{"title":"Kult Books","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9789198760774","title":"Are We There","description":"In 1929, Jenni Toivonen’s great-grandparents left everything behind and relocated their family to Brazil. They were part of a group of Finns, led by pastor and gardener Toivo Uuskallio, who hoped to separate themselves from capitalist society and live in harmony with nature. They settled on land surrounded by the Atlantic Forest in the state of Rio de Janeiro, where they founded the community of Penedo. Penedo went on to become one of the most well-known examples of Finnish utopian migration, a movement of similar instances occurring from the late 1800’s to the early 1900’s. Many memories from this time in Jenni’s family are preserved through her grandaunt’s writings, photographs, Brazilian music and stories- which continue to circulate and evolve through generations. \n\nPrompted by the nostalgic but vivid world her grandaunt had depicted, Jenni set out to experience it herself. She longed to plunge into the clear mountain rivers and feel a deep, radiant connection with the forest. In revisiting the location her grandparents had inhabited, she strove to experience a shimmer of the utopia Uuskallio spoke of a century ago.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56310021456245,"sku":"9789198760774","price":31.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9789198760774_af67d0e4-b849-4d2f-9650-58a6017a7693.jpg?v=1786032203"},{"product_id":"9789198405941","title":"BLUEPRINT 2017–20","description":"Blueprint 2017–20 explores how the mass media has influenced political debates and democratic processes during the process of Brexit.  Norman Behrendt's photographs of Brexit-related video material examine what sort of imagery is used to influence people by stirring up deep-seated attitudes around national pride, immigration and lack of control.  The blue color of the cyanotypes reflects the invisible influence of the European Union on the United Kingdom. \n\nWhen Norman Behrendt arrived in London from Berlin in August 2017, he set out to document Britain in the period of its transition out of the EU.  He crisscrossed the Remain-voting capital and its Brexit-voting outer suburbs by bicycle, foot and public transport.  The photographs that he took revealed material traces of class, race, nationality and income disparity that had fed into the referendum’s result, but they did not get under the skin of the issue in the way that he wanted.  Abstract and diffuse, the shift in Britain’s sense of itself eluded a traditional documentary approach.  At night, Behrendt surfed the internet, making screengrabs from pro- and anti-Brexit videos on mainstream media, YouTube and social media sites.  He immersed himself in official political messaging, amateur propaganda and personal video posts, giving equal attention to both sides of the debate. \n\n“I am interested in how the mass media contributed to a post-truth political environment.  By photographing details of publicly accessible online video content, uploaded on various media channels including newspapers, magazines, Leave and Remain Youtube channels, documentaries and political debates in the UK and EU parliaments, I disassemble the visual layers into their individual parts and thereby scrutinize and recycle these pixelated, transient images.  In my presentation I bring these different visual extracts together, rearrange them and thereby form a new narrative. ”\n- Norman Behrendt","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56310064218485,"sku":"9789198405941","price":35.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9789198405941_ae0dc3f5-1ac6-4884-808e-6a9a33042686.jpg?v=1786032176"},{"product_id":"9789198760736","title":"Les yeux fermes","description":"Les yeux fermés explores how the human body can engage in a therapeutic healing process, as well as the role of performative photography in this journey. The few anonymous protagonists of the book are followed on a quest through a changing Mediterranean landscape, interacting with their surroundings. By engaging in rituals and performative actions, the body taps into external energies to fortify its inner strength. The journey culminates in Greece's Stefanos volcano, symbolising a new boundary to cross. The active volcano represents both danger and a lost paternal figure.\n\nEliot Nasrallah, a French-Lebanese artist based in Paris, initiated the project after experiencing the loss of a place of personal significance, as a result of the loss of a loved one. The deliberately underexposed photographs create a visual language connected to broad themes of memory, absence and loss.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56310982607221,"sku":"9789198760736","price":30.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9789198760736_48bbc62f-068f-4906-93f9-8a87e80997e9.jpg?v=1786032201"},{"product_id":"9789198760729","title":"The Perfect Crime: Concerning the Murder of Reality","description":"Germany is a crime fiction country. If wanted, fictional murder and manslaughter can be witnessed many times a day throughout the main television networks. There are more than 238 crime series available on Germany’s six largest broadcasting channels. Based on the overrepresentation of fictional murder on German television, The Perfect Crime investigates the effect of crime series on our perception and behaviour. The work examines the use of imaging techniques within police work and its epistemic implications, as well as the question of how fictional narratives change our perception of reality.\n\nThe work combines several photographic techniques and approaches: Staiger and Uchtmann have made photographs on the film sets of German crime series, overstaging scenes, leading to an abstraction of what is depicted contrasted with supposedly authentic imagery of corpses and crime scenes. In the portrait series various actors, who played victims and perpetrators in German crime series have been altered by artificial intelligence to create new possible versions of them, linked to the creation of phantom images in real police work. Furthermore, locations that have served as a movie set for a fictional crime scenes are documented as 3D reconstructions via photogrammetric methods, referring to the potential emergence of so-called 'fear spaces‘.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56311060595061,"sku":"9789198760729","price":33.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9789198760729_3cc29e45-c2d3-4f9b-9234-c46b68c4709a.jpg?v=1786032200"},{"product_id":"9789198760743","title":"La Soufriere","description":"La Soufrière captures a poignant reunion between a father and son after 25 years apart. Swedish photographer Kristian Krän travels to the island of Guadeloupe in the Caribbean to meet his father, Arthur — a meeting that turns out to be both their first and their last. Arthur had left the family when Kristian was just two years old. It was only years later that Kristian learned of his father’s existence and his longstanding mental illness.\nTo meet Arthur and gain understanding, Kristian journeys to Basse-Terre, the capital of Guadeloupe, a quiet town with a shrinking population of around 10,000. Over the course of a week, they explore the island together, visiting places Arthur wants to show Kristian. Communication is difficult, as Kristian’s understanding of Guadeloupean Creole French is limited. Instead, they spend much of their time bonding through music. Kristian’s camera becomes an essential bridge between them, serving as both a means of connection and a source of comfort.\nOne day, they hiked to the top of the volcano La Grande Soufrière. Arthur, dressed in a blazer and flip-flops, kept vanishing and reappearing in the mist. The volcano, a place where some of their most significant memories were made, inspired the book’s title. The word “soufrière” comes from the French “soufre,” meaning sulfur or to sulfurize—a kind of sulfurous condemnation. Phonetically, it closely resembles “souffrir,” the verb meaning to suffer and endure.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56311151362421,"sku":"9789198760743","price":33.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9789198760743_c276329c-e7e3-4d25-8b55-b620b3db1f72.jpg?v=1786032202"},{"product_id":"9789198760637","title":"Antro","description":"Delving beneath the surface of everyday life, Andrea Simonato explores a world of underground caves and stone quarries in his second monograph, Antro. Historically prompting a wide array of interpretations -such as sacred boundaries between the human and divine, practical places of refuge or dwellings of the supernatural- caves have attracted countless cultures due to their distinctly ambiguous qualities. Today, these underground structures offer a stark contrast to the precisely defined nature of our above-ground surroundings. The entanglement of corridors and caverns seemingly strip themselves of worldly notions and, in their presence, ask us to do the same. Wandering through a cluster in the hills of South Vicenza, Italy, Andrea delicately approaches both the intricacies and magnitude of these spaces.\n“During the time of the pandemic, I made a habit of climbing the paths leading to the caves and abandoned quarries in the hills near my home. I couldn't say exactly what drove me to go all the way back there each time, perhaps it was just a way of distancing myself from what was happening. There was a calmness and a sense of stability in those places that somehow contrasted the uncertainty and emotional chaos of those months. Entering them and surrendering to their silence and shadows was like stepping into another world and leaving everything else behind, at least for a while.”","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56311217160565,"sku":"9789198760637","price":34.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9789198760637_1ba785bc-24c5-4545-b67b-615b287ad511.jpg?v=1786032198"},{"product_id":"9789198760682","title":"Noema","description":"In 1961, in the small Spanish village of San Sebastian de Garabandal, four young girls had an apparition of the Virgin Mary. They entered a state of ecstasy in which they became completely unaware of their surroundings and sensory perceptions. Reportedly, witnesses would pinch the girls, pierce their skin with needles, lift them up and drop them onto rough rocks, and yet they remained entranced. The light and presence of the Virgin is all they claim to have experienced. Twenty years later, in the town of Medjugorje, in Bosnia \u0026amp; Herzegovina, six children also had simultaneous visions of the Virgin, with similar ecstatic qualities.\n\nIn his debut book Noema Michael Swann investigates the aura of place and religious experience by searching for signs of the Virgin Mary’s presence in these two locations. Alongside original photographs made at both sites, Noema also includes images that have been appropriated from video footage of the visionaries taken during their apparitions. These emphasise the impenetrability of the individual religious and phenomenological experience, and speaks to the separation between what is apparently being seen and what Is photographable.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56313329713525,"sku":"9789198760682","price":30.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9789198760682_49303ff5-6f33-46c3-b4b1-dc5d6b1bd845.jpg?v=1786032199"},{"product_id":"probable-cause","title":"Probable Cause","description":"\"In January 2012, Henri Airo’s little sister was killed in a hit-and-run by a repeat drunk driver. In that instant, his family’s life was divided into what was before and after. \n\nWhile the Airo family struggled with the loss, the national media covered the crash and the subsequent police investigation extensively. The police focused on technical details—crash simulations, blood tests—while media narratives reduced the case to a drama between the innocent victim and the malicious perpetrator. The resulting documents and reports examined drunk driving and alcoholism in Finnish society but largely ignored the social circumstances surrounding addiction.\n\nIn 2018 Airo came across the original police report. It felt incomplete. Together with primary eye-witnesses and actors, Airo began to re-visualise scenes which had been glossed over in the documents. \n\nProbable Cause draws on media and police archives, re-enactment and Airo’s personal testimony to understand the circumstances of his sister’s death. By restructuring existing narratives, the project reveals multiple personal perspectives embedded within the official record. In reconstructing the perpetrator’s day, speculation and doubt become entry points for reflecting on how addiction is perceived in Finnish society.\"","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57492264780149,"sku":"9789198760798","price":34.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}]},{"product_id":"weltschmerz","title":"Weltschmerz","description":"We live in times marked by authoritarianism, violence, and a disregard for human rights. The world feels divided and paralyzed, and this climate of uncertainty takes photographer Jens Olof Lasthein back to another tumultuous time.\n\nIn the winter of 1991–92, Lasthein walked up and down Stockholm’s main pedestrian street, Drottninggatan, photographing people. He felt uneasy as his immediate world grew increasingly unsettled. The war in Croatia was clearly about to spread to Bosnia, the true melting pot of the former Yugoslavia. The Soviet Union was dissolving and formally ceased to exist on New Year’s Eve. At the same time, a man who came to be known as the “Laser Man” had begun shooting immigrants in Stockholm.\n\nWith his camera’s standard lens and focus fixed at one meter, Lasthein reacts quickly and intuitively—one flash exposure per person as they pass by. Some notice him, but most are so deeply lost in their own thoughts that they do not realize they are being captured on film. Everyone has their own story, their own small world, yet everyone threads their way through the crowd. The individual. The collective. And the shared world, fragmented and diverse though it may be. In the photographs, Lasthein saw reflections of his own unease.\n\nNow, 34 years later, those expressions mirror Lasthein’s state of mind today. Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine is entering its fifth year with undiminished force. Israel’s government continues to bomb, displace, and starve the Palestinian population. Democratic principles and international law are being abandoned in the United States, while the climate crisis accelerates. Amid all this, individuals move through their own small worlds, carrying their worries alone.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57492270383477,"sku":"9789199023533","price":34.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}]}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/publisher-kult-books.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}