It’s funny how these days, you have to look to the small and independent to find some idea of a personal vision. Whereas most large publishers – and this goes for companies in any cultural arena – seem to be content to churn out book after book, losing along the way any trace of identity or definition, it’s usually the small houses that still follow some sort of personal agenda. The reason is probably simple enough: one must be doted with a serious amount of desire (or was it stupidity?) to devote oneself blindly to a world with notoriously little financial rewards, such as the world of art books.
Anyway, enter Mörel Books: a small and fine independent publishing house based in London, named after it’s founder Aron Morel, with a distinct faible for the raw and the gritty in art photography. Oscillating between light heavyweights such as Ryan McGinley or Boris Mikhailov or, announced, Terry Richardson, and lesser known artists, what unites all publications to date is a sort of red thread running through a fairly varied output: revealing the odd in the normal, the beauty in the ugly, the occult in the everyday, the raw in the pretty.
Well-produced, carefully curated, and fairly priced, it’s a welcome and refreshing addition to a tired market, where in spite of the overwhelming amount of art books produced, for most artists that are not called Tillmans or Araki, it’s next to impossible to get their work published.
Photography: from the series Supreme Vice by Tereza Zelekova, published by Mörel Books
