{"title":"L'Artiere","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9791280978103","title":"To Be","description":"\u003cp\u003e“When I was 17, my older sister Susan let me photograph her. I was amazed at how her newly prominent veins and capillaries defined her pregnant body as they raced down her arms and across her abdomen and breasts. I felt I could almost see the growing child through her pale skin. Around the turn of the millennium, it was as though I was surrounded by women — colleagues, family, friends — who were expecting, and I felt an urgency to photograph them. Perhaps the urgency I felt had to do with knowing their pregnancy was limited to nine or so months. To photograph a woman before she gives birth, a loved one before they die, the sunlight before it fades and grows dark are all a motivation, and expression of the life force. Inspired by altar paintings from the Italian Renaissance, I used my 7”x17” panoramic camera for standing portraits. When I realized my subjects sometimes had trouble balancing, I also made horizontals, with the recumbent portraits of Francisco de Goya’s Naked Maja, Edouard Manet’s Olympia, and André Kertész’s Satiric Dancer in mind. I collected copies of paintings, drawings and photographs for inspiration and often asked my subjects to interpret for themselves their gestures or their contrapposto stances. During the time we spent together, we worked collaboratively and slowly—moving and rearranging furniture and props—to create an intimate studio, be it inside their homes or, sometimes, out in the landscape. Sometimes partners, dogs or cats would join us.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe oldest known depiction of pregnancy is the Venus of Willendorf (c. 25,000 BC), discovered in Austria in 1908. It’s a limestone figurine with pendulous breasts and fertile hips.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOne night in the summer of 2023 when I was developing the last negatives for this project the temperature in my darkroom reached 100 degrees. Overwhelmed by the heat and the intensity of these images, I left the negatives in a water holding bath overnight. When I went to hang them up the next morning I was horrified when the emulsion began sliding down the plastic base of the film. I hurriedly held up one of the sheets of film to the light box and took a photograph. Suddenly, there was a Venus of Willendorf of my own. Now, I see the shape or spirit of Venus in each one of these portraits, images of seen and unseen transformations that give rise to human life. I also see my own inspiration to understand and describe the pregnant form — fertility, fecundity, hope, birth, precarity and even time itself.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLois Conner\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56311253729653,"sku":"9791280978103","price":60.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9791280978103_b779f669-6d02-4ba1-ae79-61c4b4e3b4d7.jpg?v=1786033287"},{"product_id":"firelight","title":"Firelight","description":"Firelight by Amy Friend is a captivating photographic collection that breathes new life into vintage photographs from the 1920s to the 1940s. Sourced from family albums, online finds, and market discoveries, these images are reimagined through Friend’s artistic vision. The series, titled “Dare alla Luce”—Italian for “to bring to the light”—embodies a dual meaning of illumination and birth. By introducing delicate perforations and backlighting, Friend transforms these historical moments into ethereal scenes where figures and landscapes are adorned with luminous patterns, evoking a sense of magic and nostalgia. This interplay of light and shadow invites viewers to reflect on the transient nature of time, memory, and existence. Firelight is presented in a meticulously crafted volume, featuring laser-cut paper and French binding, all encased in a clothbound box. This edition is a testament to the fusion of past and present, art and artifact.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57495564812661,"sku":"9791280978226","price":65.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9791280978226.jpg?v=1786618237"},{"product_id":"golden-memories","title":"Golden Memories","description":"Golden Memories by Lee Shulman is a deeply poetic exploration of forgotten moments, uplifted through precious material transformation. For over eight years the artist has rescued anonymous colour slides — snapshots of lives once lived — and, in this series, he prints them on sheets of gold leaf. The gold, with its sacred and eternal connotations, elevates ordinary domestic scenes, holiday poses and candid glances into the realm of memory’s shrine. On these fragile surfaces, light moves, image and gold merge, and the photograph becomes a meditation on impermanence and presence. The project invites us to stop before the ordinary, to bear witness to lives we do not know and yet somehow recognise. With this book, Shulman expands his ongoing mission to restore dignity to forgotten photographs and asks what it means to remember in an age of fading analog material. Golden Memories is at once elegy, tribute and icon — a quiet invitation to honour the visual traces of our collective past.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57495565304181,"sku":"9791280978240","price":70.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9791280978240.jpg?v=1786618238"},{"product_id":"calling-the-birds-home","title":"Calling the birds home","description":"Calling the Birds Home by Cheryle St. Onge is an intimate meditation on memory, nature, and loss. Born from the experience of her mother’s illness and death, the work delicately traces the shifting roles of mother and daughter, transforming the act of caregiving into a poetic dialogue with the landscape. Through luminous, contemplative photographs, St. Onge captures the rhythms of waiting, the textures of daily life, and the fleeting presence of light and nature as signs of continuity. Her writing and images move between fragility and resilience, evoking how love and grief shape our perception of the world. Designed by Teresa Piardi (Maxwell Studio) and published by L’Artiere, the book is both elegy and renewal—a tender testament to the enduring ties between generations and the quiet power of photography to keep what is gone within reach.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57495565861237,"sku":"9791280978257","price":50.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9791280978257.jpg?v=1786618239"},{"product_id":"song-of-silent-water","title":"Song of Silent Water","description":"Song of Silent Water by Mathieu Chaze is a visual meditation on nature, captured through a lens that prioritizes sin-cerity and essentiality over contemporary trends. Curated by the renowned David Campany, the volume brings toge-ther images born from long walks and a profound observation of the landscape: a dog in the mist, rolling hills, a treereflected in water, a solitary heron. As noted by the legendary photographer Bernard Plossu in his introduction, Cha-ze’s photographs possess a \"secret atmosphere\" and a fragrance that speaks directly to the soul, free from technicalartifice or passing fashions. The work explores the concept of sustained time, where individual moments are not iso-lated events but fragments linked by a quiet, invisible rhythm—much like the intervals that give shape to a song.Beautifully designed by Federico Barbon and printed in duotone, this book invites the reader to walk alongside theartist on a journey of pure expression and a discovery of the authentic.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57573202231669,"sku":"9791280978301","price":45.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9791280978301.jpg?v=1789395901"},{"product_id":"italian-story","title":"Italian Story","description":"Italian Story is the culmination of more than forty years of photographic work by Andrea Modica in Italy, a country with which the artist has formed a deep, evolving relationship. Made entirely with an 8×10 view camera, the photographs span decades and regions, revealing a slow, attentive way of seeing rooted in time, presence, and return. The title draws from the layered meaning of the Italian word storia—at once history, story, situation, and fiction—reflecting the book’s open, fluid narrative. Rather than offering a linear account, Italian Story unfolds as a personal and poetic record of encounters, places, and moments shaped by memory and imagination. Balancing intimacy and distance, documentary precision and lyrical ambiguity, Modica’s images form a quiet meditation on duration, place, and the act of looking. Published by L’Artiere, the book stands as an ongoing visual narrative—both lived and constructed—between photographer and country.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57573202395509,"sku":"9791280978332","price":55.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9791280978332.jpg?v=1789395902"},{"product_id":"adam","title":"Adam","description":"Adam is a photobook by Theo Zeal that follows his lifelong friend as he forages. Theo creates a fictional landscape,positioning Adam within it to attempt to portray and contain his elusive friend. Created over four years while Theoexperienced the alienating symptoms of Lyme disease, following his friend became an instinctive response to a gro-wing sense of disorientation and fear. Through Theo’s darkroom process, the images become fragile artifacts, asthough unearthed from the very ground Adam treads. The result is a haunting meditation on the act of seeing andthe quiet magic of friendship.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57573202559349,"sku":"9791280978349","price":40.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9791280978349.jpg?v=1789395903"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/publisher-lartiere.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}