Berlin-based photographer Tobias Zielony has visited the small, ramshackle Californian chemistry city because it is 'possibly the worst place in America, if not the world', to quote a blog; his pictures show a small town entirely in the grasp of producers, dealers and consumers of a crystalline drug that keeps people on their toes for days and lets them age decades in the course of a mere few months. Chemists call it methamphetamine, addicts call it 'crystal', or 'meth', or both; politicians call it the new American pandemic.

Tobias Zielony: Trona: Armpit of America

Arts & Photography

Photography & Video

Spector Books

CARSTEN NICOLAI PIONIER /ANGLAIS

Nicolai, Carsten

The architecture of Jerusalem, called the “White City,” has long been associated (rightly or wrongly) with Bauhaus émigrés. In the homes of German-speakers, one can still find material vestiges of European modernism and sometimes even the Bauhaus itself.

Bauhaus N° 2: Israel: The Magazine of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation (Bauhaus Magazine)

Decorative Arts & Design

John Cage's (1912–92) 4'33" premiered on August 29, 1952, distilling the composer's philosophical explorations of silence into four minutes, thirty-three seconds of performed, charged silence. Elegantly, provocatively, the piece asked: what does silence sound like?
Cage's questions about the nature of silence and sound continue to reverberate decades later; this volume―the most comprehensive on the piece to date―brings together new theoretical writings and artistic works exploring Cage's composition. A wide-ranging list of contributors, contemporary and historical―from Merce Cunningham to Rage Against the Machine―weigh in on Cage's work alongside Cage's original scores and the composer's own subsequent engagements with his most famous piece.

John Cage: 4'33''– Sounds Like Silence: Silence Today

Individual Artists

Sixty-four days in the Iranian revolution: a photographic chronology, back in print after 41 years From the beginning of the large anti-Shah demonstrations in Tehran on December 10, 1978, to the withdrawal of the Iranian military on February 11, 1979, Days of Blood, Days of Fire captures the joys and uncertainties of the people as they move from the massive Tasu'a and Ashura demonstrations to the joyous celebrations of the Shah's departure and, finally, to the revolution's victory. The book is comprised of 135 photographs by Bahman Jalali, who is best known for his Iran-Iraq war photography, along with 16 photographs by his wife, Rana Javadi, and a handful of others. Days of Blood, Days of Fire was published in 1979 by Zamineh, the only independent publishing house at that time in Tehran. This book was Zamineh's first publication and went on to become a bestseller twice before losing its publication license. Forty years later, Spector Books is bringing this powerful book back into print.

Jalali: Days of Blood, Days of Fire

Between 1967 and 1990, freelance photographer Reinhard Mende was commissioned by various GDR combines to document factories and the presentation of their manufactured products at the International Trade Fair in Leipzig. He portrayed women at their workbenches, he took shots of lamps, vacuum cleaners and kitchen appliances. The approximately 250,000 pictures in his archive – both in black and white and colour – offer a rare look at the factories and the people who produced all these commodities. Although the perspective was directed by official ideals, Mende followed his own view. Double Bound Economies explores how we might approach this unique body of images today: how we can access them, how we can derive historical insights from them, and for what considerations they might represent a starting point. Along with a number of essays the book includes artistic contributions by Armin Linke, Olaf Nicolai and KP Brehmer.

Reinhard Mende: Double Bound Economies: On Reading A Photographic Archive From The GDR

Fabian Reimann uses the Whole Earth Catalog, first published in 1968 as a concise reference of tools for the improvement of the world and the self, as the starting point for the final issue of his own, visual-essay style 'egozine,' freeman’s journal, now in its tenth year. His Another Earth Catalog, only interrupted once by a personal essay, consists of a continuous stream of images: reproductions of the Utopian visions of the late 1960s―including not only material published in the Whole Earth Catalog, but also of other visionary projects from the Cold War period and the dawn of Postmodernism. Fabian Reimann loosely maintains the five categories of the Catalog (Understanding Whole Systems, Shelter and Land Use, Industry and Craft, Communications, Community, Nomadics and Learning) and connects the visions of the late 1960s with current images that can be traced back to the fantasies of these earlier times.

Fabian Reimann: Another Earth Catalog

Cairo: Open City examines the roles that images are playing in the ongoing Egyptian revolution, from the outbreak of the Arab Spring through the present. The catalog includes a variety of approaches to the time-based media of photography and video, from the works of photo journalists, to recordings by activists and citizen journalists, to documents collected by different artists. The different chapters will generate a dialogue between the images: cover images from newspapers will stand alongside photo galleries from blogs, iconic pictures alongside unknown images of people on the streets, images of martyrs alongside long-term documentary projects. The catalog comes out on the occasion of the exhibition in the Museum for Photography Braunschweig and collects essays from young Cairo-based authors.

Cairo: Open City: New Testimonies From An Ongoing Revolution

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Clouds are fleeting entities – studying them so as to correctly classify, name and read their forms was considered in the 19th and early 20th centuries an important step in coming to understand the secrets of the atmosphere. In its early stages photography offered scientists completely new ways of depicting clouds. They used cameras to make precise, lifelike images, which provided in turn insights into the interaction of clouds and the atmosphere. Helmut Völter‘s Cloud Studies presents six different stations of scientific cloud photography, from its beginnings in the 1880s to the images made by the first weather satellites in the 1960s. Each of the six chapters represents a very different scientific and photographic perspective of clouds.

Helmut Volter: Cloud Studies

Tobias Zielony’s recent photo series started with a chance encounter. A conversation with a young couple on a Berlin subway train led Zielony to suggest to photograph them. At the next stop they took a few quick shots on the platform. She told him that she could always be found around here, and he could come back anytime to take more pictures. Here?―I walk the street, right around the corner! They meet again, Zielony first portrays her and then also her fellow prostitutes and friends. The result is the 40 part series Jenny Jenny. It is not documentary: Tobias Zielony avoids the journalistic impetus for certainty and truth. To him, the authenticity of the subject is as relevant as the question of the objectivity of the documentary image: both are never free of dramatic elements. The book was published on occasion of the exhibition Tobias Zielony: Jenny Jenny in the Berlinischen Galerie.

Tobias Zielony: Jenny Jenny

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

Books by Spector Books