A Selection of Photobooks by Atelier EXB

Birds by Sebastião Salgado

For this sixteenth title in the Birds collection, the renowned Brazilian photographer delved into his vast archives to select a series of exceptional images celebrating a world exclusively inhabited by albatrosses, eagles, parrots, gannets, and other rare species. For over 30 years, Sebastião Salgado has been photographing both on land and at sea, traveling to remote areas such as the Amazon, Asia, Africa, and the frozen expanses of Antarctica. This book, with over half of the photographs being previously unpublished, is a true ode to the beauty of our planet. “Birds transport the largest number of seeds across continents,” explains Sebastião Salgado in an interview with Philippe Séclier. “Water birds dive to eat small fish, and in doing so, their feet pick up eggs scattered in the water, which they then deposit in other small basins, aiding their proliferation. Birds are thus essential for biodiversity, and we are losing them, particularly in forests.”

112 pages, €39
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The Proof of Color by Jacques-Henri Lartigue

The Proof of Color by Jacques Henri Lartigue highlights a lesser-known aspect of the famous photographer’s work: his fascination with stereoscopic autochrome – one of the earliest color photography processes ever introduced. The 90 preserved plates, produced between 1912 and 1928, and then again in 1946, are presented here for the first time in their entirety and in their original format. This process provided a remarkable tool for exploration and renewed his relationship with the medium, moving away from his focus on speed. Paying closer attention to image construction and developing a broad chromatic palette, the photographer adopts a painterly approach rather than one focused on snapshots. “It’s worth noting that before practicing autochrome, Lartigue first discovered color photography,” explains Marion Perceval, Director of the Jacques Henri Lartigue Donation. “His science teacher, Marius Aubert, introduced him to one of the earliest color recording techniques, invented by Gabriel Lippmann, who won a Nobel Prize in 1908 for this method based on the interference principle from wave theory of light. However, it was never commercialized. When you hold this object, you have to manipulate it to find the right angle and observe the image.”

160 pages, €45
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The Firm by Richard Pak

A tiny volcanic island of nearly 100 square kilometers, Tristan da Cunha was discovered in 1506 by the Portuguese navigator of the same name. Richard Pak’s book The Firm tells the unique story of the community that gradually settled on this remote island, how it evolved, and how it passed down its founding idealistic principles of equality and sharing over generations. The book is the culmination of long-term documentary work in which the photographer lived immersed within this community. The images are complemented by excerpts from the photographer’s journal. Richard Pak thus explores the meaning and limits of this utopian system based on mutual aid and sharing in the context of today’s world. “Above all, the story of this island, discovered by Portuguese explorer Tristan da Cunha in 1506, came under British control and administration in 1816, and remains a British Overseas Territory. It was at this time that Corporal William Glass laid out the idealistic principles I mentioned earlier, which I found absolutely fascinating. This utopian attempt drove me to visit the island to see precisely what remained of it.”

96 pages, €45
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Family Ties by Tina Barney

Family Ties by Tina Barney offers an intimate look at the photographer’s relatives and friends, who, like her, belong to the upper classes of the East Coast of the United States. This book, which accompanies her first retrospective exhibition in Europe, presents sixty works – the essence of her photographic approach – produced from the late 1970s to the present day. Captured with a large-format camera, these portraits of the American and European bourgeoisie – blending family snapshots with meticulously composed photographic tableaux – are filled with micro-expressions and visual tensions, revealing a subtle disorder beneath the surface. “There is something that connects Tina Barney to this movement focused on the domestic sphere, which followed the vast landscapes of the New Topographics of the 1970s, or even earlier Street Photography,” explains Quentin Bajac, director of the Jeu de Paume in Paris. “But Tina Barney does it spectacularly, with her large 20 × 25 format camera and use of color. This is far from the aesthetics of the snapshot. Her originality lies in treating intimate subjects with a documentary approach to family life.”

176 pages, €52
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Horses by Jane Evelyn Atwood

Horses unveils a lesser-known part of Jane Evelyn Atwood’s work: her long-term series on horses, or rather, her relationship with horses. A significant photographic subject, the horse here becomes a medium for many themes dear to the American photographer: her fascination with this animal nurtured since childhood, her admiration for its strong physical presence, and its human-like qualities. Immersed in vast spaces, from Brittany to Mongolia and through Vermont, the reader discovers throughout the pages all the majesty of this animal, wild or domesticated, which has accompanied humankind since the dawn of time. Atwood’s images expose the very essence of movement, the nobility of postures, and the subtlety of the play of shadows and lights on the horses’ coats. The horse transforms into a genuine living sculpture, where the shape of its body sometimes evokes abstract, almost dreamlike landscapes. “Since childhood, I have always had this passion for horses, like many young girls,” says Jane Evelyn Atwood. “When we were with my family in Tennessee, it cost nothing to ride a horse. I started taking pictures of horses in 2014, on the island of Ouessant in Brittany. It was like a light bulb turned on in my head, even though I didn’t know yet that it would become a true subject.”

128 pages, €45
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Homeland by Harry Gruyaert

In this book, Harry Gruyaert invites us to discover his homeland, Belgium, a country he has roamed for over 60 years. A native Fleming, Gruyaert has long known that his homeland is “a visually interesting place where incongruous things happen.” His very subtle intuition for color, combined with his ability to capture the essence of places, is evident in this vast body of images, which are both “historical and epicurean,” as noted by writer Brice Matthieussent. A sense of the grotesque, sarcasm, banality, but also emotion and a certain tenderness emerge throughout images of carnivals, religious processions, café concerts, and small towns bristling with brick houses. Four portfolios of black-and-white images, a lesser-known part of the photographer’s work, punctuate this visual immersion of the flat country on different paper.

256 pages, €55
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New York Notebooks by Jean-Christian Bourcart

Jean-Christian Bourcart’s New York Notebooks immerse us in the photographer’s visual repertoire, with his obsessions, recurrences, disruptions, and experiments. Designed from forty-eight notebooks composed while he lived in New York between 1998 and 2005, the book unfolds like a visual atlas, an artist’s black box that forms the first stage in selecting his photographs before creating series. A repertoire of forms with its echoes and formal reminiscences, the New York Notebooks also bear witness to an era. They reveal how Bourcart seizes, experiences, and captures the world like a sounding board, along with the uniqueness of his multifaceted approach. Defying all documentary photography rules, his images narrate fragments of contemporary stories in a photographic style that blends investigation, personal experience, and formal invention. “Philippe Artières, who has worked extensively on archives, wrote a text for this book where he points out that I only photograph fragments of catastrophe,” says Jean-Christian Bourcart. “With this idea that, at the time, it was already very present, unfortunately, with a sort of constant tension. But it also says something about my life in New York during those years, which was very fragmented, rather depressive even though I went out a lot, and this book reflects my state of mind.”

288 pages, €49
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Father by Diana Markosian

Diana Markosian: Father presents the photographer’s journey to another place and time, where she attempts to reconstruct the image of a familiar stranger, her long-absent father. The book explores her father’s absence, her reconciliation with him, and the shared void from their prolonged separation. The images, taken over a decade, unfold in her father’s home in Armenia. In Markosian’s first monograph, Santa Barbara (Aperture, 2020), the photographer recreates her family’s journey from post-Soviet Russia to the United States in the 1990s. Father uses both documentary photography and archives of objects, letters, and vernacular images to probe the 15 years of absence and separation during the photographer’s childhood. In this journey of self-discovery, Markosian poignantly conveys her desire to connect with a man she barely remembers, who asks her upon their reunion: “Why did it take you so long?”

144 pages, €45
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Aujourd’hui by Thaddé Comar

Winner of the Grand Jury Prize for Photography 7L, Franco-Swiss photographer Thaddé Comar explores in his latest series the issue of information and its various presentations through the “media machine.” To document this highly topical subject, he visited the French National Assembly and the Paris Courthouse to be at the heart of the action. These images of politicians immersed in a forest of microphones, cameras, and booms highlight the media buzz and our desensitization to the flood of information. “In 2018, out of curiosity, I attended the trial of the so-called ‘Tarnac affair’ on the first day, with Julien Coupat, who was questioned regarding the sabotage of TGV lines (which occurred on November 8, 2008, and was later considered a judicial fiasco),” says Thaddé Comar. “It was the first time I faced a crowd of media converging on the same place and individual. It was also the first time I saw this extraordinary number of audiovisual recording devices deployed and the media buzz that resulted. I found Jérémie Assous, Julien Coupat’s lawyer at the time, very impressive, as he absorbed all this media pressure, aided by his professional status. It was during this event that I realized there was an interesting project to explore around this relationship between political elites and the media.”

76 pages, €45
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Cover image: Anvers, 2008 © Harry Gruyaert / Magnum Photos