BARON – förlag

For the seventh instalment of Baron photographer Richard Kern explores the dichotomy between girl and woman, between the nude and the dressed, and between playfulness and seriousness. Kern does not ask his subjects to pose for him, nor does he direct them. He doesn’t even contact or cast them. Rather, the subjects contact him, and pose for him in any way they are comfortable. They sometimes choose to be portrayed in the nude and they have full control of the way their bodies are photographed. Therefore, the work is a collaboration between the model and the photographer, as they both construct the image. This process plays out an interesting power dynamic, as the photographer is an older man and the subject is a young woman. Yet, by being seemingly opposed, the photographs are shaped by the male gaze, but simultaneously express the subjects’ agency over their sexuality and their bodies. However, how far is the performance of these young women a true expression of their new-found sexuality? Or is that performance rather shaped by the patriarchy and influenced by the endless stream of pop culture on what it is to be a woman?Kern explains that he wanted this series of portraits to be about the last stage of innocence, the phase where a girl is leaving childhood and is slowly but surely entering adulthood. The many uncertainties that come from being in between age groups, in a place where it’s unclear what society is expecting of being a woman, are visible through the insecurity and agitation on the girls’ faces. It’s so scary for a girl to leave her old, but safe, life behind, yet so exciting to be introduced into the thrilling, but possibly threatening world of womanhood. There is a sense of safety, but also danger here. The photographs are layered on top of each other, veiling and unveiling the female body. In doing so, Kern creates a hallucinating image of a feminine subject that is neither a girl, nor yet a woman. Both sides are emphasized through the translucency of the pictures. These girls are about to become women; in their eyes, you can see both the doubts and the joys that come with this new-found social position, role and sexual power. Richard Kern Artist Bio:Richard Kern (1954, USA) is a filmmaker and photographer from New York. He was a vivid member of the late ‘70’s ‘no-wave’ scene and the underground cult genre ‘Cinema of Transgression’. His cinematographic work is characterised by subversive elements such as violence and sex. Throughout his career, he has worked with musicians such as Lydia Lunch, Henry Rollins, Sonic Youth and Butthole Surfers. His book, New York Girls, from 1997, features punk queens and sub-cultural heroines portrayed in the nude. More recently, Kern investigated youthfulness in his work. His book, Medicated (2020), features photographs and interviews of girls on prescribed drugs. Baron Issue 7 is a continuation of Kern’s ongoing research on the portrayal of girlhood.

The Kiss Book is the debut book by musician Tove Lo and photographer Kenny Laubbacher, a collaborative project spanning 15 countries and 18 cities, showcasing 600 + subjects captured in the sensual act of kissing. Throughout 2023, during Tove Lo's Dirt Femme tour, Kenny and Tove, in collaboration with creative director Charlie Twaddle, initiated The Kiss Book. This body of work aimed to foster an interactive experience for tour attendees, inviting those interested in being photographed to participate in a kiss "All pictures were taken soon after the world fully reopened following the pandemic, when kissing and dancing in sweaty crowds still felt surreal and a little forbidden. This added a level of ecstasy to these moments and you can feel that energy in the photos". The book vividly illustrates couples, throuples and individuals caught in a passionate kiss. Their bodies are intertwined, and the images focus on their faces, hands and tongues, capturing the moment's intimacy. Central to the project is the participants' agency, as their active involvement and selfhood play a vital role in co-constructing the photographs. The book invites readers to explore and embrace spontaneous and playful desires, presenting a thoughtful examination of love and lust and opening up a constructive dialogue about the multifaceted nature of affection. Kissing can be seen not only as a physical act but also as a form of connection that transcends traditional sexual roles. By exploring these varying interpretations, we can better appreciate the role of kissing in human relationships and how it fosters intimacy and emotional expression. The book also introduces Charlie Twaddle, who, together with Samuel Burgess Johnson, have designed the book to resemble a relic from a past prohibition era 'when kissing was illegal.' "The choice of red as a colour serves as a symbol for flesh, while the red page edges reflect on the biblical concept of original sin in a 'post distancing' society."

For the sixth edition of Baron, artist Petra Collins flips the camera lens onto herself. more specifically into herself. Uninhibited, gross, disjointed, and confusing, Collins places us in a world filled with perverse personal thoughts and lucid landscapes. With the book’s Hungarian title Miért vagy te, ha lehetsz én is? Collins asks us: Why be you, when you can be me? Collins uses the camera as the third person. It captures historical truths (such as a time and place) and an emotional reality with a complicated relationship to intention and perception. Working with the sculptor Sarah Sitkin, Collins creates moulds of her body as well as her sisters to gain ownership, in a world where our bodies live in multiple realities. This new body of work features Collins first experiments with self-portraiture. ‘I’ve seen my camera take on many truths. And the truths that shocked me the most to see, were my own. I see them in every image I have taken. Seldom am I the subject of my images but I often make my way into the matter of them’. Acknowledging this, these photographs are set in a world of ‘constructed’ domestic interiors contrasted with ‘real’ exterior locations and Collins own family and friends. The sixth instalment of Baron introduces the art director Sandra Leko who has collaborated with Collin’s to present this new body of work in book form that is inspired by the graphics and layouts of Japanese Kinbaku magazines, the sequencing of the images are disjointed, ambiguous and represent its own peculiar logic.

Baron is pleased to present artist Joyce Lee’s debut book, dedicated to the artists archive of watercolour and pencil works, exploring aspects of love, sex and sexuality, and the human body. Like the surrealists before her, Lee’s work seeks to explore the subconscious. Using lucid landscapes and the body, the artist mixes high culture with trash culture, the picturesque with the disgusting and the two activities of living, humour and sex. Lee places us in a world with perverse personal thoughts and multiple realities. In our image-sharing society, where photography depicting sexuality and the human body is prohibited and censored, Lee’s work manages to challenge such rules by creating work around sex and the body, in the media of watercolour and pencil, deemed acceptable in these spaces to communicate such themes. As such, Lee’s work has found contemporary relevance on social networks, with liberators wanting to challenge ongoing censorship rules around the human body and sex, by sharing the artists work. Lee’s work has been published internationally and received critical praise from publications including Numero and Playboy Magazine. The book also contains an essay by academic Pernilla Ellens editor of Namio Harukawa (Baron 2021) and Death Book lll (Baron 2022).

For the third edition of Baroness, photographer Yushi Li takes us on a journey of desire, fantasy and looking, through a photographic study of the male body. For Li’s debut book cover, the photographer has chosen a photograph of a penis. In a heteropatriarchy, where men are represented in the media as big and strong, here the penis is small, flaccid and trapped, presenting a playful, slightly violent, but gentle and almost comical gaze.The naked male bodies in Li’s works are not intended for consumption. Instead, the male body is represented in its relation to other elements in the frame, which always involves a staging of a scene, a fantasy. The domestic space and the mundane activities in the works, invite the viewer to see beyond the naked body. The man in her images is the phallus, the signifier of desire – the desire of the (m)Other. Li’s portrayal of the body is a condensation of the imaginary: the unknown paternal and maternal body– and the fantasy of the absent (m)Other.Throughout the book, Li questions the gaze through different works. ‘My Tinder Boys’ is a set of photographs of naked young men in their kitchens — always soft-fleshed and flaccid, mostly gazing off-camera. ‘Your Reservation is Confirmed’, further develops ideas around consumption and satisfaction. Rather than Tinder, this time it’s Airbnb — a hook-up App for houses. Each image takes us to a new room, in a new house, occupied by a new naked man and often Li herself, fully clothed, engaged in some kind of leisure activity.In Li’s most recent series ‘Paintings, Dreams and Love’, we are invited to look at paintings through a different lens. Inspired by classical oil paintings of female nudes, Li creates a ‘cornucopia’ of men in the diptych ‘The Feast’, while Titian’s ‘Death of Actaeon’ is re-enacted, with the artist outside pointing her bow and arrow both beyond the frame but also ostensibly at a naked man inside. In ‘The Dream of the Fisherwoman’, we see Hokusai’s writhing, erotic octopus become a fishmonger’s corpse, draped across a serenely bathing boy.Li plays with the power dynamic inherent in looking relations further in her moving image work ‘I Hope You Like What You Have Seen’, in which Li asked different men to perform naked, mundane activities for her to watch via Skype. In these video chats, Li tries to become the digital eye, not a woman, nor a man, that is constantly looking at us.Through both looking back at old paintings, and looking directly via the webcam, Li leads us to drift between the physical and the virtual, the conscious and the unconscious, approaching a new form of theatre, desire and spectatorship.Baroness by Yushi Li also includes an introduction by psychoanalyst and writer Anouchka Grose.Yushi Li BioYushi Li is a Chinese artist, based in London. She holds an MA in Photography and is now doing her PhD in Arts & Humanities, at the Royal College of Art. Li received the Royal Photography Society Hundred Heroines Award in 2019 and was one of the winners of the Female in Focus prize in 2021. Li’s work has been exhibited internationally, with a recent group show at Fotografiska, Stockholm and solo shows at Union Gallery, London and Vasli Souza, Oslo.

The fourth edition of The Death Book is dedicated to Japanese artist, Toshio Saeki’s (1945- 2019) archive of rarely published illustration work, that explores scenes of violence, brutality, horror and what lies beneath the surface of Japanese culture. Saeki’s work is notable for combining traditional Shunga and Y?kai styles with elements of Western art and is characterised by eroticism, death and gore, questioning Japanese ideology and expansionism. Historian’s often describe Saeki’s work as being closely related to the Japanese cultural phenomenon ‘Erotic, Grotesque, Nonsense’ (ero, guro, nansensu). The book also contains an introduction by historian Euphemia Franklin. Artist BioBorn 1945, Miyazaki prefecture, Japan. Saeki's drawings are created by using an original method called “chinto printing”. This technique emphasizes the "flatness" composed of "lines" and "coloured surfaces," and gives the work a unique character. ?In recent years, Saeki has had exhibits in New York, San Francisco, London, Paris, Tel Aviv, Hong Kong, Toronto, Japan, Taipei, all of them being received with much critical acclaim. ?Saeki spent his later years in the mountains of Chiba prefecture, drawing, reading, enjoying ikebana of wildflowers; treasuring and loving the activities of everyday life with his wife.