Handmade book with individual plates sewn in by Olivia

Lee is a child who wants to know everything. She ceaselessly questions the world around her—the sea, the flowers, and the silence of adults who are too busy.

It is through a panther that she finds the answer to the question—the one usually left unspoken, which can only be approached through the detour of a story: the tale of her missing mother, carried away by the Creatures of the Sea.

Through the myth of Lee and the Creatures of the Sea, the book delicately explores major themes of memory, grief, and metamorphosis.

Olivia Arthur’s photo-collages play an integral role in this quest for meaning. Blending fragments, textures, and paint, these layered compositions serve as visual echoes of a memory attempting to piece itself back together.

Artist book, handmade at Fishbar. Edition of 30 copies, signed and numbered.

Made possible with the ‘fonds de soutien au livre photo jeunesse’ of the institute de la photography, France. Originally published in France by Bel et Bien.

Lee is a child who wants to know everything. She ceaselessly questions the world around her—the sea, the flowers, and the silence of adults who are too busy.

It is through a panther that she finds the answer to the question—the one usually left unspoken, which can only be approached through the detour of a story: the tale of her missing mother, carried away by the Creatures of the Sea.

Through the myth of Lee and the Creatures of the Sea, the book delicately explores major themes of memory, grief, and metamorphosis.

Olivia Arthur’s photo-collages play an integral role in this quest for meaning. Blending fragments, textures, and paint, these layered compositions serve as visual echoes of a memory attempting to piece itself back together.

in French and English

A new body of work by Olivia Arhur. Made as part of an artist residency at 7L Library in Paris. Using a 100 year old 10x12 plate camera and paper negatives, carefully hand coloured, Olivia creates vignettes of children's stories drawing on Lagerfelds extensive book collection.

‘Noises’ by Galician photographer, Lúa Ribeira, is a series produced between 2015 and 2019 inspired by Jamaican dancehall culture in the UK. Made in collaboration with a group of British Jamaican women in Birmingham, London and Bristol, Ribeira became progressively interested in the movement as a form of cultural resistance within the context of British colonial history, as well as its vast influence upon western popular culture.

Embracing a performative approach, the images in the series lack typological norms throughout and aim to unsettle the viewer with a chaos of unexpected imagery. Often photographed in the homes of the protagonists, the domesticity clashes with the unrestrained vitality of the gestures and outfits - amplifying the transcendent aspects of this dynamic encounter that touches upon universal themes such as birth, love, sex, and death.

The work's title is in reference to Dr Carolyn Cooper’s book ‘Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender, and the"Vulgar" Body of Jamaican Popular Culture’. Through studying Cooper’s work, ideas around womanhood and its conception within the West became a point of reflection for the series. The images playfully dissect ideas around femininity and sexuality, which also served as a mirror for the photographer’s own cultural background - encountering in dancehall a more assertive role in relation to one's own body and sexuality in opposition to the eurocentric canon of beauty that has prized fragility and prudence.

Ribeira is widely interested in the political and emancipatory functions of cultural expressions and tradition, stemming from her own heritage as Galician. Recipient of the Jerwood/Photoworks Award and the Firecracker Grant, ‘Noises’ was exhibited at Fishbar alongside a limited edition Leporello book of the work published by Fishbar Books

Lúa Ribeira Cendán (born 1986) is a Spanish documentary photographer based in Bristol. She graduated in Graphic Design at BAU School of Design, Barcelona in 2011, and earned a BA in Documentary Photography from the University of South Wales in 2016. Ribeira’s work has received several awards and honors, including the Firecracker Grant for Women in Photography, and the Jerwood/Photoworks award. Her work has been featured in the publication Firecrackers: Female Photographer Now published by Thames and Hudson in 2017, and Raw View Magazine, “Women looking at Women”. Her work has been exhibited internationally in both solo and group shows in venues including Impressions Gallery, Bradford, Ffotogallery Cardiff, Belfast Exposed gallery, Beijing International Photography Biennale, amongst others.

She joined Magnum photos in 2018.

London’s ends aren’t on the edge, where the map shows the city ends or where the M25 ring road runs. London’s ends lie like a doughnut around the city centre. Too far from the inner city to feature in the story of London, not far enough out to be leafy suburb and commuter land. Via an epic 250 kilometer walk, the book explores a swathe of largely overlooked in-between land, ever present as soon as you travel out from the centre.   

‘Coming to London from a small village in Germany, I was both overwhelmed and bewitched.’ he writes ‘I felt compelled to know every last corner of the place, to understand it as fully as I could.  For years I crisscrossed the city on my bike, finding new routes to places, exploring new neighbourhoods, getting lost and soaking up every detail. One afternoon I returned to my home in Whitechapel during a freak snowstorm. I rushed into the house to get my camera and started to photograph the local market on my doorstep. These pictures of Whitechapel in the snow started a process of documenting the city.’

Eventually the places he had visited and photographed began to look on the map like a doughnut and Ebeling set out to join the dots with one long walk around the city, avoiding the centre. Leaving his home in Hackney and heading east, he circled London, arriving back ten days and 250km later.

Taking in the Chiselhurst Caves, plane-spotters at Heathrow Airport, Brimsdown and Tottenham, Ebeling photographed places that are normally overlooked in the story of the capital. Shifting from the industrial to the idyllic, day to night, from crowds to solitude, intimate interior to boundless landscape, these photographs depict both the rhythm and contrasts of life on the peripheries of the city. Linking them together, Ebeling presents the vast and varied expanses of the landscape of Outer London.

The photographs in this book were made both on the walk and on other explorations in the city. 

They are accompanied by a diary of observations made on the walk itself. 

96 pages, 28.5x25 cms, Hardbound, 54 colour images.

every book comes with a wrap around double sided poster 96 x 68 cms.

edition of 1000

press for London Ends

the guardian - UK

BBC - UK

Creative Review - UK

i-D - UK

British Journal of Photography - UK

creative boom - UK

PDN - USA

Internationale - Italy

On 8th April 1961 the MV Dara, a ship carrying passengers between India, Pakistan and the Gulf, sank just off the port of Dubai. An estimated 238 people lost their lives. 

Some bodies were never found and relatives of the missing continue to this day to search for their loved ones.

Stranger, a new project by photographer Olivia Arthur, imagines a survivor returning to Dubai fifty years later, and what they would see. Through photographs and small anecdotes, the viewer is taken on a journey through a city that is both awe-inspiring and alienating. A city which has grown at breath-taking pace from a population of 90,0000 in the 1960s to over 2 million in the current day, and continues to draw people from all over the world with its promise of riches. 

The backbone of the project is the story of the shipwreck, transporting the viewer back and forth in history and acting as a reminder of the fragility and skin-deep nature of Dubai.

Reflecting this fragility and suggesting the feelings of loneliness and disorientation often experienced by residents of Dubai, the book is printed on transparent paper. The result is that the layered images fade in and out of view, interspersed with quotes, memories, and images of the shipwreck itself.

Available at Fishbar from 21st May 2015

‘Sometimes in order to see the things closest to you, you are forced to wear blinkers from everything else. My world shrank and became larger at the same time.’

We are offering this Special Lockdown Edition at a lockdown price of just £16

20x28 cms, softback, 100 pages.

All books are signed and numbered.

There is also a selection of prints from the book at 10x12 inch, editioned, signed for £100. Please visit the shop for more details.

All print sales from Closer will support the Artist Support Pledge #artistsupportpledge

10x 12 inch, Fuji Crystal Archive C-Type prints.

signed and numbered

edition of 25

all sales will support the #artistsupportpledge

price excludes shipping.

Please be aware that larger orders can result in irregular shipping cost due to the relative low weight/ high value nature of prints. If you experience unusually high shipping cost at checkout please get in touch and we’ll sort it out.

Thanks! Fishbar

London Ends, -special edition.

The edition comes with one of three limited edition prints in a beautiful laser cut box. The print is edition of 10, signed and numbered, size 10x8 inch. Please choose between Horse Box, Fish Tank and Mask when placing your order.

The little book combines photographs and extracts from Inge Morath's diaries (some unpublished until now). It was edited by Olivia Arthur and Lurdes R. Basolí. Thanks to the support of Inge Morath and Magnum Foundations and Fotohof Gallery Salzburg.

Pictures by Inge Morath,

Edited by Olivia Arthur and Lurdes R. Basolí