Books published by Atelier Editions

A kaleidoscopic celebration of the USDA's pomological collection, offering an engaging, biophillic meditation upon the sweetest of the earth's produceThe United States Department of Agriculture Pomological Watercolor Collection encompasses 7,497 botanical watercolor paintings of evolving fruit and nut varieties, alongside specimens introduced by USDA plant explorers from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Assembled between 1886 and 1942, the collection's remarkable, botanically accurate watercolors were executed by some 21 professional artists (including nine women). Authored largely before the widespread application of photography, the watercolors were intended to aid accurate identification and examination of fruit varietals, for the nation's fruit growers. Documenting the transformation of American pomology, the science of fruit breeding and production, and the horticultural innovations accountable for contemporary fruit cultivation and consumption, the USDA's collection offers fascinating anthropological and horticultural insights concerning the fruits we ecstatically devour, and why. With an abundance of reproductions from the collection, this gorgeous volume encompasses fruit-suffused anecdotes and observations drawn from the fields of archaeology and anthropology, horticulture and literature, ancient representation and contemporary visual art. It includes contributions by authors Jacqueline Landy, John McPhee, Michael Pollan and Marina Vitaglione.

"American photographer Shannon Taggart's fascination with Spiritualism, the belief in deceased individuals' ability to communicate with the living, began during her adolescence when a medium revealed a family secret about the circumstances of Taggart's grandfather's death. Years later, Taggart, then a practicing photojournalist, found herself obsessively drawn to Lily Dale, New York--the world's largest Spiritualist community. Her transformative experiences there catalyzed a 20-year odyssey documenting Spiritualist communities throughout the world in search of "ectoplasm"--an emanation exorcised from the body of the medium, believed to be both spiritual and material. Named one of Time's best photobooks of 2019, and now revisited by Atelier âEditions, Sâeance offers readers a remarkable series of supernatural photographs exploring Spiritualist practices and beliefs within communities found across the US, the UK, and Europe. The photos are accompanied by Taggart's commentary on her experiences, a foreword by Dan Aykroyd, creator of Ghostbusters and fourth-generation Spiritualist, and illustrated essays by curator Andreas Fischer and artist Tony Oursler." -- Publisher's website.

A fascinating glimpse into an experimental British nudist culture that radically challenged and transformed conventional attitudes to bodies and their representationsThis richly illustrated volume examines the idiosyncratic phenomenon of social nudism in mid-20th-century Britain, an island nation fabled for its lack of sunshine and its reserved social attitudes.Structured across three interrelated phases, readers first encounter the movement at its genesis in the 1920s, when nudism was synonymous with vegetarianism, intellectualism and utopianism. That nascent culture proliferated in the postwar era, with a widening landscape of amateur clubs and governing organizations alongside high-circulation publications and censorship-challenging photographers. Finally, Annebella Pollen examines the movement's redefinition as naturism, its cultural battles and its struggle to survive amid shifts in sexual liberation in the permissive 1960s.Unadorned bodies were the central campaigning tool of British naturism's photographic propaganda. They drew attention to the cause and drove publication sales but they also attracted regular public opprobrium. Naturism's shifting visual culture thus provides a microcosmic view of British moral, legal and aesthetic transformations in a period of rapid social change, revealing evolving perspectives on health and sex, gender and ethnicity, pleasure and power.Annebella Pollen is Reader in History of Art and Design at the University of Brighton. Her first book, Mass Photography: Collective Histories of Everyday Life, explored 55,000 amateur snapshots taken on one day in 1987. The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift examined the modernist craft and occult spirituality of former scoutmasters in 1920s England.

"Who is Michael Jang? I don't know if he's a hipster or a nerd, a conceptual genius or instinctual savant. All I know is that he takes some of the best pictures I've ever seen."--Alec Soth, San Francisco-based photographer .her .