In the fall of 1960 Henry Wessel left his family home in New Jersey to attend college in Central Pennsylvania. At the time, he had never been further west than Philadelphia. On Friday afternoons, to offset the daily classroom cadence, Wessel would pack a knapsack and hitchhike west. Once Saturday afternoon had ended, he would cross the highway and hitchhike back east, hoping to arrive in time for class on Monday morning. Though Wessel would not begin to photograph until years later, these early forays west planted seeds of discovery that proved fruitful for decades to come. Hitchhike is a westward journey from the grassy farmlands in the Midwest to the wide, open, dusty landscape further west. The sequence of photos draws from Wessel's 50-year archive and includes images of barns, gas stations, traveling salesmen, dogs asleep in truck beds, families eating in diners and open highways-all lit by bright western light, almost physical in its presence.
It has long been Guido Mocafico's dream to photograph the masterpiece glass models of marine invertebrates and plants that took Leopold (1822-95) and his son Rudolf (1857-1939) Blaschka a lifetime to create. This book fulfills that dream and showcases the Blaschkas' unparalleled dedication to their craft. Originally from Bohemia but based in Dresden, the Blaschkas worked from the mid-1800s until the 1930s. From clear, colored and painted glass they handmade their intricate models of invertebrate animals (including jellyfish, sea anemones, starfish and sea cucumbers) as well as plants, only on commission and for purposes of study, mainly in Europe and North America. The objects were not sold to the general public and are today held in museum collections including those of Harvard University, the Corning Museum of Glass/Cornell University, and the Natural History Museums in London and Dublin. It has been a difficult process for Mocafico to gain authorization to photograph the Blaschkas' creations, as most museums do not display these extremely fragile models. Yet Mocafico pursued the largest Blaschka collections throughout Europe and eventually gained access to photograph their hidden treasures in his trademark style. The result is similar to that of his "Nature Morte" series in that we constantly question what we see: a photograph, a painting, the object itself or a product of our imagination?
The work of German-American photographer Evelyn Hofer (1922-2009) is characterized by her single-minded creative drive and dedication to recording the essentials of her subjects. Hofer portraits her vis-à-vis-not only people, but also landscapes and interiors-well beyond the idea of the snapshot, and with great clarity and atmospheric intensity. Hofer spent months in the cities she photographed for her books of the 1950s and '60s, published with renowned authors such as Mary McCarthy and V. S. Pritchett. In titles such as New York Proclaimed (1965) and Dublin, A Portrait (1967) Hofer combines portraits, city and country views, still lifes and larger interior shots to manifest complex images of these metropolises. From this starting point Begegnungen / Encounters explores the multifaceted idea of the "portrait" throughout Hofer's oeuvre-be it in series on New York, Dublin and Washington, images of artists and their ateliers, selected photo-essays for magazines, her extensive projects "People of Soglio" and "Basque People", as well as till now unseen New York photos of Marlene Dietrich's hangar and Andy Warhol's Factory.
La femme 100 têtes / The Hundred Headless Woman presents over 150 portraits of 100 women-some acquaintances, some strangers-taken by Angela Grauerholz over a 30-year period and presented for the first time in this book. Collaging diverse photos made with various cameras and technologies with text fragments from a range of mostly female authors, Grauerholz creates a hybrid between a magazine and book that forms a complex portrait of women. The title La femme 100 têtes is borrowed from Max Ernst's 1929 Surrealist collage novel of the same name, in which he combined cut-up and reassembled nineteenth-century illustrations with bizarre captions. Grauerholz welcomes the double entendre of Ernst's title-when read aloud in French it means both "the hundred-headed woman" and "the headless woman"-to create a sense of womanhood intricately individual and violently anonymous. The intentionally quotidian nature of Grauerholz's photos blurs the "class" distinctions between images in an art context, in a printed publication and on the Internet, and tests the changing ways we encounter and judge photography.
Few events have become as iconic as Gery Keszler's annual Life Ball-for all not to forget that AIDS is still present. From Bill Clinton to Whoopi Goldberg, from Naomi Campbell to Elton John, the worlds of politics and fashion unite at amfAR's (the American Foundation for AIDS Research) gala in Vienna, designed each year by a different artist and now one of the most coveted events in Europe. The spectacle invariably turns into an all-night party with several thousand donors dressed in the most stunning and outrageous costumes. This book is Michel Comte's portrait of the glamour and grit of the Life Ball. Comte remembers: "My first journey started in New York. We all boarded a large chartered Airbus. Wherever I looked, there was somebody I knew, had read about or was interested in meeting. The experience onboard reminded me of a sixties rock-'n'-roll charter. People were frolicking through the aisles with glasses of champagne. In Vienna my assistants and I started working early afternoon before the legendary event began. Everyone was creating something special; chaos later turned into the most surreal experience. From the dazzling black-tie dinner to the fashion show, the performances and the late-night party, it all seemed like a crazy mid-summer night's dream. Here is our story."
In the summer of 1955 a relatively naive and uninformed John Cohen crossed the straits of Gibraltar. He arrived in Tangier with a handwritten note in cursive Arabic; the man who had composed it in New York had told him to "keep this paper far from your passport." Cohen had no idea why or indeed what the note said; it was not addressed to a specific person. He was simply instructed to look for a certain man when he arrived, who would then send him to "the others." Cohen's otherwise straightforward trip to make photographs in Morocco thus began with a sense of intrigue and perhaps risk.This was Cohen's first journey outside America to see the world. In his words: "The camera led my way to a distant culture, along with the desire to represent what I could see and sense there, and not be distracted by chronology or thought. My photographs were intended to be a sensual response to light and to the people who inhabited these spaces. These Morocco photos were ... an indication of what was to come."
Jeff Brouws has spent the last 30 years photographing various aspects of the American cultural landscape, often assembling typologies of common architectural forms in everyday environments. In Silent Monoliths he documents a variety of concrete coaling towers standing dormant in isolated brownfields or along active railroad lines. Built between 1907 and '56 these remnants of railroading's past were once used to dispense coal into steam locomotives. Seemingly impervious to the vicissitudes of time, decay or outright removal, these sculptural examples of former industrial brawn recall an earlier technological era most of us never witnessed. Because of this we glimpse-in real time-what Walker Evans once termed the "historical contemporary" of the modern world. Brouws practices an evidentiary form of photography, taking stand-alone portraits of coaling towers in homage to Hilla and Bernd Becher, as well as wider views revealing their broader contexts and landscapes. These two approaches reflect his dual interests in the New Topographics from the 1970s, as well as the compiling of typologies-a style of image making with historic roots traceable to the invention of photography itself as seen by Louis Daguerre's photo of his fossil collection and William Henry Fox Talbot's botanical photograms. Brouws' coaling towers emerge in dialogue with these nineteenth- and twentieth-century predecessors.
Conceived and edited by artist Slavica Perkovic, this book for Lewis Baltz presents letters she asked Baltz's friends to write to him without seeing the images he had secretly made while teaching in Venice. (Baltz had told all he had stopped photographing; he had in fact continued to do so, walking the empty Lido beach to the Grand Hotel des Bains, then closed for renovation.) The first book of new material by Baltz since his passing in 2014, For Lewis Baltz. 8 + 38 texts. 14 images is shaped by the continuing resonance of his oeuvre, his absence and the complex notion of self.
+ - 0 ("plus minus null") is a facsimile of a unique, handmade artist's book crafted by Volker Heinze in 1986. Its photos are the result of the young Heinze's decision to radically capture the world around him-be it cityscapes, rooms casts in warm artificial light, friends or simply objects sitting on a table. Working against the removed perspective of documentary photography, Heinze employs color not as a tool of realism but with experimental flair, and plays with focus and the inevitable "mistakes" of analogue film-all to create an original aesthetic born from the idiosyncrasies of the photographic medium.Heinze originally presented this body of work in two forms: as the large installation The Appearance of the Familiar, composed of individual photos pinned to the wall in the influential 1986 exhibition "Remnants of the Authentic" at Museum Folkwang in Essen. And as + - 0-with its experimental layout, leaves of tracing paper with hand-painted quotes such as "To search for reality is like diving for pearls in an aquarium", and a booklet with excerpts from Martin Kippenberger's 241 Bildtitel zum Ausleihen-now to be published for the first time since its inception more than 30 years ago.Limited edition of 750 books
This is an exacting facsimile-and first re-print overall-of Baron Adolph de Meyer's especially rare book Le Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, first published in 1914 in a handcrafted edition of 1,000. Today only six copies are known to exist, and this Steidl edition recreates a book from Karl Lagerfeld's personal collection.De Meyer's book is a privileged record of Vaslav Nijinsky's performance in the first ballet he choreographed: Le Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun) for Serge Diaghilev's famous Ballets Russes, set to a score by Claude Debussy and inspired by a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé. The ballet debuted in Paris in 1912 and shocked audiences and critics with its eroticism and unconventional choreography. De Meyer's 30 photos capture Nijinsky's animalistic performance as the faun surrounded by prancing nymphs, and are an important record of Léon Bakst's Symbolist sets and costumes.In this new edition Gerhard Steidl recreates the original, published by Editions Paul Iribe & Cie, with as much attention to detail as possible. Le Prélude is a hand-stitched brochure with a hand-folded dust jacket. Iribe's collotypes (photomechanical ink prints) on vellum paper are recreated in offset as quadratone prints tipped-in by hand onto Somerset Cotton paper, mould-made by St Cuthbert's Mill-all in a limited edition of 1,000 books.
The photographer Santu Mofokeng is one of the most vital artists to emerge from South Africa's late apartheid era. From his distinctive portrayals of township life to his acclaimed reassessment of the medium's documentary function, Mofokeng's intuitive and multilayered oeuvre continues to grow in relevance and reach. This illuminatingcollection of texts-with contributions by Rory Bester, Jean-François Chevrier, Joshua Chuang, Patricia Hayes, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, and others-provides an informed basis for engaging with Mofokeng's allusive body of work along with its related concerns. Published to accompany the photobook series Santu Mofokeng Stories, this essential, context-rich reference also features a comprehensive chronology and bibliography, interviews with David Goldblatt and Paul Weinberg, and previously unpublished writings by Mofokeng himself.
Measure of Emptiness is a meditation on the vast spaces of the Great Plains, the heartland of American agricultural productivity, and the centrality of the grain elevator to its social, cultural and symbolic life. In photographs made between 1972 and 1977 with the support of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment of Art, Frank Gohlke traveled back and forth through the central tier of states from his home in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to the Texas Panhandle, seeking an answer to the puzzle of the grain elevators' extraordinary power as architecture in a landscape whose primary dramas were in the sky."In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is," said Gertrude Stein. The Great Plains are characterized by this spaciousness, and by the presence of windowless, rumbling, enormous grain elevators, rising above the steeples of churches to announce the presence of the town and to explain, in great measure, the lives of and livelihoods of its inhabitants. Why did their builders choose that particular form to fulfill and practical necessity? And does the experience of great emptiness shape what people think, feel and do?
crossing sea presents the diverse practices of photography in Southeast Asia over the past decade. Along with documentary photography, photographic practices have expanded as part of the contemporary arts with new experimental and exploratory approaches ranging from re-contextualizing archives, site-specific installation, performance for the camera and collections of vernacular images. Interspersed between the works of 55 Southeast Asian photographers are research extracts, essays and interviews by historians, writers and curators who have been contributing to the understanding of photography from this region. Featured artists include Andia Yoeu Ali, Agan Harahap, Angki Purbandono, Ang Song Nian, Eiffel Chong, Dinh Q. Lê, Miti Ruangkritya, Piyatat Hemmatat, Wawi Navarroza, Jake Verzosa, Manit Sriwanchimpoom, Genevieve Chua, John Clang, Simryn Gill, Vincent Leong, Robert Zhao Renhui, Wong Hoy Cheong, Wawi Navarroza, Yee I-Lann and Yaya Sung.
In 2017 Rodney "Ferris Bueller" Bailey documented the contents of his old room in his parents' house in Queens, NY-full of ephemera collected while growing up in the late eighties and nineties, and largely untouched since. The result of this cathartic process of sorting and recording is this book: part visual autobiography, part time capsule. "My bedroom ... was my sanctuary because it contained all the things that defined me," recalls Bueller, and his mementos include magazines, posters, photos, collages, T-shirts, concert tickets, a Walkman. His extensive collection of sneakers dominates the book, triggers vivid personal memories (expressed in texts throughout the image sequence), and makes palpable a past where the X-Files, Nirvana and Anna Nicole Smith were still current news. Catharsis is both a chronicle of Bueller's sometimes difficult youth and a "record of life before the Internet or social media, before everyone knew what everyone else was doing all the time. [...] The only things that would connect you were clothes, sneakers and music."
Close presents 120 portraits of the world's most famous and influential people across the arts and entertainment industries, politics, business and sport-from Julia Roberts and Adele, to Frank Gehry and Marina Abramovic, Barack Obama, Julian Assange and Roger Federer. Between 2005 and 2018 Schoeller photographed his subjects, in his words "to create a level platform, where a viewer's existing notions of celebrity, values, and honesty are challenged." Schoeller realized this goal by subjecting his sitters to equal technical treatment: each portrait is a close-up of a face with the same camera angle and lighting. The expressions are consistently neutral, serious yet relaxed, in an attempt to tease out his subjects' differences and capture moments "that felt intimate, unposed." Schoeller's inspiration for Close was the water tower series of Bernd and Hilla Becher, his ambition to adapt their systematic approach to portraiture. Amidst Schoeller's famous subjects are also some unknown and unfamiliar ones, a means to comprehensively make his project an "informal anthropological study of the faces of our time."
Hans / Jean Arp's diverse visual oeuvre-primarily consisting of sculptures, reliefs, drawings, collages and prints-is world-renowned, yet his sketchbooks remain relatively unknown. Twenty Sketchbooks seeks to remedy this by reproducing as meticulous facsimiles 20 of Arp's small sketchbooks and spiral-bound pads, made between 1950 and 1966 and today held at the Fondazione Marguerite Arp-Hagenbach, located in Arp's last atelier in Locarno, Switzerland.This publication allows us for the first time to "hold" Arp's sketchbooks in our hands and thereby gain new insight into his working processes. Some sketches reveal themselves as drafts for fully realized artworks, yet the majority are exploratory works in themselves. Twenty Sketchbooks contains over 400 sketches as well as written notes by the artist. The 20 volumes, each produced at its original size, are presented in a handmade box following the design of the carton in which they were found in Arp's archive.Limited edition of 1,000 boxed sets Co-published with the Fondazione Marguerite Arp-Hagenbach, Locarno
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