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New York reduced to a miniature city? In New York Resized, photographer Jasper Léonard offers you a completely new perspective on The Big Apple. His Tilt-Shift technique creates a dazzling bird’s-eye perspective. Taking pictures from rooftops, helicopters or even drones, Léonard points his lens at the skyscrapers and yellow cabs from above, transforming the city into a swirling ant-hill of miniature people. His images are accompanied by the best quotes about New York, and his unique style guarantees that this is the most original photobook about New York that you will ever see. Praise for Antwerp Resized: “What started as a dissertation with homemade lenses has resulted in a surprising photo book” – Gazet van Antwerpen (newspaper) – “Thanks to his special tilt-shift lenses the photographer creates the illusion you are watching miniature sculptures. Not people but puppets. Not buildings but maquettes” – De Morgen (newspaper) Facebook: Jasper Leonard Photography Twitter: @jasperleonard Instagram: jasper.leonard www.jasperleonard.be Also available: Belgium Resized ISBN 9789401434614 Antwerp Resized ISBN 9789401432702

The Ruskin Society Book of The Year. Who was John Ruskin? What did he achieve – and how? Where is he today? One possible answer: almost everywhere. John Ruskin was the Victorian age’s best-known and most controversial intellectual. He was an art critic, a social activist, an early environmentalist; he was also a painter, writer, and a determined tastemaker in the fields of architecture and design. His ideas, which poured from his pen in the second half of the 19th century, sowed the seeds of the modern welfare state, universal state education and healthcare free at the point of delivery. His acute appreciation of natural beauty underpinned the National Trust, while his sensitivity to environmental change, decades before it was considered other than a local phenomenon, fuelled the modern green movement. His violent critique of free market economics, Unto This Last, has a claim to be the most influential political pamphlet ever written. Ruskin laid into the smug champions of Victorian capitalism, prefigured the current debate about inequality, executive pay, ethical business and automation. Gandhi is just one of the many whose lives were changed radically by reading Ruskin, and who went on to change the world. This book, timed to coincide with the 200th anniversary of John Ruskin’s birth in 2019, will retrace Ruskin’s steps, telling his life story and visiting the places and talking to the people who – perhaps unknowingly – were influenced by Ruskin himself or by his profoundly important ideas. What, if anything, do they know about him? How is what they do or think linked to the vivid, difficult but often prophetic pronouncements he made about the way our modern world should look, live, work and think? As important, where – and why – have his ideas been swept away or displaced, sometimes by buildings, developments and practices that Ruskin himself would have abhorred? Part travelogue, part quest, part unconventional biography, this book will attempt to map Ruskinland: a place where, two centuries after John Ruskin’s birth, more of us live than we know.

“With his legendary swag, Norman Anderson, aka Normski, hip-hop ambassador in the United Kingdom since its emergence in the 1980s, is the great archivist of these glory days he captured London to Detroit.” — Rolling Stone France
“The difference between Normski’s photograph of me and any other is that it captures my soul.” — Goldie

“He was a larger-than-life character, full of energy and totally motivating. He really was the hip hop photographer of the day in the UK.” — Stereo MC’s
“This book contains a striking catalogue of images, many of which have been exhibited by establishments such as Tate Britain, the V&A, Somerset House and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.” — Marcus Barnes

“On the heels of Hip-Hop’s 50th anniversary, Man with the Golden Shutter is a celebratory record of hip-hop as much as it is a definitive collection of Normski’s incredible photographs.” — GQ Middle East

Normski was a vital witness to the period known as the Golden Age of Rap, when big US artists like Run DMC, LL Cool J and Public Enemy started to play in the UK. At the same time, a British music scene born of Black music and myriad multicultural influence was developing, giving birth to Jungle, Garage and Techno.

The author, who describes himself as having been a “young Black British homeboy photographer”, was in the right place at the right time to document the emergent music, community and social movements of hip hop and rap in the UK. Normski: Man with the Golden Shutter presents Normski’s personal journey through that world from the mid-1980s to early 1990s.

The book includes Normski’s often previously unseen photographs of Public Enemy, N.W.A., Cypress Hill, De La Soul, Goldie, Ice-T, Run DMC, Wu-Tang Clan and many others, alongside the photographer’s stories and anecdotes from the centre of what would become a hugely influential cultural movement.

Quartier Brugmann – L’Art de Vivre in Brussels’ Most Stylish Area translates the unique atmosphere of this neighbourhood, compared to London’s Notting Hill and Paris’ Saint-Germain, into a book of three parts:

I. A short architectural introduction through the Brugmann district, explaining the origins of the place and the important houses and buildings of the Brugmann square, the Avenue Lepoutre, the Avenue Molière…

II. Interviews with 30 Ambassadors who talk about their interest in the neighbourhood: why they live and/or work there, which are the addresses they can recommend…

III. A walk along the best addresses (galleries, boutiques, restaurants…) of the place Georges Brugmann, the Rue Franz Merjay and the surrounding avenues and streets.

Text in English and French.

Almost everything that landscape architects design is ultimately for a community. Community can be the boon or bane of a project, and oftentimes both. LA+ COMMUNITY aims to explore how, over time, each of us moves in and out of multiple communities, shaping them as they shape us, and in turn shaping our landscapes and cities. We ask how different disciplines construct different ideas of community and how those communities are anchored in space and time, whose interests they serve, and what traces they leave. And we examine how — in this pluralistic, fragmented, and fluid world — designers can meaningfully engage with communities. Contributions from:

Pioneering Edinburgh photographers David Octavius Hill (1802-1870) and Robert Adamson (1821-1848) together formed one of the most famous partnerships in the history of photography.

Producing highly skilled photographs just four years after the new medium was announced to the world in 1839, their images of people, buildings and scenes in and around Edinburgh offer a fascinating glimpse into 1840s Scotland. Their much-loved prints of the Newhaven fisherfolk are among the first images of social documentary photography.

In the space of four and a half years Hill and Adamson produced several thousand prints encompassing landscapes, architectural views, tableaux vivants from Scottish literature and an impressive suite of portraits featuring key members of Edinburgh society.

Anne M. Lyden, International Photography Curator at the National Galleries of Scotland, discusses the dynamic dispute that brought these two men together and reveals their perfect chemistry as the first professional partnership in Scottish photography.

Illustrated with around 100 masterpieces from the Galleries’ unique, vast collection of the duo’s ground-breaking work.

The ancient treasures collected over the past 20 years by Ludovic Donnadieu, hail from a myriad of ancient cultures, famous or obscure, across all five continents. The selection maintains a balanced representation of different geographical areas, ensuring that all regions of the world and all historical or prehistoric periods are accounted for. Through this comprehensive panorama, the viewer is invited on a cultural and anthropological journey through time and space.

The showcased artworks are “miniatures”; few exceed a size of 20 centimetres. Indeed, an artwork doesn’t need to be monumental to evoke profound emotional impact and fascination! Fragility can endure, the minuscule can embody grandeur, and singular detail can convey a universal message.

This selection of 99 works, forming a unique ensemble worldwide, adheres to a triple criterion: authenticity, aesthetic quality, and balance, both among the represented subjects and across different forms, materials, or functions. The period covered spans from 6,000 BC to the early 20th century. Presenting this collection to the public holds a dual significance: in a world threatened by uniformity, it celebrates the richness and diversity of human cultures while also highlighting the beauty and grandeur of small-scale formats and the need to protect what is fragile.

The Donnadieu Foundation was established in 2023, under the aegis of the Foundation for Childhood, by Ludovic Donnadieu, art collector, certified public accountant, and founder of the firm Donnadieu & Associates, which specialised in securing funds entrusted to NGOs. The Foundation aims to enable young people, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds, to broaden their horizons and engage in civic activism, while also raising awareness among the general public and policymakers about the importance of culture for the world’s youth.

Text in English and French.

This love letter in photographs to the unique beauty and mystery of Venice is an evocative compilation of vintage photographs, prints, and ephemera. It is a tactile ode to the sensuality of the city, filled to the brim with all manner of Venetian memorabilia: 19th century photographs, engravings, hand-coloured magic lantern slides, vintage postcards, old luggage labels, keys from long-lost luxury hotels, golden ducats from the 18th century, Carnival ball invitations. With gilt-edged pages and antique Venetian lettering, it is not a travel or walking guide, but an atmospheric pilgrimage that pays homage to this ever-fascinating city. Serge Simonart’s engaging commentary on Venetian history and culture introduces each subject with affection and insight.

“Every day, a nervous traveller visiting the City of Doges for the first time asks the best way to get to their hotel. ‘The shortest or the most beautiful?’, I once heard the concierge at Hotel Des Bains ask. The tourist who opted for the most beautiful route is still wandering around the city. This is a unique photobook in which to wander and lose oneself.” – Serge Simonart

Mudlarking’ is the act of searching the riverbed for historical treasures. Mudlarks comb the river’s foreshore, which is only accessible for a few hours a day at low tide, in their hunt for objects, untouched since they were lost hundreds or even thousands of years ago. Jutten is about men in boots mudlarking the bank of the Scheldt river in Antwerp, in search of shards of the past, the larking, the scouring, the scavenging. One tea towel after another filled with coins, marbles, pipes.

“Finds have a strange hold over us. There’s a magic to them that shines on a lot longer than the soon fading glimmer of things we intentionally choose. That purposefulness is probably what kills our enthusiasm after a week or so. Because when we make a choice, there’s too much of ourselves in the object already. We don’t deem a consciously picked item deserving of a tea towel display. The more trash we’ve dug through to get to our treasure, the more it becomes. Hence the mud-crusted trouvailles. So we go hunting for crap that’s out of place. Crap that becomes a find, simply because it was lost.” – extract from a text by Annelies Desmet & Jill Mathieu

After the First World War, the town of Ypres was reduced to ruins. It was literally rebuilt from the ground up. The Menin Gate was also restored; the place where tens of thousands of soldiers left for the Front, never to return. Today the Menin Gate is inscribed with the names of 55,000 soldiers from across the British Empire. It is a monument for those who fell and were forever lost, those who could not be buried. Their names are ordered hierarchically by unit and rank, but many of these men were conscripted civilians, not professional soldiers, serving their country only for the duration of the war. The Menin Gate is recent, living history and still an extremely evocative and haunting place. Thousands of men, fathers, sons, brothers…a whole generation lost, but not forgotten. Every day at 20.00 hrs, a lone bugler at the Menin Gate sounds the Last Post and the fallen are remembered. Text in English, Dutch and French.

Upon setting foot in Dhaka, with its beautifully landscaped gardens adorning ancient mosques and monuments, it becomes clear that this is a city steeped in history. One of the oldest settlements in Bangladesh, it is today among the largest cities in the world, and rapid, often unplanned, urbanisation has vastly outpaced sustainability, threatening the historic buildings and communities that make up the city’s cultural soul. But, despite bursting at the seams, Dhaka’s six centuries of history are still visible if we look carefully in the shadows of the tall buildings, in the spaces between the speeding cars. Dhaka-based architect Kashef Chowdhury’s camera captures a record of the capital city of the local character that may soon be lost due to urban development. In Chowdhury’s photographs, a woman hangs sheets of polythene to dry and resell, a blind man sings mystic love songs. Other photographs reflect Dhaka’s state of social and cultural flux, like an image of weary night-shift workers returning from a wholesale market in the late morning or of the barely visible lights of a pick-up truck concealed to prevent theft. Chowdhury is one of South Asia’s most renowned architects, and Dhaka: Memories or Lost constitutes his deeply personal tribute to the city.

Please Look in the Basement is a quirky collection of posters of lost cats, dogs, birds and other pets, carefully curated from the collection of Maarten Inghels, Jan Lemaire, Jean-Michel Meyers, Denis Meyers and Nicolas Marichal from Antwerp, Brussels and Ghent. Fellow collector and writer Maarten Inghels took the posters as the starting point for conversations with the owners. Apart from the posters, this maverick collectible bundles whimsical anecdotes about loneliness and friendship in the big city. How do you find an escaped animal? Does a cat survive a fall from the fourth floor? And did the fortune-teller really see the location of the lost dog in her crystal ball? Please Look in the Basement is an ode to the bizarre occurrences of our four-legged friends and the doltish typography of homemade posters. Inghels tells the stories of pets who one day decide to go their own way.

Text in English, French and Dutch.

In January 2016, at the annual meeting held by the Trustees of the A. G. Leventis Foundation and the members of the Honorary Committee of the A. G. Leventis Gallery, the Gallery’s Director, Loukia Loizou Hadjigavriel, the Curator of the Paris Collection, Myrto Hatzaki, and the collaborator in Paris, Sylvie Hartmann, presented an ambitious plan designed to bring a lost masterpiece to life. The Jacquelin de Montluçon Project was conceived as a research and exhibition programme that would bridge the gap between academic discovery and the desire to address a broad public. Intended to transform the recent findings of art-historical research into an engaging travelling exhibition, it promised to bring together scholars and museum experts, broaden the understanding of the oeuvre of an outstanding 15th-century artist and illuminator and revisit the panels of the lost altarpiece created for the Antonine monks of Chambéry, currently housed among four European museums. The project set the pace for an extensive journey of research, restoration and planning, under the guidance of Professor Frédéric Elsig of the University of Geneva and with the collaboration of the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Chambéry, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the A. G. Leventis Gallery in Nicosia. As the project progressed, the Centre de recherche et de restauration des musées de France [C2RMF] in Paris also came on board, undertaking the X-raying and digital scanning of the panels, as well as the analysis of colours and pigments used by the artist, adding valuable information about the creative process behind the panels.

Text in English and French.

When we see a bird, do we really see it? It’s perfectly possible to go through life with an almost total disregard for birds. However, in Britain, there are more than a million members of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. And thanks to Instagram – and other networking sites – there is also a growing number of bird photographers opening our eyes to unimagined treasures.

From the giants of our skies to the sweetest singing garden warbler, from Matthew Stadlen’s London street to the Indian jungle and taking in countries as far afield as Albania and Australia, this book is, in a way, also a story of his life. 

This book is a photographic odyssey through the lands of the First World War. For more than ten years the photographer traveled from the dust of the Namib deserts to the frozen heights of the Vosges to create a unique collection of images that document how time and nature have transformed these places of horror and killing into landscapes of great beauty and tranquillity… If anyone wants the reason for these photographs then they need look no further than the thoughts of a veteran leaving the shattered fields of the Somme who wrote: “No, they would not be lonely, I saw that bare country before me… the miles and miles of torn earth… the litter, the dead trees. But the country would come back to life, the grass would grow again, the wild flowers return. They would lie still and at peace below the singing larks, beside the serenely flowing rivers. They could not feel lonely, they would have one another. And… though we were going home and leaving them behind, we belonged to them, and they would be a part of us for ever.” (P. J. Campbell).

Text in English, French, and Spanish.

“I have never read a text which goes even half as far as this one in expressing the particular poignancy which lay at the heart of the impressionist movement. I say this as an art critic. As a novelist I would simply like to pay my tribute to the mastery of language, portraiture and storytelling which Figes has now at her command.” – John Berger
“A small masterpiece” – Susan Hill
“A luminous prose poem” – Joyce Carol Oates

This shimmering novel is an extraordinary portrait of a day in the life of an artist at work and at home. In prose as luminous as the colours Monet is using to portray his garden, Eva Figes guides us from dawn (‘midnight blueblack growing grey and misty’) through midday (‘the sun was high now… shrinking what little shadow remained, fading colours, the pink rambler roses on the fence by the railway track looked almost white’) to evening (‘the tide of shadows rising as the sunset glow faded outside.’) Monet’s wife, grieving for a lost daughter; a living daughter, fretting that she will not be able to marry the man she loves; their friend the abbé, eating and drinking with them; two children playing, closest to Monet in the freshness and certainty of their vision; all experiencing in different ways the richness of the light that Monet works unceasingly to pin down in his last, great paintings.

British Silver Boxes 1640 – 1840 catalogues the remarkable diversity and depth of the Lion Collection. Assembled with a passionate and discerning eye over several years, the collection has been distilled to include only the most interesting, rare and varied of antique British silver boxes.
The featured boxes were made predominantly to carry snuff and tobacco, and the book provides fascinating insight into the habits and customs that shaped their development. A handful of nutmeg graters, vinaigrettes and counter boxes of particular interest or rarity are also included. Maker’s marks are given when present, and many of the boxes’ engravings and details are explored, often providing clues about the objects’ former owners.
Arranged chronologically, enabling the reader to chart the development of British silver boxes over the course of two centuries, the boxes have been expertly photographed and researched. Details of provenance and other literary references help to complete the story of each piece in the collection.

Tribal Rugs: Treasures of the Black Tent is the definitive work on this subject. Dedicated to one of the most ancient crafts of the world, this book leads its reader through the history of the tribal rug. Featured content ranges from the oldest complete rug in the world (dated to the fifth century BC) to the weavings of the nomadic peoples of Iran, Afghanistan, Turkey, the Caucasus and Central Asia, compiled from the 19th Century up to the present day. Each chapter introduces a different group of tribes, illustrating the rugs, carpets, kilims and utilitarian bags attributed to their weavers. This book is both a celebration of the woven legacy left by the tribes and a tribute to the skill and artistry of the women who created these magnificent artworks. It aims to provide an introduction for the novice, and entice the more knowledgeable to further study. This new 2017 edition features a marvellous array of new photography showcasing the finest work of each tribe, which will excite anyone with an eye for the tribal aesthetic.

This book grants unexpected, beautiful and provoking insights into the diversity of the collection of treasures held in Leipzig’s GRASSI Museum of Applied Arts. Focusing on the joy of contemplating the works, its hope is to awaken the desire for a personal encounter with them. The sequence of illustrations highlights exciting connections, diversions and views between the objects. Chronological records or even the stringent arrangement of the collections and materials play no role here, allowing surprisingly novel, latent qualities that are frequently otherwise hidden, to be revealed.

In this publication the works meet face to face and present a wonderful survey of the diverse forms of applied art and design.

Ever since at least the ninth century, the Chinese province of Zhejiang has been known for its fine celadon porcelain with wonderful shimmering surfaces in qing, the magnificent shades of green. Chinese celadon enjoyed its golden age from the eleventh to the fourteenth century, a time when it found its way into the Imperial collections and was exported worldwide. A decline of craftsmanship followed, and by the end of the nineteenth century celadon had almost completely disappeared. It was not until the 1950s that this style of pottery was successfully brought back to life. In the 1990s changes to the market economy forced porcelain artisans to reorient; to this day they have been able to successfully align themselves, similar to the UNESCO World Cultural Heritage system, as ‘Living State Treasures’ with their unparalleled celadon glazes. Seladon im Augenmerk offers an exciting social anthropological insight into the cultural history, technology and sociality of celadon production in the porcelain metropolis of Longquan, PR, China, up to the present day.

Text in German.

From Sumatra to Java, from the Moluccas to Papua, across the whole of Indonesia, ancestors have played and still play a leading role. The cults and representations are evidence of an enormous diversity, power and poetry. This unique introduction to Indonesia starts from a cultural heritage perspective, but also poses topical questions about the place of traditions and rituals in contemporary society. Never before exhibited archaeological and ethnographic treasures are brought together with unique footage and interviews. In collaboration with the National Museum in Jakarta and numerous collections from all four corners of the archipelago.

The National Galleries of Scotland comprises three galleries: the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and the Scottish National Gallery. Together these galleries house one of the finest collections of art to be found anywhere in the world, ranging from the thirteenth century to the present day. Many of the greatest names in Western art are represented by major works, from Titian, Rembrandt and Vermeer through to Picasso, Hockney and Warhol. This lavishly illustrated book contains one hundred of the National Galleries of Scotland s greatest and best-loved treasures. The selection made by the Director-General Sir John Leighton is intended to evoke the special character of the collection at the National Galleries with its distinctive interplay between Scottish and international art as well as the many conversations that it establishes between the art of the past and the present.

A visual history of fashion that fits in the palm of your hand.

Drawing from the extensive Textile and Fashion Arts Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, this miniature history of European and American fashion features some 275 garments, accessories, and related works of art from the 17th century to the present. Dress historian Allison Taylor introduces each new era with a concise overview of the period’s fashionable styles and silhouettes, as well as the underlying historical and cultural influences. This chic Tiny Folio is the perfect gift for fashionistas and fashion historians alike.

The largest maps in the world are to be found in the floor of the Citizens’ Hall, in the heart of the Royal Palace Amsterdam. The three circular mosaics, each measuring over six metres in diameter, together depict the known world and the night sky. They remain to this day an iconic and beloved part of the majestic palace, which was originally built in the mid-17th century to serve as Amsterdam’s town hall. At that time, the city was the world’s leading cartography centre. The prominent place of the floor maps relates directly to that primacy. This book tells the story of these unique maps and of the flourishing of cartography in Amsterdam in the 17th and 18th centuries.