and unflinching insight into our present-day world.
Katerina Angelopoulou
“A large wildfire has a very distinctive sound. No one can tell you unless they have been in one. It is a sound that can haunt you.” One of the deadliest wildfires ever recorded took place on 23 July 2018, just 30km from the historical centre of Athens, Greece. On the day of the fire, artist Katerina Angelopoulou Angelopoulou was with her mother and three-year old daughter. The temperature was 40°C and wind gusts were reaching over 100 km and hour when the flames rushed from the hilltop. Angelopoulou, her mother and daughter tried to escape to Athens by car, but had to abandon their vehicle and were forced into the sea to survive until rescue hours later. The Fumes of Mars combines her photographs with personal testimonies from other survivors, timelines, maps and reports. The photographer weaves together a narrative of the events to reveal the disconnect between her own experience and the “official” account of the disaster, in which facts were concealed and victims held culpable.
Ricardo Bofill: Visions of Architecture
Gestaldten brings audiences a new and comprehensive monograph of one of the 20th century’s most unique architects and radical visionaries. The book’s introduction opens with: “In the mid-1960s, an outsider appeared amid the serene community of Barcelonese architects, an outsider with an uncertain curriculum, who both attracts and disturbs society – an archetype often portrayed in Hollywood films.” Thus the scene is set for the life and career of Ricardo Bofill, whose visions for urban and communal life challenged preconceived notions of shared space and proposed alternative styles of living. His geometric forms are instantly recognisable, drawing from both Mediterranean and Arab aesthetics. This publication takes readers through some of his most iconic designs such as La Fábrica, Walden 7, La Muralla Roja and Abraxas, complemented by Bofill’s sketches and floor plans. Here, experts like Nacho Alegre and Douglas Murphy come together to pay homage to his originality, personality and progressive ideals.
Indifferent West
Daniel Mirer
Indifferent West is a visual investigation into the mythology, commercialisation and environmental disruption of the Western landscape. The book, published to coincide with an exhibition at Elliott Gallery, Amsterdam, showcases 108 photographs that capture the strange beauty and haunting irony of the landscape. The images are intended to be jarring, subtly disrupting a collective cultural memory of the mythic American Frontier. Cowboy legends clash with Native histories, kitsch collides with the climate crisis and remnants of settler colonial fantasies are rebranded for tourist consumption. In one image, a hut selling packaged ice sits, shuttered and abandoned, in a pool of water. Elsewhere, a rusted camper van is nestled in a canyon, clearly having never made it to its intended destination. The pictures are cleverly taken. At first glance, the sweeping vistas are reminiscent of the American West of popular imagination, it is only on closer inspection that the viewer uncovers rusting billboards and abandoned pools.
Mitchell Moreno
In this photo-text series, artist Mitchell Moreno explores the performance of queer masculinities in digital culture. Moreno began the project by collating a thousand lines of text from apps and websites where. most often, men were looking to meet other men for sex or dates. From these texts, they selected 43 adverts and created self-portraits that responded to the desires expressed in each post. The resulting project, made over the course of four years in the artist’s London flat, includes titles like “wanna young slim slave for mummification,” “love a kinky geek” and “you a living doll?” Each time, the artist transforms themselves into the “ideal” partner, saying: “Part of the project was about redirecting energies of the labouring, working-class body into something creative, for me, rather than the benefit of a wealthy client.” The work provides an “ethnography” on the archetypes, kinks, prejudices and preoccupations of non-straight masculine sexuality in the modern, digital era of dating and relationships.
Cooling Towers
This book brings together some of the country’s most distinguished architectural photographers and writers. Cooling Towers is an elegiac exploration of these monumental brutalist structures dotted around Britain that are relics of 20th century industrial history. These imposing buildings form a definitive visual record of Britain’s coal-fired power stations at the moment that they disappear into history, as most of them have been slated for demolition very soon. The book is presented in a distinctive large format, reflecting the unique and sculptural presence of cooling towers within the landscape. The publication features a celebratory foreword by Antony Gormley, a Turner Prize-winning British artist who has long expressed admiration for these immense constructions. Also featured is Hugh Pearman’s take on Drax Power Station in North Yorkshire and Otto Saumaurez Smith on the particularly beautiful set of towers that formed part of Ironbridge B Power Station.
Words: Emma Jacob
Image Credits:
1. Daniel Mirer, Alabama Hills, Lone Pine, California 2023.
2. 23/07/2018 17:22:49 My mum has picked up Clio to visit Aimi. I am walking to her house which is three minutes away from my parent’s. The air smells but we’ve been told that it’s from a fire burning close
to the Peloponnese. © Katerina Angelopoulou.
3. Photo Gregori Civera, Ricardo Bofill, gestalten 2025 (La Muralla Roja, Alicante). Courtesy of Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura.
4. Daniel Mirer, Non-Potable Water Picnic Area, Arizona 2024.
5. Mitchell Moreno, U Queer Enough 4 My Luv?
6. Last Days of Coal © Luke O’Donovan.
