Böcker utgivna av Dewi Lewis Publishing

Why do men dream of being worshipped by people on the other side of the world? The Men Who Would Be King explores an old fantasy that still has resonance in Vanuatu in the South Pacific with the prophecy that a divine man will one day come from overseas.

Every city has a shadow. Every town has a Drake. For four years Tamara Reynolds immersed herself in the lives of the people existing just above survival on one square block in the shadows of the Drake Motel in Nashville, Tennessee.

My Brother’s War tells the story of a soldier, Gary Hines, and his younger sister’s search to understand the circumstances surrounding his life with Post Traumatic Stress – and his untimely death by his own hand ten years after returning home from war. Gary’s letters, photographs, and his personal effects found in a small box, served as guides to Hines who travelled twice to Viet Nam, attended a reunion of his comrades, called army buddies decades after the war, and visited the home where he died. Finding handwritten declarations of love written by Gary’s Vietnamese fiancé, Hines also uncovered a surprising and mysterious love story.Using her brother’s photographs as starting points allowed Hines to see the landscapes that shaped his experiences of trauma and to create the illusion of memory. Using shadows, magnification, and reflections, Hines met the challenge of discovery and understanding by creating images, with limited means, of things that no longer exist.This work is the often untold story of loss, grief, hope, healing, love, and living in the aftermath of war – both for a veteran and for his family and friends. My Brother’s War makes reference to families worldwide that have lost and are presently losing loved ones to war. Hines’ work seeks to inspire, as the only alternative, a peaceful coexistence.

''Four thousand square foot of blue-flecked linoleum is decorated with maps of the world…. This random patchwork, traversed by thousands of people scuffing its surface, is slowly being worn away, the floor underneath emerging as new oceans eroding the graphic landmass. Fallen sticky price labels and other detritus settle across an ever-evolving cartography formed by human footfall.''Helen Sear reflects on the current ecological crisis and our shared responsibilities across countries and borders. It is a call for human collaboration to avert the permanent loss of other species, in an era that biologist E O Wilson has suggested might be named “The Age of Loneliness”.In 2018 and 2019 Sear spent several weeks in Durham North Carolina inside the vast warehouse premises of The Scrap Exchange, an organisation dedicated to re-diverting surplus materials from landfill and creating environmental awareness and community through reuse. It is a microcosm for something global, namely our human relationships with, and impact on the environment and our immediate surroundings.Constructing a makeshift studio on the shop floor she invited visitors to have their portraits taken, photographed hands holding chosen objects, sometimes recording brief conversations. Photographing strangers in the formal style of studio portraiture enabled a momentary stillness and connection amid the agitation of peripheral vision overload and the direct eye contact between subject and artist heightens the sense of a moment shared.Helen Sear’s practice focuses on the co-existence of human, animal, and natural environments and is rooted in an interest in Magic Realism, Surrealism and Conceptual Art. She studied Fine Art at Reading University and University College London, Slade School, her practice coming to prominence in the late 1980s, when she worked primarily with mixed-media installation, performance and video. Her photographic works became widely known in the 1991 British Council exhibition, De-Composition: Constructed Photography in Britain, Sear was the first woman to represent Wales with a solo exhibition at the 56th Venice Biennale 2015 presenting a suite of new works…the rest is smoke. Helen Sear currently lives and works in France.

The 1980s and 90s was a golden period for editorial photography. They were the Thatcher years - a period of time when a gilded and confident yuppie generation spent freely with a new hedonistic, 'never had it so cool' loads of money mentality.

Paddy Summerfield''s Home Movie tells the oldest story, the saddest story, a story that includes the story-teller. It is the Fall of Man, falling from innocence into exile, a dark world of claustrophobic interiors, of low life bars and stained streets, of casual fornication in shabby hotel rooms. It is the fall from grace into forbidden spaces, where secrets fester behind closed doors and weary eyes. And it is a fall into nightmare and psychosis, where the self, in sickness, peoples the world with terrors. These are squalid scenes, such as Dostoevsky might have recognised, expressing the madness and obsession of those imprisoned there. Even looking at such a world, at such pictures, feels transgressive. Home Movie leads us into darkness, but the journey is always a search, suggested by the final pictures moving away from corrosive indulgences and pain towards enlightenment. The last sequence starts with hands praying, in a gesture of remorse and contrition. Then the came

Rita Leistner planted over half a million trees from 1984-93. She spent the next twenty years working as a documentary photographer and photojournalist, primarily in war zones, claiming the backbreaking work of tree planting and the logistical skills she acquired as a crew boss prepared her for thriving in challenging environments. Returning to the cut-block (the vast swathes of land cleared by logging) in 2016, Leistner ΓÇ£embeddedΓÇ¥ with a community of 100 tree planters, spending four years living in their bush camps in remote parts of western Canada. She creates heroic and uncanny portraits of work and of the land in homage to the people, profession and environment that were so formative to her. High production tree planting is only in its second generation (it became necessary with the rise of mechanical logging in the late 1960s). Tree planting is a hybrid industrial labour and high intensity sport, where Canadian tree planters set the bar and are without peers worldwide. Today, tree planting is at a crossroads: the crucial moment at which it is transitioning from being something securely within the forestry industry to a kind of Anthropocene climate change symptom and solution. In addition to the book, the five-year project resulted in large scale works that are in major collections in Canada, and a feature documentary film Forest for the Trees (2021).Forest for the Trees is a finalist in the 2022 Banff Mountain Book and Film Competition.

Redolent with both sadness and hope Things Aren't Always as Mother Reports is an extended series of colour portraits and landscapes made in the documentary style through which Paul Cohen interrogates the idea of family. It is a tense document about the here and now.

Wars in Afghanistan, Syria and other countries have generated a massive stream of refugees toward Europe. Between spring 2015 and autumn 2020, Jacob Ehrbahn documented the lives of the refugees and migrants who dream of a better life in Europe. We meet people who have fled from war, political suppression, and poverty. We meet them far out in the Mediterranean in Libyan waters, and at various locations around Europe. A Dream of Europe reminds us that on the other end of policy decisions and behind the numbers and statistics, there are real people with hopes and dreams.

A fascinating historical record of England in the early 1990s, photographed by the acclaimed German photographer Peter Bialobrzeski.

Reclaimed concludes Paul Hart’s three-part series on The Fens in the UK. The first two books Farmed (2016) and Drained (2018) have received several international awards and considerable critical acclaim. In 2018 work from the series was awarded the inaugural Wolf Suschitzky Photography Prize (Austria/UK) and in 2019 it was shortlisted for the Hariban Award (Japan).The Fens, originally a region of low-lying marshland in the east of England, has been artificially drained over centuries to provide some of Britain’s most fertile agricultural land. It is a landscape of agribusiness with monoculture at it’s core, defined by human migration and long-term reclamation from the sea.Paul Hart has photographed the area for over ten years. His narrative examines the complex interrelation between humanity and nature and raises important questions about human-altered topography and our occupation and stewardship of this land. By focusing on the often-overlooked elements in familiar vistas Hart’s aesthetics carry a documentary sensibility that allows the landscapes to define themselves. He works solely with the analogue process employing traditional darkroom practice to convey something of the soulful in a landscape that is rarely considered of aesthetic merit.As the respected French curator and writer Isabelle Bonnet states in her insightful introductory essay; “Hart’s landscapes create a dialogue between art and document, lyricism and storytelling, the sublime and the ordinary. Almost everywhere, rectilinear and regular shapes unfold, impeccably drawn furrows responding to rows of trees, industrial constructions and metal structures… No movement animates this nature morte, no bird awakens these low and heavy skies and endless horizons… Hart’s images take on a universal value: the battered and exhausted Fens resonate like a subtle metaphor for what humanity engenders and inflicts on itself.”

Street art was once simply graffiti, a sign of decay that lowered property values. Fast forward to the transformation of LondonΓÇÖs East End and it became cool. Seen as ΓÇÿgrittyΓÇÖ and ΓÇÿedgyΓÇÖ, street art generates interest in an area. Refashioned, and made acceptable, it transforms public space as areas become high-priced, trendy and attractive to the emerging creative class. Its ΓÇÿedgeΓÇÖ and sense of ΓÇÿauthenticityΓÇÖ become a means to speed up gentrification. Yet as property prices rise, the high cost of living forces out those artists who created the art as well as the local residents. Never was this truer than in LondonΓÇÖs Shoreditch where these images are shot ΓÇô an open-air showcase of urban art that generates considerable tourism.Graffiti now appears in galleries and museums worldwide. Artists who were once hoodied, hidden and nocturnal are out in the open, working in broad daylight from cherry-picker platforms. Commissioned by corporate brands such as Adidas and Gucci they offer creative interventions into the urban landscape, images of coolness and affluence ΓÇô in murals destined to become Instagrammable propaganda. In East Ended you see every code of cool fashion and attitude, alongside scenes of poverty and people on the streets trading in anything but the cool. Gentrification has brought a numbing sameness. Yet look carefully and youΓÇÖll spot the cheeky protest posters ΓÇô political critique to climate change resistance ΓÇô purposefully plastered over and defacing the ads. The voice of the streets is reclaiming its walls.

Asked what he wished to convey in his poetry, Robert Lowell once said ΓÇ£I want to break your heart.ΓÇ¥ This book is nothing if not heart breaking, heartbreakingly wistful and poignant, heartbreaking in the way that the inexorable passage of time, with its inevitable losses and recuperations, can be heartbreaking.Spanning almost thirty years, House Music chronicles seemingly quotidian moments in the lives of multiple generations of the photographerΓÇÖs extended family.Training the camera on those closest to him: ''Charles Rozier brings the sensibility of a street photographer to his own domestic setting. This is a body of work that transcends convention and the particularities of RozierΓÇÖs own circumstances to create a story that speaks to universal experience."House Music underscores the uncanny in the everyday, presenting a series of suddenly meaningful tableaux framed by the stage of ordinary surroundings. Circumstance and familiarity have made the photographer invisible ΓÇô in very few images do we see any recognition of his actions by his subjects ΓÇô but we are deeply aware of his presence. Though Rozier does not appear in these images, House Music is a self-portrait. It is also a book about beginnings and endings, over a long generation in which everything has changed, including the photographer himself." ΓÇô Alison Nordstr├╢m

In 1976, aged nineteen and a student at Exeter College of Art, Iain McKell got a summer job on Weymouth seafront photographing holidaymakers. It was a wonderful opportunity for him to both earn a living and carry out a project exploring the life of the seaside photographer. As well as holidaymakers he photographed his friends, his family and local people from the town, and in the evening the disco bars, fairgrounds and caravan parks of the town. Private Reality is about youth culture and being a teenager in the 1970s. As McKell turned from teenager to young adult existential angst preoccupied his thoughts as it does for many teenagers, yet the project came together through his lens as he experimented through his photography. For McKell it was his rite of passage, his coming of age, as he began to look at the world and tounderstand it through the camera.

Lust for Life is the first comprehensive overview of Ed van der Elsken's colour work. Its publication coincides with a major six month long exhibition which opens at the end of May at The Nederlands Fotomuseum, the national museum of photography in the Netherlands. The exhibition has only been possible as a result of the largest photo restoration project in Dutch history - with more than 42,000 slides of van der Esken's work now carefully restored. The book is published as a collaboration between Dewi Lewis Publishing, Lecturis and the Nederlands Fotomuseum. Design is by leading Dutch designers Kummer & Herrman.

Let Us Not Fall Asleep While Walking explores the impact of the ongoing war in Ukraine by focusing on aspects of daily life, rather than the war itself. It is a collaborative project in which Denil has worked with Ukranian people to translate their individual experiences and thoughts. It is as if time is frozen, though the dreams and the hopes remain.

The New Londoners is a powerful celebration of London''s unique cultural richness, and of the diversity that is the hallmark of this great and fascinating city. Over the last four years leading British photographer Chris Steele-Perkins has photographed and interviewed 164 families from 188 different countries, all of whom have made their homes in London. These are beautiful and powerful portraits, with each family photographed in their homes. Through insightful interviews we learn of the varied experiences of these families from across the globe.

The Way We Were 1968-1983 is a look at British society through the eyes of leading British photographer Homer Sykes - his personal view of 'life' as he encountered it as a young photographer setting out in the early years of his career.This was a time when British society was going through a period of enormous change. This is reflected by Sykes as he embraces everyday life, with a gentle and seeing eye; a knife throwing striptease tent booth at The Derby in Epsom, through to a kite-flying middle class family battling against the wind and rain on Brighton promenade. The book covers poverty in the East End, rich kids and their parents at society balls, teddy boys, factory workers in the north of England and New Romantics at the Blitz Club in Covent Garden, when Boy George was just George O'Dowd and there was still an Alternative Miss World. Skinheads hang out in upstairs bars, while Catholic youths riot in the streets of Northern Ireland. He also chronicles many of the social issues of the time and the demonstrations that brought those problems to public attention: "I attempted to get behind the more obvious news image; I was looking for other moments, that gave depth and understanding to those people's predicaments."

The Fens, a region of reclaimed marshland in eastern England, is one of the richest arable areas in the UK. It is a landscape of agribusiness that Paul Hart has been photographing for over eight years. In his new book, DRAINED, hecontinues the exploration of this wide-open environment which he began with FARMED, the first in a planned seriesof three books about the region. This is a linear landscape of straight lines and flat horizons, with monoculture atit's core. Hart's narrative pinpoints the objects that remain when all that surrounds has been cleared by modernagricultural practice. He conveys nature's vulnerability within this unsheltered, unprotected environment.Hart's working method is in the vein of documentary, exploring our relationship to the landscape by highlightingelements that are so often overlooked. He employs the analogue process and traditional darkroom techniques, toconvey something of the soulful in a landscape. As Francis Hodgson says in his insightful introductory essay: "PaulHart is a photographer interested in the slow harvesting of hidden truth from the ordinary places that most of uspass by ... (his) placid, formally peaceful landscape is pregnant with stories that lurk in the mud or the mist.

To strengthen his own political position, Albania's dictator Enver Hoxha (who ruled from 1944 to 1985), convinced his people that the outside world wished to invade their communist 'paradise'. Unable to afford advanced technological deterrents during the Cold War years, the country's communist regime built a costly and extensive network of military bunkers, allocating huge physical and economic resources in a frenzy of construction. Today the people of Albania reuse and recycle these in ways that are both extraordinary and varied: as cafés, homes, restaurants, swimming pools, barns, bridges and water tanks. Over several years Robert Hackman has photographed these strange mushroom-like structures which have now also become a popular element in Albania's burgeoning tourism industry.From 1975 to 1982 former Prime Minister of Albania, Alfred Moisiu, oversaw the fortification of the country with these defensive bunkers. In a fascinating interview he tells their story, estimating that up to 500,000 were built. As he says, 'Albania could not afford to produce aeroplanes and missiles and so we built bunkers instead.'Genti Gjikola, the former Head of Exhibitions at the Albanian National Gallery of Arts, provides an illuminating introduction. In April 2018 he became curator for the Centre for Openness and Dialogue (COD), a unique art-and-culture space at the Office of the Prime Minister of Albania. The book also includes examples of photographs taken by Algerian-born French Michel Setboun in 1981 and by Martin Parr in 1990.

Bruce Gilden has always had a fascination with what he calls characters . So, for Bruce, New York, with its famous idiosyncratic citizenry and the unique energy of its streets, proved to be a giant creative playground. Originally published in 1992 and long out of print, ''Facing New York'' has become a recognised photobook classic. For this new edition Bruce has replaced two images, of which he says that he just can t understand why they didn t make his original selection.

In the month before the 2016 presidential election New Zealand photographer Harvey Benge spent time in SanFrancisco and New York making the images in this book. In many ways these 59 photographs represent a time capsule - places, people and scraps of visual information - that is an affectionate and sometimes critical look at this mash up of a society that in October 2016 was at an existential watershed. This work does not pretend to be an objective look at America, it is simply Benge's subjective view. The images are filtered through Benge's own sensibilities, formed by his country's own brand of politics where socialism is embraced and not a dirty word. And, of course, the states of California and New York present just one aspect of what it means to be an American. There is no judgment here, just Benge's desire to understand and attempt to tap into something resembling truth. There is a sense of profound sadness here too, of futility and a feeling that not much lies behind the fake news, the hard sell, or the glossy surface of things. Despite all of this there is resilience and resistance. Stoicism is in the air and there is a feeling that things will come right.

The Englishman and the Eel is a journey into that most London of institutions, the Eel, Pie and Mash shop. Today, these simple spaces hold within them the memories of a rich, largely undocumented cultural heritage of generations of working-class Londoners in a city whose only constant is change. Often elaborately decorated with ornate Victorian tiling, many sold live eels in metal trays that faced out onto the street to the fascination (and sometimes horror) of passersby. Inside, warmth and comfort. Steam. Tea. Laughter. Families.

For over a decade, Simon Roberts has documented events and places across Britain that have drawn people together in public, communal experiences. This has often been an implicit theme of his work, the apparent desire for common presence and participation and the need to share a sense of belonging, suggesting something distinctive about our national character and identity. Merrie Albion ranges across several of his projects from the last decade, projects that have explored not only our leisure landscape but also our social and political landscape.