Inspired by the sight of his grandchildren splashing joyfully in the rain, artist John Newling explores the myriad histories and cosmic mysteries contained within a small puddle by his garden gate.
Images of the ever-changing puddle appear alongside Newling’s life-affirming, insightful, humorous and profound reflections and observations. Through them, we are shown hope for the future of humanity, while being reminded of the miracle and fragility of our existence.
The Book of Puddle reveals how even the simplest and most ordinary of things can become a gateway to a deeper understanding of our connection with the natural world and each other.
‘In the puddle is the knowledge that all things are connected to everything else, and we are a small bit of everything’
70 × 245 mm
152 pages
148 full colour images
Softcover with flaps, printed and foiled cover, speciality papers throughout.English
Published by Beam Editions
ISBN 978-1-7385574-5-5
1st Edition 2025
Delivery within 3–5 days.
With essays by Duncan Wooldridge, Nicholas Royle, Jonathan Casciani and Ashley Gallant.
Drift has been realised from a collection of over 20,000 35mm photographic slide transparencies, sourced from house clearances. Each resulting picture is made by photographing slides stacked together on a light box. The work reflects on the malleable nature of both memory and photography, and their elastic correspondences with reality.
The book includes four newly commissioned essays, exploring the work from different perspectives: Photography academic and writer, Duncan Wooldridge, contextualises the project in relation to the conditions of our contemporary mediascape. Academic on The Uncanny, Dr Nicholas Royle, reflects on an inherently uncanny dimension in the work. Curator, Ashley Gallant’s, essay focusses on the sensorial experience of photographic matter and, in its poetic form, mirrors the painterly character of the work. Book publisher and curator, Jonathan Casciani’s essay positions the project in the wider context of the artist’s recurring interests, methodologies and creative concerns.
215 × 260 mm
96 pages
42 full colour images
Softcover, printed and foiled cover, section sewn, Swiss bound, speciality papers throughout.English
Published by Beam Editions
ISBN 978-1-7385574-2-4
1st Edition 2025
Delivery within 3–5 days.
Exploring the work of one of the most prolific, versatile and admired female photographers of the 20th century, Dorothy Bohm at 100 takes a fresh look at the photographer’s 75-year-long career, showing a selection of her most iconic images alongside many previously unpublished works.
Born in 1924 into a Jewish family in East Prussia, Dorothy Bohm was sent to the safety of England in 1939. Her experience of war and dislocation deeply influenced her photographic approach, one that displays a fascination with people from all walks of life, particularly women and children.
After training in studio portraiture in 1940s Manchester, Bohm travelled extensively in the post-war period, establishing herself as a leading humanist street photographer. The mid-1980s saw a shift as Bohm started working exclusively in colour, infusing her images with texture and spatial ambiguity, evoking the human presence in increasingly abstract, complex and allusive forms.
This new volume, published to mark the centenary of Bohm’s birth, showcases the diversity of her work and her profound empathy for the human condition.
The book features essays by Martin Barnes, Senior Curator of Photographs, Victoria & Albert Museum, photographer and writer Rachel Wallace, a biographical essay by art historian Monica Bohm-Duchen, and short texts by a wide range of notable contributors, each focussing on a single photograph.
With contributions from:
Maria Balshaw
Martin Barnes
Katy Barron
Monica Bohm-Duchen
Colin Ford CBE
Anna Fox
Lydia Goldblatt
Mark Haworth-Booth
Amanda Hopkinson
Ian Jeffrey
Esther Leslie
Markéta Luskačová
Don McCullin
Pelumi Odubanjo
Martin Parr
Nissan N. Perez
Marissa Roth
Paul Smith
George Szirtes
Rachel Wallace
Marina Warner
Val Williams
Details
245 x 300 mm
240 pages
197 images
Hardcover, printed and foiled cover, section sewn, speciality papers and full colour printing throughout.English
Published by Beam Editions
1st Edition 2024
Carol Adlam first crossed the threshold of Girton College as the Mary Amelia Cummins Harvey Visiting Fellow Commoner in October 2021. She spent the next year haunting its corridors, lurking in stairwells, lying in long grass, drawing wheatfields, wind tunnels, laboratories, offices, libraries, archives, basements, bike huts, and clock innards.
Using rapid drawing techniques and materials including charcoal, printmaking, and chalk on blackboard, she focused on fleeting interactions and neglected spaces in order to tell new stories about the College and its people.
Adam Crothers’ and James Wade’s poems sit alongside the artwork, agreeing and disagreeing, remixing and riffing on its themes of daily time and deep time that underpin the life of the College in all its variety.
Details
240 x 300 mm
136 pages
108 colour images
Hardcover, printed and foiled cover, section sewn, speciality papers and full colour printing throughout.English
Published by Beam Editions
ISBN 978-1-7399865-9-9
1st Edition 2023
Leonard McComb RA, one of six children from an Irish immigrant family, grew up on the outskirts of Manchester. With some encouragement from his father (an amateur painter), the artist transcended his hard, working-class beginnings to become one of the most respected artists of his generation.
An extraordinary draughtsman, McComb’s work combines close observations of people, nature, landscape and still life, capturing the vital energy embodied in the world around us. His mesmerising techniques provide an almost infinite depth to the works, often on an epic scale.
Richard Davey’s illuminating text resonates with the same energy found in McComb’s paintings, providing the reader with analytical deconstructions of the technical aspects of the work and insight into the perspectives of the artist.
Featuring contributions from McComb’s sister, Anne Lee-Draycott, and the artist’s friends and colleagues.
This book shows the artist’s major works, featured in collections such as Tate, National Portrait Gallery and The Royal Academy of Arts, alongside previously unseen work and intimate excerpts from the artist’s sketchbooks.
246 x 310 mm
224 pages
Hardcover, printed and foiled cover, section sewn, speciality papers throughout.English
Published by Beam Editions
ISBN 978-1-7399865-6-8
1st Edition 2022
Delivery within 3-5 days.
FIRST EDITION PAPERBACK
In 2015 artist Fernanda Fragateiro presented a series of plywood boxes containing research material to students of Anthropology at the Harvard Art Museums. The materials offered the audience an opportunity to explore the artist’s practice through a collection of objects as an alternative to documentary photographs of completed works. This event was the beginning of the artist’s seminal work Materials Lab.
Materials Lab sits between sculpture, installation, documentation and research. Material Lab is a landscape’ of materials such as silk threads, books, book segments, exhibition catalogues, models, text fragments, magazine pages, inkjet prints, notes, drawings, marble, steel, bricks, dirt, dust and fragments of artworks drawn from the artist’s personal archive. Documenting the work in detail, this book demonstrates how Materials Lab is a navigation tool for probing the social and political history of modernism, the practices of the artist’s own work and how looking at the ‘cracks’ between ‘accepted’ knowledge is essential for a progressive future.
Introduction by Jonathan Casciani
Essays and interviews by Claudio Zecchi, Alfredo Puente and David Barro
15.2 × 21.6 cm
228 Pages, 196 Images
Paperback, speciality papers throughout, exposed bindingEnglish
Published by Beam Editions
ISBN 978-1-9162759-6-6
1st Edition Paperback, 2022
This book focuses on the sculptor Katharina Fitz’s major installation ‘When Seams Become Audible’.
Fitz’s work is brilliantly unpacked by Sarah Tutt’s insightful writing where she demonstrates how the artist’s work and process are inseparable and exposes its conceptual and poetic resonants.
Jennifer Higgie’s contribution connects the artist’s early photographic practice with her current engagement with sculpture, while relating it’s position within art history.
Emma Cocker’s insightful interview explores the artist’s working methods and how Fitz investigates the limits of materials, how photography has informed her practice and where the boundaries between the process and the finished artwork lie.
These essays reveal the intent and meaning embedded in the work of Katharina Fitz and, alongside a series of images of details, installations and artworks in transition, provide a lens by which to observe the material world. Fitz’s work acts as a reminder of the need for humans to remain connected to process and materiality in a world facing profound change, a world where the gap in our understanding between product and production becomes ever wider.
175 x 225 mm
112 pages
Hardcover, individualised screen printed and plaster dragged cover by the artist, PUR bound, speciality papers throughout.English
Published by Beam Editions
ISBN 978-1-7399865-5-1
1st Edition 2022
Delivery within 3–5 days.
In 1978 Grey Crawford created a body of colour photographic work that was so radical in its aesthetic and technique that few people to this day understand how it was made.
Chroma documents late 70s Los Angeles in a period of radical urban transformation. Scenes of vernacular architecture, demolition sites and everyday places are contrasted with graphic forms that float on the surface and sit within the image.
A student at Claremont and LA native, Crawford’s work shows the influence of radical Californian painters such as Karl Benjamin and John McLaughlin in the medium of photography.
While Light and Space, Minimalism, and Geometric Abstraction, existed firmly within painting and sculpture, Crawford showed the possibilities of photography as an art form and blurred the boundaries between photography, sculpture and installation.
Crawford’s work holds an important place in art history and its visionary aesthetic remains relevant and more familiar than ever in the 21st century.
Featuring essays by Timothy Persons, Lyle Rexer, Hannah Glauner, and Ashley Gallant, and a detailed, technical description of the process used to create the images in the darkroom by the artist himself.
24 x 30 cm
152 pages
Hardcover, printed cover, section sewn, speciality papers throughout.English
Published by Beam Editions
ISBN 978-1-7399865-3-7
1st Edition 2022
Delivery within 3-5 days.
Hy-phen, Paintings – Drawings – Objects, is the definitive study of the work of Derek Sprawson (born 1955). This book provides an overview of the diverse phases his paintings have traversed over forty years of practice.
Inspired by travels in Italy and the flatlands of Norfolk, Sprawson’s large canvases from the 80s and early 90s bring landscape into abstraction. His paintings question the appropriateness of terms such as representation and abstraction with an approach that blurred the boundaries between painting and drawing. Forms depicted in his work since the mid-90s appear reminiscent of amorphous shelters and, at times, take on the cartoon-like characteristics that can be found in the work of Phillip Guston, one of the artist’s key influences.
More recently, the artist has produced a series of highly inventive ‘painted objects’. Through the construction of fluid, plywood forms, Sprawson takes painting into three dimensions to create work that explores the margins between painting and sculpture.
Featuring two essays by Richard Davey and Emma Cocker that illuminate and analyse Sprawson’s themes and approaches, and extended captions revealing processes and inspirations written by the artist himself, this book celebrates the work of a truly innovative painter.
24.5 x 28cm
200 Pages
Hardcover, printed cover, section sewn, speciality papers throughout.English
Published by Beam Editions
ISBN 978-1-7399865-1-3
1st Edition 2022
A complete, two-volume slipcased special edition documenting the radical, experimental photography of Grey Crawford’s Chroma series.
From 1978 to 1985, Los Angeles-based photographic artist Grey Crawford created a series of hand-printed color photographs using intricate masks and filters, pioneering a pre-digital aesthetic that was decades ahead of its time.
Chroma perfectly captures Los Angeles at a pivotal moment of transformation, as it shifted from the agricultural expanses of the 1960s to become the globalized urban centre it is today.
The creation of Chroma ran in parallel with the emergence and development of key artistic movements of 1970s California. Grey Crawford’s work unites the minimal aesthetic of the Light and Space movement, the emptiness of Lewis Baltz and Ed Ruscha’s American landscapes, and the hard-edge abstract painting of Karl Benjamin and John McLaughlin, through an experimental approach to photography that remains uniquely his own.
Crawford’s work holds an important place in art history, and its visionary aesthetic remains relevant and more familiar than ever in the 21st century.
The books feature essays by Jonathan Casciani, Ashley Gallant, Hannah Glauner, Timothy Persons, Mark Rawlinson, Lyle Rexer, and detailed, technical descriptions of the process used to create the images in the darkroom by the artist himself.
Available for Pre-order, website only