Bøger udgivet af Editions Xavier Barral

From darkly fascinating photographs of ravens to humorous self-portraits, Fukase created images of enormous emotional powerAmong the most radical and original photographers of his generation, Masahisa Fukase was famous for The Solitude of Ravens (1991), in which these birds of doom, in flocks or alone, blacken the pages of the book in inky, somber, calligraphic clusters; in 2010 it was voted the best photobook of the past 25 years by the British Journal of Photography. Fukase also has a lesser-known corpus of collages, self-portraits, photographs reworked as sketches, black-and-white prints, Polaroids and more. This book brings together all of his work for the very first time.Its editors, Simon Baker, director of the Maison européenne de la photographie, Paris, and Tomo Kosuga, director of the Masahisa Fukase Archives, Tokyo, have assembled 26 series from Fukase's oeuvre, including Memories of Father; The Solitude of Ravens; his portraits of cats; his famous self-portraits taken in a bathtub with a waterproof camera; and many previously unpublished works. Fukase tried his hand at everything, and this essential volume, at more than 400 pages, at last reveals the full breadth of his imagination in an English-language publication.

A tender and joyful portrait of cat companionship from the author of The Solitude of RavensIn 1977, photographer Masahisa Fukase turned his lens toward a new companion: his cat, Sasuke. "That year I took a lot of pictures crawling on my stomach to be at eye level with a cat and, in a way, that made me a cat. It was a job full of joy, taking these photos playing with what I liked, in accordance with the changes of nature." A year later, he acquired a second cat, named Momoe. "I didn't want to photograph the most beautiful cats in the world but rather capture their charm in my lens, while reflecting me in their pupils," he wrote of these images. "You could rightly say that this collection is actually a 'self-portrait' for which I took the form of Sasuke and Momoe."Featuring tipped-on cover images, this gorgeously made book is arranged in four chapters, organized around the chronology of Fukase's life with his cats. As so often in his work, these tender images also express the photographer's subjectivity and his connection to his subject.Born in 1934 on the island of Hokkaido, in the north of Japan, into a family of studio photographers, Masahisa Fukase was meant to take over the family business, but instead he launched a career as a freelance reporter in the late 1960s. In 1971 he published his first photography book, dedicated to his family. In 1974, he cofounded the Workshop Photography School with Shomei Tomatsu, Eikoh Hosoe, Noriaki Yokosuka, Nobuyoshi Araki and Daido Moriyama. That same year, MoMA dedicated a milestone exhibition New Japanese Photography to their work; but it was the 1986 book The Solitude of Ravens that was to make Fukase a revered photographer worldwide. After a fall in 1992, Fukase went into a coma at the age of 58 and was kept on life support until his death in 2012.

The haunting story of Sophie Calle's mother, told through diary excerpts and family photographs"She was called successively Rachel, Monique, Szyndler, Calle, Pagliero, Gonthier, Sindler," reads the first lines of Sophie Calle: Rachel Monique, embroidered on the cover. "My mother liked people to talk about her. Her life did not appear in my work, and that annoyed her. When I set up my camera at the bottom of the bed in which she lay dying--fearing that she would pass away in my absence, whereas I wanted to be present and hear her last words--she exclaimed, 'Finally.'" Sophie Calle: Rachel Monique tells the story of Monique Szyndler, Sophie Calle's mother who died in 2007, through diary excerpts and photographs selected by the artist from family albums. Described as "haunting" and "a mystery novel that tirelessly searches for a missing person," the Rachel Monique project honors a daughter's complicated relationship with her mother and the artist's deeply felt grief. This volume, presenting Calle's installation of Rachel Monique at the Palais de Tokyo, was designed in close collaboration with the artist. The cover text is embroidered to create a precious object, and all of the texts relating to the installation are beautifully embossed. Sophie Calle: Rachel Monique is a highly personal and moving book, intimate and universal in its expressions of mourning and memory.

Images of Conviction shows, through 11 cases, how the photographic image is constructed to become evidence.From the scientific methods developed by Alphonse Bertillon, a criminologist who worked for the Préfecture de Police de Paris in the late 19th century, to the first aerial images of the front taken by the army during World War I, to the shots allowing the victims of Stalin's Great Purge to be identified--for over 150 years photography has served as proof, testifying to crime and thus seeming to deliver truths. In the 11 cases presented here, each one situated within its historical and political context, the question of the status of images is acutely posed. Whether it be the famous shots of the Shroud of Turin, the images of the Nuremberg trial, the skull of Josef Mengele or photos taken with cell phones recording the damage of drone strikes in Afghanistan and Israel, forensic images are now part of any police or political investigation.

Sure to captivate film and photobook fans alike with its fantastically bizarre restaging of Star Wars on an abandoned New Brutalist planet EarthJabba the Hut lurks in the shadows of a decrepit, abandoned warehouse, his toady eyes glowing; Boba Fett looms up from the fluorescent glare of an indoor car park, poised to kill; Yoda peers out inquiringly from the window ledge of some otherwise untenanted institutional building; Han Solo's cryogenically frozen form on a slab stands, installed bizarrely in an anonymous concrete plaza. Of the many scenarios to which Star Wars fans have dispatched the films' protagonists over the years, none--not even Seth McFarlane's Family Guy homages--are as unlikely as Cédric Delsaux's. In Dark Lens, Delsaux transports Darth Vader and the whole gamut of Star Wars iconography to a post-apocalyptic, urban-suburban landscape of endless parking lots, highrises and wasteland interzones, vacant of ordinary human life. Delsaux's "mythology of banality" (as he describes it) produces images that are not just funny or preposterous, but also weirdly compelling; in their photographic plausibility they successfully incorporate Star Wars into an everyday reality that we can all recognize, but in ways that make both worlds seem strangely real and absurdly false. Delsaux's Dark Lens will captivate both film and photobook fans alike with its fantastically bizarre recasting of Star Wars on planet Earth after the apocalypse.

On 13 January 1958, the grotesquely disfigured body of a man was discovered near Lake Sembako in Japan. Two investigators from Tokyo came to help the local police in resolving what at first appeared to be a banal case, but which soon proved to be something more complicated. For the first time, a photographer was authorized to accompany the police to document the investigation. Press photographer Watabe Yukichi (1924-1993) followed the inspectors as they questioned witnesses (workers in a tannery factory, local police officers) and pounded the streets of the most insalubrious neighborhoods in Tokyo--its bars, bridges, alleyways and hospitals--in search of the killer. Like the haunted film stills of a newly discovered noir classic, Watabe's images record much more than simply a police investigation, and reveal a Tokyo of the 1950s in a way that has rarely been depicted.