“If I’m knocking on the Pearly Gates and they say, ‘Okay, mate, what have you done? Just show us one book. See if you can get in,’ I’ll still go for The Last Resort.”

Parr accepted that The Last Resort would forever be his calling card. And, after his passing, the talking points returned to his position as an interloper from the Home Counties poking his lens around the detritus of a working-class seaside town in Merseyside. Few ever mention that he was living in Wallasey at the time, of which New Brighton is a suburb.

“If you think about the early days of Martin’s work, he was photographing the areas where he was living and working,” says Dewi Lewis, who has known Parr since the mind-1980s and published many of his books, including the first reprint of The Last Resort, which had initially been self-published in 1986. “When he was in Hebden Bridge, he was doing local stuff,” most memorably with the series, The Non-Conformists shot in Calderdale’s Methodist chapels, published by Aperture in 2013, some 33 years after it was completed. “And New Brighton was local.”

Time has smoothed the edges off The Last Resort’s very palpable rupture from the dominant humanist documentary tradition. Yet it’s easy to see how the photographs appeared different; not just because they were shot in colour with the clarity of medium format, both of which were more closely associated with commercial imagery, but because they were unromantic. “Our historic working class, normally dealt with generously by documentary photographers, becomes a sitting duck for a more sophisticated audience,” wrote David Lee in Arts Review when it was exhibited at Serpentine Gallery in London. “They appear fat, simple, styleless, tediously conformist and unable to assert any individual identity.”

Parr’s defenders argue that the ugliness in the pictures lay in the eyes of the beholders. “I was brought up in Rhyll in North Wales, which is very similar to New Brighton,” says Lewis. “I worked in the amusement arcades. I did all the summer jobs that you do in that sort of place. So I knew all those people. And I knew that there was no sense of it being exploitative.”

Neil Burgess showed the work at Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool, before the Serpentine exhibition, alongside Tom Wood’s photographs of New Brighton. “It was seen by some as taking the piss out of the working classes, which to a certain extent it was. But I don’t think the working classes gave a fuck, really. They came into the show and thought it was hysterical. We didn’t have any complaints from people who saw themselves in those pictures at all.”

Parr remained grateful that the work was still being talked about decades later. The show at the Serpentine and then at Rencontres d’Arles festival in 1986 put him on a new trajectory towards the figure we know today. He is one of the few photographers to transcend his medium and become not just an internationally celebrated artist, but an instantly recognisable figure in wider popular culture. However, The Last Resort tends to overshadow the work he made over the next 15 years, when he was at his prolific peak, putting out an extraordinary series of books, including The Cost of Living, One Day Trip, Signs of the Times, Bored Couples, Small World and his magnum opus, Common Sense. 

Published by Dewi Lewis in 1999, Common Sense was — and still is — a wildly original and audacious take on consumer culture, focused in extreme close up. It’s the book he said he’d be holding in reply at the Pearly Gates, in case they asked for another chance to get in. “It’s when I put together the experimentation I’d done with the macro lens,” he recalled in the Zoom talk in 2020. “One of the dangers of being me is that I get lazy and complacent and repeat myself ad infinitum, which I could do pretty easily. So the thing is to give yourself challenges. I’ve always used the beach as my experimental lab. I first started the medium format pictures in New Brighton. I then applied the macro lens to the beach. Then I thought I’d challenge myself and use a telephoto lens [for Beach Therapy, published in 2018] because in the world of art and documentary photography, it’s generally frowned upon.”

Lewis says that even Parr was unsure about Common Sense, and that it might have all been different. “He said that he had a new project that he wanted to show me, but he wasn’t quite there with it. He was still weighing up in his own mind whether it was something that he wanted to keep going on…. Before things really started taking off for him, around 1997 to 98, he was getting properly interested in book collecting. He turned to me at one point and said, ‘I’m getting a bit fed up with photography, but I really love books. I should go and open a bookshop.’ How serious he was, I’ve no idea. And within two or three months, he started making films. That must have also been about the same time that he was developing Common Sense. So, in a sense, it all ties in that he hadn’t quite worked out where he would go next with work.”

He persevered, and this time the world was ready to embrace the shock of the new. Alongside the book, Common Sense opened as a simultaneous exhibition in 41 venues around the world, from Janet Borden in New York, the first commercial gallery to fully represent him, to the Australian Centre for Photography and the House of Filmmakers in Moscow. Parr would be the first to admit that his very best work was now behind him, but he remained prolific, especially after becoming a full member of Magnum Photos in the mid-1990s, embracing a new role as an in-demand fashion and commercial photographer. Meanwhile, his public profile grew far and wide, much of it on the back of his 2002 retrospective initiated by Barbican Art Gallery and the National Media Museum, curated by Val Williams, which toured Europe for the next five years.

In this next overlapping phase of his career, Parr turned more of his attention towards curating and collecting. He was Guest Artistic Director for Rencontres d’Arles in 2004, and arguably that edition of the festival has never been bettered. The same year saw the publication of the first volume of The Photobook: A History, a serious and scholarly research project completed with Gerry Badger, challenging the dominant narrative of the medium. Parrworld opened at Haus de Kunst in Munich in 2008 featuring his collection of objects, postcards, prints by other photographers, and his vast archive of photobooks, later acquired by Tate and the Luma foundation. 

For many in the photography community, this is his most important legacy. “Martin is the reason for the photobook revolution,” says Lewis. “Someone may have come later, but it’s really all down to Martin and his enthusiasm for the book form. And, if you think about it, who else could it be? He got it going.”

The sale of his photobook collection, for a middling seven-figure sum, helped pay for the focus of the third and last phase of his career, opening a foundation in Bristol supporting emerging, established and overlooked photographers who have made and continue to make work focused on Britain and Ireland. The Foundation’s collection holds more than 5000 prints, from postwar figures such as Marketa Luskacova, Charlie Philips, Tony Ray-Jones, Joy Gregory and Chris Killip, to emerging artists from the last 10-15 years, such as Clementine Schneidermann and Rene Matic. International photographers are represented with major works shot in the UK and Ireland, such as Eugene Smith’s Three Generations of Welsh Miners, alongside book maquettes which includes dummies made in the production of photobooks such as Chris Killip’s In Flagrante and Richard Billingham’s Ray’s a Laugh.

“In a strange way, Martin’s work has been slightly overlooked at the Foundation because he was so eager and excited to discover and promote the work of others,” says Jenni Smith. “We hope to spend time exploring Martin’s archive and exhibit more of his work in the gallery in the future. At the moment his Common Sense work is on display in the Foundation toilets, which he always found amusing. There is so much work that remains unseen. During Covid, Martin spent time revisiting his contact sheets and selecting new images, so scanning those negatives feels like a good place to begin that exploration.”

Find out more about Martin Parr and his Foundation here martinparrfoundation.org

“It’s important for us as Tunisian photographers, and not only for the Tunisian scene, to approach photo books from our own perspective”

Conceived as a bridge to Jaou Tunis, the biennale of image and moving image, Bound Narratives, co-curated with Iraqi photographer Abdul Hadi, aims to strengthen the Tunisian cultural scene through innovative curatorial formats that centre the photo book and the image. The festival’s ambition, according to Ghorbel, was not only to showcase work but also to re-anchor the project in Tunisia – bringing the photo book medium closer to local audiences and practitioners.

“This was the main idea behind bringing Bound Narratives to Tunis – it’s a project from artists from the MENA region but it was mostly showcased in Western countries. It made a lot of sense for us to bring this project to North Africa and create a one-of-kind event in the region,” says Ghorbel. “We have a lot of projects in the region about photography, about books and the arts, but not about photo books specifically.”

Initially envisioned as a small reading room, the project expanded into a large-scale exhibition featuring over 30 artists from across the Middle East, North Africa, and beyond – including Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Palestine, Turkey, and Lebanon. The show was organised around three curatorial threads: Longing and Belonging, Upheaval, and Reimagining Histories, exploring how artists use the photo book as a medium for counter-narratives, memory, and reclamation.

One of the festival’s most powerful undertones is its decolonial spirit – rethinking how visual narratives from the MENA region are produced, circulated, and historicised. As Ghorbel explains, for many Tunisian artists, exposure to photobooks has long been mediated through Western references and institutions. Bound Narratives challenged that by offering a platform built from within the region, featuring creators whose perspectives are often underrepresented in global publishing circuits.

“It’s important for us as Tunisian photographers, and not only for the Tunisian scene, to approach photo books from our own perspective. Here, we have mostly Western references and we don’t know what’s happening in the region. With this project, we discover the richness of projects that are happening that we didn’t have access to,” Ghorbel continues.

Panels such as “Independent Publishing in the Region,” moderated by Mohamed Somji of Gulf Photo Plus, created space for reflection on the infrastructures of artistic production. Participants included Tunisian voices such as Zied Ben Romdhane, Souheila Ghorbel, and Moez Akkari, founder of Bao Books, a new independent bookstore in Tunis.

These discussions culminated in the creation of a regional database of creators and publishing resources – an initiative toward sustainable collaboration and knowledge exchange.

Parallel to the exhibition, the festival hosted numerous workshops, concerts, and community programs. Egyptian photographer Heba Khalifa presented her work virtually, while Maen Hammad led a skate zine-making session with Tunis’s skating community – part of his ongoing Landing project linking youth collectives from Palestine to Colombia and the US. Landing is the inaugural publication of Saade’s publishing house, Huwawa, launched this year which expands his efforts to practice disruptive publishing focused on artists and local economies in the region. 

A key component of the ongoing festival is the Photobook-Making Lab, led by Tamara Abdul Hadi, Roï Saade, and Zied Ben Romdhane, in which ten Tunisian photographers are developing photobook dummies under mentorship. This lab reflects the festival’s commitment to capacity-building and to cultivating a self-sustaining photobook culture in Tunisia.

For Ghorbel, Bound Narratives represents a turning point: “Just by having only photobooks from the region is an achievement itself.” The exhibition revealed the multiplicity of approaches to bookmaking emerging from the Arab world – works that blend intimacy and politics, history and materiality.

Bound Narratives will continue its journey through a forthcoming presentation at Ibraaz, the newly relaunched London-based initiative by Lina Lazaar and the Kamel Lazaar Foundation. The aim is to engage with the London art scene and its diasporic communities, and to create new synergies between the foundation’s regional and international platforms.

Bound Narratives runs until 15 November at B7L9, Tunis. The exhibition A Photobook World closed its doors at B7L9 Art Centre on November 2. However, the Bound Narratives festival is still ongoing at Le 32bis through the Photobook-Making Lab.

Portrait of Britain Vol. 8 Shortlist © Matthew Joseph

Portrait of Britain returns with a shortlist of 200 photographs reflecting a nation caught between change and continuity.

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Dartmoor, though beautiful, is an eerie sight. A place rich in folklore, where the pixies and will-o’-the-wisp exist, one where it is possible to be miles away from  the next closest person. In this vast, quiet moorland stands a young man. Dressed in a gandoura (a traditional Moroccan garment), trainers and other streetwear, his presence creates a powerful contrast to this rugged, quintessentially British landscape. In Jaiyana Chelikha’s photograph, ‘Jounaid, Go Back To Where?’ there is a convergence of an ancient, elemental landscape of this nation with a portrait of a second-generation immigrant. It makes a clear statement of belonging. This young man’s interaction with the land is just as emotional, just as connected, as a person whose family has been here for countless generations.

Britain in 2025 is a complex place. It feels ever more frenzied and more contested for those that live here. Amid growing division, this year’s Portrait of Britain Vol 8 photobook explores and celebrates the many identities that create this land, showing that it can be a place of harmony, humour, beauty and life. The 200 shortlisted photographs making up the book – which this year is sponsored by WePresent, the arts platform of WeTransfer – will be available to pre-order from mid November. In January, 100 of the images will be awarded as winners and presented in a public exhibition in partnership with JCDecaux.

‘For me, a photograph doesn’t have to define Britain – that would be impossible – but it should feel like it’s in conversation with it; questioning, complicating or expanding the idea of what Britishness looks like and who gets to be included in it.’

– Rene Matić, Artist and Portrait of Britain Vol. 8 Judge

Elsewhere in the shortlist, a person is dressed in a wintry outfit, their shoulders and head covered in a black tent of fabric with an orange-billed bird’s head atop – its beady eye dazed. The costume features in the traditional ‘hoodening’ wassailing ceremony in East Kent, enacted in January to bless the apple orchards for a bountiful harvest. It is a joyous ritual, one that is part of an ongoing project by Leonie Freeman to capture modern Britain’s relationship to ancient traditions. Further north, a thriving tradition is present in Joe Gelder’s portrait of the robust but straining figure of a natural stone lifter in Glencoe, Scottish Highlands. The use of black-and-white creates a sense of timelessness about this pursuit, of which the lifter Harley, when asked why he participates in the sport says: ‘It’s just primal innit’.

Amongst this year’s judging panel, made up of Sophie Parker, Dennis Morris, Claire Rees, Mick Moore, Alice Zoo and Vivienne Gamble, is Turner Prize 2025 nominee, artist Rene Matić. I asked Matić what it is that they are looking for a photograph to communicate about Britain when considering this year’s selection? “With my work I’m always searching for what these things are – identity, place, belonging – and I was searching for the same thing when looking at all the images. I’m interested in how Britain reveals itself through people’s relationships to it: whether that’s love, frustration, estrangement or pride. For me, a photograph doesn’t have to define Britain – that would be impossible – but it should feel like it’s in conversation with it; questioning, complicating or expanding the idea of what Britishness looks like and who gets to be included in it. I was drawn to images that held contradictions, that felt lived-in and specific, yet spoke to something collective and unresolved about this place we call ‘home’.”

Something that feels universal to many who inhabit Britain is the living room. So much of our lives play out in our homes – perhaps harbouring the truest version of ourselves, the secrets and the love. In Sean Hardy’s giddy family portrait of his three children, there exists two planes of reality. While his daughter and youngest son – who is non-verbal and autistic – rough-and-tumble on the sofa, Hardy’s eldest son is unaware of his physical surroundings, with a virtual reality headset over his eyes, utterly engrossed in this other world. It is an electric, dynamic image of everyday family life in all its usual scruffiness. But there is a poignant undercurrent. On the wall behind them hang three William Morris prints – the designer and activist once said: “The true secret of happiness lies in taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life.” It is a line that could easily thread through every image in this Portrait of Britain shortlist.

It can be rare to feel relaxed when we are outside of our homes, and in Britain community spaces have been on a sharp decline for many years. In Matthew Joseph’s image ‘Skate Break’, taken in a Tesco car park, we see a group of skaters: laughing, smoking and using the supermarket trollies as a place of rest. What it captures is the potential for subculture and community to flourish, even if that means making the fluorescent strip-light ceiling of a London car park your shelter. Joseph describes the community as a “sacred place where warmth, acceptance and dedication thrive – a true testament to the power of community”.

For some, their community existed in (quite literal) ecstatic escape amidst hundreds of undulating limbs and pulsing sonic vibrations along the M25 orbital. AboveGround captures a handshake with ‘Dave the Rave’ through an open car window, an ode to Essex’s oldest raver. Debbie Todd captures a young boy, sporting an expression of wisdom beyond his years and a suave slicked hair-do, at the Appleby Horse Fair. The annual gathering of Romany and Traveller communities in Cumbria is a rich and vital opportunity for a section of society that can often be ostracised or wrongly stereotyped to come together.

The Portrait of Britain Vol. 8 Book is sponsored by WePresent, the arts platform of WeTransfer and will be available to pre-order from mid November.

“I am forever finding Alan – he’s physically part of the machines”

– Christopher Sutherland, Metro-Auto-Photo

After servicing each model, Adler photographed himself to check it was working; he ended up running the photobooths for 50-plus years, and thus created a life in portraits. “He built up this incredible archive of images of himself over the years,” says Christopher Sutherland, who now runs Adler’s old booths with his partner Jessie Norman, under the name Metro-Auto-Photo. “He says he took these photos to test the machines, but yet he kept them.”

“Hoarding may be one angle of it,” explains Norman. “But I do feel a lot of it was his late wife, Lorraine. I think she was responsible for at least organising them all and putting them away in some sort of preservation. Because he would have taken 10 times more than what we have, so not all of them were kept. Theres only so many you can realistically find a reason to keep.”

Together, the images create a funny, poignant record. Adler was not a follower of fashion so his clothes remain the same for long stretches, yet the years inexorably pass. In many of the photographs he has his eyes closed, shielding them from the flash, in some shots he looks serious, in others he is goofing around. In one strip he sports a fake moustache. Members of his family – including cats – appear in a few images, photographed in machines that were in a very bad way, and that he had to take home to repair. The passage of time also unfolds through technical aspects of the medium, colour coming in – after Adler bought six or seven Prontophot booths – then quite literally fading. Adler never upgraded to digital, and in the book tells Sutherland and Norman to stick with monochrome. 

“Black-and-white was always more popular than colour,” he observes. “I suggest you just stick with the black-and-whites, rather than get involved in the colour, but that is up to you… The colour is far more corrosive, it just eats through everything.”

Sutherland and Norman got to know Adler in 2018 and the story of how they met is great; passport photographs went digital in Australia years ago, but Adler’s analogue booth in Flinders Street Station has remained popular, a spot for couples and friends to have fun and record themselves. Sutherland and Norman visited to mark their first date, and spotted a note taped to the booth stating it was going to be removed. Station managers had decided to move some barriers, and had given Adler just 10 days’ notice to take the machine away. The note included a phone number so Sutherland called it and decided to help. He launched a Facebook campaign to save the booth, which gathered so much support the City of Melbourne and its mayor stepped in. The photobooth ended up being relocated to another spot in Flinders Street Station, where it remains to this day.

From this auspicious beginning, Sutherland and Norman stayed in touch with Adler, intrigued by the man, his photobooths, and what turned out to be his huge cache of images. When Adler retired they took over the booths, and when they realised quite how many portraits he had taken, they gathered and scanned them. Sutherland and Norman’s work has helped make the book, Auto-Photo, and an exhibition which will take place next year. “The photographs were literally just in shoe boxes, or loose among other things,” says Sutherland. “I still find them now, wedged inside machines, because they were such a perfect medium to fold and use as a spacer or to screw in a part or something. I am forever finding Alan – he’s physically part of the machines.”

Getting to know Adler better, Sutherland and Norman eventually got to see his family photos; they expected to be shown holiday snaps, but what he brought out was a series of images, mostly by Lorraine, depicting him checking out photobooths around the world. There are Japanese photobooths, American photobooths, Brazilian photobooths; there is even a Chuck E Cheese photo ride, and the low-quality snap it produced. There is something humorous about these busman’s holidays, which are included in Auto-Photo, but they also testify to Adler’s love of the booths – and the hard graft of keeping his business alive. 

“Being in Australia [pre-internet], he had to be boots on the ground, researching what other people were doing,” says Norman. “The only time he went on holiday was to research these booths with his family.”

It is an interest that was perhaps practical rather than cultural. Auto-Photo was edited by photo historian Catlin Langford, and includes a fascinating history of photobooths written by her (drawn on in this article), plus an essay by artist and vernacular photography collector Patrick Pound, sketching out an artistic history of these machines, and their use by the Surrealists and others. But Adler is not particularly interested in this history, say Sutherland and Norman. When they mentioned the forthcoming exhibition, he said, “Great”, then asked after the booths; when they showed him photographs of them getting engaged – taken in the Flinders Street Station machine – he immediately checked the image reproduction. 

“Chris proposed in the booth, you can see my shocked face. Alan looked at the pictures and said, ’Oh, this is a rather good quality strip’,” laughs Norman. “It’s good, he keeps us in line [as they now service the booths]… He’s a man on an island, physically and mentally. I mean, he’s quite a solitary person. He does know the industry, and has friends in it, but he drove around all day servicing machines for decades. He spent a lot of his time just by himself, basically.” 

“Even the group discussion included in the book, it’s heavily edited because every few sentences he would ask how the machines are running,” agrees Langford. “And then compare the quality of the strips, saying, ’This one’s not as good’.”

Adler has become famous in Australia, and Auto-Photo came about when Daniel Boetker-Smith, director of Melbourne’s Centre for Contemporary Photography, got in touch with Sutherland and Norman. Originally the idea was for the book to launch at the same time as an exhibition but, with the CCP recently forced to move to a temporary space, the show will now be co-presented with RMIT University Gallery in 2025 – the centenary of the invention of the photobooth. Langford, former curator at the CCP, will curate the 2025 exhibition alongside editing the book; she particularly enjoyed the images with cats, she says, and was keen to zoom in and out, showing both particular images and something of the extent of Adler’s collection. She also spent hours working with the book designer, Clayton Walker, trying to put the images in chronological order.

Langford also wanted to untangle the history of photobooths in the publication, as it is a narrative that has gone under-researched – particularly the story of booths in Australia. “We wanted the book to be very accessible and dynamic and exciting for a general audience, but hopefully also, with my referenced essay, there’s a value for scholars too,” she says. The book and exhibition were supported by the Gordon Darling Foundation, a charitable organisation which supports visual arts in public institutions in Australia.

In short, there is wide interest in this project but despite this, and despite being photographed so many times, Adler somehow remains enigmatic. Photobooths were originally associated with passports and identity cards, but the sheer number of images render this logic absurd, suggesting the difficulty of pinning someone down, not the ability to fix identity. More enigmatic still are the questions of what these photographs meant to Adler, and what to make of this archive. Langford says Adler did not intend to make art but points out his images suggest creativity; technically he did not take any shots, and yet he is also the author.

“He was expressing himself,” she muses. “It’s so interesting that we think of photobooths as not having photographers, and yet so many people are drawn to play with them.”

Auto-Photo: A Life in Portraits is published by Centre for Contemporary Photography and Perimeter Editions, priced £26. ccp.org.au perimeterbooks.com

“Being good at finding the best (and previously overlooked) books of the last fifty years or so has given us a step up into publishing”

– David Owen and Angela Hill

“I like to think people come here to find what they didn’t know they were looking for,” Hall tells me. He didn’t quite expect for High Valley to gain the allure it’s achieved today – running the shop solo, he has his hands completely full, but still says that “It has been very positive to get validation from diverse sources.” Now, one difficulty remains: “finding room to cram all the treasures in.”

Over in London, IDEA has become an institution of bookselling and rare print material for decades. After couple Angela Hill and David Owen had sourced the books for the once iconic concept store Colette in Paris. From there, they picked up Dover Street Market which remains their main distributor – in London, New York, Tokyo and LA. 

After the birth of Instagram, IDEA “exploded,” the couple reminisces. They use the page to catalogue images from their books, which span mostly ‘90s high fashion, popular and subculture, and photography. Their archive includes David Lee’s The Cocaine Consumer’s Handbook and the James Is A Girl cover issue of The New York Times Magazine, 1996, written by Jennifer Egan and photographed by Nan Goldin, “probably the single most important ‘90s fashion and photography reference,” says IDEA’s archive page. And their current collection boasts the Lost in Translation photobook, a signed copy of Soldiers by Wolfgang Tillmans, and several vintage Jurgen Teller editorial monographs (of course).

Despite the fact the store is marked simply by a blank door on the street and a small bell, their low-key exterior is no reflection of both the swanky store inside of their Soho building, and the reputation they’ve reached as the go-to vintage book supplier in Europe. 

“IDEA happens to be an acronym for our family,” Hill and Owen tell me. “Iris, David, Edith and Angela. It was Iris that thought of it aged around 10 years old.” They took the same retro, on-the-nose approach to naming their sales arm of the collection: SUPERBOOKS. “It is embarrassing now but we haven’t ever thought of a better one word descriptor. These are the books that have a huge reach and impact with a creative audience.”

“Being good at finding the best (and previously overlooked) books of the last fifty years or so has given us a step up into publishing,” the couple says. IDEA now publishes its own books, “Some of the people we sell books to become the artists we publish.” 

Interestingly, Hill and Owen say that they are “not so desperately devoted to books as such,” rather, for the period they respond to most – the ‘70s to 2000s – was books were the best way to record visual creativity. “As a result, to want to find and share that creativity (and make a living), you almost have to become a book dealer.”

The industry has changed and book dealing is not what it was before the internet. “You used to be able to go to a second hand bookshop and find wonderful things. Then the internet came along and everyone listed their books and everyone else bought them. If someone wanted all the classic Irving Penn or Richard Avedon, they could just click and buy them,” say the duo. “The result of that mass purchasing is that, on a daily basis, the only books in a bookshop that are not being packed up to be shipped, are either titles no one wants or great books that are wildly overpriced.” 

In a wildly too-convenient technological era, decades-old dealers such as IDEA and High Valley are a breath of fresh air and perhaps a hark back to the ‘good ‘ol days’ of print. It’s a feeling many creative youth crave today, which is why Isabella Burley’s Climax Books finds itself at home in Soho, London – it has quickly become a true favourite among the fashion industry’s bright minds and rising photographers.

Burley, the former editor-in-chief of Dazed magazine and current chief marketing officer for Acne Studios, began ideating Climax during the pandemic, and the London store opened in 2020. In September 2024, she opened the New York storefront. “I’ve always been obsessively collecting books and ephemera, since I was a teenager,” Burley tells me. “I knew I wanted to bring together my background in fashion and publishing to present a new vision of a bookstore.”

Burley certainly represents an unorthodox, sometimes sexy approach to selling books on sub and counterculture, providing latex shopping bags and hosting collaborations in-store with designers from Chopova Lowena to Marc Jacobs Heaven.

The rare books Burley sources are “confrontational, tasteful and of cultural significance,” a fitting description also for Climax’s recent publications: Pissing Women by Sophy Rickett, for example, is an archival project featuring photographs of women dressed in officewear urinating on the streets of London. Its next publication will be Queer Dyke Cruising, an ‘80s archive by Del LaGrace Volcano shot at Hampstead Heath, London. 

Burley feels that sourcing books is “never difficult,” but it is “an exciting challenge! I love the hunt,” she says. 

Below, IDEA, Climax Books and High Valley Books share their favourite photo books from their collections:

IDEA

Ask The Angels by Donna Santisi – “Published in 1978. It is practically handmade – surely assembled by hand. It is the cheap plastic binding that actually cuts through the pictures that makes it work wonders for us.” 

Lady’s – “There are a lot of Japanese motorcycle gang books and all of them focus on the male members of the Bōsōzoku. Not this one. And the women are even more fierce!”

Skinhead Girl by Alan Mead – “All the photographs were submitted by skinhead girls. And they did this way before camera phones, hence the cover being entirely composed of photobooth pictures.”

High School USA by Jim Richardson – “Jim Richardson’s photographic survey of American high schools somehow avoided being labelled or lauded as a photobook. But it is incredibly good so we are championing it.”

The Bangy Book by Vincent Alan W – “This one has a great story. The photographer Vincent Alan W was clearly obsessed with the street fashions of these Bangy boys but (we are only guessing) could only find a publisher in Vis A Vis who seem to have exclusively produced gay erotica. So seemingly in a compromise, the photographer returned to New York, booked a studio, and in every 10 or so photos, his subjects drop their shorts. A very surprising fashion book!”

Cathy by John Carder Bush – “John Carder Bush’s book of photographs of his sister, Kate Bush. The pictures capture her in girlhood to, possibly, early teens. These are quite remarkably prescient pictures.

High Valley Books

Animals in Motion by Eadweard Muybridge 

“An interesting, historical work by a complicated character.”

Fresh Fruits Postcard Box

“Relentlessly cheerful.”

Souvenirs Improbables by Sarah Moon

“Mysterious, moody.”

Executive Model by Ron Jude

“Fashion and art combined”

The New Color Photography by Sally Eauclair

“The beauty of film colour, as explored by many photographers before digital.”

Climax Books

Photographs by J.D. ’Okhai Ojeikere

PICTURES, 2014–2024 by Martine Syms

Offstage by Dana Lixenberg

Girls Blue by Hiromix

@idea.ltd

@climaxbooks 

@highvalleybooks

“We’re obsessed with being in control, but something is lost in that”

There’s a pleasing, quasi-scientific order in this separation of taxonomies and types which comes across in other ways too. When we speak, Perlaki describes his former studio in terms of a “laboratory”, and his drawings – abstracted images of his parents – in terms of diagrams. “Anything that feels too close to home or sentimental, I tend to try to cool it down,” he explains. “I try to step back from it emotionally and make it as objective and as scientific as possible. That’s why the drawings are almost like architectural plans – that’s why one of them is blue. I was thinking of the blueprint technique that used to be used for architectural drawings, where it’s not about the beauty of the house but its parameters.”

But Perlaki’s project is also open to the playful, the unexpected, and the mysterious – to the third hand referenced in the title. To make his luminograms he has to work in darkness, manipulating cheap light sources over the image surface, and moving the paper between each phase in the process. His shots of sketchbooks bear testimony to the painstaking notes required. “It’s just science, photosensitive paper and light, photographs in the very purest way,” he says, but he adds that the results are unpredictable, and that his studio is also a laboratory in the sense of experimentation. “It’s important to see that this is a thought process, and that includes sometimes senseless play,” he says. “I wanted it to feel open-ended, not something very perfect.”

Perlaki’s decision to include everyday images and found photography is inspired by a similar urge and embrace of the unexpected. The selected shots cover a wide range of subjects and are matched by visual correspondence rather than a formal order. There are weird and wonderful combinations of airbags and umbrellas, ice cubes and illuminated thumbs. But though they are enigmatic, the subjects don’t seem totally random, with ongoing strands around science and nature, ancient statues and politics, the history of art and the prosaic.

The unifying force is Perlaki himself who was like “a big magnet” over this period, he says, “gathering all these visual notations that are somehow connected”. “I also wanted to inject a little bit of humour into the book,” he adds. “It’s not all about some highbrow, difficult technique that nobody can do.”

The Third Hand starts and ends with images of teeth: a medical image superimposed on the front, and a hand-drawn illustration on the inside back cover. The drawing shows incisors cracking and breaking, evoking the common nightmare of teeth fracturing or falling apart – unfunny dreams which Perlaki sometimes experiences. He interprets them as “about losing power and losing control”. The third hand in this case is the subconscious, and perhaps that’s haunting the whole project. ‘Fingery Eyes’ by Felix Bazalgette, one of two essays in the book, explores a spectral, psychic theme, discussing how in the 19th century people “made sense of photography” with fantastical stories.

Bazalgette considers how horror films continue to digest this uncanny medium, and in particular our growing obsession with screens. As he points out, films such as Orpheus (1950), The Matrix (1999), and Ringu (1998) suggest the screens which surround us might be permeable – that what’s shown in them might leak out or absorb us. In the past, people believed photography might be able to trace out thoughts, he writes, “and why not, when the idea of recording the perfect outlines of bones encased in flesh had previously been an equally strange proposition?” Actually these ideas aren’t so fanciful, or paved the way for a new reality: in March 2023, the New Scientist reported that researchers from Osaka University had used AI on brain scans, to make pictures of what people were viewing. As sci-fi novelist Arthur C. Clarke put it: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Our relationship with photography is hard to pin down, and the medium is fast evolving. Perhaps a publication such as Perlaki’s, which foregrounds both chaos and our attempts to find order, is as much sense as we can make of it. “You know, I’m one of the few people who doesn’t mind going to the dentist,” he says. “I find it relaxing. You’re in a situation in which you have less control, and I think losing control is sometimes very good. We’re obsessed with being in control, but something is lost in that. This is more about a different way of focusing, without your senses, or especially without your eyes.”

Marton Perlaki, The Third Hand is out now (InOtherWords)

 “I went into this expecting to come out with a project about what recovery looks like… What I found was not a recovered woman, but someone who was still in the midst of dealing with these disorders”

Last month, one of Russell-Jeffrey’s photographs – from her 2021 photobook You Will Always Be Loved Even When You Feel Alone – was selected for this year’s Portrait of Britain award. The image is of Xanthe, the protagonist of the series and one of Russell-Jeffrey’s closest friends. Growing up, Xanthe struggled with disordered eating. “[Back then,] I didn’t quite understand it with great depth, or interrogate it in any capacity,” the photographer says. 

In 2021, while studying photography at Oxford Brookes University, Russell-Jeffrey decided to move in with Xanthe for two months. She wanted to capture how her friend was healing from adolescent trauma. “Naively, I went into this expecting to come out with a project about what recovery looks like… What I found was not a recovered woman, but someone who was still in the midst of dealing with these disorders,” Russell-Jeffrey says.

The pair spent two months together – day-in, day-out – and Russell-Jeffrey became aware of an “immense loneliness” that consumed Xanthe. This was surprising. “Xanthe is very outspoken, driven, and successful,” Russell-Jeffrey explains. They had grown up together as girls, but this was the first time they had spent a prolonged period of time together as adults. While they were living together, Xanthe experienced a bulimia relapse. “She’s not someone who welcomes pity, but I’d never seen her so defeated,” says Russell-Jeffrey. “I noticed that the problems she grappled with when she was 14 are just as prevalent today.”

The sequencing of You Will Always Be Loved Even When You Feel Alone echoes the reality of living with an eating disorder – moving through periods of binge eating, relapse, and healing. “Then the cycle begins again, of trying to stay in recovery, and this immense fatigue around that, because you’re never entirely free of it,” Russell-Jeffrey reflects. Alongside the images are Xanthe’s handwritten notes as well as letters from her family. Imbued with a striking vulnerability, these notes provide further insight into the complex process of dealing with trauma. 

What emerged was a series not just about recovery, but also friendship, and most crucially, care. Even though Russell-Jeffrey doesn’t appear in the images, her presence is palpable. The series feels like a dialogue of understanding and acceptance between two women that have grappled with many of the same issues. “It was almost a documentation of the small-scale things that you can do, the act of noticing, and not always over-analysing someone’s life but being attentive to it,” she says.

Due to the nature of the work, Russell-Jeffrey had to make certain ethical considerations. Xanthe was involved in every step of the process – while making the images, but also in the editing phases. When the project was finished, the photographer made sure that her friend was aware of all the implications of sharing it on the internet. Most importantly, the door was always left open to take it all down if she wanted to. 

Fortunately, “she loved it,” Russell-Jeffrey says. “It made her very emotional. She’s really proud of it as well, which she never thought she’d be able to feel.” The women have also grown closer through collaboration. “We went from having a friendship that we knew so well, to realising there’s so much we don’t know,” Russell-Jeffrey explains. “This was the first time I got to know her in loneliness, which is a rare thing.”

As an adult, it can be difficult to find the right words, or even the time, to properly care for friends as they experience hardship. Russell-Jeffrey’s project is a reminder that sometimes the best act of care is purely our presence. As she pledges in her introduction: “I shall be here not as a spectator to your pain or recovery like before, but as a hand to hold in the sunshine or on the cold bathroom floor, for you will always be loved even when you feel alone.”

sophie-jeffrey.com