Trolley Books – förlag

Damien Hirst provides the illustrations for Paul Fryer's first collection of poems, the two minds meeting in the middle as they survey their lives and those of their fellow men and women with an acute distillation of manners, cultures and prejudices. Drinking, fooling with toxic substances, loving and losing and loving again - the components of life in its fullness and beguiling ordinariness.This is Paul Fryer's first collection of poems, and it has been illustrated with keen insight by Damien Hirst. Together they have produced a beautiful diatribe against current complacencies that, remarkably, also shows a precious tolerance and love for their fellow men and women. The novelist and painter Harland Miller has written the foreword.Hirst and Fryer have concocted an acute distillation of manners, cultures and prejudices, a polemic even, that reflects a light suffused with a powerful disinterest, a disturbing sine qua non.Drinking, fooling with toxic substances, loving and losing and loving again, railing against authority, sinking one's head in one's hands at the ordinariness of life's decisions, these are but part of Don't Be So...It is also, remarkably, a book of love and curious humility. Paul Fryer deconstructs accepted conceits and replaces them with commonplace sensibilities that make you wonder how you ever got dressed in the morning, let alone go out in the world."I've had tougher dilemmas," Fryer says. "But I do find it a bit embarrassing to talk about the writing of poems. I remember my first effort at primary school; I was nine. It was a cheerful composition entitled 'The End Of The World'. Funnily enough I still know it by heart."

Nick Waplington's contribution to the Venice Biennale in 2001 expresses a yearning for the artistic and commercial freedom that the internet might yet expose, and a celebration of the dislocated reason behind conventional thoughts and the media they use. The limitless boundaries of the internet, and the endless possibilities that exist in cyberspace for communication and information, are what drives Nick Waplington's survey of what this new media holds for the artist and society in general. Not bound by social, moral or ethical considerations, the internet and its implications were elaborated on for Waplington's presence at the Venice Biennale.Somewhere out there lies the new unchartered frontier of cyberspace. In that Babel there are images, dreams, inert and vital messages, anonymous ciphers and calculating incubi. Because it is faceless, as if somehow subterranean, human dialogue and the expression of ideas can multiply without responsibility, without the parameters of authorial disciplines or social conventions. Could this be anarchy, of the kind that artists linger on street corners for? For Waplington, the medium is certainly the message, but one far more profound than McLuhan's epithet, since this is a medium not bound by social, moral or ethical considerations. It is as if he had found himself a child again, locked in the toy shop overnight, where train sets would double as conveyor belts of ideas, and Action Man as a table leg."If, as I suspect," says Waplington, "the internet has broken the stranglehold of governments and large media corporations on mass communication, then we could be in for a very exciting period of development on a number of different levels. Would a breakdown of current modes of social, moral and political cohesion be too much for a man to ask for?"

Hide That Can brings together images taken over four years at Arlington House, Camden, a hostel which primarily accommodates male Irish emigrants. Most of them are alcoholic. Often sad, interspersed with lighter touches of humour, the book is a record of lives that function without families, jobs or prospects, yet are still portrayed with a sense of dignity amid the depression.Deirdre O'Callaghan has provided an unsettling but ultimately invigorating record of the inmates at Arlington House, Europe's largest refuge for alcoholics and the displaced. One hundred years ago Lord Rowton took it into his head to build a hostel. Being a peer of the realm the grandiose came easily to him, and in 1905 the massive, even forbidding, red-brick edifice arose in Camden Town in London, filled with 382 beds for impoverished manual labourers. Clean sheets, washing facilities and nourishing food were to be provided for the inmates. In fact the great building, Arlington House, was designed to be, and quickly became, billets for the destitute Irish navvies who crossed the sea to find work in the capital. Today the Irish connection has not gone; almost 70% of the current residents are Irish, and, although they are equally poor, few of them work or labour - most are alcoholics, and largely forgotten by society.A picture of Arlington House in the past can be found in George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London. It is not pleasant. Now the photographer Deidre O'Callaghan has brought together four year's work at the refuge, her record of the despair, humour and hope on the faces of the residents, a remarkable gallery of a largely expatriate community at odds with the world outside. But her pictures also record the work of the hostel itself in trying to reintegrate the residents into that world, photographs of clarity and wonder taken during trips to Ireland for the inmates. Some have lived at Arlington House for 30 years; many have not seen their families for as long. Her pictures of these reunions with their kin and their country are remarkable.

Bosozoku is the secret world of Japanese bike gangs, who gather every week in their thousands for rallies in the major urban areas of the country. Shot by a leading fashion and reportage photographer, himself a member of one of the gangs, this is a colourful look at the strange and often violent subculture that takes its lead from the Hells Angels, and is linked to the Japanese mafia.The Japanese term "Bosozoku" refers to a specific Japanese phenomenon, the teenage bike gangs based in the urban centres of Japan that gather every weekend in the major metropolises, such as Osaka and Tokyo, for mass rallies of bikers in their thousands.First formed in the 1950s, when the Hell’s Angels in the U.S. reached their apogee with Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones, the Bosozoku have a tame equivalent in the Mods and Rockers that fought pitched battles on Brighton Beach in Britain in the late 1960s. They are also considered in Japan to be the first rung on the ladder for would-be members of the Yakuza (the Japanese equivalent of the Mafia). Bosozoku will be the first book to reveal the intimate secrets of Japanese biker gangs, through a series of stunning images captured by the leading Japanese photographer Masayuki Yoshinaga over the last six years. He himself was a member of the Bosozoku, and has gained an unprecedented access to their secret societies.His homage to the bikers include images of the various Bosozoku clubs throughout Japan, including female bike gangs, alongside studio portraits of individual members with their customised bikes, and the mass rallies and road wars that have made the Bosozoku subculture such a world-wide underground phenomenon.

Bringing together the work of forty young artists, Reflex seeks to present the voice of young Japan through their own unique brand of self-portraiture. From a gay sumo wrestling couple, subverting the usual masculinity of the Manga culture, to amateur photography of Geishas, there are bewildering and fantastic concepts at play here, highlighting the pressures at work in Japanese teenage minds. For Japan the existence of the 20th century was announced apocalyptically by the hydrogen bomb at Hiroshima. Whatever clothes the Emperor wore that day, they were useless to him now. And no sooner had the revelation of Western civilisation been so awesomely visited upon the Rising Sun than came the 21st century, gizmoid and insensible, surreal and plastic. In Reflex, 40 urban young artists and performers realise the manifestations of modern Japan through their own unique brand of self-portraiture. Superficially many of them seem simply weird – two gay Sumo wrestlers fighting in a bathhouse, for instance, thereby subverting the parameters of traditional, male-orientated Manga culture, or amateur photography of Geishas and phallic steam trains. But they are more than that. By identifying six distinct Japanese reflexes to the 21st century, namely the Kid Reflex, Naked Reflex, Manga Reflex, Group Reflex, Amateur Reflex and the Imaged Reflex, these artists have provided, in a myriad of self-representations, the concerns of young Japan, shocking to anyone ignorant of the pressures at work in their society. The amateur auteur seeking to explain; the group methodology seeking to conform; the liberated innocence of nakedness at odds with nudity; the mass-market phenomenon of a strictured teenage audience; the professional artist and above all, the powerful Manga culture – these are bewildering and fantastic concepts, illustrated by images both sublime and confusing.

Roma tribe emanated from India and settled in Europe, bringing an alien culture into its midst. Resolutely holding onto their traditions, the Roma nobly carry on in the face of Western adversity. This is an account dedicated to bringing the truth of these people and the Romany way of life, with four seasons spent in the settlement of Hermanovce in Eastern Slovakia.Gypsies' is a term bandied about like the vampire bat, conjuring images of mystery, danger, repulsion, derision and disgust. Some call them tinkers, travellers, or even outcasts. They are all wrong. Their name is the Roma, a tribe that emanated from India and brought to Europe a culture infinitely alien to the people who lived there.As once the culture of native North American Indians was regarded with hate and superstition, so too have the Romanies in Europe been harried and murdered and rejected as beyond the pale. But they have pursued their traditions with a tenacity unmatched by Western cultures of church or state.Jarret Schecter sought to define those traditions, to encapsulate both the animation of Romany life and the dispossession of their culture in a so-called modern, civilized Europe. After three years he came to concentrate on the gypsy settlement of Hermanovce in Eastern Slovakia.Over four seasons he has given the lie to prejudice and bigotry, but at the same time demonstrating the hunger and despair, the innate joy and camaraderie of the Roma in Hermanovce. It is not a voyage of love or romance, though the subjects themselves suggest it. It is rather the result of a singular dedication to a truth, and the reality of that truth.

Renowned photojournalist Stanley Greene's unflinchingly honest images from four years covering the war in Chechnya.The collapse of Russian communism in 1991 resounded to the shudder of an empire. It also sounded the death knell of the small, impoverished, forgotten land-locked state of Chechnya in the Caucasus, which had the misfortune to be of geopolitical importance.Chechnya, whose population is mainly Muslim, reiterated its desire to become an independent state as it had already done 150 years earlier. In 1991, most Chechens were not aware of the economic stakes of oil and they were considered peasants who were just good at throwing clods of earth at the Russian cavalry. Today, they know what to expect.A “lightning war” was launched against the Chechens in 1994, reducing the capital to a rat-infested pile of rubble. Grozny has become the Dresden of the Caucasus. Subsequently the Spetznatz, a Russian special forces unit, chained murders and kidnappings. No one was spared, neither men, nor women, nor children.But the Chechens are not resigned. What is left in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, is a vision of hell in the eyes of the survivors – pictured by Stanley Greene – that seems impossible to contemplate. What do the mothers of the Russian soldiers who have done this to Chechnya feel now about their sons?Stanley Greene was born in New York in 1949. Twenty years later he was given a camera. Open Wound records nine years of the history of the Chechen rebellion through his eyes.“… when you sit on the fence and watch genocide without doing anything about it, you are as guilty as those who are committing it.” Stanley Greene

Phil & Me is a personal document of a daughter's use of photography to try to control her relationship with her father and the disease that has crippled him, as well as an attempt to focus public understanding upon the essential humanity, the worth and contribution, of all victims of schizophrenia.In the book Amanda explores the world of her father, Philip Tetrault - a poet who has lived with schizophrenia since he attended McGill University at the age of 21. Philip was a poet suffused with promise and was hailed by Leonard Cohen as Canada's best-kept secret in 1989...before he slipped into yet another schizophrenic nightmare.The book juxtaposes Philip's poetry with black and white images of him taken during the sporadic meetings with Amanda. The photographs encompass a period of six years and the poetry eight years. Photo-booth pictures that span the past twenty-seven years form the thread that binds the surreal visual and poetic narrative. Phil & Me evolved into a collaboration between father and daughter after Amanda asked Philip to try to write again. Since then he has given her scraps of paper and napkins full of poetry at every meeting.Philip's poetry immerses us into the reality of his days - moving through the cafes and parks of Montreal his habitual Mickey of vodka in hand, where many of his acquaintances are street kids, squirrels, crows and seagulls. His are the musings of a man who has survived a crippling disease - a disease rarely discussed and more often disowned.Phil & Me tells the stories of many, through the experience of one, and gives passionate voice to those who rarely speak out and are even more rarely heard.

Making Art Work unravels the activities of the Mike Smith Studios, including the symbiosis of the studio with the process of creation of such artists as Damien Hirst, Mona Hatoum, Keith Tyson, Darren Almond and Mark Wallinger. Over the last 12 years she has collected from the Studio's archives, along with the detritus, the correspondence, notes, ideas, failures and successes of these and other artists at the studio.Even in Renaissance times the construction of works of art was often by the hand of someone other than the artist. Mike Smith's studio on the Old Kent road has been witness to the making of many important works of the Young British Artists, including Damien Hirst, Keith Tyson and Rachel Whiteread. Here the processes and practices of his studio are revealed.In the 15th century the ideas of the great Renaissance artists required the attentions of engineers and artisans to construct and explain the dynamics of their ambitious works. Leonardo da Vinci's helicopter was built in a studio; very probably his submarine too.Today that endeavour and enquiry is represented by Mike Smith, whose studio in the Old Kent Road in London furnishes the architecture for the most pressing installations and sculptures of young British artists. He is the carborundum that enables the best artists working in Britain today to realise their work - Rachel Whiteread's Monument in Trafalgar Square is a testament to his work.The painter Patsy Craig, out of Connecticut and Peru, has, in Making Art Work, unravelled the activities of the Mike Smith Studios, including the symbiosis of the studio with the process of creation of such artists as Damien Hirst, Mona Hatoum, Keith Tyson, Darren Almond and Mark Wallinger. Over the last 12 years she has collected from the Studio's archives, along with the detritus, the correspondence, notes, ideas, failures and successes of these and other artists at the studio. They are a diary and vade mecum of the construction of a significant theory in current British art.It is an extraordinary assembly of the very templates of the thinking, design and creation of art in Britain today, edited with a painter's eye to the relevant and a disdain for the irrelevant. It is as if one were provided with a pop-up illustration of how and why artists think, and how their ideas are engineered by those who translate their odysseys into reality. Germano Celant, a Senior Curator for Guggenheim New York, has contributed the critical text. William Furlong, from Audio Arts, has conducted the artists' interviews.

In Water Culture, Francesca Sorrenti and Marisha Shibuya of the SKe GROUP project, in partnership with Ocean Futures Society's Jean-Michel Cousteau, have collected a kaleidoscope of the elemental qualities of water and interviews with prominent world personalities on the problems facing our water supply.Water is the source of all life on this planet, yet more than one billion people have it in insufficient supply. Representing this vital element in all our lives are a kaleidoscopic selection of photographs from among others, Nan Goldin, Mario Sorrenti and Fabien Baron, demonstrating both our dependence and our carelessness towards this precious natural supply.The series of photographs they have compiled are breathtaking in its range of expressionism. They chose the works of Andreas Gursky, Richard Misrach, Mario Sorrenti, Nan Goldin, Mario Testino, and Steve McCurry, among others, to represent this multi-faceted world of water. Against these extraordinary images are set the records of the follies of mankind, the greed, despair and ignorance of the source of life. Again and again, it will leave a bewildered albatross or a seal coated in oil by another Amoco Cadiz that has spilt 250,000 tons of human degradation into the oceans. This is expressed with compelling facts and interviews throughout the book that bring awareness to the threat that our most important element faces today.Water Culture, reprinted after just one year, is dedicated to The International Year of Freshwater. Jean-Michel Cousteau promoted the book at the World Water Forum in Kyoto, Japan. A portion of the sales benefits the Ocean Futures Society.

The evolution of ideas from artists Stella Scala and Simeone Crispino who make up Vedovamazzei, have been tracked and analysed in an almost scientific classification by curator Mirta D'Argenzio. It is a rare insight into the creative process of this artist duo, with notes, sketches and doodles presented in a dazzling display.Classification and qualification seem almost to be the enemy of artistic endeavour. Yet in The Natural History of Vedovamazzei the curator Mirta D'Argenzio has produced an elliptical collation of the artists' ideas and hopes that offers a remarkable insight into a rarely defined world, that of Vedovamazzei's creative process.Simeone and Stella were lovers, from Naples. They were, and are, artists, painters, sculptors. As a matter of course they sketched out ideas in drawings and watercolours, produced cartoons for future projects, dallied with line and colour for experimental concepts. Some of them didn't work, or were put away for another day. These sketches, sometimes no more than doodles or jokes, were also their means of communication when one was away, so that at any moment, on their return, they would find a scrap with an illustration to muse over pinned to the wall.Mirta D'Argenzio, the art historian and curator, came across these fleeting memoranda and resolved to make sense of them, like an Egyptologist deciphering hieroglyphs, or an entomologist ordering the development of the Wing-tailed Cabbage White. She set about classifying them into an almost scientific order, from their larval forms through the pupae to the first spread of wings.She has produced a collection of the sketches in eight sections that makes up a visual record of the nascent ideas of Vedova and Mazzei, even in the 21st century cognisant of the traditions of Leonardo. The result of her work is as if one were treading the hallowed halls of the Natural History Museum, with its polished cases of botanical and insect collections, minutely marked and classified by the scientist's copperplate hand. It is a dazzling display.

A daughter documents the absence of her father at home, after he is in prison for 51 Months.On her 15th birthday Carrie Levy was waiting at home in hope for her father's return. He didn't make it. At the time he was being sentenced to prison for four years. Here she charts the years of his absence from their lives through her camera, as the void he left is filled with memories and reminders of him, compounded by his absence, from the empty garden, to the road trip to the prison five hours away. It took a year for Carrie Levy to grasp the consequences, the significance, of that day. At school her story was a jewel of gossip – the sidelong glances, the whispers, the outright glares. But she worked hard, and left a half a year early to escape her own prison. She picked up her camera. With the glimmering dark glass between her and her life, she began to photograph the empty spaces in her home, on the road, outside the prison (her mother would make the 10-hour round trip almost every weekend), in her pointless garden. But it was not pointless. These pictures are redolent of loss, of vacant landscapes and interiors that appear to be meaningless but as a whole sing a narrative song of those four years, like Carson McCullers’s sentences which, when dissected, add up to no more than nouns, verbs and adjectives, or the brushstrokes of Impressionist painting. It is a singular story, and one that stopped when her father came home in March, 2000. She spoke to her father for 15 minutes about his crime. It has not been mentioned since. Four months later, in June, Carrie Levy closed the lid of the suitcase under her bed that contained the 500 images she had taken.

Werner Bischof was a singular post-war photographer. His focus on showing the poverty and despair around him in Europe was tempered with a desire to travel the world, and convey the beauty and humanity waiting to be discovered through his lens. Tragically his inspirational life was cut short by a car accident in Peru, but his legacy lives on, and here his son Marco presents 70 of his father's photographs, never before published.In 1916, with the Great War reducing northern Europe to a treeless, shattered void, a boy was born to the prosperous director of a pharmaceutical firm in Zurich. He was named Werner. It was not an auspicious time to be born and, indeed, his mother died soon after. As a child, young Werner sought order in his life by dissecting snails and photographing, in the limpid light of his creation, the elegant whorls revealed. He did not become the physical training instructor (a compromise) his father wanted him to be. He did not become the painter he had once wanted to be in Paris in 1939, on the brink of another devastating conflict. He became Werner Bischof, the man, and a photographer of incalculable artistry who found in both order and the chaos he confronted and experienced a sublime beauty, a humanity that was singularly his own.His photographs of the post-war Europe in poverty and despair expressed infinite hope for the human condition; yet he was only 29. Less than 10 years later he was dead, leaving behind among his last photographs that of a Peruvian child playing his flute on the edge of a ravine. It is now an iconic photograph, and has a fatal allure.Bischof died when his jeep plunged over a ravine in the Andes on a quest for the faces, the lives, of harmony there. Fifty years later his son Marco has gathered together 70 previously unpublished photographs by Werner Bischof. They powerfully reiterate the man his father was, the nature of his humanity and his search for a benign and beautiful cognisance of the brief and terrifying world he lived in.

A year in the life of photographer Chris Steele-Perkins, and a vast departure from his usual striking images of Africa and Afghanistan: now he gives us misting glimpses of 2001, from the Surrey hills to New York; shots of family, home and his life that year.Chris Steele-Perkins has selected here, from the fragments of a working photographer's life and the archive of a single year - 2001, and the new millennium - images that unashamedly evoke his memories of that year, sentimental, odd, striking and intensely personal.Photographers create in an instant an image that is indelible - until the print fades. Memory, wilful and indiscriminate, cannot compete. But in Echoes Chris Steele-Perkins has somehow combined the two by selecting images he created throughout a single year that recall his misting glimpses of 2001. They are not his normal milieu, the stunning images of Africa and further abroad for which he is renowned. They are something new.Here are the Surrey hills, New York, Japan, family, Africa, home, solipsistic aide-memoires arranged in a chronology that combine to make, for him, a Pandora's box of his recollections of that year. No matter that they are at once intimate and unengaged. After all, photographers are human beings with the flickering sight of a raptor's eye, scanning the horizon and the nest.

A collection of every 'official portrait' from the members of the United Nations, resulting in a fascinating insight into power and portraiture from around the world.Authority, leadership, stability, benevolence, even grace: these are some of the qualities state leaders seek to portray in their official portraits.When all member states of the United Nations were asked to submit the official portrait of their Head of State the diversity was surprising: ranging from snapshots to staged tableaux in generic offices, from full-length portraits in front of stately buildings to close-ups before national emblems. Some portraits invoke the bureaucratic machinery that went into their production, while others seem more indebted to personal whimsy; even the banality of the everyday snapshot occasionally creeps into these staged displays of official power.Editorial influence is kept to a minimum. The selection of a single image to be reproduced in this volume was always left to the submitting embassies or governmental press offices. Organised alphabetically by state, Official Portraits allows these images to speak for themselves.If you suspected a single person could embody a nation, the official portraits of world leaders confirm it…a fascinating – and somewhat bizarre – collection of world leaders. The Independent, UKAll photos speak of power, every single one tells a story, about the character of a man, of a country. A small instructive mine. Il Sole – 24 Ore, ItalyAs one flips through Official Portraits, each photo becomes a passport into a country. Newsweek, USA

A Purple Heart, the honour given to US soldiers for their wounds, is one that many cling to when faced with the realities of both the return home and their time at war. Accompanying the images are first person interviews with the soldiers as they discuss why they enlisted and their experiences in the second Iraq war, as well as their lives now and the prospect of living as disabled veterans.The images are accompanied by first person interviews with the young soldiers who discuss their lives, reasons for enlisting, experiences in Iraq and their prospects as disabled veterans, some of them blind, some without limbs, others brain damaged and wheel-chair bound.The words and photos make for a complex portrait of American youth, their values, their dreams, the lack of opportunity facing them upon high school graduation, and the myths of warfare which informed their decisions to join.One soldier explained that he always wanted to be a hero and thought the military would be fun. He never imagined an RPG attack in Fallujah would leave him a cripple unable to care for a wife and two children. Another described calling the recruiting station after he saw an MTV-style Army commercial on TV. An immigrant from Pakistan, he was given his citizenship following his injury, a fair trade in his mind, a leg for an American passport. Yet another soldier left a crime, drug ridden neighbourhood in Alabama, only to return 100 percent disabled back where he started but now bedridden.The photographs are accompanied by essays from Verlyn Klinkenborg, an author and editorial writer for the New York Times, and Tim Origer, a Vietnam veteran and former Marine who fought in the Tet offensive. He came back a 19 year-old amputee."I've been a documentary photographer since 1987 working in a dozen countries including Afghanistan, Bosnia, India and Vietnam, but most of my time has been spent traveling the USA trying to understand the American Way of Life."

When Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount and the Al-Aqsa mosque in September 2000, there began at once a cycle of violence that has yet to be resolved. Ilkka Uimonen was there to witness the events.As the vehemence escalated he sought out flashpoints on both sides, Palestinian and Israeli. His photographs in Cycles do not follow the chronology of the events; they are very much his own narrative of his experiences. His sequence of 61 photographs of the combatants, and the innocents, is presented without an introduction. The violence and defining sentiments require none. His images fill the page, all of them full bleed, and provide a mesmeric testimony to the aggression, despair and pride that exist without boundaries in Palestine.Cycles has been edited and bound with Ilkka Uimonen's stark realism in mind. There are no frills to this volume that weighs heavy in the hand.

No one has charted the misfortunes of the innocent people caught up in the Viet Nam war as Philip Jones Griffiths. This book chonicles his respect and love for the country 25 years after the end of the war.Viet Nam At Peace is the monumental chronicle of a country struggling to emerge from the apocalyptic destruction of war, a destruction so seismic that it was thought vainly by many to be the end of all contemporary imperial aggression. It is Tolstoyan in its reach and emotional responses.Philip Jones Griffiths, the author of Vietnam Inc. and Agent Orange: Collateral Damage in Viet Nam, has visited Viet Nam 25 times since the end of the war. The first Westerner to travel by road from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City after the war, and later the Ho Chi Minh trail, he has amassed an unparalleled photographic record of the post-war transformation of the country.From the first days of terrible hardships, as the joys of victory were quickly tempered by the reality of the extent of the destruction wreaked by the war, and the crippling effects of the US embargo, he has recorded an uncomfortably comprehensive view of the aftermath of war. This is not simply a record of shattered landscapes; it is also a record of the shattered hearts and minds, culture and hopes.He has witnessed the limbless heroes, the Amerasian children, the boat people, and the re-emergence of the social problems of prostitution and drug addiction as the country embraces consumerism. Equally, here are recognised the horrified attempts by the Vietnamese themselves to curb the hydra of its worst excesses.

80 per cent of the world's blind population are blind because they were born in the wrong place. You are less likely to go blind in Japan, the second richest nation in the world, than in Burkina Faso in Africa, one of the three poorest. Jarret Schecter followed the work of Orbis, an international organisation who provide free and inexpensive eye treatment in impoverished nations, among them Burkina Faso."Visiting Burkina Faso, one of the world's poorest countries, I sensed that there was a disproportionate number of people deprived of sight. Back in the United States, in February 2002, I discovered that 8 out 10 blind people live in the developing world. Astounding as this statistic is, I was even more surprise to learn that the vast majority of blindness in the world is preventable. Incredibly, most preventable blindness is cured through inexpensive procedures, that literally last minutes".Like many residual problems of poverty that are endemic to the developing world, people in the developed world do not make an intuitive link between blindness and poverty. The association is not made and the magnitude of the problem is even much less understood. Approximately, 80% of the world's 50 million blind people are blind because they were born in the wrong place. They are blind due to the residual effects of poverty: vitamin A deficiency, unsanitary conditions, minimal healthcare, and other issues. At the moment, in the world, 40 million people suffer from preventable blindness and around 125 million can barely see due to impoverished conditions. Although the developed world has done relatively little thus far, there are fortunately certain international organisations that are declaring war on preventable blindness. Organisations such as Orbis provide free or inexpensive eye treatment to people who needlessly suffer from preventable blindness. Through Orbis, ophthalmologists and support staff, whom in many instances volunteer, heroically and tirelessly travel throughout the world's poorest countries to give sight to those who are arbitrarily prevented from seeing.

During the Second World War, thousands of Dutch, British, Australian and American POWs were forced by the Japanese to work on the railways in Burma and Sumatra. 50-80 per cent died under such terrible conditions. Photographer Jan Banning photographed 24 Dutch and Indonesian survivors, bravely revisiting this horrendous ordeal.Victory for the allied forces in the Pacific theatre of the Second World War will be celebrated in August 2005, 60 years after the Japanese Emperor Hirohito conceded defeat. Among the celebrants was a small, largely forgotten group who will once again have to relive their nightmares of the war in the Pacific.Dutch, English, Australian and American POWs were among more than a quarter of a million Asians - so called romushas - forced by the Japanese to work on railways in Burma and Sumatra. They worked in desperate conditions. Between 50 and 80 per cent of the romushas did not survive the regime, not least as a result of being torpedoed in transit. The sinking of the Junyo Maru, for instance, resulted in the deaths of 4000 romushas and 1500 prisoners of war.In Traces of War the Dutch photographer Jan Banning has interviewed and photographed just 24 of the Dutch and Indonesian survivors. The haunting images show them as they worked, naked from the waist up. The words elicit, with a matter-of-fact disinterest, the misery of their constant understanding of death. Unsurprisingly, after their experiences, they have hitherto been loath to discuss their ordeals.Jan Banning's Dutch publication of Traces of War has all but sold out. Trolley presents the English language version for the many thousands of relatives and children, and the few survivors, who want to know the truths of what happened in Burma and Sumatra.

The camp of Denan in southeastern Ethiopia holds 10,000 people, officially Ethiopian but ethnically Somali. They are not classified as refugees. They are instead Internally Displaced Peoples, IDPs, and they live in squalor with virtually no aid, food or medicines, not even eligible to benefit from the UN refugee programs. Jarret Schecter emphasises the plight of Africa as a struggle with Western bureaucracy.In the Ogaden region of southeastern Ethiopia there is a camp with approximately 10,000 people, officially Ethiopian but ethnically Somali. They live there in squalor, with virtually no nourishment or medicines, and with minimal shelter. According to the United Nations they are not refugees, and as such benefit even less from the marginal assistance that refugee programs can offer. Not classified as refugees, they are therefore Internally Displaced Peoples, or IDPs.The number of IDPs worldwide is staggering, far greater than officially recognised refugees. They number near the equivalent of the population of Canada, for instance. Refugee programs do not reach them. Displaced in Denan is a record of the camp and the efforts of a small town in Connecticut, USA, to help the people there.The tragedy of Africa is not just the corruption, the poverty, the wars, the civil wars, the droughts, the famine - as if they were not enough. It is also the profound inability of Western societies, desperate to help with or without their politicians, to understand the tribal, even nomadic, claims to the land. Logic and order, in the shape of international borders and agreements, do not hold sway there. Jarret Schecter's referential work on The Denan Project shows how individuals can overcome these bureaucracies, and how desperate the plight of IDPs are with official recognition even less than that of refugees.

Five young Italian photographers document the changes in their country, as around them economic shifts in production systems have affected their society and its workers. Published in both English and Italian, the photographs are accompanied with texts by renowned Italian philosophers and writers.Less than a generation after the death of Garibaldi, Italy's largest trade union, the CGIL, was formed in 1906. The union's birth epitomised what the fledgling nation's culture and credos were to represent in the 20th century, encapsulating a traditional working class, the inevitable bourgeoisie, capitalists and, later, fervent communists.Now, almost 100 years later, Italy has changed fundamentally. The demographic differences so starkly apparent at the time of the CGIL's formation have simply faded away, like a vibrant watercolour exposed to the sun. They have been replaced by a colourless homogeneity, a vagueness of purpose, even a decadence, in which chain stores are remarked upon for their garish use of colours.To mark the 100th anniversary of Italy's greatest workers' union, Made in Italy - CGIL 100 is an independent photographic survey of Italy today undertaken by four young prize-winning photographers. They have, so to speak, peered underneath the superficiality of contemporary Italy in attempt to understand the numbing, sclerotic changes in its society and its aims - if they are to be found.Italy is not the only European country to have been subject to the enervating syndromes of the shopping mall. But it has suffered more dramatically than any other simply because of its former passions, its cultural flamboyance and its intellectual rigour. Pier Paolo Pasolini recognized these changes, saying that Italian society was becoming the embourgeoisie, as if in some alarming way the entire nation had embraced the flatulent notions of a middle class without values, and without value.Made in Italy - CGIL 100 tries to capture what is critically important to a society that appears to be imploding, a startling journey via images through to that part of Italy that today bears the heaviest burden of those changes. It asks the inevitable question: 'How can this have happened? Is anybody paying attention?'

The unfolding events in the run up to the Iraq war had given Tom Hurndall, a 21-year-old British photojournalist, an increased curiosity and desire to journey to the Middle East. This book presents his images and writing in the lead up to his fatal shooting in Gaza.In February 2003, initially as an observer alongside the Human Shields, Tom Hurndall left with a passion to make a difference, to record and photograph the truth for himself.We follow his journey first from Baghdad, then to Amman and the Al-Rweished refugee camp in Jordan, and finally on to the town of Rafah in Gaza close to the Egyptian border, where US peaceworker Rachel Corrie had been killed just weeks previously. On April 11th, unarmed and wearing an internationally recognizable orange peacekeeper jacket, he was severely wounded while carrying Palestinian children to safety. He died nine months later in a London hospital.The book follows Tom’s life and thoughts in the final weeks leading up to the shooting. Motivated by a sense of injustice and striving to remain objective we are drawn into his increasingly serious photographs and words, through extracts from his diary, emails and poems.It is realised through collaboration with the Hurndall family on the eighth anniversary of that fateful day, and follows the 2008 Channel 4 film-documentary ‘The Shooting of Thomas Hurndall’.

Mario Tauchi invites you to join a transcendental trip through the deepest parts of the artist's brain with his incredible Mario-mandalas, 108 free-floating cosmic forms in white space, that the reader brings the final dimension to by colouring them in.Psychiatrist Carl Jung saw the mandala as 'a representation of the unconscious self' and believed his paintings of mandalas enabled him to identify emotional states and disorders and work towards wholeness in personality. For Jung, this identification of the id, and its transience, was a fundamental tool in his understanding of personality.Dynamically, this volume of Mario-mandalas goes beyond a passive recognition of the intricate mandala designs, leading readers to develop their own interpretation of their personality and contribute towards the entity of the mandala form. Once a mandala has been coloured in it can be detached from the book, as each becomes a unique work of art that has been created in their own design; the final mandala is thus a creation of personal interaction with the artist, and a wider connection with the universal language of colour and shape through the unconscious.This book can appeal to nearly anyone with an interest in art either as a technique or as a finished work, and to adults and children alike, as the mandalas return generous rewards, regardless of technical ability.

Paolo Pellegrin, renowned Magnum photographer, documented the war in Lebanon during the months of July and August 2006 by Israel in retaliation to Hezbollah attacks.The onslaught in Lebanon during the months of July and August 2006 resulted in not only the deaths of over 600 Lebanese civilians but also an almost complete destruction of the country's infrastructure: schools, roads, hospitals and homes. In total Hezbollah launched 2500 rockets into Israel, resulting in the deaths of 36 Israeli civilians, and the wounding of hundreds more.Paolo Pellegrin (Magnum Photos) and journalist Scott Anderson were in Lebanon during the conflict, on assignment for The New York Times. Pellegrin's photographs intimately capture the fear and powerlessness of the Lebanese population in the face of the ceaseless Israeli air strikes, revealing the terror and despair of families and friends witnessing the deaths of their loved ones, whilst around them their homes were destroyed. In particular Pellegrin also documented the aftermath of the attack on the village of Qana in southern Lebanon; many of the victims children, his photographs reveal the immense suffering of the civilians involved.Alongside his work exposing the consequences of indiscriminate attacks on a civilian population is a 3000-word account by Scott Anderson, who accompanied Pellegrin in Lebanon. Pellegrin and Anderson were both wounded in a missile attack by an Israeli drone, which fired on their vehicle as they traveled through the city of Tyre. Along with the civilians of southern Lebanon, they were stranded for weeks under heavy bombing and air strikes by the IDF. The attack at Qana, also the second one to strike the village in living memory, soon after prompted the singer Patti Smith to respond in the form of a song, entitled 'Qana', the words and music of which form her contribution to the book.

Chernobyl – The Hidden Legacy shows the region over a period of four years twenty years later and the contaminated landscape the people still inhabit. It shows that the horrors of Chernobyl, and its legacy, are still anything but forgotten.On April 26, 1986, at 1:24 a.m, the world’s worst ever man-made disaster took place. Reactor 4 at Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station, was beset by a series of explosions that rose deep from its radioactive depths and blasted itself high into the atmosphere, eventually seeping its way into the far corners of the globe. Chernobyl in 2008, 22 years later, has become a half-global legend and half-forgotten horror story. Many people have returned to the contaminated areas they still call home. Since then birth defects and various other pathologies, especially thyroid cancer, have afflicted the population. Chernobyl is not the past, Cherobyl is not history, Chernobyl is the beginning.

Portraits taken over a period of two to three years in the US, now as adults and in their own words, they speak of a childhood blighted by the violation and horror of sexual abuse at the hands of a member of the Catholic clergy. From countless interviews, emails and phone conversations they recall their experiences of an abuse of power, be they priest, monk or nun - which has followed them into their adult lives."My name is Robert M. Hoatson. I am 53 years old and I am a Catholic priest. I was born February 15, 1952 and raised in West Orange, NJ and I went to Catholic elementary school and Catholic High School and three Catholic Colleges. It was during my late junior year that a Christian Brother approached me and told me that I was going to be moved into his senior honors English class. That Christian Brother later became perhaps the most serial paedophile in the order”.Accompanying their words are black and white portraits of the survivors today, in places that for them echo where they are now, or where they were then. Each has a different story to tell, a unique pattern of abuse, though they all share certain similarities. A certain grooming by the perpetrator, a blind trust of the parents in this person to look after their child both spiritually and in all ways their welfare, all systematically overruled by the one person who a community put their faith in.When the sexual abuse would end, then the self-abuse would often start. Drugs, alcohol, violence. Many went to jail for their crimes, this as a direct result of a much worse one that they had been too young to realise. Others, including two cases in the book, committed suicide.Two prominent writers have contributed, an introduction by A.W. Richard Sipe, a psychotherapist and former Benedictine monk and priest now married to a former Maryknoll nun. Well-known in his community, he has written several books, and counts as a speciality the exploration of priestly celibacy. Michael Kelly is an award winning newspaper journalist and author, who writes focusing not on the overall clergy sexual abuse problem in the Church, but narrows it down to the individual, the person who is hurt for life.

Thomas Dworzak (Magnum) was embedded with a US medical corps in Iraq in 2005. His images of soldiers at work and play, from mess rooms to operating rooms and out in the field, are juxtaposed with stills from the 70s TV series M*A*S*H. Together they reveal the parallels of life at war, unchanged over the decades, the mad mixed with the small moments of sanity, that evolve from living in conflict, from Korea to Iraq."If it weren't for the war, we'd all be having a great time." Taken from the series M*A*S*H, 1970.First seen in the early 1970s at the height of anti-Vietnam feeling in America, the original series M*A*S*H followed a hapless US medical corps stationed out in the preceding Korean war. Here underlay a dark commentary throughout its comedy. As the US Military continue to fight onwards in Iraq, doctors, nurses and medics are working on the front lines to keep their casualties down. Magnum Photographer Thomas Dworzak was with them, embedded with the 44th Medcoms 50th and 1150th Medical Companies in Iraq over several periods in 2005. Taking the lead from the satirical commentary first provided by the film and subsequent series of M*A*S*H, this book juxtaposes images from the series with Dworzak's own from his time with the medical companies he was stationed with out in Iraq.From mess tents to surgical tables, the story of everyday life behind the scenes of these medical corps shows at times a pathos and comradeship alongside the expected blood and suffering. The accompanying stills and subtitled images from M*A*S*H bring Dworzak's photographs out of the realm of the purely photojournalistic, and instead poignantly provide a black humour for a disenchanted audience of the modern world, and a comment on the concept of photographers today working embedded and alongside the military.