The Heavens: Annual Report
A photobook styled as a corporate annual report, in which Paolo Woods and Gabriele Galimberti follow the world of tax havens, offshore banking and secrecy, and the wealth that collects there.
The two photographers spent more than two years visiting the offshore centres where tax is avoided and extreme wealth collects. The book takes the form of an annual report and pairs 84 colour plates with an essay by Nicholas Shaxson on how tax havens feed the global economy and touch everyday life. Ramon Pez was art director. It is a slip-cased hardback of 218 pages, issued in an edition of 1200 copies by Dewi Lewis Media. The work was shown at the Rencontres d'Arles in 2015 and at Université Paris II Panthéon-Assas in Paris in 2017, where the book was listed as published by Delpire and Dewi Lewis.
Woods, born to Canadian and Dutch parents and raised in Italy, had published five earlier books, among them Chinafrica, and has received two World Press Photo awards. Galimberti is Italian and had published three earlier books with Random House and Abrams. Shaxson is the author of Treasure Islands, a study of tax havens.