Generation AK: The Afghanistan Wars, 1993 - 2012
Photography by Stephen Dupont
stephendupont.com
 
Publisher: Gerhard Steidl
Editing: Stephen Dupont and Gerhard Steidl
Design: Stephen Dupont, Gerhard Steidl and Bernard Fischer
Pages: 320
Sizes: 275 x 365
Edition Size: 3000
RRP: POA
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Artist Description
Dupont is an award-winning photographer and documentary filmmaker. He is internationally recognised for his work in some of the world's most dangerous areas including Afghanistan, Iraq, Papua New Guinea, Rwanda and Angola. His photographs and handmade artist books are collected by leading institutions such as the New York Public Library, Library of Congress, British Library and Yale University.
 
Book Description
Generation AK. The Afghanistan Wars 1993-2012 is a retrospective selection of images of the country where Dupont has covered everything from civil war and the rise of the Taliban in the 1990s, to the launch of 'Operation Enduring Freedom' and the ongoing war on terrorism. Dupont completed much of this work on self-funded trips and as part of one of the last small independent photographic agencies, Contact Press Images. In 2008 Dupont survived a suicide bombing while travelling with an Afghan opium eradication team near Jalalabad.
 
Judges’ Comment
Generation AK brings together a large body of work into a single book of great magnitude. The photographs are forceful and interesting in themselves, woven into a complex design that's sympathetic and doesn't overwhelm the imagery. Securing Steidl as a publisher reinforces that Dupont is a photojournalist as well as a photo artist, who produces photobooks of international quality and appeal.

Belanglo
Photography by Warwick Baker
warwickbaker.com.au
 
Publisher: Perimeter Editions
Editing: Justine Ellis, Dan Rule and Nadiah Abdulrahim
Design: Narelle Brewer
Pages: 128
Size: 235 x 270
Editon Size: 700
RRP: $60 AUD
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Artist Description
Melbourne based photographer, Warwick Baker, completed a Bachelor of Arts in Photography at RMIT in 2007. He has been a finalist in the National Youth Self Portrait Prize (2009); the National Photographic Portrait Prize (2009); and the William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize (2011).
 
Book Description
Baker's debut book is a photographic meditation on sites of trauma and the psychological and historical resonances of landscape. Shot within the Belanglo State Forest, the location of the murders committed by Ivan Milat in the 1990s, the aerial, hand-held, and still-life photographs are at once forensic, evidentiary and speculative, making use of both traditional and experimental documentary techniques.
 
Judges’ Comment
Belanglo taps into our fears and anxieties about this well-known and dark Australian story, but it also reclaims the landscape on which the murders took place. Beautiful images are sequenced into a well-crafted story that is equally cinematic as it is documentary. Factual and fictional narratives weave together, lulling the reader into a false sense of security before an object or image appears on the page to remind us this is not simply a study of a landscape.

Birdland
Photography by Leila Jeffreys
leilajeffreys.com
 
Publisher: Hachette in association with PQ Blackwell
Editor: Rachel Clare
Design: Bianca Chang
Pages: 190
Size: 225 x 305
Editon Size: 5000
RRP: $49 AUD
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Artist Description
Photographic artist, bird-watcher and environmentalist Leila Jeffreys grew up surrounded by wildlife, igniting a love of nature and a passion for conservation. After noticing how unengaged people seemed to be with birds, she began taking portraits of them, hoping to portray them in a way that displayed their incredible beauty and diversity, while also focusing on character and expression. Represented by Olsen Irwin gallery (Sydney), Purdy Hicks Gallery (London), Cat Street Gallery (Hong Kong).
 
Book Description
Birdland is a birdwatching experience like no other, drawing birds out from their leafy shadows and airy territories to present them to us with all the skill and intricate detail of a portrait painter. The result is a stunning encounter with some of the world's most beautiful birds. On display are fine feathers of all types - eagles in burnished battle armour, fairy-floss pink cockatoos, owls in spangled eveningwear, and the finches and parrots who couldn't settle for one or two colours, so chose the whole palette.
 
Judges’ Comment
Birdland seduced us with its bird portraits. Each inidividual has its own unique character and the detail in each photograph is stunning. It's a simple idea that is well executed in a beautifully designed and packaged book that you can dip in and out of. Despite the Australian focus it will attract local and international appeal.

The Middle of Somewhere
Photography by Sam Harris
samharris.org
 
Publisher: Ceiba Foto
Editing: Sam Harris, Eva Maria Kunz and Candy Pilar Godoy
Design: Sam Harris and Eva Maria Kunz
Artwork: Uma Harris, Diary: Yael Harris, Text: Alasdair Foster
Pages: 160
Size: 187 x 245
Edition Size: 600
RRP: $59 USD
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Artist Description
Through the 90s Sam Harris was one of London's leading young portrait photographers, shooting editorial portraits and sleeve art for major UK publications, record labels and design studios. In the new millennium he abandoned his London career and turned the camera inwards to focus on his family and slowing down. After several nomadic years between India and Australia, Sam and family settled in the forests of southwest Australia where he continues to photograph his family diary.
 
Book Description
The Middle of Somewhere documents 12 years in the life of Harris' family in a remote corner of West Australia, where his daughters are free to experience childhood and wonder at their surroundings. It touches on themes of love, growing up, sisterhood, family, and the rhythm of nature. The intimacy of the book is enhanced by notes, messages and lists written by the sisters and stuck into every book by hand, and the cover artwork that was designed by Harris' eldest daughter Uma.
 
Judges’ Comment
The Middle Of Somewhere is a dense book with exceptional attention to design. The unique production elements and the addition of meaningful inserts and ephemera make it a treat to read.

Arc
Photography by Zoe Croggon
dainesinger.com/zoe-croggon/
 
Publisher: Perimeter Editions, Asia Pacific Photobook Archive
Editing: Daniel Boetker-Smith, Justine Ellis and Dan Rule
Design: Amelia Leuzzi
Pages: 80
Size: 210 x 300
Edition Size: 500
RRP: $35 AUD
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Artist Description
Melbourne-based artist Croggon works with sculpture, video, drawing and primarily, collage.  Her practice considers the relationship between the kinetic body and its surroundings. Croggon has a Bachelor of Fine Art from the Victorian College of the Arts, she has held solo exhibitions at Daine Singer and the Melbourne Art Fair and is the recipient of an ARTAND Australia / Credit Suisse Contemporary Art Award (2014), the Asia-Pacific Photobook Prize (2015) and ACACIA Art Award (2010).
 
Book Description
Arc is the debut book by artist Zoe Croggon and the winner of the 2015 Asia-Pacific Photobook Prize, sponsored by Grenadier Press, Singapore. Croggon's practice revolves around collage in its most economical and decisive form. Drawing on found images mining the histories of modernist and minimalist architecture, dance, performance and sporting endeavour, Croggon orchestrates highly aesthetic and formally charged arrangements via the simplest of cuts and gestures, pointing towards the limitations and potentials of the body and the built form.
 
Judges’ Comment
The photography in Arc is exquisite and this monograph proves that while Zoe's images are made to be exhibited, they work beautifully in book form too.

Limits to Growth
Photography by James Farley
jamesfarleyphotography.com
 
Publisher: Currency Editions
Editing & Design: James Farley and Jacob Raupach
Edition Size: 50
Pages: 28
Size: 290 x 380
RRP: POA
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Artist Description
James Farley is an artist and curator based in regional NSW. His main interests include land and environmental issues, climate change, ecology and the understanding / representation of place.
 
Book Description
Limits to Growth uses the form and aesthetic of an ageing tabloid newspaper to explore the logic behind the message outlined in the 1972 publication of the same name. The original book explored the relationship between exponential growth and finite resources. It anticipated a future where continued social, economic and industrial development would require more resources than planet earth could physically sustain.
 
Judges’ Comment
The nature of the book was carefully considered, with the fading newspaper enhancing the concept of decay and collapse. The broadsheet format also reflects the new forms emerging in contemporary photobook practice.

 

Red Herring
Photography by Jordan Madge
jordanmadge.com
 
Design: Jordan Madge
Edition Size: 15
Pages: 196
Size: 192 x 239
RRP: POA
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Artist Description
Jordan Madge is a 21-year-old photographer based in Melbourne. His work is concerned with journey, and ways of constructing and disseminating narrative in photography. He blends, and questions, fact, fiction, truth and representation. His work was shown as part of Photobook Melbourne 2015, published in Landscape Stories LS 19 and featured on Fotografia Magazine. He has a Bachelor of Photography from Photography Studies College, Melbourne.
 
Book Description
Red Herring is inspired by the disappearance of a girl in a small country town in Central Victoria, Australia, in 2009. Through the blending and questioning of fact, fiction and representation, the work challenges and tests the ways we construct and interpret narrative. It is also concerned with contextualising contemporary Australian social and physical landscapes.
 
Judges' Comment
Red Herring is utterly engaging. It ignites your imagination. You're aware that a girl has disappeared but you have to piece the story together. It is an open narrative that captivates, that makes you want to re-read, that drives you to connect the images. The longer you look the more there is to explore and the more you see.

The layout is inventive. The scale and pairing of images, the use of colour with black-and-white and the snippets of text create a rhythm, build drama and whisper the story rather than shout out answers. The minimalist aesthetic, liminal equivocal imagery and use of different paper textures also add to the mystery. Red Herring conveys a story and acts as a meditation on the way we read images and build a narrative.

Your love is not safe with me
Photography by Ailsa Bowyer
ailsabowyer.com
 
Design: Ailsa Bowyer, Calin Kruse and Alisha Sett
Editing: Ailsa Bowyer, Calin Kruse and Alisha Sett
Editon Size: 80
Pages: 112
Size: 133 x 182
RRP: $27 AUD
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Artist Description
Based in Perth, Bowyer feels instinctively drawn to photography as a way of combining her desire for aesthetic pleasure with a very visceral need to bring about a deeper focus upon the most profound aspects of her being. Through her work, she explores these aspects as she perceives them in other people and places. She then weaves these into narratives that entangle with her personal history, while also documenting her experience of self in the present moment.
 
Book Description
Bonnie is my favourite person in the world to photograph. A year ago, I started going through all of my photos of her. I wanted to make her a book: It was my love song to her. It was my Bonnie Book. I wanted her to look through the book, to feel how much I love her, how much I ache for her, and everything else in between. The Bonnie Book still remains, but was re-edited to become this book, designed to share with others.

During my editing and journaling for this book, I came to realise what the outcome of our story actually means. It killed me to come to terms with, but I knew it was something I had to say to her, and that it needed to become the title of the book.

Judges' Comment
Your love is not safe with me is a moving story that quietly sneaks up on you. The more you look, the more you discover, the more you like. The story is perfectly complemented by the book's construction - its size, design and materials. The unpretentious paper cover, hand binding and rounded corners reflect the intimacy of the story, and this simple form works perfectly when presenting a 'fragment of life'. The different kinds of image construction are complementary, not a mash up, but a concise exploration of the creator and subject's relationship.

 

LA - NY
Photography by Sam Wong and Jack Shelton
samwong.com.au
jackshelton.com.au
 
Design: Alex Crampton
Production: Blue Print Dynamic Printing
Edition Size: 150
Pages: 90
Size: 285 x 220
RRP: $45 AUD
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Artist Description
Sam Wong is a photographer based in Melbourne, originally from Hong Kong. In 2014 he was selected to be an intern at Magnum Photos' New York office. With an interest in street and fashion photography, Sam's work often captures the unfettered side of life.

Jack Shelton completed his Bachelor of Photography at RMIT University in 2013, majoring in documentary. Taking cues from pop culture and film, he spent time living and studying in the United States. He is interested in characters and places.
 
Book Description
Having successfully collaborated on their 2013 project Rain, Jack Shelton and Sam Wong teamed up again to present their take on opposing sides of the US, a colourful Southern California set against a stark black-and-white New York.  The project took the form of a book and exhibition presented as part of the Photobook Melbourne 2015 Festival.
 
Judges' Comment
LA - NY is packed with personality and energy. It has a distinct and innovative format that allows the character of the two cities and the visual style of the two photographers to shine through.  The darkness of New York is physically and visually juxtaposed against the colour of Los Angeles. The flexible binding means the pages can be removed and re-sequenced by the reader, turning the book into an experience not just an object.

By the River
Photography by Ian Flanders
anywherebuthere.photography
 
Design: Ian Flanders
Production: Digital Press, Sydney
Edition Size: 1
Pages: 120
Size: 193 x 258
RRP: POA
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Artist Description
Ian Flanders is a self-taught documentary photographer based in Sydney.
 
Book Description
The cover is a poster design taken from inside the brothel housing the women photographed in the book. The posters are bright and surreal, a total contrast to the dire situation the women are in. I have used that concept for the cover of my work By the River which documents a group of Vietnamese sex slaves in Phnom Penh. I have laid the handwritten text from the women over the photographs to emphasise the importance of the women's voices.
 
Judges' Comment
By the River is a complex book with uncomfortable imagery and a controversial subject matter but the design, layout and use of colour is striking. The heightened colour clashing with black-and-white is jarring but it works. It reflects the environment it portrays and makes you stop and think.

The Smell of Nârenj
Photography by Hoda Afshar
hodaafsharart.com
 
Design: Heidi Romano
Editing: Daniel Boetker-Smith and Heidi Romano
Production: Impact Printing
Edition Size: 5
Pages: 62
Size: 300 x 280
RRP: POA
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Artist Description
Born in Iran, Hoda Afshar is now based in Melbourne.  She completed a Bachelor degree in Fine Art - Photography in Tehran and is now a PhD candidate at Curtin University, and a lecturer at Photography Studies College, Melbourne. In 2006, World Press Photo selected Hoda, as one of the top 10 young documentary photographers in Iran.  She has exhibited in the Pingyao International Photography Festival (2012), the PhotoVisa Festival of Photography in Russia (2013) and won the Australian National Photographic Portrait Prize (2015).
 
Book Description
In The Smell of Narenj, an ongoing photographic series I began in 2014, I document the many and changing faces of Iran - my country of birth - a country that's often misrepresented or misunderstood because of ignorance, or because of the difficulty in navigating the surface in a place where the surface and depth often exchange looks.  The work captures Iran and Iranians' lives through their history and present, while questioning identity, memory and representation. It is a record of my own evolving vision of my homeland - an insider's view shaped by the feeling of distance that accompanies migration - and a documentary exploration of the interplay of presence and absence and the truth that emerges in-between.
 
Judges' Comment
There is a delicacy about The Smell of Narenj that makes it clear a designer was involved. It is a beautifully constructed book in traditional canvas bound style, with beautiful images that talk in a quiet and serious way while subtlly playing with the narrative. This is not just another book made by a westerner travelling to a foreign land. It has a personal resonance and it is a well-articulated exploration of 'place'. You sense an intimate connection between the photographer and the space in which she's working.

Magic City #2
Photography by Andrew Kaufman and Daniel Milnor
instagram.com/chloeferres
 
Design: Chloe Ferres
Editing: Chloe Ferres
Production: Blurb
Edition Size: 20
Pages: 152
Size: 127 x 203
RRP: POA
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Artist Description
Chloe Ferres is a Sydney-based creative and self-confessed bibliophile, who has completed a Masters dissertation exploring the photographic print in an age of digital technology. Her work explores the boundaries, and freedom, of print-on-demand technology. After completing a Bachelor of Arts in Visual Communication majoring in photography, and a Bachelor of Design majoring in graphic design, book making became a logical intersection of these two professions. During the week Chloe can be found impressing her love of print on photography students.
 
Book Description
Magic City #2 is an idiosyncratic publication. It's a collaboration between photographers Daniel Milnor and Andrew Kaufmann, who spent two days shooting in Miami before sending their images to designer Chloe Ferres, who was given the freedom to indulge in experimental book design. This book invites the owner to finish the production process, folding particular pages to make whole images visible. The book cover design extends to the page edges of the book, where a custom designed page border mimics edge printing - a service not available to print on demand consumers.
 
Judges' Comment
Magic City #2 has a zine sensibility about it and it clearly wants you to play - to fold, to cut, to create your own reading, to enjoy the moment. It reminds us how important the raw materials and format are in the construction of a photo book, in addition to the quality of the images and page design.

The Moon Belongs to Everyone
Photography by Stacy Arezou Mehrfar
stacymehrfar.com

Design: Stacy Arezou Mehrfar
Edition Size: 10
Production: Momento Pro
Pages: 36
Size: 210 x 150
RRP: POA
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Artist Description
Stacy Arezou Mehrfar is a photo-media artist currently residing in Sydney. She predominantly works on long-term projects that explore identity and culture. Her images have been exhibited in the United States, Poland and Germany, and are held in public and private collections worldwide. She has received distinctions from Arts NSW, NAVA, the Moran Arts Foundation, Head On, Photography.Book Now, the Camera Club of NY, The Center for Photography at Woodstock and PDN. Her first monograph, Tall Poppy Syndrome, was published by Decode Books in 2012.
 
Book Description
The Moon Belongs to Everyone depicts the modern-day story of migration, of shifting continents and mindsets, of hybridisation and dislocation. The subjects hail from different parts of the world. They don't necessarily know one another, nor do they share the same heritage however, they each find themselves living in a similar liminal space - somewhere between 'there' and 'here.'

The photobook is comprised of 36 plates, printed on transposable pages. The viewer is given authority to (re)position the pages and personally construct multiple narratives; new narratives may unfold with each interaction with the book. The Moon Belongs to Everyone frames a metaphor for an increasingly ubiquitous, non-specific, ever-changing, global identity.
 
Judges' Comment
The Moon Belongs to Everyone is different. It is a photo book and an artist book. It works as an interactive book and as a static display. The images are beautiful but its focal point is the way you can unfold it into different fragments, narratives and sequences to make your own reading Its construction leads you to think it is profound and encourages you to explore a philosophical idea.

STAN
Photography by Christian Belgaux
 
Design Christian Belgaux and Jack Pam
Edition Size: 200
Production: Christian Belgaux
Pages: 80
Size: 195 x 262
RRP: $25 AUD
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Artist Description
Christian Belgaux is a Norwegian photographer. Since graduating from Edith Cowan University in Perth in 2008 he has worked on several documentary and book projects. Primarily, Christian has worked on longer projects in South-East and Central Asia.
 
Book Description
STAN is the result of five trips made from 2010 to 2015 to parts of the ancient Silk Road in Central Asia. The book depicts people and places met on the road in Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Iran, Pakistan and China. It is co-edited with Australian artist Jack Pam and was the catalogue for an exhibition of the same name at PSAS in Fremantle, WA in October 2015. The book comes with an essay from Norwegian author Erika Fatland.
 
Judges' Comment
STAN is a refreshing example of storytelling in photobook form. It presents a tale about travels through Asia that is simply and successfully execute.  The binding style is poetic and visually striking.