Humboldt Books

Run by Giovanna Silva, Humboldt is an Italian publishing house based in Milan. Humboldt draws inspiration from scientific explorations of the 18th and 19th centuries with the aim of examining travel narrative today. Humboldt collects multidisciplinary experiences, combines knowledge and practices for recounting travels and countries with a watchful and unconventional eye. Humboldt investigates the intersection of journey with geography, literature and art. The publishing house has three editorial lines: Travel Books, Artists' Books, Atlas. A series of special projects and an online section complete the catalogue.
Series:
 
Jacopo Valentini - Concerning Dante - Autonomous Cell
2022
bilingual edition (English / Italian)
A Dantean geography.
Editorial - An Exhibition in Words
2022
English edition
Ten contemporary Italian writers dialogue with the works displayed in the exhibition inaugurating Luca Lo Pinto's program at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome.
Marco Sammicheli - Danish Diaries
2022
bilingual edition (English / Italian)
A singular history of cultural encounters between Italy and Denmark.
Carlo Gabriele Tribbioli - A Season in Slemani
2021
English edition
A series of artistic residencies in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Ludovico Quaroni - Roma 1968
2021
bilingual edition (English / Italian)
The architect's photographic view of his native Rome.
Gustave Flaubert - Lettere dall\'Egitto
2021
Italian edition
The Italian edition of Flaubert's account of his trip to Egypt, illustrated by Nathalie du Pasquier.
Mahalla - The Survey (box set)
2021
English edition
Mahalla – The Survey offers a scientific investigation and an artistic statement which aims at a critical reading and a tentative exploration of a fascinating Uzbek cultural heritage: the mahalla (luxury box set including numerous documents, a 7" vinyl record by Carlos Casas and exclusive art prints by Bas Princen).
Gabriele Basilico - Non recensiti
2021
bilingual edition (English / Italian)
Gabriele Basilico's previoulsy unpublished photographs in the strip-tease theaters and nightclubs of Milan in the 1970s reveal a new dimension of his oeuvre.
Paolo Monti - Procida 1972
2021
bilingual edition (English / Italian)
The architectural images of the famous photographer on the island of Procida off Naples in 1972, presented for the first time.
Giorgio Andreotta Calò - Gloria
2021
bilingual edition (English / Italian)
The text and photo diary of a forty-day journey on foot from Venice to L'Aquila, following the subterranean fracture where the European and African tectonic plates meet, in search of the symbolic dimension and the real effects of seismic waves.
Josef Albers - Messico 1935/1956
2021
bilingual edition (English / Italian)
Unpublished photographs taken by Josef Albers during his travels to Mexico with Anni in the 1930s and 50s.
Louis De Belle - Cartographies
2021
English edition
A photographic series that portrays details of the clothes of passers-by glimpsed along the streets of Manhattan (artist's book).
Giovanna Silva - Togliatti - The FIAT Factory
2021
Italian edition
A look back at social and intimate history of the automotive industry in the 1960s and 1970s, between the USSR and Italy.
Carlos Casas - Cemetery - Journeys to the Elephant Graveyard and Beyond
2021
English edition
Cemetery. Journeys to the Elephant Graveyard and Beyond compiles a selection of the visual and research materials accumulated during the development of the film and project Cemetery (2009–2019).
Nino Migliori - Gente del Delta 1958
2021
bilingual edition (English / Italian)
The early work of the doyen of Italian photography paint a striking portrait of Italy in the 1950s.
Nanna Debois Buhl - Cloud Behavior
2020
English edition
A study of clouds through photographs, drawings, essays, and interviews.
Enzo Mari - Falce e martello / The Hammer and Sickle
2020
bilingual edition (English / Italian)
The expanded anastatic reprint of the Italian designer's sulphurous catalog of 1973.
Nathalie du Pasquier - Campo di Marte
2020
English edition
Artist's book.
Michele Lombardelli - California
2020
English edition
A collection of photographs and drawings retracing the founding Californian experience of the artist.
Federico Patellani - Stromboli 1949
2020
bilingual edition (English / Italian)
In the spring of 1949, while they were shooting “Stromboli” on the island of the same name, Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini began a love affair which was to cause a scandal. The great photographer Federico Patellani documented the development of the film as well as life on the island.
Daniela Comani - Planet Earth - 21st Century
2020
trilingual edition (English / German / Italian)
A collection of 360 postcards of cities from all around the world, made with screenshots from 3D software Apple Maps and Google Earth.
Jonas Mekas - Transcript 04 44\' 14\
2020
bilingual edition (English / Lithuanian)
Full transcript of Mekas's Lithuania and the Collapse of the USSR: a five-hour-long film made up of footage from US television newscasts covering the independence of Lithuania and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Fog Friend Font - Ways of Doing Multilingual Sense (box set)
2020
English edition (texts in Inuktitut and other languages)
Box set comprising five books, a vinyl and a supplementary dust jacket, each highlighting different practices and transformative developments occurring in the realm of writing and speaking today as triggered by digital communication.
Carlo Levi a San Costantino Albanese - Archivi della Basilicata – Vol. 2
2020
bilingual edition (English / Italian)
Three multidisciplinary essays—from cultural anthropology to photography analysis—based on visual archives documenting the visit of writer, painter and politician Carlo Levi to an Albanian community in Southern Italy (second volume in the series “Archivi della Basilicata”).
Antonio Rovaldi - The Sound of the Woodpecker Bill - New York City
2019
English edition
This publication documents a visual research on the perimeters of all five boroughs of New York, featuring a photographic portfolio, a set of maps and a series of texts.
Luca Vitone - Romanistan
2019
bilingual edition (English / Italian)
Both a journal and a photographic report, this publication documents Luca Vitone's travel from Italy to India, in the footsteps of the first Roma migrations between the eighth and fourteenth centuries.
La Bonifica di Bradano e Metaponto - Archivi della Basilicata – Vol. 1
2019
bilingual edition (English / Italian)
The first in a series of publications dedicated to the exploration of the archives of the Italian region of Basilicata from an artistic perspective. This volume focuses on areas affected by the reclamation of the water system.
Lele Saveri - Hong Kong Barricades
2019
English edition
Images of the Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong by Italian photographer Lele Saveri.
Aesthetics and Politics of Logistics
2019
English edition
Aesthetics and politics of architecture of logistics.
Neither Nor / Né altra né questa - The challenge to the Labyrinth / La sfida al Labirinto
2019
bilingual edition (English / Italian)
The catalogue of the Italian Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale investigates and develops the theme chosen by the curator Milovan Farronato for the exhibition: the labyrinth.
Antonio Grulli - Tel Aviv - Jerusalem Diary
2019
English edition
A travel diary / a screenplay.
Mario Schifano - America 1970
2019
bilingual edition (English / Italian)
Mario Schifano's road trip in the United States.
Linda Fregni Nagler - Yama no Shashin
2018
bilingual edition (English / Italian)
This publication presents a project by Linda Fregni Nagler about the photographic “School of Yokohama”, which emerged during the Meiji era in Japan. Over the past ten years, the artist has collected hand-colored photographs of this period representing Mount Fuji. She re-photographed them, printed them and colored them by hand, according to colorization method of that time.
Gabriele Basilico - Free Zone 2006
2018
bilingual edition (English / Italian)
In 2006, film director Amos Gitai invited Gabriele Basilico to undertake a journey retracing the locations of the shooting of Gitai's film Free Zone, on the demilitarized zone between Israel and Jordan. This publication follows this unique photographic project.
Vincenzo Castella - Mississippi / Tennessee 1976
2018
bilingual edition (English / Italian)
A photographic journey in search of the very last bluesmen. The birth of a vocation for the Italian photographer.
Carlo Gabriele Tribbioli - Towards the Altar of a God Unknown - Liberian Notes
2018
English edition
Federico Lodoli and Carlo Gabriele Tribbioli went twice in Liberia to carry out a study on the war. This publication gathers their travel memoirs, interviews with Liberian warlords and a photographic reportage.
Paolo Gioli - Etruschi Polaroid 1984
2018
bilingual edition (English / Italian)
This publication features an unpublished series of artworks by artist Paolo Gioli based on polaroid images of etruscan funerary sculptures set in the Italian city of Volterra. The volume is supplemented by a text on Volterra by novelist D. H. Lawrence, and an essay by historian of photography Roberta Valtorta.
Hämatli & Patriæ
2018
trilingual edition (English / German / Italian)
Catalogue documenting an eponymous exhibition project which interprets contemporary issues such as migration, nationalism, populism and identity, using the symbolism in the Flemish painting of 1570 by Simon de Myle entitled Noah's Ark on Mount Ararat.
Hercule Florence - Le Nouveau Robinson
2018
English edition
Through a series of scientific contributions and archives, this publication recounts the extraordinary character that was Hercule Florence—an explorer, an inventor and an artist, considered one of the inventors of photography.
Hilario Isola - Oh… My God! - Bamboo Scaffolding on Myanmar Pagoda
2017
English edition
This artist's book collects a photo series taken in spring 2017 in Myanmar, one of the Buddhism's sacred places, where one hundred or so temples have been destroyed by a recent earthquake. Now the pagodas affected by the earthquake, covered by thin bamboo structures, have taken original and unexpected forms, hanging between architecture and art, life and destruction. This temporary condition allowed Isola to catalogue, study and also to develop a sort of appropriation.
 Rita Canarezza & Pier Paolo Coro - San Marino - 30th September 1950
2017
bilingual edition (English / Italian)
This publication documents a previously unreleased video project by Canarezza & Coro inspired by poet Eugenio Montale's unusual walk across the Italy-San Marino border to receive a Literature Prize in a context of tensions between the two States. The volume also includes fragments of forty-seven poems by Eugenio Montale, modified by the two artists.
Gabriele Basilico - Glasgow 1969
2017
bilingual edition (English / Italian)
Then architecture student Gabriele Basilico photographs the suburbs of Glasgow on a late summer afternoon of 1969, with its Scottish kids, terrains vagues, and 19th-century industrial archaeology. A photographic baptism for Basilico, who will become one of the main contemporary figures of the medium. The publication of this early series is completed with texts by Umberto Fiori, Pippo Ciorra, and Giovanna Calvenzi.
Federico Patellani - Matera 1953
2017
bilingual edition (English / Italian)
The troglodyte town of Matera in Southern Italy has fascinated generations of filmmakers since the Post-war area. Documenting the making of the 1953 film She-Wolf by Alberto Lattuada set in Matera, photographer Federico Patellani provides a unique insight of the life of the provincial city in the fifties.
Nanna Debois Buhl - Intervals and forms of stones of stars
2017
English edition
A biological investigation of a Nordic man-made beach landscape through a series of cameraless photographic registrations of the site's flora, fauna, and particles.
Michele Lombardelli - Los Angeles 1989 Tokyo 1991
2017
English edition
Los Angeles 1989 Tokyo 1991 brings together a collection of images from two of the most complex and undefinable metropolises on the face of the Earth, the social and urban form of which is ceaselessly reshaped by the minimal existence of millions of people in movement. Lombardelli's photographs are also cinematographic homages to the works of Wim Wenders and Yasujirō Ozu.
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