Bøger udgivet af Steidl Publishers

This book is a visual biography of the legendary Swiss aviation pioneer Alfred Comte (1895-1965). Combining historical photos and documents with texts by Comte's son (also Alfred) and grandson the photographer Michel Comte, the book is the first to comprehensively explore the aviator's extraordinary life and achievements. Alfred Comte grew up in the village of Delsberg in the Berner Jura, where his brother had a carpentry shop and Alfred became obsessed with building model airplanes. At the time, newspapers lauded the courageous first aviators-and Comte's dream was born. At the age of 17, he took a taxi from Gare du Nord to Villacoublay, where a plane crashed just yards from the still moving vehicle. Unmoved, Comte spent his savings on flying lessons on an early Morane machine; he was a fearless and calculated student and soon made his first solo flights as well as forays into aerobatics. Comte joined the Swiss Air Force at the outbreak of the First World War, during which Oskar Bider selected him to train 63 young pilots. Among them was the avid photographer Walter Mittelholzer, who later became Comte's first partner in the Comte Mittelholzer & Cie, which in time became Swissair.

In spring 2020 Edward Burtynsky found himself, like most of us, in lockdown due to the corona pandemic. At the time Burtynsky was in his beloved Grey County, Ontario-an area of wild beauty where he made his earliest photos-and he used his isolation there to reflect and create: with a new camera in hand he began recording nature in images which, in his words, are an "affirmation of the complexity, wonder and resilience of the natural order in all things."Over the past 40 years Burtynsky has compellingly explored the shocking variety and scale of industrialized landscapes, from oil refineries to quarries, from aquaculture to salt extraction. Yet in Natural Order he captures a moment when mankind has been temporarily stopped in its tracks, businesses suspended and economies disrupted-a moment for nature to breathe. These photos of trees and other flora show nature on the dynamic cusp between winter and spring, a time of melting snow, sprouting shoots and the promise of bounty: for Burtynsky, "an enduring order that remains intact regardless of our own human fate."

Survivors. Faces of Life after the Holocaust zeigt frontale, eindringliche Porträts von 75 Holocaust-Überlebenden in Israel. Entstanden sind diese Aufnahmen von Martin Schoeller in Zusammenarbeit mit dem World Holocaust Remembrance Center Yad Vashem mit Blick auf den 75. Jahrestag der Befreiung von Auschwitz am 27. Januar 2020. Diese überwältigenden Bilder halten vom Leben gezeichnete Gesichter jüdischer Frauen und Männer fest, die die Gräuel der Schoa mit angesehen, erduldet und überstanden haben. Sie vermitteln eine Ahnung vom Überlebenskampf und von der außergewöhnlichen körperlichen wie seelischen Zähigkeit dieser Menschen. Aus allernächster Nähe aufgenommen, erzählt uns jedes dieser Porträts von Martin Schoeller eine zugleich individuelle und kollektive Geschichte. Diese Augen betrachten uns, ihr Blick hält den unseren, die Falten dieser Gesichter bezeugen erlittene Qualen, aber auch den Triumph, überlebt und sich ein neues Leben aufgebaut zu haben. Survivors gibt Opfern der Schoa ein Gesicht - denjenigen, die überlebt haben, wie auch den vielen anderen, die nicht überlebt haben, und erlaubt uns als Betrachtern eine große Nähe zu diesen Menschen. Martin Schoellers Fotografien sind der Versuch, das Unbegreifliche für künftige Generationen zu bewahren.

Silent Cities presents Mat Hennek's portraits of some of the world's great cities-from New York, Los Angeles and London, to Tokyo, Munich and Abu Dhabi-yet all curiously lacking people. Conceived and constructed by man as vessels for human activity, these metropolises are transformed by Hennek into monuments of silence: empty, sometimes eerie sites for rituals of work and recreation that are yet to take place. Whether the shimmering windows of a Dallas office building, a lush Hong Kong garden of palms, blooms and fountains, the famed pastel terraced facades of Monaco, or rows of trolleys outside the concrete bulk of Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport, Hennek's pictures demonstrate a consistent formal rigor and recast familiar environments as new sources for focus and reflection.

"I wanted to suggest a conversation among these chairs, which have always seemed to me more like people than objects, with distinct personalities and genders even." With this sentiment in mind, Dayanita Singh went about photographing the many chairs living throughout the houses and public buildings designed by Geoffrey Bawa (1919-2003), whom Singh deems a "tropical modernist" and the most influential architect of the South Asian region. Less still lifes than portraits, Singh's images show how Bawa's spaces engage with the chairs, be they designed or collected by Bawa, or installed after his passing. Made to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of Bawa's birth, Bawa Chairs is constructed as an accordion-fold booklet in the manner of Singh's Chairs (2005), Sent a Letter (2007) and Museum Bhavan (2017), and intended to be unfolded and installed at will-transforming the book into an exhibition, and the reader into a curator.