CONVOKE Books

2019-2025

PUBLICATIONS

PUBLICATION

Cherry Blossom

This limited-edition, collector's version of Cherry Blossom comes in a custom-made, hot-foiled box signed and numbered by the artist. To accompany Ryker’s intimate first monograph, legendary artist and Boston School photographer, Jack Pierson, a pioneer of the style of photography in which Ryker works, leads a cross-generational conversation about queer love and the lens.

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PUBLICATION

Far From All That Allows

This limited-edition, seven-book set brings together 6 photographers — Zak Krevitt, Molly Matalon, Corey Olsen, Pat O’Malley, Tim Schutsky, and Caroline Tompkins — through the books’ editor, Joseph Maida, their mentor and fellow artist, who taught them as undergraduate students at New York’s School of Visual Arts from 2010-2014. Included in the set is a monographic volume by each photographer edited by Maida as well as a compilation book in which Maida constellates their work in a dynamic visual conversation through a thought-provoking edit and sequence.

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PUBLICATION

Utopia Centerfolds At Play

Utopia Centerfolds At Play brings together three artists' projects - Brandon Isralsky's Centerfolds and Fuckboys, Ina Jang's Utopia, and Dean Sameshima's Young Men At Play - to constellate explorations of censorship, ephemera, and sexuality across gender and social spectrums. While each artist's work employs unique visual strategies, they all begin with culturally specific, appropriated images of the body, which they treat to speak to their current perspectives, connecting geographies, nationalities, and ethnicities. The book features a uniquely designed fold-out cover that doubles as a poster as well as a must-read introduction by Mizz Even.

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PUBLICATION

TOKALA (forthcoming January 2026)

Tokala is a photography series focused on the next generation of BIPOC climate activists and their areas of activism. The series’s name is derived from the Lakota tribe’s historical Tokala Society, a group of warriors recognized for their bravery and leadership from a young age.

→ Presales begin Dec 2025

PUBLICATION

Radical Justice: Lifting Every Voice

Radical Justice: Lifting Every Voice brings together two bodies of socially-engaged photographic portraiture by Accra Shepp, who has documented New York City’s Occupy Wall Street movement starting in 2011 and its racial justice/BLM protests since 2020.

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PUBLICATION

A Third Look

In A Third Look, Joseph Maida reflects on Lee Friedlander’s nudes from the 1970’s and 80’s, reinterpreting this series as a cutting edge homage both to Friedlander, the modernist titan of photography, and to LGBTQIA+ bodies across gender and identity spectra.

Foreword by Zackary Drucker, The (Un)Certainty of Seeing

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PUBLICATION

Utopia Centerfolds At Play Limited Edition (Ina Jang)

Jang's playful whimsy strikes again on her Utopia Centerfolds At Play limited edition by inserting five transparencies loosely into the book creating a fun and dynamic intermingling of the nude, representation, art and commerce, and social hierarchies. Four images are taken from the book's edit and the fifth is a never-been-seen image from Jang's project Utopia.

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PUBLICATION

Utopia Centerfolds At Play Limited Edition (Dean Sameshima)

For Convoke's special, limited-edition of Utopia Centerfolds At Play, which explores the body, sexuality, and the archive in art today, Dean Sameshima hand-silkscreened one of his iconic Young Men At Play images on the book's cover. This bold intervention by an unapologetic visionary makes for a one-of-a- kind collectable, bringing the marginal spaces of mid-20th century male-male desire to the fore for a 21st century audience.

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PUBLICATION

Utopia Centerfolds At Play Limited Edition (Mr B.)

For his limited edition of Utopia Centerfolds At Play Brandon Isralsky — aka Mr. B — has created 4 unique, must-have artworks, incorporating his signature mark-making over the books’ fold-out-poster covers. In these covers, as in his series Centerfolds, Isralsky navigates the nature of desire as it has been crafted in 20th century American print media. He treats each of the 4 versions of his covers (white, blue, green and yellow “X”) with a unique color palette and stroke. Isralsky’s covers-cum-paintings call to mind the work of those who have influenced him - including Jean-Michel Basquiat and Pablo Picasso — though the results are quintessentially his, reflecting the artist’s unique perspective as a native New Yorker of Afro-Peruvian descent and as one of the leading artists in today’s New York street scene.

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PUBLICATION

Born Free and Equal: The Story Of Loyal ______-Americans (Softcover)

When donating his WWII photographs of interned Japanese-Americans to the Library of Congress in 1965, Ansel Adams wrote, “I think this Manzanar Collection is an important historical document and I trust it can be put to good use.” Responding to Adams' prompt, Joseph Maida has reconstructed Adams' catalog Born Free and Equal, which accompanied Adams' 1944 MoMA exhibition curated by Nancy Newhall. In this new book, Maida incorporates Adams' vintage negatives and prints while obscuring specific faces, names, ethnicities, and dates. This collaborative volume illuminates the past's timely relationship to the present and punctuates the far-seeing power of Adams' original documents.

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PUBLICATION

Born Free and Equal: The Story Of Loyal ______-Americans (Limited Edition)

This hardcover, collector's version of Born Free and Equal is a limited edition of 20 copies with some documents and photographs hand-placed. Each book is signed and numbered by the artist.

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PUBLICATION

Born Free, Born Equal

It was not until the death of his beloved Aunt Katherine Takeshita, a nisei Japanese American from Hawaiʻi, that Maida learned the details of the family’s incarceration during World War II. This discovery prompted Maida to revisit Ansel Adams’s 1943 Manzanar archive in 2017 in the wake of President Trump’s Executive Order 13769. Through obscuring specific faces, names, ethnicities, and dates in Adams’s Manzanar photographs and documents, which were once controversial and are now publicly accessible through the Library of Congress, Maida’s 2018 book, Born Free and Equal: The Story of Loyal _______-Americans, draws parallels between Ansel Adams’s empathetic images of citizens incarcerated based solely on ethnic origin and the resurgence of legislation targeting women, religious minorities, BIPOC, and LGBTQIA+ individuals.

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PORTFOLIOS

PORTFOLIO

Occupying Wall Street

One of the things that good portraits have the capacity to do is to reveal the human community to itself, creating a momentary sense of intimacy and familiarity between strangers. Accra Shepp’s engaging portraits do this. Photographing at a moment of profound social upheaval, he brings us visually into a conversation with our fellow citizens. This is important and timely work.. – DAWOUD BEY

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PORTFOLIO

A Third Look

Against the backdrop of photography’s long, often fraught, history in the genre of nudes, Joseph Maida creates unforgettable pictures of those less-visualized, so long known, but long unseen. Through his tender, incisive photographs, Maida also investigates his own masculinity and position of power to picture others, making an essential project for our times. – EVA RESPINI

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PORTFOLIO

Cut Deep

Marcus Correa is one brightly emerging star of this movement, who speaks his prose through creative direction and fashion styling. His latest work in collaboration with fellow photographer Carlos Jaramillo, aptly named Cut Deep, is a cultural statement. – WILLY CHAVARRIA

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PORTFOLIO

Exhibition-in-a-Box

I think this Manzanar Collection is an important historical document and I trust it can be put to good use. – ANSEL ADAMS

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PORTFOLIO

Maida’s overlays and interventions onto the catalog’s original sequence amplify the prophetic nature of this historic story. It is both a sensitive reanimation of a still-resonant chapter in American history and a hard-hitting meditation upon photography’s complicity with its outplaying. – CHARLOTTE COTTON

Born Free, Born Equal

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PORTFOLIO

Accra Shepp’s “Radical Justice,” is a vision. Clear-eyed and unique, Shepp’s photographs are also a powerful record of hope and resiliency, framed by a compassionate eye interested in these times, and in times to come. An uplifting and necessary book. – HILTON ALS

COVID Journals: Justice

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POSTCARD SETS

POSTCARD

Tokala Topographics (forthcoming)

Tokala is a photography series focused on the next generation of BIPOC climate activists and their areas of activism. The series’s name is derived from the Lakota tribe’s historical Tokala Society, a group of warriors recognized for their bravery and leadership from a young age.

→ Available Dec 2025

POSTCARD

Things “R” Queer

This uniquely designed postcard set features some of Joseph Maida’s most popular Things “R” Queer photographs from his Instagram feed @josephmaida. The 6 included perforated sheets divide into 24 individual cards, linking Maida’s series back to one of the first photo sharing platforms, the postcard.

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POSTCARD

9 Strong Women

A selection of portraits from Ansel Adams' Manzanar portfolio features 9 of the women, whom Adams depicted in his historic series about Japanese-Americans incarcerated in the United States during World War II. Each card includes a portrait initialed by Adams on the front with Adams' title of the work on the back. These ready-to-mail or frame cards honor the unsung women who have contributed to the betterment of all people through the history of the United States.

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