Photo London Live: You don’t have to be mad to be a publisher, but it helps

For the inaugural event of our 2021 Talks programme, join London-based publishers Aron Morel, Founder of Mörel books, Martin Usborne, Co-founder Hoxton Mini Press, and Hannah Watson, Director of Trolley Books, for a panel discussion moderated by Sarah Allen, Assistant Curator, International Art at Tate Modern.

 

You don’t have to be mad to be a publisher, but it helps

Thursday 1 April 2021

6.30 pm BST | 7.30 pm CET | 1.30 pm ET

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About the speakers

Aron Morel founded Mörel books in 2008. Mörel books focus on limited edition artist books with emerging and established artists. They see the book as the final stage of an artist’s project and therefore see a need to work closely with the artist encouraging them to develop their own edit, sequence and aesthetic. Always keen to work outside of the box, Mörel often invites collaborators, including artists (George Condo, Rene Ricard), typographers (Pablo Ferro, John Stevens), writers and curators (Irvine Welsh, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Simon Baker, Nina Power) to work within a set project. When necessary, they also work with unconventional materials, such as flexible concrete, wall coverings, and rare or antique papers. Mörel’s titles include books by Alix Marie, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Patti Smith, Boris Mikhailov, Steffi Klenz, Stephen Shore, Corinne Day, Thomas Ruff, Antony Cairns, Hannah Whitaker, Lucas Blalock, and David Armstrong, to mention but a few.

Martin Usborne is a photographer and the co-founder of Hoxton Mini Press, which he started along with his wife, Ann Waldvogel, in 2015. Hoxton Mini Press is dedicated to making good photography more accessible. It was started to the rallying cry of ‘print is dead’, so it is committed to the book as a physical object and believes art should be affordable and accessible. Their books are neither too big, too heavy, nor too expensive. Originally the publishing house only covered topics about and around East London but now has branched out further afield, both geographically and in spirit, making books about plants as well as badly repaired cars. They continue to be small, not because they want to avoid growth, but because they fail to hit their targets, don’t understand the figures anyway and love expensive paper.

Hannah Watson is the Director of publisher Trolley Books and contemporary art gallery TJ Boulting. Hannah joined Trolley in 2005, which was founded in 2001 by the late Gigi Giannuzzi. Trolley Books publish a diverse range of titles presenting unique stories in photography, photojournalism and contemporary art. Trolley has championed the work of many photographers, often publishing their first book, including those of Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Paolo Pellegrin, Alex Majoli, and Siân Davey. In 2005 Trolley received a special commendation from the Kraszna-Krausz Book Awards for its outstanding contribution to photography book publishing. In 2015 Trolley were chosen to be the inaugural co-publishers with The Photographers’ Gallery for their Bar Tur Book Award, for a graduate or recent graduate’s first book. Recent awards for the books include the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards for Siân Davey’s Looking For Alice (2016) and Maisie Cousins’s Rubbish, Dipping Sauce, Grass Peonie Bum (2019).

Sarah Allen is Assistant Curator, International Art at Tate Modern, where she curates exhibitions and displays and researches acquisitions for the collection. She has recently co-curated the major touring survey Zanele Muholi (2020) as well as curating exhibitions and displays from the permanent collection, including Nan Goldin (2019), Irving Penn (2019) and David Goldblatt (2019). Further exhibitions she has worked on include The Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art (2018); Sophie Taeuber-Arp (forthcoming, 2021) and The Turbine Hall Commission (forthcoming, 2022). She is the Curator of the Martin Parr Photobook collection at Tate.