From Simone Sapienza’s Charlie Surfs on Lotus Flowers, published in 2018. Hardcover with transparent silk-screened dust-jacket
110 pages, 87 photographs.
Link in the IGshop ✨
“I don't know if photography is still about pressing the shutter at the right moment. I'm ever more far from that Bressonian point of view about photography. Time flows, pictures leave, people don't. I'd like to engage more the viewer into my pictures - let him questioning the picture, its content, even myself and himself too. The meaning of the project will come up slowly along the series. Just spend time with the images, dive your sight into them - don't have just a fast look. We are overwhelmed by pictures everyday. Look around you. For one time at day, slow down.
I come from Italy where - especially in Sicily - body language is the first language.
@bonsaimon on @urbanautica
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#photobook #photobookjousting #photobooks #bookphotography #akinabooks #photography #vietnam #charliesurfsonlotusflowers #photojournalism #documentaryphotography #simonesapienza #photoessay #photooftheday #photo #photographylovers #photographer #publishing #bookstagram #booklover #book #war #capitalism #communism
From Simone Sapienza’s Charlie Surfs on Lotus Flowers, published in 2018. Hardcover with transparent silk-screened dust-jacket
110 pages, 87 photographs.
Link in the IGshop ✨
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It was while studying documentary photography in Wales that Sapienza’s curiosity in the country began to grow. “I was thinking about my knowledge of Vietnam when I went for the first time. It was nothing beyond the pictures. Thinking about it, my only reference was Hollywood,” explains Sapienza. On one side, the libraries were stocked with iconic photojournalism like Don McCullin’s harrowing portrait of a shell-shocked US marine, and movies like Platoon and Full Metal Jacket dominated the portrayal of Vietnam. On the other, National Geographic photographs and idyllic travel landscapes. Curious about its current incarnation beyond these representations, Sapienza embarked on research into the make-up of Vietnam’s post-war society.
But how to capture these contradictions? How do they manifest themselves on the country’s streets? Developing his own visual map over the course of several trips, Sapienza began to assemble symbols that hinted at the friction between freedom and control. Combined together (in its most complete form, the project exists as a book published by AKINA) these different metaphors build a portrait of the country that speaks of power, promise and ambiguity—one that draws on the power of photography as a central device in the spectacle of capitalism. “With this project, there were many different layers of the same cake. This idea of ‘illusion’ was also an important part of Hollywood and the movies I had been watching,” he says. “It’s a kind of fiction.”
@bonsaimon on @lensculture
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#photobook #photobookjousting #photobooks #bookphotography #akinabooks #photography #vietnam #charliesurfsonlotusflowers #photojournalism #documentaryphotography #simonesapienza #photoessay #photooftheday #photo #photographylovers #photographer #publishing #bookstagram #booklover #book #war #capitalism #communism
From Simone Sapienza’s Charlie Surfs on Lotus Flowers, published in 2018. Hardcover with transparent silk-screened dust-jacket
110 pages, 87 photographs.
Link in the IGshop ✨
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“On April 30th, 1975, a North Vietnamese tank rolled through the gate of the Presidential Palace in Saigon, signifying the end of the cruel American War and the beginning of a new independent era from Western regimes.
More than 40 years later, “Charlie surfs on Lotus Flowers” depicts post war Vietnam through a sequence of metaphorical responses to its current Hollywoodian limbo between the rise of the free-market economy and the Communist only-one Party that still rule with uncontested power since the end of the war, disappointing the hope of a democratic and free country. History repeats itself, looking at the West.”
@bonsaimon on @phroom_magazine
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#photobook #photobookjousting #photobooks #bookphotography #akinabooks #photography #vietnam #charliesurfsonlotusflowers #photojournalism #documentaryphotography #simonesapienza #photoessay #photooftheday #photo #photographylovers #photographer #publishing #bookstagram #booklover #book #war #capitalism #communism
Thomas Vandenberghe’s ‘Can’t pay you to disappear’, published in 2016. French fold stab strip binding with white cloth cover, 80 pages, with 136 black and white images. In a handmade edition of 200 copies.
Link in bio ✨
The “Can’t pay you to disappear” urgent unraveling of the life-span of an intense relationship where love, death and obsession mix, also follows Vandenberghe’s ever-changing relationship with photography, from his early clean minimal images to his experiment with collage and physical intervention on the prints themselves.
The images of the book are scanned from Thomas’ original darkroom prints and mostly retain their original sizes, giving a precious insight to the photographers’ process and evolution.
@thomas.vandenberghe
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#photobook #photobookjousting #photobooks #bookphotography #akinabooks #darkroom #photography #blackandwhite #handmade #love #thomasvandenberghe #photoessay #photooftheday #photo #photographylovers #photographer #publishing #bookstagram #booklover #book
Thomas Vandenberghe’s ‘Can’t pay you to disappear’, published in 2016. French fold stab strip binding with white cloth cover, 80 pages, with 136 black and white images. In a handmade edition of 200 copies.
Link in bio ✨
This time they just sat on a rock, next to the water.
“It would be nice if you were always easy going like this” she said
“Uh” he said, his eyes lost in running water.
The rage was gone and with the rage, everything else was also gone.
“Things will be fine from now on”
“Yes maybe”
“I want to go back”
“There’s no way out either”
@thomas.vandenberghe
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#photobook #photobookjousting #photobooks #bookphotography #akinabooks #darkroom #photography #blackandwhite #handmade #love #thomasvandenberghe #photoessay #photooftheday #photo #photographylovers #photographer #publishing #bookstagram #booklover #book
Thomas Vandenberghe’s ‘Can’t pay you to disappear’, published in 2016. French fold stab strip binding with white cloth cover, 80 pages, with 136 black and white images. In a handmade edition of 200 copies.
Link in bio ✨
“They went to a pond, in the pines.
The first time they were there together, wild and free.
The second time, after months, he found himself in the same place alone at night, measuring the forest with restless steps back and forth, ‘Nobody would find you here for months’ he said to himself.”
@thomas.vandenberghe
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#photobook #photobookjousting #photobooks #bookphotography #akinabooks #darkroom #photography #blackandwhite #handmade #love #thomasvandenberghe #photoessay #photooftheday #photo #photographylovers #photographer #publishing #bookstagram #booklover #book
Oldies but goodies, the making of #daisukeyokota's first book #linger,
Door to an inner dimension.
The cover was linocut printed in the London garden thanks to the fortuitous find of an old Victorian garden roller. The special edition, quarter-bound in leather had a print-run of 77 copies, 50£ RRP. It took a long while to produce them but it was worth! #fromthearchive #akinabooks #photobook #photobookediting #provoke #blackandwhitephotography #2013 #diy #booklover #photobookjousting
While working on the website, archives and pdfs, we found again a treasure trove of b-sides and images which did not make the final cut. Digital files but also tarot-sized Xerox print of the pictures we used while editing. They spend their half-life in the realm of possibility as forgotten scraps of books that never were.
These are some of the tarots from the #daisukeyokota #tekai #linger #immerse trilogy . Simple hand-made books published with love by #akina starting 2013.
#photobookjousting #photobookediting #japanesephotography #blackwhite #provoke #photobookjousting #yokota
This text is part of the C. Sawyer project at @tipibookshop The project cultivates a character - C. Sawyer - who interlaces his/her personal analysis of Tipi’s photobooks with his/her unfolding life, thoughts, routine, emotions, relations etc. Every now and then C. Sawyer writes a chronicle based on a selection of books. ♥️ #thegrayline @laura.rodari #akinabooks #photobookjousting
@laura.rodari ’s first book THE GRAY LINE is the artist’s attempt to come to terms with the vanishing of a memory, of a presence, of love. Her practice is to capture absence into materiality: each picture is printed in darkroom blended with light and paper, changed in time and each time. It is published in 300 copies completely handmade: the book has an open spine, it comes in a slipcase, featuring 60 beautiful single images of which 24 torn and pasted on grey and black paper. Printing is cmky offset, using 4 different papers, surely a lot of love. 🖤 not many copies left!! go visit for more treasures made by great storytellers. Shipping happens from Kathmandu, Istanbul and north Italy. You won’t find Akina down on any map. True places never are.
80 copies left of THE GRAY LINE, released in November in only 300 copies all handmade. @laura.rodari@akinabooks@valentina.abenavoli #photobook #photobookjousting #handmadebook #darkroomphotography #akinabooks DM for orders or visit our website
We still have some copies of this little precious book @valentina.abenavoli made some time ago, second chapter of the unfinished trilogy. If you’re in Paris this Friday 8th Nov from 5pm please come by Aux 2 Academies, 15 Rue Bonaparte, in front of Offprints. We are throwing a little pirate party! .
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It is first spark, a glimmer of assumptions, the shivering and the craving. Love arrives as nothing new, except every time it does, foolishly.” Empathy is an imaginative projection of the other, a psychological identification, not an emotional reaction. Starting from this assumption, and following the previous book Anaesthesia in which the concept of empathy is analysed as collective experience, The Harvest takes on stake the private realm, the most intimate experience with another, the act of sex and the act of love. In the unfolding of the process from falling to being in love, disguising the objectification of the other and the unbalanced power that occurs mutually in the couple, The Harvest is built like a play: the person who speaks, the person who acts, the person who experiences, and the reader, are interchangeable.
Hard cover
140 pages
10.5 x 14.8 cm
Black and Pearl Grey paper Winter & Company
Silver printing
Text written by Valentina Abenavoli
Original Prints from a private pornographic archive, bought in Istanbul
Visit @akinabooks website to see more
