21st Editions

Publishers of limited edition books that bring together a variety of photographic work with international writers, poets, and essayists. Each fine press book is a handmade limited edition, and is illustrated with original signed photographs.

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Sally Mann’s “Southern Landscape” is in production

Sally Mann’s “Southern Landscape” is in production. Hand-coated prints made with platinum, palladium, and gold exemplify the classic printing processes 21st Editions is known for publishing. Letterpress on handmade sheets and individually sewn and hand-crafted bindings all are a tribute to these time honored processes that together lead to exceptional offerings.

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21st Editions in London

Unique to the history of photography, 21st Editions represents the intersection created between the classically processed photographic image, prose, poetry, and the fine-press book that began with the great English designer, artist, poet and publisher, William Morris, and his Kelmscott Press's masterpiece, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer.

It is therefore fitting that 21st Editions, just having celebrating its 15th year, will be exhibiting at the London Art Fair. The fair runs from January 15-19, 2014 with a VIP Preview on Tuesday, January 14. Highlights from the collection of more than 40 titles published since 1998 will be on display and available.

Our booth (stand #50) will highlight our newest books: Imogen Cunningham: Symbolist with poetry and prose by William Morris and Sally Mann's Southern Landscape. We will also showcase significant titles such as Love, Graham Nash, Yamamoto Masao, The Sonnets of Shakespeare with artist Flor Garduño, Michael Kenna's Huangshan, and a portfolio of hand-pulled photogravures by Josephine Sacabo.

Please let us know if you are interested in seeing us in London. Pam or Steve can be reached at 508-398-3000 or [email protected]

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21st Editions in London

Unique to the history of photography, 21st Editions represents the intersection created between the classically processed photographic image, prose, poetry, and the fine-press book that began with the great English designer, artist, poet and publisher, William Morris, and his Kelmscott Press's masterpiece, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer.

It is therefore fitting that 21st Editions, just having celebrating its 15th year, will be exhibiting at the London Art Fair. The fair runs from January 15-19, 2014 with a VIP Preview on Tuesday, January 14. Highlights from the collection of more than 40 titles published since 1998 will be on display and available.

Our booth (stand #50) will highlight our newest books: Imogen Cunningham: Symbolist with poetry and prose by William Morris and Sally Mann's Southern Landscape. We will also showcase significant titles such as Love, Graham Nash, Yamamoto Masao, The Sonnets of Shakespeare with artist Flor Garduño, Michael Kenna's Huangshan, and a portfolio of hand-pulled photogravures by Josephine Sacabo.

Please let us know if you are interested in seeing us in London. Pam or Steve can be reached at 508-398-3000 or [email protected]

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Orders now being taken for Sally Mann's "Southern Landscape"

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"[her] first nude photography was a self-portrait in the woods, 1906, on the University of Washington campus. I set it up and jumped into it, and that was it." -Imogen Cunningham

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Tony and Rex by Greg Gorman from "The Odes of Pindar" published by 21st Editions

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from John Wood's introduction in "The Odes of Pindar" translated by Scott Goins

Gorman’s greatness—and he is as genuinely great as any living photographer—derives from his amazing ability to catch the essence of his model. The pictures of Tony and Rex and Gregory in this volume; his well-known nude torso of Iman, a portrait of the essence of feminine allure; Elton John, his eyes closed as if in a moment of ecstasy; Brigitte Nielsen nude and looking like an Amazon colossal in her power; or the closely cropped, full face portrait of Leonardo Di Caprio exuding the most intense sexualityare iconic images that people will still be looking at a hundred years from now, looking at when they no longer can recall who these people were or why there were important to us. These pictures will still speak because others will continue to recognize in them what they are actually about—not celebrity, fame, or even the particular individual but something fundamental about the human species regardless of the century. These are portraits of allure, ecstasy, power, and sexuality because Gorman’s portraiture extracts something essential from the individual. His portraits may be of the famous and the beautiful, but his art, like the art of the great portrait painters, is rooted in our humanity.

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Listening to the Earth

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from John Wood's introduction in Listening to the Earth with poems by Morri Creech

Listening to the Earth can be seen as a lament for what man has done to Gaia, the living planet, the Mother of us all; it can be viewed as a sad farewell, a portrait of planetary wreckage and the twilight of humankind. But ParkeHarrison’s genius is that his work can also be seen as a new genesis—the creation of a world, the molding of nature, and the making of sacrifice. He chronicles the preparation and readying of the earth for man, the making of light and wind and rain, a creator’s sowing, pollinating, tilling the earth, and writing the wind’s words into his great book. By this reading of Listening to the Earth, we see not a ruined, destroyed world being listened to for some sound of life by the last man, but the creator himself kneeling down listening to the roaring land he has fashioned. It is here that ParkeHarrison, the sacred metaphysician, suggests the very remedy for the mistakes and horrors that have plagued us and ravaged the planet. Listening to the Earth is a literal prescription for salvation; it tells us exactly what we need to do, exactly what we must do if we are to survive. That ParkeHarrison can fuse both readings into a single work—and that he does it in photograph after photograph—is his most amazing accomplishment. He warns us but gives us hope simultaneously.

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from John Wood’s introduction in “The New City” with poems by Maclean Gander

It is a cliché to think that the only way an artist can be original is by repudiating and turning his back upon the past. The past is often less of a burden than the present. Quite often the present carries far more fearsome baggage with it than any past, for if an artist does not accept the received conventions and strictures of his own time, he may well be completely ignored. It is a brave artist who chooses not to paint, photograph, or write like his contemporaries. Every period has its received aesthetic. What chance for recognition would a hyper-realist, for example, have had in New York in the 1950’s during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism? And how easy is it today for an artist to get attention if the work is not in some way “edgy,” a word used to suggest that some unpleasant feature of it is a commendable act of artistic bravery?

In The Culture of Hope philosopher and art critic Frederick Turner wrote, “Sometimes the present creates the future by breaking the shackles of the past; but sometimes the past creates the future by breaking the shackles of the present.”  That is exactly what Jefferson Hayman does in his art—he allows the past to break through the rules and restrictions of the present….

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To the Wheatlight of June: The Art of Ben Nixon and Steven Brown

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Gilded Circles and Sure Trouble: The Art of Josephine Sacabo and Keagan LeJeune

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from John Wood's introduction in The Duino Elegies with poems by Rainer Maria Rilke translated by Leslie Norris and Alan Keele

"Sacabo’s photographs inspired by the Elegies, like all great Symbolist art, are not so much concerned with intellectual content as with emotional content. Their power, grace, and beauty are not lessened by saying they are built upon emotional knowledge rather than intellectual knowledge or to call them, like the Duino Elegies themselves, a product of an intuitive spirituality. Mysticism of any sort demands belief, not analytical reasoning, and great art does not need systems or mythologies to validate or infuse it with meaning"

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Upcoming new titles this fall with (from top to bottom) Josephine Sacabo, Ben Nixon, and Rondal Partridge.

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