1975. Okinawa, Japan. The Vietnam War has just ended. Koza City is where the Kadena U.S. Air Force base is located. The B-52s that attacked North Vietnam took off from here. With the end of the war the city becomes the epicenter of a celebrative rush that lasts for a few years. The city experiences a momentary crazed and raucous time. A cacophonic spell where Japanese culture collides and becomes intimate with African-American trends and culture. Ultimately it became a successful, popular shock wave. It all dies off with the advent of the 1980s. Keizo Kitajima visits Koza city regularly during those years and he executes a vital work, a crucial and important piece of documentary photography. During those years Keizo realizes that the photographic exploration of reality is everything but small talk or commentary: it is an observation detached from any sentimentalism, a way to go further than what meets the eye and to document what is beyond the simple appearance.

Post Scriptum is the largest monograph to date on one of Sweden’s most beloved photographers. Founder of the legendary photography school Fotoskolan in Stockholm in 1962, and an inspiration to two generations of photographers, Christer Strömholm (1918–2002) was one of the first Swedish photographers to attain international prominence. Living in both Sweden and France, he first won acclaim with his photo book Poste Restante, which he followed up with Vännerna från Place Blanche (The Friends from Place Blanche)–portrayals of transsexuals in 1960s Paris. His images from his travels in Japan, Spain and the United States are also widely admired. This volume includes these and numerous other bodies of work, including his portraits of artists such as Duchamp, Breton, Ernst, Giacometti, Klein, Rauschenberg, Spoerri and others, compiling nearly 270 of Strömholm’s best photographs.

Originally published in 1983, Les Amies focuses on the transsexual community around the Place Blanche district of Paris in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The book established Christer Strömholm’s reputation as one of the leading photographers of the twentieth century.

The book includes the original essays by Strömholm and publisher Johan Ehrenberg as well as newly commissioned texts by Jackie and Nana, two of the women who feature in many photographs in the book. The book concludes with a thirty-two-page notebook of unpublished letters, papers, and contact sheets.

The Indian city of Benares, the holy City of Light on the shores of the Ganges, is one of the oldest cities in the world, and one of the most frequently photographed. In this, his first book, New York photographer Michael Ackerman has created an overwhelming and deeply personal portrait of the city which he visited for the first time in 1991. Eschewing stereotypical representations of Benares, Ackerman’s photographs testify to the sensitivity of the personal relationship he forged with the city: intense glances from people in the streets, dreamlike observations of a monkey balancing through electrical wires, moving and dignified images of mourners at the cremation grounds. Working in a variety of formats. Ackerman creates a moving and radically personal portrait of human life and death that transcends the particularities of this ancient city and speaks universally.

Toit du Monde is “the roof of the world,” it is Tibet, it is “a spirit, a sensation, a process, a building, a color pallet, a mixing table, a space for live experimentation,” and it is, most importantly in the context of this book, a center for multidisciplinary contemporary arts that was located in Vevey, Switzerland for ten years. Though the building that housed the arts center was destroyed in February 2002, the center itself has left traces of its existence throughout the nearly 400 pages of this book. Thirty-four international artists exhibited at the Toit du Monde are represented, including Dolorès Marat, Spencer Tunick, Renate Buser, Sofa Surfers, Antoine d’Agata, Michael Ackerman, Kreidler, Oval, Terre Thaemlitz, and Luigi Archetti. The volume also includes “The Potential Museum Project,” with contributions by Tobias Stengel, John Peter Nilsson, Le Corbusier, and Sigismond de Vajay, and “Trajectories,” a dynamic overview of the center’s archives, featuring projects made between 1994 and 2001. Edited by Sigismond de Vajay. Essays by Françoise Ninghetto, Christian Caujolle, Conny Voester, Gunter Müller, Michel Masserey, Janka Vunkmir, Patrick Bühler and Rubio Pérez