Atelier Éditions – serie

An unprecedented delve into the dazzling, inventive and long-overlooked Surrealist photograms and poetry of Anneliese HagerThis publication introduces the untold story of German artist and poet Anneliese Hager. Active from the 1930s to the 1960s, Hager began her photographic experimentation in Germany during the Nazi censure of modern art. Her preferred medium was the cameraless photograph, or photogram—an image made by placing objects directly on (or in close proximity to) a light-sensitive surface and exposing the assembled material to light. In its final form, a photogram is a one-of-a-kind work that reverses light and dark: the longer the paper is covered, and hence unexposed, the brighter the covered parts will be, and vice versa. Hager called these bright areas "white shadows."Hager’s photograms offer a more inclusive history of the medium, synthesizing the technique’s 20th-century avant-garde trajectory (best known in the work of László Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray) and its 19th-century prehistories in the realm of science and in practices such as the making of silhouettes, collage and textile arts—pursuits often coded feminine. In 1945, all Hager’s existing artwork was destroyed in the bombing of Dresden during World War II. This book offers an unprecedented reconstruction of her development and postwar creation of otherworldly, Surrealist visions in photograms and poems, a selection of which appear here in English for the first time. For Hager, the photogram was significant for its provocative tonal inversions and surprising chance effects, but also for what emerges from the dark.Anneliese Hager (1904–97) was a German Surrealist poet, translator and photo artist. She began making photographs in Berlin in the 1920s, and from 1935 began to experiment with photograms. Hager also made the first German translations of French authors such as Apollinaire, Breton, Char, Jarry, Lautréamont and Yourcenar.

San Francisco based photographer Michael Jang spent nearly four decades working as a successful commercial portrait photographer. Unbeknownst to the world, however, he was simultaneously assembling a vast archive of thousands of remarkable images documenting, variously: college days, Hollywood celebrities, would-be weather-presenters, San Francisco street scenes, his family, Bay Area punks and adolescent garage bands. Jang revealed nothing of his ever-expanding, eclectic archive for almost 40 years until 2003, when he submitted a number of images for consideration to San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art. Jang's work attracted immediate acclaim, and for the past decade he has continued to unveil his considerable oeuvre in national and international exhibitions and monographs. The photographer's first major monograph, Who Is Michael Jang? highlights the photographer's most important bodies of work. Introduced by Jang's longtime collaborator and SFMoMA curator emerita of photography, Sandra Phillips, this volume offers readers a long-overdue introduction to Jang's incredible images.Michael Jang (born 1951) has practiced photography in San Francisco for more than 50 years. Expanding the medium's perceived parameters from the very outset of his engagement, Jang's eclectic images, many of which were authored throughout America's photographic golden age, have more recently drawn broad renown. After decades of successful commercial portraiture, Jang began to revisit the vast archive of unseen, spontaneous images he has amassed, many of which betray the influence of celebrated street photographers such as Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand and Lisette Model.

A kaleidoscopic celebration of the USDA’s pomological collection, offering an engaging, biophillic meditation upon the sweetest of the earth’s produceThe United States Department of Agriculture Pomological Watercolor Collection encompasses 7,497 botanical watercolor paintings of evolving fruit and nut varieties, alongside specimens introduced by USDA plant explorers from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Assembled between 1886 and 1942, the collection's remarkable, botanically accurate watercolors were executed by some 21 professional artists (including nine women). Authored largely before the widespread application of photography, the watercolors were intended to aid accurate identification and examination of fruit varietals, for the nation’s fruit growers.Documenting the transformation of American pomology, the science of fruit breeding and production, and the horticultural innovations accountable for contemporary fruit cultivation and consumption, the USDA’s collection offers fascinating anthropological and horticultural insights concerning the fruits we ecstatically devour, and why.With an abundance of reproductions from the collection, this gorgeous volume encompasses fruit-suffused anecdotes and observations drawn from the fields of archaeology and anthropology, horticulture and literature, ancient representation and contemporary visual art. It includes contributions by authors Jacqueline Landy, John McPhee, Michael Pollan and Marina Vitaglione.

A fascinating glimpse into an experimental British nudist culture that radically challenged and transformed conventional attitudes to bodies and their representationsThis richly illustrated volume examines the idiosyncratic phenomenon of social nudism in mid-20th-century Britain, an island nation fabled for its lack of sunshine and its reserved social attitudes.Structured across three interrelated phases, readers first encounter the movement at its genesis in the 1920s, when nudism was synonymous with vegetarianism, intellectualism and utopianism. That nascent culture proliferated in the postwar era, with a widening landscape of amateur clubs and governing organizations alongside high-circulation publications and censorship-challenging photographers. Finally, Annebella Pollen examines the movement’s redefinition as naturism, its cultural battles and its struggle to survive amid shifts in sexual liberation in the permissive 1960s.Unadorned bodies were the central campaigning tool of British naturism’s photographic propaganda. They drew attention to the cause and drove publication sales but they also attracted regular public opprobrium. Naturism’s shifting visual culture thus provides a microcosmic view of British moral, legal and aesthetic transformations in a period of rapid social change, revealing evolving perspectives on health and sex, gender and ethnicity, pleasure and power.Annebella Pollen is Reader in History of Art and Design at the University of Brighton. Her first book, Mass Photography: Collective Histories of Everyday Life, explored 55,000 amateur snapshots taken on one day in 1987. The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift examined the modernist craft and occult spirituality of former scoutmasters in 1920s England.

A gorgeous illustrated meditation on the homes of iconic Southern women, from Nina Simone to Flannery O’ConnorIn These Long Shadows, 14 personal, working, and domestic spaces of distinguished women are the framework for this exploration of public history in the American South. The entries are arranged chronologically and comprise artists Elisabet Ney and Clementine Hunter; musician Nina Simone; authors Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, and Margaret Mitchell; poet Anne Spencer; activists Pauli Murray and Ida B. Wells; architect Amaza Lee Meredith; Girl Scouts founder Juliet Gordon Low; socialites Julia Nutt and Emily Inman; and plantation owner Adelicia Acklen.Covering a period of 186 years, the book's chapters include original photography, first-person research, and archival material to illuminate these women’s legacies. It examines what we experience when we visit house museums and provokes questions about authority, the archive, and how the past is written about today. Though women are underrepresented in the historical narrative, there are women behind every preservation movement, and white women, specifically, had a great hand in spinning some of the mythology integral to the United States.Monica Nelson is the author of Edible Flowers: How, Why, and When We Eat Flowers (Monacelli, 2021), These Long Shadows: Women’s House Museums in the American South (Atelier Èditions, 2026), Antiques Today (Princeton Architectural Press, 2027), and is the founding photo and design director of Wilder Quarterly. She writes about history through material culture, design and nature.

Food as social ritual, personal liberation and spiritual alchemy: from Alison Knowles and Adrian Piper to Agnes Denes and Andy WarholIn More Than the Eyes, writer Ellen Mara De Wachter considers the ways in which food, when used as a material in contemporary art, confronts, subverts and ultimately brings us to our senses. Focusing on artists working between 1960 and 2000, the book shows how we have become restricted by a hierarchy that values sight and reason above other senses, and how encounters with food in art can help us break this bind. By putting food at the center of the highly visual art world, the artists in this book quicken a range of sensations beyond visual perception, helping us access and liberate aspects of our experience that have been ignored or suppressed. Topics include Carolee Schneemann’s performance pieces using meat; the way in which Hannah Wilke rejects the imperative for women to be “sweet”; Zoe Leonard’s exploration of decomposition as process; Adrian Piper’s conceptual work incorporating hamburgers; the SoHo artists’ restaurant FOOD; Agnes Denes’ wheat field near Wall Street; and how other artists, such as Sarah Lucas and Andy Warhol, introduce the iconography, foods and desires of the working class into the rarefied environment of the gallery and museum.London-based writer Ellen Mara De Wachter is the author of Co-Art: Artists on Creative Collaboration and the coauthor of Great Women Artists (both published by Phaidon). Her writing has featured in publications including Frieze, Art Quarterly, Art Monthly, the World of Interiors and the White Review.

A record of the rise and fall of the BMC farm that foregrounds the voices of a new cast of characters Black Mountain College (BMC) was a wellspring of 20th-century creative unorthodoxy. From its founding in 1933 and over its celebrated 23-year history, the small liberal arts school in rural North Carolina attracted a remarkable number of famous and soon-to-be famous artists, writers and visionaries including Anni and Josef Albers, Ruth Asawa, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Willem de Kooning, Buckminster Fuller, Ray Johnson, Charles Olson and M.C. Richards. The exploits of these BMC cultural luminaries have been recounted time and time again.David Silver’s fascinating new book offers a very different perspective. The farm was vital to BMC. Throughout the Depression and World War II it provided vital sustenance, while serving as a testing ground for self-sufficiency, communal living and collaboration—the most precious and precarious ingredient at the college.Through deep original research, The Farm at Black Mountain College follows renegade students, faculty and farmers as they establish a campus farm in the 1930s, build a better farm in the 1940s and watch it all collapse in the 1950s. We meet a new cast of BMC characters whose stories have seldom, if ever, been explored, and whose adventures in agriculture illuminate what exactly happened at BMC across the decades, from optimistic community building to its plunge into substance-addled scarcity. In these engrossing pages, we encounter the extraordinary folk whose endeavors on the land helped shape the Black Mountain College of myth and extraordinary reality.David Silver (born 1968) is professor and chair of environmental studies at the University of San Francisco. He teaches classes on urban agriculture, hyperlocal food systems and food, culture and storytelling.

Foraging for mushrooms with John Cage: writing, art, photography and ephemera from an idiosyncratic chapter in the composer's lifeImagined as an extended mushroom-foraging expedition, John Cage: A Mycological Foray gathers together Cage’s mushroom-themed compositions, photographs, illustrations and ephemera. Indeterminacy Stories and other writings by Cage are interwoven throughout the first volume within a central essay examining Cage’s enduring relationship with mycology. Also included is a transcript of Cage’s 1983 performance, MUSHROOMS et Variationes. The second volume is the inaugural reproduction of Cage’s 1972 portfolio, Mushroom Book, authored in collaboration with illustrator Lois Long and botanist Alexander H. Smith. Readers are thus drawn through the landscape of Cage’s mycologically centred oeuvre and interests, discovering assorted works, images, compositions, philosophies and ephemera, as one might encounter assorted fungi and flora while foraging.John Cage: A Mycological Foray constitutes a new, idiosyncratic chapter in Cage’s oeuvre, a departure from the composer’s more established narrative.American composer and music theorist John Cage (1912–92) was a pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music and a leading figure of the postwar avant-garde. His influence extended to the realms of dance, poetry, performance and visual art.