In the spring of 2000, Richard Renaldi began making frequent trips to the small New England city of Fall River, Massachusetts. Situated just a short distance from the Atlantic coast, Fall River was once at the very center of American textile manufacturing. Renaldi's aim was to photograph the young men of Fall River coming of age amidst an industrial landscape well past its boom years. This extraordinary body of images both portraits and landscapes is gathered here for the first time in Renaldi s second monograph, 'Fall River Boys'. The resulting photographs, made over the course of nine years, are not brief encounters. Renaldi's quiet gaze considers his subjects with neither judgment nor irony. What emerges is a nuanced portrait of a city where young men grow into manhood surrounded by a landscape of idyllic natural beauty, frayed at the margins by darkened relics of an industrial past. Like the city of Fall River itself, the boys looking directly into Renaldi's lens face an uncertain future, at once hinting of possibility yet promising nothing. Fall River Boys is a beautiful, clothbound volume of 89 black-and-white images reproduced in rich tritone and published in an edition of 1200. The introduction is an original essay by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Cunningham.

Fall River Boys

Arts & Photography

Photography & Video

Charles Lane Press

Since completing her photography MFA at Yale in the late nineties, Davies has assumed many guises. Between intermittent assignments as an undercover private investigator for a Manhattan law firm, she has been quietly slipping away from a career fraught with risk to make landscape photographs and ambiguous self-portraits of haunting beauty. In Outerland, her debut collaboration with Charles Lane Press, Davies reveals for the first time her personal work of more than a decade. Portraying herself as a solitary wanderer in the spectacular vistas of alien worlds, she appears only obliquely in her images, veiled in a spacesuit of her own design. As Davies traverses the beautiful but deadly topography of Outerland, her purpose is unclear. What is the meaning of the strange insignia on her suit? Are the instruments she carries with her and with which she subtly alters the landscape for science or survival? Where exactly is Outerland, if it is not in fact a harsh and dystopian vision of our own planet deep in the future? Presented without text or explanation of any kind, and with only a handful of mysterious symbols to help us orient ourselves in Davies imagined cosmos, Outerland offers a compelling new perspective on self-portraiture within the continuum of modern landscape photography. Outerland is the second book in Charles Lane Press carefully curated, one-a-year titles. Lushly printed in a large horizontal format with a unique Tyvek and gold foil-stamped binding, Outerland was edited by photographer Richard Renaldi and consists of 65 full color plates.

Outerland

Allison Davies

In recent years, China has proffered tantalizingly fertile landscapes to photographers exploring the socioeconomic impact of its arrival as a superpower. Such projects typically hew closely to well-established narratives, revealing an obvious truth: that China is undergoing a radical wave of transformational change. In his first monograph, Chinese Sentiment, Shen Wei has performed a radical act in its own right by sidestepping all such cliche. Instead, he presents a vision of his homeland that peers deep beneath the surface, plumbing the psychological shades of gray, and finding a nation ambivalent to its perpetual state of suspension between past and future. Running counter to virtually every Western interpretation, Shen Wei reveals the human scale of China: a lone figure observed through the trees; the stolen glance of a young girl; a moment of repose in the bedroom. With nuanced observation and a serene visual style marked with wit and compassion, the seventy-five images in Chinese Sentiment render a complex portrait of modern China. Employing the language of photography in a manner both dreamlike and cinematic in scope, Chinese Sentiment gracefully limns the interior life of a nation in the throes of epic change. The introduction is by Peter Hessler, staff writer and former Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker. Hessler is the author of three books on China, including Country Driving, A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory (Harper, 2010). Chinese Sentiment was guest-edited by Lesley A. Martin, publisher of the Aperture Foundation book program.

Chinese Sentiment

Peter, Hessler

While Ian van Coller was growing up in the 1970s, the black women working in his parents upper class home in a whites-only suburb of Johannesburg were valued as members of the family. Nannies and maids who helped raise the children and run the household, they were ever-present confidants and friends. And yet they were conspicuously absent from family vacations and photo albums.  Apartheid, though it has been officially consigned to history, continues to live on in nearly a million South African homes where blacks still serve the needs of the white minority. Ian van Coller s first monograph, Interior Relations, deftly probes this enduring racial fault line with a simple yet elegant premise: he has asked black housekeepers, nannies and maids to wear their finest clothes, and to sit for formal portraits in the homes they care for.  Though the subjects' white employers are never shown, evidence of their privilege crowds around the women, forever out of reach: every portrait a cameo of apartheid in redux.  For Sindiwe Magona, one of South Africa's most celebrated black writers, working as a domestic in her youth provided a desperately needed but meager income that she was forced to supplement by selling sheep heads on the street. Serving white families represented a constriction of the soul that was broken only by the force of her will to become a writer.  Magona's introduction channels the voices of van Coller s subjects through her own years as a domestic worker. Ian van Coller s delicate and reverential portraits, coupled with Sindiwe Magona s searing essay, offer a starkly original view of the intersection of race and class in post-apartheid South Africa.

Interior Relations

Sindiwe Magona

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Books by Charles Lane Press

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Charles Lane Press publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Fall River Boys

Outerland

Chinese Sentiment

Interior Relations