Böcker utgivna av Steidl Publishers

Zoo is a wild ride through Anders Petersen's oeuvre, a racy edit of his work that has animals as its central theme. Whether they be conscious portraits of animals or a haphazard photographic encounter with a woman's legs in python-print tights, Petersen draws out the animal and animalistic in all that he sees. At a typical zoo we are the spectators, peering in on creatures as they go about their existence, mostly oblivious to our presence. Yet in Zoo we find ourselves both behind and before the bars of the cage-with Petersen as the delighted zookeeper.

This book contains more than 400 pictures of Gunnar Smoliansky's hands, each a spontaneous composition crafted by the photographer in his traditional darkroom. The inspiration for this series was unexpected and Smoliansky pursued it with an artist's rigor, creating a complex series, each image a nuanced variation on a theme. Some pictures are deceptively simple, hardly recognizable abstractions; others are realistic, revealing even the texture of Smoliansky's palm; while others still are almost violent inky overlappings. By bypassing the tool of the camera and reinterpreting the photogram, Smoliansky revisits one of the earliest means of photographic picture making and creates a gestural space between photography and drawing.

Asia Highway is Luke Powell's photographic examination of Iran and particularly Pakistan, acknowledging the destruction these cultures have undergone while emphasizing the beautiful and good that Powell discovered on his travels. The photos in the first chapter were taken in Iran in 1974 and include the historical bazaar of Tabriz (a crucial center on the Silk Road and since 2010 a UNESCO World Heritage Site), while the succeeding chapters depict northern Pakistan. The story of the book's origins orbits around various political events: Powell photographed a series on Pakistan's Swat district after he had left Afghanistan just ahead of the Taraki coup in 1978; and in 2000 the Taliban invited him to return while restricting his subsequent movements, prompting Powell to travel to Pakistan and work in Chitral and Gilgit. Other chapters explore Peshawar and the Kalash people in Chitral.

This book presents photos by David Goldblatt taken between 1952 and 2016 of Fietas in Johannesburg, with an emphasis on his 1976-77 images of the suburb's last Indian residents before they were forcibly removed under apartheid. Known affectionately by its inhabitants as Fietas, though officially called Pageview, this was one of the city's few "non-racial" suburbs, where Malay, African, Chinese, Indian and a few white people lived. Composed of narrow streets and small houses of two rooms and a kitchen for up to 15 people, here different races and religions formed a strong, safe community where children played in the streets. There were two mosques, Hindu, Tamil and Muslim schools, cricket, soccer and bridge clubs, and 170 shops-customers came from all over the Witwatersrand.In 1948 the National Party came to power and made the clearance of all "non-white" inhabitants of Pageview an immediate objective. Some 5,000 Africans and other people of color were evicted or "persuaded" to leave by the promise of better townships, while under the Group Areas Act the Indians were to move to Lenasia, an apartheid creation 35 kilometers from the city. For 20 years the remaining Indians fought against removal, principally in the courts, but in 1977 police and their dogs finally forced them out, except for a few. Almost all buildings were destroyed and in their place new houses for lower-income whites built. Today these are occupied by a mix of people from Africa, Europe and Asia; no sense of community remains except that of the homeless sheltering in the spaces left by demolition.

Lesser Known presents Bruce Davidson's photos made between 1955 and 1993 that have been overshadowed until now. Consisting of 130 images that have been consistently overlooked throughout Davidson's long career, the book is the result of a year-long undertaking by the photographer and his studio to examine 60 years of contact sheets and edit individual images into a singular work that plots his professional and personal growth. Lesser Known showcases Davidson's perpetual versatility and adaptability as a photographer through a focus on early assignments, the intimate documentation of his family life and smaller series such as unpublished color photographs from major bodies of work including "East 100th Street" and "Campers."

Midnight Tweedle is Zhang Lijie's personal portrait of China's complex cultural and political history. Juxtaposing diverse and seemingly unrelated images with a collage technique, Lijie explores the depths of Chinese collective memory in a process she describes as "whispering to herself ... to understand where we come from and where we are going."This book combines materials as varied as found and original photos, posters, illustrations and even a meal ticket from the planned economy time which Lijie either collected from antique markets, newspapers and the Internet, or created herself. Here smiling families and uniformed civilians during the Cultural Revolution mingle with key historical figures such as the Empress Dowager Cixi and Mao Zedong, all interspersed by recent landscapes and photos as unexpected as a still life of mangoes. Lijie believes that "all kinds of identities and labels are nothing but fragments of history," and in this book she creates a new whole from these pieces.

Though born in Snow Hill, Alabama in 1917, Noah Purifoy lived most of his life in Los Angeles and Joshua Tree, California, where he died in 2004. The exhibition of his work, Junk Dada, at LACMA in 2015 as well as the recent publication by Steidl of his notebooks and essays in High Desert, have contributed to the legacy of this long-overlooked artist who first came to prominence with sculpture assembled from the debris of the Watts Rebellion of 1965.In the last fifteen years of his life Purifoy lived in the Mojave Desert where he created large-scale sculptures spread over ten acres. On visiting this site Hannah Collins made a series of exquisite black-andwhite photographic studies of Purifoy's work. Her rigorous aesthetic stance is unwittingly reminiscent of the formality of Walker Evans, who would have greatly appreciated Purifoy's transformation of discarded materials into grand yet vernacular forms.Message from the Interior, Walker Evans' photographic study of 1966, which through the selection of a handful of pictures of interiors suggests a wide and disparate landscape, became a model for the publication of Collins' work from Purifoy's site. Her 18 photographs are presented here in a format that exactly echoes Evans' publication, both typographically and spatially. The intention is not imitative, but refers to the grandeur and scale achieved by Purifoy. Cumulatively his work becomes a transitory monument inevitably destined to decay into the desert itself.

The "dream shock" of Liu Zheng's title refers to an awakening as if from a deep sleep. There is a moment between sleep and consciousness in which the dream state and conscious reality collide. It is a fertile, erotic and sometimes violent area of the mind, in which both exquisite and tortured imagery may surface.Liu Zheng is one of the few Chinese photographers whose work has reached the West. The exhibition of his extensive series The Chinese at ICP in New York in 2004 and the accompanying Steidl book indicated he was working on the borders between the documentary tradition and the extended portrait school of August Sander. His background on the Workers' Daily suggests his grounding as a photojournalist. Yet Liu Zheng's vision does not echo the common view of China, characterized by anonymity in the sheer mass of the population or by the momentum of industry. Frequently the subjects of his portraits are those on the fringes of Chinese society; his outsiders contribute to an unfamiliar collective portrait of a nation.Dream Shock brings us to another space that exists in the mind itself. Some of the characters, such as a beautiful Peking Opera singer, may be half-familiar, but the historical references to a brutal occupation and the sexual explicitness take us into unprecedented territory. Elaborate scenes are delicately choreographed in a series of terrifying tableaux. The directness of photographic evidence exists alongside studio staging that is pure and unsettling theatre. We enter a wholly new domain.