Bøger udgivet af Steidl

Ephemeral glimpses of ancient American trees not yet destroyed by climate changeWith Old Growth, American photographer Mitch Epstein invites readers into a diverse transcontinental forest that includes white pines, hemlocks, sequoias, moss-covered cedars, bald cypresses and bristlecone pines that have survived for millennia. The book explores the enigma of time, while also evoking the forests' historical struggle to survive American expansionism. Over the past 500 years, Americans have destroyed more than 95 percent of the original forests in the United States. Yet, these are indispensable in the fight against climate change--large, old trees hold significantly more carbon than replanted saplings.Old Growth highlights the astounding diversity, interdependence and sculptural beauty of America's ancient forests. Made with an 8×10 camera in color and black and white, Epstein's images convey nuances of the forest that people cannot normally see, in the hope that gaining proximity to these epic, life-giving trees could inspire us to protect them. To borrow from ecologist Suzanne Simard, this book is not simply about how we can save trees; it is about how the trees might save us.Mitch Epstein (born 1952) has photographed the landscape and psyche of America for half a century. A pioneer of color photography in the 1970s, Epstein was inducted into the National Academy of Design and awarded the Prix Pictet, the Berlin Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work is in the collections of Tate Modern, the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

From German colonialism to the post-apartheid present, Brandt's photographs present new views of Namibia that intertwine its many historiesFeaturing images and video stills made over more than a decade, The Distance Within reflects on photographer Nicola Brandt's (born 1983) German and Namibian ancestry and deconstructs certain established ways of seeing Namibia. Brandt traveled the country extensively, documenting landscapes and people, structures and encounters, to reveal ensnared histories of German colonialism, National Socialism and apartheid. Markers of these histories range from the ephemeral and private, such as a dilapidated mound of stones as a roadside memorial, to official sites of remembrance and resistance, particularly for colonial atrocities. Alongside her images, Brandt assembles texts by scholars in photography, postcolonial cultures, memory and genocide studies, as well as archival material, to understand enduring blind spots. The result is an intersectional argument in favor of reclaiming suppressed Indigenous stories and identities, undoing romantic notions of whiteness and, ultimately, illuminating what has not been visible.

Europe's image of Japanese culture remains dominated by clichés such as the cherry blossom, temples, samurai, geisha and Zen. Fascinated and irritated by these clichés, photographer Andri Pol attempts to overturn them, both by confronting them and by looking elsewhere, setting his lens upon the everyday sights of Japanese life.

The Teller family business produces small parts for string instruments. Juergen Teller has taken photographs of company employees, his uncle and his uncle's collection of hunting trophies. He has also shot pictures in dripstone caves, of Kate Moss during her pregnancy and of himself. In the world of Juergen Teller, it somehow all fits together. Werkstatt--a studio or creative environment--collects, as Juergen Teller does, people and places. It combines scenes from the world he grew up in with selections from the world of beautiful images that he travels in today. Candid, subjective and completely without superficial affect, Teller offers a peek or two into his world. How it all fits together is left up to the viewer.

Between 1939 and 1993, Arnold Odermatt (born 1925) documented car accidents in Nidwalden for the Swiss police office. His poignant, unpeopled, sometimes funny and always strange atmospheric photographs call to mind such precedents as Weegee's crime pictures from the 1930s and 40s. They were introduced to the art world when Harald Szeeman exhibited them at the 49th Venice Biennale.

Robert Adams began by photographing suburban landscapes along the edge of the Rocky Mountains. His goal was to record the erasure of the American wilderness, while attempting to affirm what survives of it. For Adams, photography at this juncture in history presents a melancholy vocation: "It seems to me that we are now compelled to recognize that we have no place to go but where we've been," he judges. "We've got to go look at what we've done, which is oftentimes pretty awful, and see if we can't make of this place a civilized home." In Gone?, his most personal work to date, Adams lives out the implications of these words. In the 1980s, he revisited semi-rural areas he had known as a boy-landscapes that were no longer pristine, but which still retained their own particular qualities of light.

Unpublished images from Nickerson's classic depiction of African agricultural workersThis book presents previously unpublished work from Jackie Nickerson's acclaimed Farm series. Farm was published by Random House in 2002 and features images made between 1997 and 2001 across Southern Africa. Unseen Farm is an exploration of the people working in agriculture in Zimbabwe, Malawi, Mozambique and South Africa, and includes 6×7 medium-format photographs shot on film, Polaroids and contact sheets from the artist's archive. Comparable to Walker Evans' and James Agee's influential account of US rural workers in the mid-1930s, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Nickerson's vision is celebratory and non-judgmental while aware of photography's limits in capturing the full depth of its subjects. In Edward K. Owusu-Ansah's words: "Nickerson registers everything about her subjects in minute detail, sincerely and without commentary, allowing them to live through her lens. The result is a display of dignity amidst want, pride in labor and perseverance in spite of limited resources."

Tools have been among Jim Dine's favorite motifs since his beginnings as an artist, and are a passion born in his childhood, when his grandfather and later his father ran a hardware store in Cincinnati. My Tools provides new insight into Dine's ongoing photographic exploration of this multifaceted theme. In large-format black-and-white and color photographs, as well as heliogravures produced between 2001 and 2014, he explores the formal vocabulary of individual objects, their materials, as well as their collective constellations and surrounding spaces. Dine defines himself as an artist through the tools and objects he creates with his own hands. His analog photographs-themselves creations of a complex tool, the camera-are both true to the objective appearance of his tools, while opening up our field of imagination.

Futuro Certo is a selection of South African photographer Guy Tillim's (born 1962) most influential works and series of the last decade. Exploring modernist architecture--and its utopian ruins--in postcolonial Angola, Congo and Mozambique, Tillim portrays the communities, social landscapes and symbolic structures of societies altered by conflict.

From 1985 to 1987, Maria Sewcz created a series of radical photographs of Berlin's east side. Collected here, these bold images capture a cold and irreconcilable rage with the status quo during a period of historic transition.

A-chan created the images in Salt'n Vinegar in her home in New York and on travels between 2011 and 2013. Continuing her eloquent unassuming reflections on her immediate surroundings, A-chan depicts the unexpected beauty of water streaming from a faucet, a figure skater caught mid-pirouette, street scenes, supermarket shelves and a lone packet of potato chips, which lends its title to this book. Salt'n Vinegar features both color and black-and-white images, suggesting that the independent threads of A-chan's color photo book Vibrant Home and her black-and-white Off Beat, both published by Steidl in 2012, have now found resolution in book form.

This book presents photographs spanning Sharon Ya'ari's entire creative career, focusing on his recent works. It is published in conjunction with a major exhibition of Ya'ari's work at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, featuring a comprehensive selection of his photographs. Sharon Ya'ari does not seek unusual moments, special places or unique subjects. His photographs offer an intimate look at the commonplace and familiar, making the viewer take pause and observe closely. He does not depict climactic moments; rather, he stops and photographs things that appear to him along the way, thereby conferring permanence on a particular time and place. Ya'ari's images summon a multilayered reading, combining local, historical references on the one hand and conceptual references to the medium of photography and to the history of art on the other.

The pictures in Ether--Fazal Sheikh's first book in color--were made as a way to honor the experience of death and to try to comprehend its significance. Benares (Varanasi) is one of India's sacred cities, where many Hindus come to die in the belief that they will find salvation. As he walked its streets by night, Sheikh observed sleeping figures, shrouded in blankets, lost to an oblivion that seemed, in that holy city, to offer a simulacrum of death. In watching these ambiguous figures, which hover in the imagination between a dream state, sleep and death, Sheikh recalled his own experience with his dying father and their passage together through his father's final days. He remembered it as an invaluable period of emotional connection with the body and soul of the person he knew and loved, a connection that reached back to his paternal ancestors, who had travelled south from northern India a century before. To lose oneself in sleep is to abandon the senses and leave the way open to a dream state in which mind and body separate.

Jim Dine may be best known for his prints, paintings and sculptural works--and for being one of the founders of Pop art--but he has also been making photographs since 1996. Most of the photographs are set up in the studio. Often featuring multiple exposures, Gothic imagery and automatic-writing-like text, they tend to convey a tinge of Surrealism. Dine has said about his practice, "I don't use Photoshop with all the things you can do. I photograph and then I preview. I preview all day until I get it right, but I get it right by changing the objects." For this volume, which will be eye-opening even to Dine's most familiar fans, the artist has selected a group of self-portraits, portraits he has taken of friends and relatives--both alive and dead--and portraits of Pinochio, the fictional character he has been reimagining for the last several years.

At first Martin d'Orgeval's (born 1973) fifth monograph, Découpages, appears to be a highly anonymous entity. Information is deliberately missing: there is no title on the cover, no printed text inside, no linearity of subject. Yet as the book unfolds, the photographer's attention to shapes, lines and surfaces emerges.

This book is a facsimile of June Leaf's sketchbook from the winter of 1974 and 1975, spent in Mabou Coal Mines, Nova Scotia. She has lived here since 1969 with her husband, Swiss-American photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank. The book is above all a working document of Leaf's thoughts. Drawing is her primary medium, an approach explained in her first written entry of 26 November, 1974: "I don't usually like to write because I am more satisfied by an action." Her sketches are exploratory, inquisitive, incomplete: for example, she refines a motif as simple as a knot over days and weeks, drawing it in different ways until it becomes no more than a detail in a larger, more complex picture. Leaf is not afraid to express the difficulty of the creative process, her frustration as well as her progress: "I've come to a dead stop. Should make a sculpture--don't want to! Should play the fiddle--don't want to! Should take a walk--too cold. Where's the inspiration?" Amidst such uncertainty Leaf's husband remains a constant source of inspiration: representations of Frank are scattered throughout the book, from its opening pages to the last.

New York-born photographer and activist Fazal Sheikh closely crops his subjects' faces, making their eyes the central focus of the frame, in turn forcing his viewers to face them. He captures portraits of communities around the world in an effort to bridge the gap between the diversity of human experience and the often-insurmountable differences in opportunity. This volume focuses on photographs of women, taken in India over the past five years. In his last two books, Moksha (2005) and Ladli (2007), Sheikh addressed the social and political implications of Indian women's subordination and mistreatment, recording many stories of isolation and extreme abuse. In The Circle, Sheikh concentrates on the power of these women's gazes and their ability to engage our empathy and our curiosity. This series reflects an intimacy and directness between photographer and subject that challenges Westerners' preconceptions about Indian women.

In 1989 Kai Wiedenhöfer photographed the fall of the Berlin Wall in his hometown. He was deeply moved by this experience of history unfolding, and at the time, like many, he believed this event would mark the end of walls being employed as political tools and dismissed them as anachronistic instruments of division. Over 20 years later, history has proved us wrong; indeed, walls have enjoyed a barbaric renaissance. Border barriers have been erected in the US, Europe and the Middle East in the aftermath of political, economic, religious and ethnic conflicts. Wiedenhöfer has documented walls in Belfast, Ceuta and Melilla, Baghdad, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, the American- Mexican border, Cyprus, Korea as well as the remains of the Iron Curtain. Confrontier presents Wiedenhöfer's project and expresses his conviction that walls are not solutions to today's political and economic problems, but proof of human weakness, error and our failure to communicate with one another.

In September 2011 a group of scientists, artists and writers embarked on an expedition to North-West Svalbard, the northern extremity of Norway. Travelling on the M/S Stockholm, each of them recorded the event from their own professional and personal perspective. The sites on the route map of the journey facing the northern shores of the Polar Sea all have a story to tell, natural or cultural. The book is a narrative of the places visited by the expedition with the many different approaches shaping the views of the land encountered. The poetics of artists and photographers meeting the environmentalist writers and researchers of science and history tells the story of an expedition following its historic predecessors. The history of photography and earlier travel accounts as well as burning contemporary issues guided the journey into the Arctic.

Wilmot is a little town in Ashley County, in southeast Arkansas. Its main street--US Highway 165--runs north-south on the east side of a railroad track, raised on a bed several feet above the highway itself. Once a town reliant on agriculture and cotton production, the growth of mechanized farming in the 1950s and 1960s and the arrival of mass retail in the 1970s made people leave Wilmot just as in other rural areas of the U.S. Susan Paulsen based her series on Wilmot on texts written and transferred to her by her cousin Mary Currie and sees it as a metaphor for the American agricultural south in general. At the same time it represents a visual archive of the liveliness of the town's former times, depicting many buildings that do not exist anymore today or are derelict. As her relative George T.M. Shackleford puts it: "Paulsen has created photographs that have resonance for anyone who looks at them. That resonance comes not from some abstract language of forms seen in nature and captured in her lens, or from a series of facts gathered and arranged in a dispassionate order. That resonance comes not in spite of her involvement with the subject but because of it."

Jakob Tuggener's Fabrik, published in Zurich in 1943, is a milestone in the history of the photography book. Its 72 images, in the expressionist aesthetic of a silent movie, impart a skeptical view of technological progress: at the time the Swiss military industry was producing weapons for World War II. Tuggener, who was born in 1904, had an uncompromisingly critical view of the military-industrial complex that did not suit his era. His images of rural life and high-society parties had been easy to sell, but Fabrik found no publisher. And when the book did come out, it was not a commercial success. Copies were sold at a loss and some are believed to have been pulped. Now this seminal work, which has since become a sought-after classic, is being reissued with a contemporary afterword. In his lifetime, Tuggener's work appeared--at Robert Frank's suggestion--in Edward Steichen's Post-War European Photography and in The Museum of Modern Art's seminal exhibition, The Family of Man, in whose catalogue it remains in print. Tuggener's death in 1988 left an immense catalogue of his life's work, much of which has yet to be shown: more than 60 maquettes, thousands of photographs, drawings, watercolors, oil paintings and silent films.

Roni Horn's To Place series explores the connections between identity and location. This latest volume in the series is related to Haraldsdóttir, which was published in 1996. Using water as a context, the photographs of a woman create an intimate but ambiguous portrait where the face becomes the place. Haraldsdóttir, Part Two contains 100 photographs of the same subject taken 15 years after the publication of Haraldsdóttir. Each book is presented in a blue clothbound embossed slipcase and comes with a signed and numbered original color c-print.

Americans is the second book in a series on America by Christopher Morris. While the first book, My America (Steidl, 2006), focused on Republican nationalism, Americans takes a much broader journey across American society. With an empathetic and critical eye, Morris presents a nation in a state of perpetual loss and its people searching for an identity--stranded within two long-running wars and an economy on the verge of collapse.

A portrait of New York at its most lived-in and lowdown, from under-appreciated street photographer Leon LevinsteinAmerican street photographer Leon Levinstein is much admired within the photographic community, but little known outside of it. Solo exhibitions at the National Gallery of Canada in 1995 and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2010 brought him to the attention of many, but his dynamic and original work is yet to achieve the recognition it deserves. Levinstein's fearless and unsentimental black-and-white images, whether shot in New York City, Coney Island, Haiti, Mexico or India, possess in Metropolitan Museum of Art Curator of Photographs Jeff Rosenheim's words, "graphic virtuosity--seen in raw, expressive gestures and seemingly monumental bodies--balanced by an unusual compassion for his offbeat subjects." In 1975, at the age of 65, Levinstein received a grant from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. His intention, in his own words, was "to photograph as wide a spectrum of the American scene as my experience and vision will allow." This long-awaited book fulfils this ambitious goal.

The artists Diana Michener and Jim Dine are married, have lived together in Paris and New York and Los Angeles, have photographed one another and one another's work, and have inspired and collected one another's work as well. 3 Poems celebrates the expressive relationship between black-and-white and color in their work, over the course of 96 pages with 23 tritone prints and 22 color plates. The photographs and poems can be read separately and collectively--the artists invite the viewer to explore both.

Much of Qatar appears to be desert stretching in all directions, a seemingly lifeless landscape of low, barren sand plains and rolling dunes. Yet within this desolateness are signs of life and things of beauty which Al-Thani--who has perhaps examined the Qatari landscape more closely than any other photographer--reveals for the first time to an international audience. The photos in Here Is My Secret were taken in 2008 and 2009, when Al-Thani traversed Qatar, his only companions a Toyota four-wheel drive and his Leica camera. Eschewing human change on the landscape, Here Is My Secret is a poetic contemplation on nature and an illustration of the larger cultural transformation that Qatar is currently undergoing.

In 1959 John Cohen travelled to East Kentucky looking for what he calls old music. Cohen asked for names at local gas stations but soon ran out of leads, and drove off the highway onto the next dirt road. Here he stumbled across Roscoe Holcomb playing the banjo and singing on his front porch in a way says Cohen, "that made the hairs on my neck stand up on end." And so by pure chance began the lifelong friendship that is the background for The High and Lonesome Sound. Cohen visited Holcomb frequently over the next three decades, and made many photographs, films and records of his music. In time Holcomb, a poor coal miner by trade, became a regular feature on the American concert and festival circuits. The strange beauty and discomfort of his music--a mixture of blues, ballads and Baptist hymns, and unique through his high strained voice--was exposed to a larger audience. Nevertheless, Holcomb died alone in a nursing home in 1981. The High and Lonesome Sound combines Cohen's vintage photos, film and musical recordings as well as an anecdotal text into a multimedia tribute to this underappreciated legend of American music whose every performance was, in Cohen's words, "not just a rendition of music, but a test of something to be overcome."

The Walther Collection is a private international art collection dedicated to collecting and exhibiting contemporary photography with special emphasis on the works of African and Asian artists. It is a dynamic collection, constantly growing and driven by four core activities: collecting, curating, exhibiting and publishing. Each activity is designed to present the works of the artists and to engage them in dialogue with the general public and the specialized field of contemporary art. The Walther Collection encompasses more than 700 works of widely known as well as emerging African and Asian artists, which makes it one of the most comprehensive collections of African photography worldwide. These extensive holdings are contextualized and complemented by historically significant contributions to the art of photography mainly from Germany and the United States, which expand the understanding, conception and history of the medium. The exhibitions and their curators at The Walther Collection will change once a year. Each year, based on a different curatorial emphasis, the collection will be examined and new constellations of the holdings and the new acquisitions will be presented. The Walther Collection will present in the inaugural exhibition a series of four projects in the nine galleries of its three buildings under the curatorial direction of Okwui Enwezor. It will integrate the work of three generations of African artists and photographers and a selection of the work of classical German photographers: Seydou Keïta (Mali), Malick Sidibé (Mali), J.D. 'Okhai Ojeikere (Nigeria), Rotimi Fani-Kayode (Nigeria), Santu Mofokeng (South Africa), as well as August Sander and Bernd and Hilla Becher (Germany). The exhibition series will center on issues of portraiture, identity, body, sexuality and performance. In total 230 works of 31 artists from 13 nations, among them South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia, Mali, Benin, Cameroon and Senegal, are presented. This comprehensive catalogue contains full-page reproductions of all works on display. It includes contributions by Okwui Enwezor, Virginia Heckert, Kobena Mercer, Chika Okeke-Agulu, Gabriele Conrath-Scholl and Deborah Willis as well as a conversation between William Hartshorn and Artur Walther.

Over the past 20 years Christopher Morris has concentrated the greater part of his work on war correspondence, documenting more than 18 foreign conflicts, including the U.S. invasion of Panama, the Persian Gulf War, the drug war in Columbia, and the wars in Afghanistan, Chechnya and Yugoslavia. For the last four years he has been home, photographing the relative calm of the domestic side of George W. Bush's presidency, on assignment for Time. Morris describes this collection of his Bush-era work as his personal journey into a Republican America. "Hopefully," Morris says, "you will see what I saw and feel what I felt--a nation that has wrapped its eyes so tightly in red, white and blue that it has gone blind. This is My America." Morris, a founding member of the photojournalist agency VII, based in Paris, has received numerous awards for his work, including the Robert Capa Gold Medal, several World Press Photo awards, and the Infinity Photojournalist award from the International Center of Photography. This is his first monograph.