Having previously expressed no interest in color photography, Roger Ballen was inspired to engage with the medium after receiving a Leica SL camera as a gift in 2016. Opening to the potential of color in his work, Ballen used light in creative ways, exploring new avenues of experimentation. Spirits and Spaces eloquently captures the absurd and bizarre world of Roger Ballen, where animals and art brut–like drawings dominate, and humanity is reduced to obscure figures or fragmented body parts.

The color images in Spirits and Spaces, created in conjunction with Ballen’s artistic director, Marguerite Rossouw, were produced in a claustrophobic space, constructed of worn, wallpapered wooden panels and with minimalistic lighting. Here, in this dense, oppressive environment, Ballen creates what might be seen by many as a world that is unexplainable in words: one in which absurdity, chaos, comedy, and tragedy apparently exist side by side.

Both a visual revelation and an artistic evolution by one of contemporary photography’s most unique voices, Spirits and Spaces will be an essential and much-anticipated photobook for all Roger Ballen fans.

Ruth Orkin (1921–1985) always dreamed of becoming a filmmaker, and although that ambition was thwarted until later in her career, she quickly found other ways of engaging with the world of images. She was given her first camera at the age of ten, and by the age of seventeen, she was cycling across the United States from Los Angeles to New York, documenting her trip in albums of annotated photographs. In the early 1940s, she settled in New York, joining the Photo League and making her name with photo stories for major magazines such as Life, Look, and This Week.

In images that range from celebrity portraits to bird’s-eye views from her apartment window, from children at play to the experiences of a lone American tourist in Italy, Orkin’s photography retains a cinematic sense of the passage of time and allows the humanity and charisma of her subjects to shine through.

First published by Aperture in 1988, At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women is a groundbreaking classic by one of photography’s most renowned artists.

At Twelve is Sally Mann’s illuminating, collective portrait of twelve-year-old girls, taken in the artist’s native Rockbridge County, Virginia. The age of twelve brings tremendous excitement and social possibilities; it is a trying time as well, caught between childhood and adulthood, when the difference is not entirely understood. As Ann Beattie writes in her perceptive introduction maintained from the 1988 original publication, “These girls still exist in an innocent world in which a pose is only a pose—what adults make of that pose may be the issue.” The consequences of this misunderstanding can be real: destitution, abuse, unwanted pregnancy. The young women in Mann’s unflinching large-format photographs, however, are not victims. Within this book of portraits, many of which are accompanied by writings of the artist, they return the viewer’s gaze with a disturbing equanimity.

This reissue of At Twelve has been printed using new scans and separations from Mann’s prints, which were taken with an 8-by-10-inch view camera, rendering them with a quality true to the original edition.

The majestic fantasy world of photographer-artist Sanja Marušić

Saul Leiter was one of those photographers who sought neither fame nor commercial success, despite his talent for image-making.

Born in Pittsburgh, he spent his entire adult life in New York City’s East Village, in an intensely creative environment where ideas from Europe and America came together and intermingled. There he encountered Mark Rothko and the abstract expressionists and discovered street photography and the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson. His mastery of color is displayed in unconventional cityscapes in which reflections, transparency, complex framing, and mirroring effects are married to a very personal printing style, creating a unique kind of urban view.

Saul Leiter photographed and painted nearly every day for over sixty years, amassing an enormous archive, most of which remained unseen during his lifetime. Finding inspiration within a few blocks of his apartment in lower Manhattan, he was a master at discovering beauty in the most ordinary places. Celebrated today for his evocative color photographs of New York in the 1950s and 1960s, which were unknown in their day, Leiter also found success as a fashion photographer for Harper’s Bazaar. All the while he was shooting black-and-white street scenes on his daily walks, and nudes and intimate portraits back home, while continuing his painting explorations with abstract watercolors, whimsical sketchbooks, and painted photographs.

Created in collaboration with the Saul Leiter Foundation, this definitive monograph brings together these diverse yet interconnected bodies of work—including much that was previously unpublished—to reveal the complete artist for the first time.