The Ice Plant – förlag

From Augusta to Bristol, Brunswick and beyond, Johansson’s chronicle of Maine combines humor and emotion with a sense of place In 2023, Swedish photographer Gerry Johansson (born 1945) roamed the state of Maine with a Rolleiflex, curious to make new pictures in a region of America he first encountered in the work of Paul Strand five decades ago—he found Strand’s views of New England “boring” at the time—and also wondering, “Why is American photography so focused on the west?” Johansson’s Maine echoes the formal restraint of his earlier books, notably American Winter, Spanish Summer, Meloni Meloni and Pontiac, sequencing nearly 200 black-and-white duotones alphabetically by their oddly poetic Northeastern town names (Bath, Friendship, Purgatory, etc). Somehow, none of the Maine pictures draws more attention than any other, and the flawless and playful compositions never seem to repeat. As in all of Johansson’s work, endlessly inventive arrangements of architecture and landscape orient the viewer in a specific geographic and cultural place while generously sharing his way of seeing, walking and thinking with a camera.

Clothbound in delicate pinstripes with a red ribbon bookmark, the diary is designed so that it can be started on any day of the year, even on a leap year!Now available in blue, Tamara Shopsin’s classic 5 Year Diary is back in stock. Designed by Shopsin--whose illustration work is regularly featured in The New York Times--and produced by The Ice Plant and Shopsin’s General Store, the pint-sized 5 Year Diary helps you keep track of the next 60 months of your life in just a few lines a day. Each page of the diary is devoted to one day of the year and subdivided into five sections (each with its own space for notes), so that, as time goes by, past entries can be read as the new ones are written. Handsomely clothbound with a red ribbon bookmark, the diary can be started on any day of any year--even a leap year. In the back of the diary are pages to record the books you’ve read and places you’ve traveled. As New York magazine’s Kendall Herbst noted, the 5 Year Diary is an ideal gift for anyone, anytime, as well as the perfect way to “trace your life’s highlights and trim out the minutiae… Think of it as a sort of CliffsNotes to your life."

Clothbound in delicate pinstripes with a red ribbon bookmark, the diary is designed so that it can be started on any day of the year, even on a leap year!"THIS book belongs to," reads the frontispiece of the little red diary, followed by the words "Florence Wolfson," scrawled in faded black ink. Inside the worn leather cover, in brief, breathless dispatches written on gold-edged pages, the journal recorded five years of the life and times of a smart and headstrong New York teenager, a girl who loved Balzac, Central Park and male and female lovers with equal abandon…The diary was a gift for her fourteenth birthday, on August 11, 1929, and she wrote a few lines faithfully, every day, until she turned 19. Then, like so many relics of time past, it was forgotten… for more than half a century inside an old steamer trunk, plastered with vintage travel stickers that evoke the glamorous golden age of ocean liner voyages. The trunk in turn languished in the basement of 98 Riverside Drive… until October 2003, when the management decided it was time to clear out the storage area." --The New York TimesBrought to you by The Ice Plant in collaboration with Shopsin's General Store, this charming, pint-sized and extremely well-designed diary, inspired by a 2006 story in The New York Times, lets you keep track of your life with just a few lines every day for five years. Each page of the diary is devoted to one day of the year and subdivided into five sections-so that as time goes by, past entries can be read as new ones are written. Clothbound in delicate, nubby pinstripes with a red ribbon bookmark, it is designed so that it can be started on any day of the year, even on a leap year. In the back of the diary are pages to record books read and places traveled. An ideal gift for sophisticated nostalgics, new parents, dreamers, schemers and plain old lovers of good design.

A poetic artist’s book of found photographs from the early to mid-20th century, sequenced thematicallyPhotographer and bookseller Melissa Catanese has been editing the vast photography collection of Peter J. Cohen, a celebrated trove of more than 20,000 vernacular and found anonymous photographs from the early to mid-twentieth century. Gathered from flea markets, dealers and Ebay, these prints have been acquired, exhibited and included in a range of major museum publications. In organizing the archive into a series of thematic catalogues, she has pursued an alternate reading of the collection, drifting away from simple typology into something more personal, intuitive and openly poetic. Her magical new artist’s book, Dive Dark Dream Slow, is rooted in the mystery and delight of the “found” image and the “snapshot” aesthetic, but pushes beyond the nostalgic surface of these pictures and reimagines them as luminous transmissions of anxious sensuality. Through a series of abandoned visual clues, from the sepia-infused shadow of a little girl running along a beach to silhouettes of a group of distant figures pausing upon a steep and snowy hill, a dreamlike journey is evoked. Like an album of pop songs about a girl (or a civilization) hovering on the verge of transformation, the book cycles through overlapping themes and counter-themes--moon and ocean; violence and tenderness; innocence and experience; masks and nakedness--that sparkle with deep psychic longing and apocalyptic comedy.

Los Angeles artist Bettina Hubby (born 1968) takes a detour from her curatorial, community-based projects with Uniforms, an artist’s book of paper collages as precise and elegant as they are chaotic and devious. Here, clothed bodies collide, recombine and somersault across the page; machines mimic birds; jackets seem to genuflect in prayer. Constructed with the muted hues and contemplative negative space of a Noh play, Hubby’s mash-ups reassemble the familiar photographic imagery of fashion, commerce and reportage into a open-ended riff on personal identity and the human organism. Complementing the work is an original fictional narrative by Dave Cull, delivered in brief installments throughout the book. Uniforms is published in an edition of 750 copies on the occasion of Pretty Limber, Hubby’s fall 2013 exhibition at Klowden Mann Gallery.

Found: The Rolling Stones presents a series of never-before-seen snapshots of The Rolling Stones on a 1965 tour through Savannah, Georgia and Clearwater, Florida. Found in an unmarked box at a flea market in Southern California by musician and art collector Lauren White, these rare candid images of Mick Jagger, Brian Jones, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts, Bill Wyman and founding member and road manager, Ian Stewart, capture the band--on the brink of global superstardom--relaxed and unguarded. On tour in North America in the spring of 1965, the young band was playing YMCA auditoriums and college gymnasiums in support of their third album, The Rolling Stones, Now!, and still trying to set themselves apart from the scores of other bands emerging out of Britain at the time. An additional handful of snapshots (found in the same box) appear to be from a year or two later, with the band in full rock-star mode. Dilettante gallery in Los Angeles showed the photographs for the first time after their discovery, but despite considerable press attention, the photographer responsible for these remarkable images still has not emerged. Some have speculated that it could be Keith Richards, since he appears in only one of the 23 photographs. White has her own suspicions: “My female intuition says that it was a girl. If you look at the photos, they look very vulnerable … I don’t think that a guy could evoke that kind of expression.” This key moment in the band’s history was recently chronicled in the documentary The Rolling Stones: Charlie Is My Darling--Ireland 1965 (2012), filmed during another tour that same year. The cache of photographs in Found: The Rolling Stones is a rare discovery and a thrilling piece of rock-and-roll history, but also an intimate, fresh look at five faces that were soon to become iconic.

“From chicken to sheep, frogs to dogs, each of the creatures seems to ask: “You looking at me? Who are you?” –American PhotoAnimals That Saw Me, Volume Two presents a new collection of photographs from the observational wanderings of Ed Panar, author of Animals That Saw Me, Volume One (2011, now out of print). This body of work, encompassing recent pictures and newly discovered gems from Panar’s vast back catalogue, records a series of brief, often strangely amusing moments in which nonhuman species (mammal, reptile, bird or insect) seem to behold the human photographer. Edited for the viewer’s maximum delight, the photos convey a whimsical concept with surprisingly complex ramifications under the surface. Why do we distinguish between “us” and “them,” and what exists in the space between these distinctions? What does it mean to make “eye contact” with another species? What does the presence of a camera add to this phenomenon? Channeling the same thoughtful humor, wonder and peculiar engagement with the world that made the first volume of Animals That Saw Me an instant hit, this second installment also includes an original essay by acclaimed speculative realist philosopher Timothy Morton.

A charming collection of vintage photographs of readers lost in thoughtWhere do our minds go when we read books, magazines and letters? Do we seek an escape, a portal to another world? A secret, a truth, a pleasant distraction? Voyagers, edited by Melissa Catanese (author of Dive Dark Dream Slow), consists almost entirely of anonymous black-and-white snapshots of people in various postures of reading in living rooms, on beds, at the beach, eating breakfast.We can't see what these readers are thinking, but Catanese occasionally breaks the hypnotic typological rhythm to reveal a new photographic element—a pyramid, a starry night, sunlight blindingly glowing through a window—giving us brief glimpses of the readers' potential narrative journeys.A wordless book with the size and feel of a vintage paperback found at a flea market, Voyagers reminds us of the power and intimacy of our relationship to reading devices, and evokes an exotic nostalgia for our recent predigital culture.As with Catanese's prior books (Dive Dark Dream Slow [2012], Hells Hollow, Fallen Monarch [2016]), the images were judiciously selected from the collection of Peter J. Cohen, a celebrated trove of more than 20,000 vernacular photographs from the early to mid-20th century. Gathered from flea markets, dealers and eBay, these images have been acquired, exhibited and included in a range of major museum publications.

Return to the real world! A coupon-style booklet of 52 activities for offline fun, from Jason Fulford and Tamara ShopsinJason Fulford and Tamara Shopsin's Offline Activities is a book of 52 suggestions for things you can do in real life. Rearrange your furniture; invite an old friend to lunch; bring something home from the supermarket and treat it as sculpture. Part novelty, part self-help guide, Offline Activities encourages you to seek out the chance and mystery that is often lacking in the digital age. Featuring the kind of ingenious, charming design you expect from a Jason Fulford and Tamara Shopsin project, Offline Activities is designed as a coupon book with tear-out pages, with one inspirational suggestion and quote per page. You are encouraged to physically do the activity and rip the page out of the book as proof. If you do one offline activity per week, the book will last a year. Offline Activities is a delightfully analog, pleasantly practical guide to shaking up your offscreen life.Tamara Shopsin (born 1979) is an illustrator, graphic designer, writer and part-time cook in her family’s New York restaurant. She is the author of two memoirs, Mumbai New York Scranton (2013) and Arbitrary Stupid Goal (2017), designer of the 5 Year Diary and coauthor, with Jason Fulford, of the children's book This Equals That (2014), among many other projects. Jason Fulford (born 1973) is a photographer and cofounder of J&L Books. He is a Guggenheim Fellow, a frequent lecturer at universities and has led workshops across the globe. His numerous monographs include The Mushroom Collector (2011) and Hotel Oracle (2013).

A luminous photographic consideration of atmospheric phenomena, visual perception and life on Earth, from the author of Des OiseauxIn Cloud Physics, American photographer Terri Weifenbach explores the vital interconnection of our planet’s clouds and the intimate forms and textures of its biological life. The backbone of this work is a series of photographs (for which she received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2015) made at an American research facility used for the study and measurement of clouds, their origin, structure, particles and solar relationships. The exotic instruments she portrays are designed to express ephemeral atmospheric phenomena as sets of numeric data, yet Weifenbach's camera (and her way of seeing) renders our organic terrestrial world as an unquantifiable mystery. The vibrant scenes of her wide-ranging images — tiny variations of light, humidity, fire, lightning; iridescent mists and vapors; glimpses of the animal kingdom and the vegetal world — are like myths-within-myths unfolding throughout the book, against a backdrop of endless weather events. In an original essay, Luce Lebart examines Weifenbach's work in the historical contexts of visual art and environmental science.Terri Weifenbach (born 1957) is an American photographer based in Paris. She has taught at the Corcoran College of Art + Design and American University (both in Washington, DC). Her work has been exhibited internationally for over 15 years and is in numerous collections, including the Sir Elton John Photography Collection and the Museum Ludwig in Koln, Germany. She has published more than 10 books, with presses such as Nazraeli and Atelier EXB.

A first collection of Los Angeles artist Jon Huck’s hauntingly beautiful watercolor paintings on paper and woodThe bold first collection of watercolors on paper and wood by Los Angeles artist Jon Huck (born 1961), At the Drop of a Hat portrays a wild tableau of misfits and weirdos caught in a panoply of odd scenarios and ambivalent moods. There are masks, costumes, recurring props and motifs, and a pervasive ambiguity between human and beast. A gleefully deranged comedy animates these bright surfaces—a sense of spontaneous mischief and delight in the brush strokes and blurred paints—but also a longing within the characters themselves, hints of dark melancholy and unsettling private narratives.With a self-taught experimental style both unrestrained and delicately precise, Huck is a nuanced observer of gesture, posture and facial expression, of the personae that conceal us and the flaws that make us real.

Unmoored from any sense of definite place, Di Giovanni’s landscapes reveal a universal tension between landscape and civilizationFrom 2013 to 2023, photographer Matteo Di Giovanni (born 1980) embarked on several rambling journeys off the beaten path through Italy, Scandinavia and Northern Europe, in which map and territory gave way to intuition and curiosity, documenting the outer world through attentive observation and image-making. Di Giovanni’s landscapes seem intimate and mythic, while the still lifes are vast and open—interior and exterior are interchangeable. True Places Never Are resequences this series of medium format photographs (originally released as three separate photobooks) and adds several previously unpublished images. The result is a fresh, cohesive body of work in which the location and chronology are secondary to the intangible meanings and associations suggested by the lens. Taken from a line in Moby-Dick, the title expands upon this search for metaphysical enlightenment: "It is not down on any map; true places never are."

An unassuming sequence of 42 medium-format photographs depicting slivers of the semirural landscape of Central Illinois Tim Carpenter’s (born 1968) Little is a visual memoir that completes a trilogy rooted in the sensibility and approach to the practice of “camera” he elaborated in the best-selling, book-length essay To Photograph Is to Learn How to Die (2022). In other words, he steadfastly upholds photography’s capacity to bridge the gap between self and other, and to cultivate meaning in an alienating world. Less formally rigorous than Local Objects (2017) and less introspective and linear than Christmas Day, Bucks Pond Road, this new installment channels the perspective of a child’s meandering mind, open to possible meanings, absorbing whatever the eyes encounter—marks, buildings, branches, paths, the daylight of a Central Illinois afternoon—nascent symbols everywhere, fleeting images improvised of mind and matter. Adapting a style in the lineage of the New Topographics photographers—Robert Adams, John Gossage and Lewis Baltz—these black-and-white photographs are affecting in their minimalism, imbuing poignance within the banal composites of the Midwestern landscape. The volume itself is beautifully produced with a flush-cut cover treatment and a foil-stamped title.

The sequel to Bad Luck, Hot Rocks includes more rueful letters from repentant tourists, this time on stealing lava rocks from Hawai‘iFollowing a trail of regret from the Petrified Forest (the subject of his classic Bad Luck, Hot Rocks) to the islands of Maui and Hawai‘i, artist and educator Ryan Thompson considers the implications of another trove of handwritten apologies, this time from the archives of the Haleakala and Hawai‘i Volcanoes National Parks. Written to accompany chunks of volcanic rock and other objects that tourists have pilfered from the Islands and subsequently returned (because of bad luck or bad conscience), the notes and letters express not only a need for forgiveness but also an awareness of the writers’ relationship to the Hawaiian landscape, and perhaps also to earth itself—a taking-and-returning phenomenon that (as noted in his earlier book) is its own form of absolution and self-help. Ah Ah weaves together Thompson’s own black-and-white travelog with vibrantly colored “portraits” of the returned specimens and facsimiles of selected letters into an endearing reflection on humanity’s troubling (but hopeful) entanglement with geology, colonialism and tourism in the Anthropocene.Ryan Thompson lives and works in Chicago, where he is an artist and associate professor of art and design at Trinity Christian College. His ongoing Department of Natural History projects engage a range of complex and peculiar relationships between humans and the natural world. He is the coauthor of the bestselling photobook Bad Luck, Hot Rocks.

From Xanax to Xanadu to Kodak Double X, Odette England's photographic memoir-cum-meditation is a reckoning with childhood, memory and the meaning of imagesWriter and artist Odette Elix England (born 1975) first crossed paths with photography—and, crucially, the letter X—as a child on her family's 200-acre dairy farm in Southern Australia, watching her sharecropping father make SX-70 Polaroids of cattle in the springtime. In Isn't X Beautiful!, an autobiographical reckoning with family memory, the fate of that plot of land and the history of photography are tangled and bound at every turn with the ubiquitous letter X: shadowy character, placeholder for nothing and everything, age-old stand-in for the indefinable. Teeming with free-associative factoids, humor and philosophical tangents, and written with the obsessive idiosyncrasy of Tim Carpenter's To Photograph Is to Learn How to Die, England's ambling 10-chapter tale is an extended meditation on the blind spots of personal narrative and the functions (and limitations) of photography in our personal and creative lives.

Jason Fulford has arranged his third collection of photographs into eight distinct chapters that can be read as a game, a series of essays, an abstract visual narrative or all of the above. "The intention of this edit and layout," Fulford explains, "is to create as many relationships as possible between the pictures as well as the chapters. I like the idea of a meticulously planned-out event that remains unpredictable." The work in Raising Frogs for $ $ $ was selected from the photographer's personal archive, from images taken in various countries between 1997 and 2005. Fulford's photographs have been used on book covers by Don Delillo, John Updike, Bertrand Russell, Terry Eagleton, Ha Jin and many others. His work frequently appears in Harper's and The New York Times Magazine. He lives in Brooklyn and Scranton, PA, and is a cofounder of J&L Books.

In his previous book, Alpine Star, photographer and publisher Ron Jude appropriated and recast a collection of his hometown newspaper photographs as a cryptically humorous meditation on the grey area between personal history and collective memory. Jude's latest series of photographs, Other Nature, adds a more intimate, diaristic strain to this line of inquiry. In this handsome volume, two separate sets of his own 4 x 5 color pictures (made between 2001 and 2008) combine to create a subtle and uncanny instance of what Jude has called the "slippery threshold of narrative" in still images. Drawing on the concerns of the New Topographics photographers, Jude's accounts of anonymous motel rooms and the stranger regions of the American landscape could, on first glance, be mistaken for an ecological critique. But as the exterior and interior details of these environments (floral patterns, wood grain, sunlight) begin to merge, interrupt and inform each other, the book shifts into a more abstract, subjective register, provoking reflections on photography, the visible world and the things hovering just outside our physical perception.

Clothbound in delicate pinstripes with a red ribbon bookmark, the diary is designed so that it can be started on any day of the year, even on a leap year!Now available in red, Tamara Shopsin's classic 5 Year Diary is back in stock. Designed by Shopsin--whose illustration work is regularly featured in The New York Times--and produced by The Ice Plant and Shopsin's General Store, the pint-sized 5 Year Diary helps you keep track of the next 60 months of your life in just a few lines a day. Each page of the diary is devoted to one day of the year and subdivided into five sections (each with its own space for notes), so that, as time goes by, past entries can be read as the new ones are written. Handsomely clothbound with a ribbon bookmark, the diary can be started on any day of any year--even a leap year. In the back of the diary are pages to record the books you've read and places you've traveled. As New York magazine's Kendall Herbst noted, the 5 Year Diary is an ideal gift for anyone, anytime, as well as the perfect way to "trace your life's highlights and trim out the minutiae... Think of it as a sort of CliffsNotes to your life."

Mike Slack’s Pyramids builds on the striking Polaroid aesthetic of his previous books, Ok Ok Ok (2002) and Scorpio (2006), rounding out a trilogy of stand-alone volumes that together contain 123 pictures. This collection records everyday details of what could be a recent past or a very near future--a dust storm in the desert, simple geometry, stairways and windows, schoolchildren on a field trip--quietly dramatic scenes energized by a sense of anticipation rather than nostalgia. Presented as physical artifacts of fictitious events to be deciphered by the viewer, the pictures also document the travels, observations and graphic fixations of the photographer, centering on a set of three identical early 1970s office buildings (in Slack's hometown of Indianapolis), from which the book takes its title.

This expanded edition of Mike Slack's High Tide collects a series of evocative Polaroid close-ups of film actors paused in apparent states of calm. "More like meditating than acting," wrote Jeffrey Ladd about the limited 2006 edition, "each seems to have momentarily dropped their profession and found a personal truth. "

The story of the curse made famous by the hit show Dead to MeThe Petrified Forest National Park in Northeast Arizona protects one of the largest deposits of petrified wood in the world. Despite stern warnings, visitors remove several tons of petrified wood from the park each year, often returning these rocks by mail (sometimes years later), accompanied by a "conscience letter." These letters often include stories of misfortune attributed directly to their theft: car troubles, cats with cancer, deaths of family members, etc. Some writers hope that by returning these stolen rocks, good fortune will return to their lives, while others simply apologize or ask forgiveness. "They are beautiful," reads one letter, "but I can't enjoy them. They weigh like a ton of bricks on my conscience. Sorry…." Bad Luck, Hot Rocks documents this ongoing phenomenon, combining a series of original photographs of these otherworldly "bad luck rocks" with facsimiles of intimate, oddly entertaining letters from the park's archives.

It is never too early to learn about abstraction--especially if celebrated illustrator Tamara Shopsin is doing the teaching. What Is This? is Shopsin's wordless children's book that will encourage imaginative thinking in readers both young and old. The miniature book, made for small hands, is filled with simple line drawings, executed with characteristic charm by Shopsin. Each drawing playfully adds to and alters the same basic squiggle, which is transformed across different contexts on each successive page: first the squiggle appears as the petals of a flower, next as a bird's nest, then a cowboy's lasso, then a plume of smoke from a factory chimney. Each time, only a few extra lines are required to suggest the conversion. By the end of the book, faced with an innocent squiggle, the question is not "what is this?" but rather, "what isn't this?" Tamara Shopsin (born 1979) is a graphic designer and illustrator whose work has been featured in The New York Times, Good, Time, Wired and Newsweek. She is the author of the memoir Mumbai New York Scranton, designer of the 5 Year Diary and coauthor, with Jason Fulford, of the children's book This Equals That. She is also a cook at her family's restaurant, Shopsin's, in New York.

What does the world look like? What feelings does it stimulate? Why do we photograph it so urgently? Since 2009, Danish photographer Albert Elm (born 1990) has pursued his curiosity about human existence with a restless energy and intrepid wanderlust, crossing far-flung time zones, boarding the Trans-Siberian Railway, traveling alone in Dubai, China, India, or just walking through his neighborhood in Copenhagen.What Sort of Life Is This remixes Elm’s distant and local journeys into a bright, bewildering panoply of narrative fragments and surreal compositions that feels both global and personal, fractured yet strangely complete. Photographed using a 35mm film camera (color and black and white) and referencing numerous styles and genres, the work explodes with the spontaneous color and complexity of life—tender, violent, lonely, joyful, bizarre. Equalizing the exotic and the banal, the book treats every picture as if it were made in the same mystifying place: the world itself.

Clouds, electronics, fog, bugs, glass, cellophane, rust, weeds, waves, particles: Mike Slack (born 1970) delves into an overheated terrestrial ecosystem in his new book The Transverse Path (or Nature’s Little Secret), surveying a luminous topography of monumental details and mundane vistas alike with cosmic curiosity. Transcendental in mood, Slack’s vaguely sci-fi photographs envision a sun-blasted wilderness of synthetic and organic stuff tangled together, flourishing and disintegrating on its own terms, as if engaged in an ageless negotiation (or flirtation?) just beyond our grasp. Where does nature end and its opposite begin? And where do people figure into this balance? Made primarily around the American Southwest from 2011 to 2017, these vivid photographs—like a series of thought bubbles in search of a narrative—are concise and direct, yet driven by an emotional ambivalence that hovers between stark environmental dread and calm intimate reverie.