#2 Mathilde Polak // U.B.C ✸ Top5

Mathilde Polak is a french Photographer based in Paris and a passionate book dealer for the cultural center Culturé in Pantin. She is an active member of Ultra Book Club and there is the detail of her top 5 :

✸ N°5 : « Santa Barbara shame on us » edited by @alexcartagenamex and published by @skinnerboox (2017)

After « Santa Barbara back to us » the second chapter by Alejandro Cartagena on the US is a more tragically constructed visual landscape. The current state of things in “America” has created a greater divide and contrast socially and especially politically. As such, the book carefully suggests and addresses these issues that need no literal explanation but an almost theatrical approach to feel the surface and see the inside of the decline of an empire.

✸ N°4 : « Surf Fiction » Edited by @werneramann and Published by White Press (2014)

« Surf Fiction » is Werner Amann’s unpublished work from 1997. It engages with social reality and image bound-culture in Los Angeles and other urban centers in the US. Beyond a mere documentary or created approach, « Surf Fiction » interlinks photography with collages, typography, videostills, abrupt breaks and double page spreads — switching with each page turn from one plot to another. The work plays with projections of a myth that regenerates itself from day to day, producing an image of Los Angeles and at the same time a visual reflection on modern reality.

✸ N°3 : « we don’t embroider cushions here (third edition) » edited by augustine and josephine rockebrune and published by editionmonumental (2015)

In We Don’t Embroider Cushions Here artists Augustine and Josephine Rockebrune reveal a new and outrageous chapter in the legend of designer Charlotte Perriand and her famous master Le Corbusier. 50 years after Corbusier’s death, this book documents how his degrading view of women haunts the very chair his unpaid and uncredited assistant Perriand designed in his shadow: the LC4. Throughout 192 pages of screenshots, uncovered through meticulous research on adult websites, the sisters Rockebrune explore the diabolical irony with which Perriand’s iconic chaise longue has become a preferred “fuck-prop” in the adult film industry. Readers will witness how the LC4 has become the leather “altar” on which women of all races are systematically reduced to objects, good for nothing but whoring or — as Le Corbusier suggested to Perriand — “embroidering cushions”. We Don’t Embroider Cushions Here is printed in a limited edition of 500 numbered copies, and is published in conjunction with the 50th anniversary of Le Corbusier’s death.

✸ N°2 : « atlas of forms » edited by @erictabuchi and published by poursuite editions @poursuiteed (2017)

Atlas of Forms a great picture book is generated of shapes, all kinds of shapes from architecture, from all architectures. Along the 256 pages that compose it, there are nearly 1,500 photographs, patiently stored on the Internet and classified according to rudimentary criteria of geometry (circle, square, triangle, polygon) or state (construction site, completed, abandonment or ruin) which combines and succeeds without interruption. Opening onto a series of spherical constructions, as if it were the construction site of the worlds, to end with the image of an overturned bunker, it is a long wander, a sort of hypnotic chant with its recurrences and its variations, its repetitions and its ruptures, its harmonies and dissonances that this book invites you to. More than a book on architecture or photography, Atlas of Forms is first and foremost a praise of diversity, of all diversities.

✸ N°1 : « Machine » Edited by @ari_marcopoulos_official and Published by @_red_lebanese_ (2017)

“Machine” is a catalog produced by French independent publisher Red Lebanese for Ari Marcopoulos’ installation of prints and videos at Galerie Frank Elbaz (Paris) in 2017. As ne loved to say, make books, zines, and films as a way to extend the life of the photograph. So in a way, this rare edition — printed in 250 copies are the few vestige left of a generous range of photos that Ari selected randomly for the pleaser of making them run one last time for the eternity.

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