Limited Edition Handmade Artist's Books
Irene Reti grew up in Los Angeles and drank water extracted from the Owens Valley/ Payahüünadü through the Owens Valley Aqueduct. Bodies of Water is a personal, poetic, and imagistic meditation on what it means to be entangled in an extractive economy impacting the beloved natural and cultural landscape of the Eastern Sierra Nevada.
This book weaves together a four-part poem and a series of original images. While the focus is on water politics and Indigenous history in the Eastern Sierra, the topic resonates far beyond this region
Handmade accordion book. 8.25 x 8.25 inches. Double-sided, forty-two pages, original prints on matte archival paper. Bound in Indian marbled paper reminiscent of swirling currents of water.
Custom made to order
Contact the author at irenereti@protonmail.com
$200
This book of landscape and historic archival photographs wrestles with the painful history of Yosemite and also is a tribute to its beauty. It especially focuses on Yosemite Falls.
Twenty-page single-sided unfolding accordion book hand-printed on archival Red River Aurora White paper. Hardbound in Thai Marbled Mulberry Kozo paper.
Custom made to order
Contact the author at irenereti@protonmail.com
$200
This chapbook is a tender poetic and photographic journey into memory and landscape, history and climate catastrophe.
Irene Reti's mother was a Holocaust refugee who found solace and joy in the landscapes of the Western United States, most especially a beloved lake in Lassen National Park. Later, Irene's stepfather, Jerry, became her mother's steadfast companion on trips to Lassen both in summer and winter. They both chose to have their ashes scattered on the shores of Juniper Lake. But neither of them ever imagined that the shore of Juniper Lake would burn in a massive wildfire in 2021 and their ashes would mingle with the ashes of fir and pine.
Handmade and archival. Twenty pages, pamphlet-stitched in linen thread. Cover is Hahnemühle William Turner paper.
Custom made to order
Contact the author at irenereti@protonmail.com
$25.00
While several works of scholarship and digital archives have documented and investigated the Venezuelan oil camps within the context of Venezuela’s troubling history, primary sources written from the perspective of a woman living in the oil camps are rare. Ingrid Reti was an aspiring writer who much later in life found success as a feminist poet, literature teacher, and book reviewer.
Born in Nuremberg, Germany, Ingrid survived the Nazis by immigrating to England as a Kindertransport refugee. She was reunited with her parents and spent her teenage years in Boston. She married Andy Reti, a Hungarian-born engineering student at MIT, who had also escaped the Holocaust and moved with his parents to Venezuela in the 1950s. In 1954 they arrived in Adaro, an oil camp set up for Creole workers. They lived in a Quonset hut in Adaro from 1954 to 1956, right on the edge of the sea. In 1957, they moved back to the US so that Andy could complete his graduate studies at MIT.
They returned to Venezuela from 1958 to 1960 and lived in Judibana in a concrete block house. In Judibana, Ingrid, then thirty years old, kept a journal documenting her experiences in this isolated and remote tropical enclave of mostly American expatriates. Designed in an album format, this handmade artist's book features excerpts from Ingrid's journal and photographs by both Andy Reti and Ingrid Reti.
Japanese stab-bound album, bound in Italian Canapetta bookcloth with marbled end sheets. Hand-printed on semi-gloss archival photo paper. Thirty-six single sheets. 8.5 x 11.
Custom made to order
Contact the author at irenereti@protonmail.com
$175.00
Join Sandhill Cranes in the Central Valley of California, from their fly-out of the wetlands in the early morning, to their fly-in at the end of the day. Watch them dance as their kind has danced for millions of years. See how they care for each other and tenderly protect their colts—the young cranes—even as they fly. Glimpse details of their lives and landscape—in water, clouds, and reeds. Come, be a guest in their intimate environment, in this book of photographic images.
Deluxe handmade 11x17-inch artist’s book. 100 pages. Japanese stab-bound in Canapetta bookcloth. Original photographic images printed on heavy weight semi-gloss acid free paper.
$1000
Custom made to order. Contact the authors at irenereti@protonmail.com
Also available in small and coffee table hardback trade editions,
as well as a PDF from Blurb.com
https://www.blurb.com/b/10771311-the-book-of-cranes
https://www.blurb.com/b/10841300-the-book-of-cranes
"Two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, we focus long lenses on monarch butterflies clustered in eucalyptus and Monterey cypress trees. We struggle with our protective masks. Not far away, cars rumble along the ocean cliffs, but it is quiet in this grove. The monarchs have returned to the Monterey Bay area. Not long ago more than a million butterflies overwintered along the California coast. But habitat degradation, climate change, pesticides, and other calamities have reduced the western monarch population by a shocking 95 percent.
Monarch butterflies gift us with beauty and joy in normal and pandemic times. Like the monarchs, we find refuge in this grove. And like the monarchs, we are vulnerable and strong, two feminist lesbians who have survived fractured histories to migrate and go through a metamorphosis ourselves by the shores of Monterey Bay.
In these fractious times, we hunger for environmental and feminist justice. We offer these images photographed in sacred butterfly groves around the Monterey Bay, not only as a tribute to monarch beauty and as a call for the conservation of this unique species, but also in the spirit of transformation, of hope."
—Irene Reti and Elizabeth Van Dyke
8.25 x 8.25-inch unfolding accordion structure with nineteen original prints on glossy archival paper. Bound in luxurious Japanese Asahi bookcloth.
$200
Custom made to order
Contact the authors at: irenereti@protonmail.com