Bøger udgivet af Steidl Publishers

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.