Out of Place Books

CENTRAL

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OCT 17&18 2025 BIRMINGHAM

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CENTRAL - OCT 17&18 2025 BIRMINGHAM -

We make beautifully designed and affordable photobooks about places

Out of Place is a platform developed to promote photography as a way of exploring and learning about places. We focus on publishing photobooks and we are committed to developing community and educational programs.

We are interested in exploring ideas about place; how we understand and experience our environments and how we define them. Photography lends itself to such a task because in one way or another you have to experience the thing you want to photograph, you have to be there. This is a key concept behind documentary style photography and is one of the reasons why we sometimes believe in photographs.

This, coupled with the cameras knack for seemingly objective reproduction of even the most incidental details, can give photographs a certain amount of authenticity. We want to use photography as a way of learning about our environments and we see these elements of the photographic process as essential to achieving that. The camera offers an opportunity to explore and develop a physical dialogue with a place and the photographs can serve as record of that experience. We are not just interested in objective studies of places, we are interested in providing a platform for individual explorations and interpretations of place.

We believe that the best way to communicate these ideas about place is through the photobook. The physical qualities of the book help refine and communicate ideas but the book is also something permanent. Unlike exhibitions in galleries and museums it can be kept, shared, exist in many places at once and be rediscovered in years to come.

INFO

A SEA APART (2nd Edition)

Hanley Carparks by Daniel Lyttleton

by Daniel Lyttleton
190mm x 270mm
64 pages / Perfect Bound
130gsm Silk
175gsm Factory Yellow Colorplan Cover
£15.00
PRE-ORDER

“There is a significant amount of anecdotal evidence, opinion and speculation over the relationship between car parking provision and town centre prosperity” - The British Parking Association
Ticket machines sprout from every orifice of the town like weeds in a neglected garden once fit for purpose. Relentless appropriation of public land that is privatised and profited from for people who live elsewhere. The occasional splash of yellow amongst the greyness of everything else. I marvel at the calamity of it all. The complete commodification of time and space. £2.50 for 12 hours of what?

GONE FISHING SEE U NEXT WEEK by Chris Neophytou

120mm × 297mm / 40pp stapled Booklet
Munken Pure smooth 100gsm / Grey 200gsm cover with Red ink
zerox printed
Out of Place Books 2025
£15
I don't know whether there are an infinite number of reasons why people leave home or whether they are all just many different versions of the same thing. Whatever the impulse or circumstance might be that propels us to travel in one way or another it is inevitably linked to our notion of home, and what home should be. There always seems, at least to me, to be this undulating degree of tension between the place we have set out from and the place we arrive at; always this balance between expectation and doubt, the unknown and the familiar, the memory and the moment.
The people and places captured in these images form a record of a particularly itinerant period in my life. Made in a number of different towns, cities and countries, the images that now congregate here suggest a narrative where disparate experiences and observations are unified by a persisting sentiment.Often arriving at night, we were met with cities in a state of emergency, barren buildings and streets almost completely devoid of any light. Our time was filled with locating supplies from neighbouring areas due to the emptied markets as displaced residents waited for the state’s intervention. The despair and anger could be felt by survivors, volunteers and local political parties as we moved between cities.'

A Million Decaying Tree Stumps by Grant Archer

170 x 290mm / 40pp
Staple binding / 120gm Uncoated
Out of Place Books 2025
£18.00
We joined the tradition in the 50th Edition of the Venice Biennale, myself and my dad returning every two years to see the pavilions of the Giardini and the munitions factory of the Arsenale transformed into living galleries of contemporary art from across the world. With national councils and unrecognised states spilling their participation out into those original alleyways and piazzas it has become a treasure hunt, recorded over 20 years in these images.

MORE BOOKS

Prints & Posters

Education

We believe the best way to learn about a place is to explore it. In a technology driven world that is becoming increasingly virtual we think that direct experience with the environment around you is important. Photography has long been a way of documenting the world and learning about it and we see the camera as a tool to help explore your environment, to help you look at it more closely. One thing that makes photography unique is that you have to confront reality when making the picture, you have to be there.

At out of place we aim to facilitate individuals and groups to explore, interact, and learn about their environment with photography. It is an opportunity for people to share their own observations about their own environment and raise awareness for issues important to them. Along the way participants develop practical skills in creative photography and new ways of seeing.

We believe the photobook has many strengths. Unlike exhibitions, they are physical objects that can be held and can be rediscovered in years to come. Books can act like a dialogue from one place to another, a way of passing on ideas far and wide, but also they are a democratic form of art where there is not just one original and many people can have a copy.

As part of our commitment to education, we provide talks and lectures on photography and photobooks. The photobook is an incredibly important and active part of creative photography. In our talks we look at the photobook from a historical point of view, offering a slightly different approach to traditional histories of photography, but also we look at their cultural impact and how they fit into present-day uses of photography including social media and digital platforms for photography.