A fantastic addition to the Carte Blanche bookstore that combines text and photos is Bertrand Fleuret’s new book, The Cliffs.

French photographer Bertrand Fleuret explores the moods and imagery of imaginary worlds with The Cliffs, a small, handsome volume of sixty-eight pages. Several years ago, Fleuret had an unusually intense dream that began with him standing by a wall of dark cliffs. When he awoke, he found that the details of the dream remained oddly vivid, and he decided to reconstruct it in photographs. The cover presents a textual account of Fleuret’s dream, originally written in a notebook upon waking. Inside, each page depicts a single image against a stark black background, illustrating a line or two of text. Most of the images are Fleuret’s own original photographs, though some were (intriguingly) sourced from vintage ads and dusty copies of National Geographic. The Cliffs concludes with several pages of reproductions of Fleuret’s sketches and notes on the dream.

A new beautiful addition to our bookstore, is Elementary Calculus, by J Carrier.

J Carrier has had a nomadic lifestyle, moving from Washington D.C. to Ecuador, and then to Africa and the Middle East, every move taking him further from his friends and family. During his time in Israel, Carrier began to feel an affinity with the migrants who had landed in the dusty city of Tel Aviv, relating to their experience as an outsider, someone far from home.

Elementary Calculus, through a series of portraits, landscapes and still life photographs, observes the publicly private moments of these peregrine foreigners as they attempt to connect back to their homes. In his documentation of migrants and refugees in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, Carrier explores the distance between reality and desire – the want for what was and the hope for what will be – and traces the manner in which we navigate the points between the unknowns. His photographs resonate with the sense that in a foreign country geographical distance loses its physical measure and home feels like a hazy memory, a half-remembered dream.

A very fun addition to the Carte Blanche bookstore is Slide Your Brains Out: Surfing in General 1997-2012, by Thomas Campbell. A perfect taste of summer as it starts to get cold here in San Francisco!

Growing up in southern California, artist, photographer and filmmaker Thomas Campbell was raised on the DIY aesthetic of the early 1980s skateboarding culture. The first of ten projected volumes in Um Yeah Press’ surf photobook series, Slide Your Brains Out compiles work from the past 15 years. Often lo-fi and gritty, other times lush and saturated, Campbell’s compositions—which include portraits and action shots of some of the best surfers in the world—are always surprising and full of emotion, from melancholy to exultation.

Once again, Carte Blanche is carrying the very popular Portraits De Villes! We now have portrait books of 10 different cities and artists from all over the globe including: Brasilia byVincent Fournier; Paris by Patrick Messina; Moscou by Harry Gruyaert; New York by Steve Hiett; Naples by Vanessa Atlan; Dubai by Philippe Chancel; Tbilisi by VIncent Lappartient; Pekin by Artus De Lavilleon; Tokyo by Frederic Lebain; and Los Angeles by Vincent Mercier.

In 2007. Be-Pôles. Graphic design studio. First four cities. Four photographers. Four books. This is the beginning of a long journey… Four years later, 15 Portraits de Villes have been published. Each book was a unique journey seen through the eyes of a photographer. A disconcerting, intimate and personal journey.

For its new Portrait de Ville, Éditions Be-Pôles gave Vincent Fournier the carte blanche. The city he decided to capture was Brasilia. In this travel journal, he delivers a fragment of the city, and he wants it all: dizzying angles, hyper-calibrated lines, saturated colors and empty spaces. Its rationalized nature, its ambition and its people. A day in the life, but scripted.

Carte Blanche is happy to now carry another wonderful book from Alec Soth’s earlier years, Looking for Love, 1996.

Love makes people do strange things. The history of mankind is rife with love producing illogical and oddball behavior. When it comes to photography, falling in love with the medium is hardly an exception. For example, someone painfully shy might find themselves impulsively photographing strangers without asking for permission. Or, they instinctively photograph something without any ability to later explain why. Alec Soth’s newest book Looking for Love, 1996 is, in its way, about both—the search for love guided by the heart and the search of love guided by the eye.

New to the Carte Blanche bookstore and to John Gossage, is his new book “The Actor” (signed).

The response to why he robbed banks “That’s where the money is” is often misattributed to renowned bank robber Willie “the actor” Sutton provides the backdrop for this series of photographs of saving institutions by John Gossage. A book of 4x5 view camera contact print photographs of banks from 1975, presented these many years after they were shot. For Gossage, 2012 provides a prefect moment to review the conceits of vernacular bank architecture and the concept of thievery. 

Carte Blanche is please to now carry local San Francisco photographer, Chris McCaw’s amazing book Sunburn.

Using his home-built large-format cameras, McCaw’s images track the movement of the sun across the sky with exposures ranging from about 2 to 8 hours in length.He uses black-and-white print paper instead of traditional negative film in his cameras — which include a 20x24” and a 30x40” — and the long, direct-sunlight exposures create positives, or truly solarized images. And because the sun is so highly focused, the paper actually burns, leaving gashes and streaks across the images.What results, McCaw says, is a “unique piece where the sun has physically touched the surface and affected it. It’s creation and destruction at the same time. Smoke comes out the camera — it’s really cool.”

You might think that photographing the sun traversing the sky would result in a series of repetitive-looking images, but that’s far from the case: McCaw carefully crafts each shot, framing mountains, waterways and trees, always cognizant of the sun’s path.

“I’m really getting more in tune with where I am on the planet and what season it is. I might see an interesting photograph but realize I can’t photograph that until the winter solstice or summer solstice,” McCaw says. “I have a little list of places I need to go near the equinox.”

Another new beauty at the Carte Blanche bookstore is Dive Dark Dream Slow, a book of found imagery edited by Melissa Catanese.

Photographer and bookseller Melissa Catanese has recently been editing the vernacular photography collection of Peter J. Cohen, helping to organize this massive curated archive (a trove of 20,000+ prints) into a series of single-theme catalogues. Along the way, she has pursued an alternate reading of the collection, drifting away from simple typology into something more personal, intuitive, and openly poetic. Her magical new artist book, Dive Dark Dream Slow, is rooted in the mystery and delight of the ‘found’ image and the ‘snapshot’ aesthetic, but pushes beneath the nostalgic surface of these pictures, re-reading them as luminous transmissions of anticipation, fear, and desire. Like an album of pop songs about a girl (or a civilization) hovering on the verge of transformation, the book cycles through overlapping themes and counter-themes—moon/ocean; violence/tenderness; innocence/experience; masks/nakedness—that sparkle with psychic longing and apocalyptic comedy.

One of our favorite new books to the Carte Blanche bookstore is Nekopathy, by Japanese photographer, Masayuki Nakaya!

This Masayuki Nakaya cohabits a Tokyo apartment with four cats and one wife.  A story of one man, one woman and four cats in an apartment in central Tokyo. There is an unwritten contract. The humans pay the bills. The cats own the apartment. Quirky, humorous and charming little book from Japan with an interesting  and beautiful hand sewn design.