Every summer thousands of people from all over the world gather in a Kentish field and leave the present firmly behind. They step out of their routine daily lives and transform into historical characters from the First and Second World Wars, often embracing their roles with such vigor and obsessive attention to detail that it is hard to imagine them outside of this fictitious combat zone. Taking on a different name, identity and sometimes even a different tongue, these roleplayers re-enact battles and drills from an imagined past to a degree that becomes something more than acting, a collective fantasy played out on a massive scale. London photographer Jim Naughten's portraits of these re-enactors are shot formally, in three-quarter profile, usually from the legs up, against white back drops--an effect that heightens the sense of artifice and anachronism. Beautifully bound and printed, this volume records a world apart from both past and present.

Jim Naughten: Re-enactors

Arts & Photography

Rappolt, Mark

Kouwenhoven, Bill

Photography & Video

HotShoe Books

Charles Fr ger finds his favorite portrait subjects clustered in social crowds, work teams, or collective structures or communities, and in fact those structures are as much his subjects as the people in them. Where better to look for the forces that draw people together and set them against one another than among children being coached to wrestle? United in purpose and set against one another on the mat, Fr ger's subjects seem to struggle against one another in soundless tension, the squeak of the mat silenced, the smack of a body in the air anticipated--one subject in the process of being hauled over his opponent's back has zero points of contact with the ground.

Charles Fréger: 2Nelson

Individual Artists

Artimo/POC Editions

Chongqing. City of Ambition

Edkins, Diana

Benteli Verlag

Danish photographer Henrik Saxgren (born 1953) finds everyday art in the least likely places, as the title of his series Unintended Sculptures indicates. Rummaging outdoors, Saxgren discovers sculptural forms and optical illusions one would swear had been deliberately installed, at the very moment that they reveal themselves in the framework of their environments.

Henrik Saxgren: Unintended Sculptures

Persons, Timothy

Hatje Cantz

The photo series Little Adults explores what it feels like to grow up as a privileged child in Russia, a country where its radical history still rules the daily life. It explores the recently growing society of the "Nouveau Riche" in which children are raised to become the "Elite." Photographing children of Russia's oligarchs reflects the extreme contrast between social hierarchies and touches on the control of family aspirations, ideas of normality, the loss of childhood, and the constant desire for fame.
Anna Skladmann works between New York and Moscow and has exhibited in Europe and the United States. She has been published in The New York Times and BusinessWeek, among others.

Little Adults

Kehrer Verlag

Michael Itkoff has traveled the world since 2002 taking portraits of everyday people in the street. In the photographs gathered here, a makeshift backdrop is held behind subjects in London, Sydney, Hanoi, Bangkok and New York, allowing the larger urban scene to fill out the frame. Born in 1981 in Philadelphia, Itkoff is a Founding Editor of Daylight magazine.

Michael Itkoff: Street Portraits

Schuman, Aaron

Charta

The Chinese city of Chongquing is little known in the West. Yet with its 32 million inhabitants, the city is twice as big as the Netherlands Located on the Yangtze river in southwestern China, it is one of China's most rapidly growing cities. Ferit Kuyas stayed in Chongqing on dozens of occasions for long periods and became totally fascinated by the megalomaniacal construction fervor he witnessed there, as well as its beauty. The almost ubiquitous haze -- naturally present in this region but intensified by large-scale pollution -- gave his work almost automatically an added layer of mystery. Kuyas focussed predominantly on the periphery of the city, where the enormity of it cannot be directly seen, but rather felt. The result is a stifling and exceptional book that displays all the superlatives that describe China: huge unstoppable, terrifying, incomprehensible, fascinating, beautiful....

Chongqing: City of Ambition

Schilt Pub

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Books by Kouwenhoven, Bill