Photobook Publisher Pop-Up: MAKAN

Meet Makan, an artist-run publisher, and shop their latest photobooks, including their newest title, TAKE A SEAT, by photographer, Natalie Tischler, during this special photobook publisher pop-up in ICP’s shop.

No tickets needed for the program.

About MAKAN:

MAKAN is an independent, artist-run publishing house founded in New York in 2024, dedicated to producing and circulating artist books that bring voices, places, and perspectives often absent from mainstream publishing into wider cultural conversation.

Makan means “place” or “space” in Arabic, and that idea continues to guide the press: publishing can create a place for an artist’s work to exist, travel, and encounter new audiences.

In two years, Makan has published eleven titles. What began primarily through photography from the Global South and its diasporas has grown into a broader publishing practice encompassing artist books, experimental photographic works, archives, and increasingly, writing and critical conversations around art. They are interested not in defining what an ideal photobook should look like, but in allowing the form of each publication to emerge from the work itself.

Its publications reflect this range. Photography from Yemen brings together fourteen Yemeni photographers working across Yemen and its diaspora, allowing artists to narrate their practices in their own words. Ethan Lan’s A-Ma transforms an intimate family archive into a handmade object, Rhea Karam’s Drift translates her practice of cutting, layering, and intervening on urban surfaces into the physical language of a book; and Samantha Jensen’s Desert Notes expands our list through a woman photographer reconsidering the mythology and visual language of the American landscape. For Makan, publishing and circulation are inseparable. Makan carries its artists’ work across cities, countries, languages, fairs, bookstores, and institutional collections, while also circulating independently published work beyond our own imprint. Each table, publication, and collaboration becomes another opportunity to create encounters between artists and audiences who may otherwise never meet.

Makan is operated by Yemeni American artist Ibi Ibrahim.

For press or general inquires, please contact [email protected] 

Header image by Jutharat ‘Poupay’ Pinyodoonyachet