L'Artiere – förlag

I’ve been photographing my daughter and nieces for a decade. There’s something sacred about the lives of girls, and their innocent, confident relationships to themselves, their world and one another is gravitational. Between them is an intimate and spiritual knowledge, both ordinary and extraordinary, and I aim to capture the brilliance of their communion. I hope when they look back on this work, they’ll see their beauty, and their devotion to each other, and find themselves here, in this work we made together, reflected with love.  Kristen Joy Emack

“When I was 17, my older sister Susan let me photograph her. I was amazed at how her newly prominent veins and capillaries defined her pregnant body as they raced down her arms and across her abdomen and breasts. I felt I could almost see the growing child through her pale skin.Around the turn of the millennium, it was as though I was surrounded by women — colleagues, family, friends — who were expecting, and I felt an urgency to photograph them. Perhaps the urgency I felt had to do with knowing their pregnancy was limited to nine or so months. To photograph a woman before she gives birth, a loved one before they die, the sunlight before it fades and grows dark are all a motivation, and expression of the life force.Inspired by altar paintings from the Italian Renaissance, I used my 7”x17” panoramic camera  for standing portraits. When I realized my subjects sometimes had trouble balancing, I also made horizontals, with the recumbent portraits of Francisco de Goya’s Naked Maja, Edouard Manet’s Olympia, and André Kertész’s Satiric Dancer in mind. I collected copies of paintings, drawings and photographs for inspiration and often asked my subjects to interpret for themselves their gestures or their contrapposto stances. During the time we spent together, we worked collaboratively and slowly—moving and rearranging furniture and props—to create an intimate studio, be it inside their homes or, sometimes, out in the landscape.  Sometimes partners, dogs or cats would join us.The oldest known depiction of pregnancy is the Venus of Willendorf (c. 25,000 BC), discovered in Austria in 1908. It’s a limestone figurine with pendulous breasts and fertile hips. One night in the summer of 2023 when I was developing the last negatives for this project the temperature in my darkroom reached 100 degrees. Overwhelmed by the heat and the intensity of these images, I left the negatives in a water holding bath overnight. When I went to hang them up the next morning I was horrified when the emulsion began sliding down the plastic base of the film. I hurriedly held up one of the sheets of film to the light box and took a photograph. Suddenly, there was a Venus of Willendorf of my own.Now, I see the shape or spirit of Venus in each one of these portraits, images of seen and unseen transformations that give rise to human life. I also see my own inspiration to understand and describe the pregnant form — fertility, fecundity, hope, birth, precarity and even time itself.”Lois Conner

Grace is a poetic and visually stunning collaboration between Scott and Grace, a couple whose intertwined livesand creative partnership transcend traditional artistic roles. This evocative photographic series challenges con-ventions of gender, aging, and representation, presenting Grace not as a passive subject but as an empoweredfigure navigating dreamlike landscapes. She moves between domestic spaces and the untamed wilderness, em-bodying mythological and symbolic roles—at once ethereal and powerful, present and elusive. Working withlarge-format cameras, Scott and Grace engage in a slow, intentional creative process, crafting images that blurthe boundaries between reality, imagination, and the natural world. Their work offers viewers an invitation tostep beyond societal norms and experience an alternate realm of freedom and transformation. Grace is both anartistic dialogue and a meditation on identity, nature, and the unknowable forces that shape our perceptions.

Atlas of the New World is a photographic journey into the future of our planet’s landscapes, seascapes, and cityscapes, transformed by the accelerating climate crisis. Unlike traditional photography, which captures the present moment, this project attempts to visualize the future by merging scientific data with artistic vision, presenting what could be described as a “true lie.” By superimposing images of future scenarios onto current places, the project makes the invisible visible, turning abstract concepts into tangible realities. Giulia Piermartiri and Edoardo Delille employ an entirely analogue technique: slides containing future vistas are projected momentarily onto real environments using a flash. As the shutter clicks, subjects remain unaware of these projections, moving naturally within their surroundings. The resulting photographs are the product of this fleeting fusion of present and future, capturing a metaphorical image of a world spinning increasingly beyond our control, overlaid on the reality we know. The images are both captivating and unsettling. Their vibrant colors draw the eye, yet beneath their beauty lies a pressing urgency. This layering of narrative invites viewers to confront the fragility of our ecosystems and the profound implications of climate change. The project portrays climate disruption not only as a present-day challenge but also as a critical question for generations to come. As such, Atlas of the New World transcends art to become a tool for knowledge, bridging science, imagination, and creative expression. Reflecting on the climate crisis as “a crisis of imagination,” as Amitav Ghosh describes in The Great Derangement, the Atlas confronts our difficulty in truly grasping the scale and complexity of environmental change. By transforming data and projections into visceral images, Piermartiri and Delille weave past, present, and future into a dynamic continuum, reminding us that the world is not static but in constant flux. Imagining the future thus becomes an act of resistance, hope, and responsibility. How we envision the future will shape how it unfolds. This is why Atlas of the New World calls us to imagine beyond fear and loss. It offers not only a record of what we stand to lose but a manifesto for envisioning new possibilities. It challenges us to see climate change not just as catastrophe but as a catalyst for transformation, urging collective action toward a more sustainable and hopeful future.

Morning Bus is a poignant photographic meditation on childhood, vulnerability, and the haunting weight of America’s mass shooting epidemic. Inspired by the tragic events at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012, Greg Miller captures children waiting for the morning school bus in his Connecticut community. These everyday moments—ordinary yet profound—become symbols of trust, innocence, and the silent anxiety carried by parents across the nation. Through intimate portraits, Miller reflects on the unsettling reality that each goodbye at the bus stop is tinged with uncertainty. His images, taken over a decade, underscore the cyclical nature of violence and the quiet resilience of childhood. Morning Bus is more than a photographic series; it is a deeply personal exploration of love, loss, and the fragile line between safety and tragedy in contemporary America.

Firelight by Amy Friend is a captivating photographic collection that breathes new life into vintage photographs from the 1920s to the 1940s. Sourced from family albums, online finds, and market discoveries, these images are reimagined through Friend’s artistic vision. The series, titled “Dare alla Luce”—Italian for “to bring to the light”—embodies a dual meaning of illumination and birth. By introducing delicate perforations and backlighting, Friend transforms these historical moments into ethereal scenes where figures and landscapes are adorned with luminous patterns, evoking a sense of magic and nostalgia. This interplay of light and shadow invites viewers to reflect on the transient nature of time, memory, and existence. Firelight is presented in a meticulously crafted volume, featuring laser-cut paper and French binding, all encased in a clothbound box. This edition is a testament to the fusion of past and present, art and artifact.

Golden Memories by Lee Shulman is a deeply poetic exploration of forgotten moments, uplifted through precious material transformation. For over eight years the artist has rescued anonymous colour slides — snapshots of lives once lived — and, in this series, he prints them on sheets of gold leaf. The gold, with its sacred and eternal connotations, elevates ordinary domestic scenes, holiday poses and candid glances into the realm of memory’s shrine. On these fragile surfaces, light moves, image and gold merge, and the photograph becomes a meditation on impermanence and presence. The project invites us to stop before the ordinary, to bear witness to lives we do not know and yet somehow recognise. With this book, Shulman expands his ongoing mission to restore dignity to forgotten photographs and asks what it means to remember in an age of fading analog material. Golden Memories is at once elegy, tribute and icon — a quiet invitation to honour the visual traces of our collective past.

Calling the Birds Home by Cheryle St. Onge is an intimate meditation on memory, nature, and loss. Born from the experience of her mother’s illness and death, the work delicately traces the shifting roles of mother and daughter, transforming the act of caregiving into a poetic dialogue with the landscape. Through luminous, contemplative photographs, St. Onge captures the rhythms of waiting, the textures of daily life, and the fleeting presence of light and nature as signs of continuity. Her writing and images move between fragility and resilience, evoking how love and grief shape our perception of the world. Designed by Teresa Piardi (Maxwell Studio) and published by L’Artiere, the book is both elegy and renewal—a tender testament to the enduring ties between generations and the quiet power of photography to keep what is gone within reach.

KAMI is a meditative visual elegy by Japanese photographer Hitoshi Fugo, unfolding across nearly three decades of reflection on impermanence and renewal. The work interlaces two temporal and emotional landscapes: the aftermath of the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake in Kobe, and a series of intimate studies of a scorched industrial paper roll found outside a burned printing factory in Tokyo. In both, Fugo traces the fragile line between destruction and transformation, revealing form within ruin and spirit within residue. The Japanese word kami means both “god” and “paper,” and this duality anchors the project’s philosophical depth — where the divine and the material, the sacred and the ordinary, dissolve into one another. Through images stripped of narrative yet charged with presence, KAMI becomes a quiet act of reparation: an offering to what survives, and to the poetic stillness left after loss.

Song of Silent Water by Mathieu Chaze is a visual meditation on nature, captured through a lens that prioritizes sin-cerity and essentiality over contemporary trends. Curated by the renowned David Campany, the volume brings toge-ther images born from long walks and a profound observation of the landscape: a dog in the mist, rolling hills, a treereflected in water, a solitary heron. As noted by the legendary photographer Bernard Plossu in his introduction, Cha-ze’s photographs possess a "secret atmosphere" and a fragrance that speaks directly to the soul, free from technicalartifice or passing fashions. The work explores the concept of sustained time, where individual moments are not iso-lated events but fragments linked by a quiet, invisible rhythm—much like the intervals that give shape to a song.Beautifully designed by Federico Barbon and printed in duotone, this book invites the reader to walk alongside theartist on a journey of pure expression and a discovery of the authentic.

Italian Story is the culmination of more than forty years of photographic work by Andrea Modica in Italy, a country with which the artist has formed a deep, evolving relationship. Made entirely with an 8×10 view camera, the photographs span decades and regions, revealing a slow, attentive way of seeing rooted in time, presence, and return. The title draws from the layered meaning of the Italian word storia—at once history, story, situation, and fiction—reflecting the book’s open, fluid narrative. Rather than offering a linear account, Italian Story unfolds as a personal and poetic record of encounters, places, and moments shaped by memory and imagination. Balancing intimacy and distance, documentary precision and lyrical ambiguity, Modica’s images form a quiet meditation on duration, place, and the act of looking. Published by L’Artiere, the book stands as an ongoing visual narrative—both lived and constructed—between photographer and country.

Adam is a photobook by Theo Zeal that follows his lifelong friend as he forages. Theo creates a fictional landscape,positioning Adam within it to attempt to portray and contain his elusive friend. Created over four years while Theoexperienced the alienating symptoms of Lyme disease, following his friend became an instinctive response to a gro-wing sense of disorientation and fear. Through Theo’s darkroom process, the images become fragile artifacts, asthough unearthed from the very ground Adam treads. The result is a haunting meditation on the act of seeing andthe quiet magic of friendship.

Speaking about her relationship with Naples, Lea Vergine once said that it was the only city that did not have a ghetto. Remarking “do you think a Neapolitan cares if you are Jewish or whatever?” This nonchalance for the other, by whom one wants to be looked at, yet always eluding the judgment, is what I find in Anders Petersen’s shots. A kind of continual escape, an ability to speak only through fragments. Yet everything can be found in these fragments: there is irony and sensuality, and a kind of ancient nobility, there is surrender to the artist’s eye, yes, but never completely. There is trust, though. Trust and defiance always walk these paths together, in what percentage is unknown: the subject sets them each time, or the photographer finds them in that sole possible motion that grounds a relationship, that is, the encounter. These photographs are born in this undetermined space, pertaining more to the soul than to topography, at the crossroads between Petersen’s imagination and the hyperbolic reality he – or better, we – intersect. Thus, he renders it back to us in the only way it can be rendered. No one will ever know how to shape this chaos, but we can, through our observing eyes, both make it our own and be a part of it, knowing that it will mutate, escape us, betray itself, and that what we see will only be true in the instant it occurred. Never before have I been able to find, as I did in this work by a man so distant in origins from Mediterranean culture, the words used by Fabrizia Ramondino in her 1991 biography Star di casa: “Naples, where it is so difficult to live and so tempting to leave, which is so difficult to abandon and always compels one to return, becomes, more than any others, the emblematic place of the general human condition of our time: to find oneself on an uninhabitable planet and yet to know that this is the only one that for the time being we can call home. Valeria Parrella

Another America challenges the notion of truth in photography, blurring the lines between reality and fiction. Set against the backdrop of the 1940s and 50s—a time when photographic imagery held a unique sense of veracity—the project transports viewers to a parallel universe where historical events take unexpected turns. From surreal landscapes to hauntingly realistic scenes, each AI-generated image invites audiences to question their perceptions and reconsider the narratives that shape our understanding of the past.

Inferno & Paradiso is the catalog accompanying the exhibition to be presented at the Cortona On The Move festival and later shown at the Musée de l'Élysée in Lausanne. This project explores the complexity of the human condition between suffering and hope, pain and joy. The project include twenty of today’s greatest photojournalists, each invited to select two images from their archives: one representing the most harrowing horror and one capturing a moment of joy. The exhibition and book challenge the idea that constant exposure to images of suffering leads to numbness. The real problem is often seeing bodies and stories that fail to reflect the genuine gaze we wish to offer them. The photographs, projected as slides in an immersive installation, guide visitors on a journey through Inferno and Paradiso, much like Virgil leads Dante in the Divine Comedy. The project reveals that hell and paradise are not distant or metaphysical places, but concrete conditions of our everyday lives. Happiness and suffering intertwine in a fragile balance that requires care, attention, and responsibility. Inferno & Paradiso serves as a warning against the indifference and apathy that often accompany global tragedies and crises. It invites us not to turn away, but to become active witnesses to reality. The book pays tribute to the moral courage of photographers who, often risking their lives, bring us hidden truths, revealing the darkest and brightest facets of humanity. In times marked by new crises and rising authoritarianism, this work confirms art’s power as a tool for memory and transformation. It urges us to reflect on what it means to live together, to face pain, and to nurture hope in a fragile and divided world.