Message from the Exterior explores the ruins and remains of failed attempts to live in the desert’s harsh environments, depicting abandoned houses – small, often eccentric huts, both humorous and a little forlorn. Ruwedel examines the desert regions east of Los Angeles as a palimpsest of cultural and natural histories, presenting an inventory of a particular, and poignant, form of vernacular architecture; each structure might be read as a clue to the lives of anonymous individuals, and the impulse to create a home in the wilderness, however transitory. The first section, ‘Desert Houses’, comprises 68 desert structures, while the second section, ‘Dusk’, presents houses photographed after the sun had disappeared over the horizon, now rendered in subdued, dusky tones that suggest both present and absence, and the weight of isolation.

(MACK)

Paolo Ventura’s Short Stories are whimsical narratives told through pictures—tales of love, war, and family—where things magically appear or disappear, set in an imaginary past of World War II Italy. Much like in silent films, the drama unfolds with no words or captions. For these works, Ventura constructed life-sized sets, in which he situated himself and members of his family (casting his son, wife, and twin brother as actors), in stories that are at once charming and disquieting. While seemingly simple, Ventura’s vignettes come with larger implications: brothers who encounter each other by surprise on the battlefield, jugglers who appear from above, a man who packs himself into his suitcase, a small-town magician who accidentally makes his son disappear for real, and many others. Here, Ventura has built a world of realistic proportions and actors, in fantastical tales and against painted backdrops—challenging notions of what is real and what is make-believe. This book collects the entire series of Ventura’s Short Stories together for the first time, including three previously unpublished, and offers a glimpse into the artist’s extraordinaryimagination.

(Aperture)

With the Californian desert as background, “Happy Nothing” is a personal journey that delves into the lives of its inhabitants and its secrets. Here is where ex-convicts, war veterans, retirees and people that for some reason have decided to stay outside of the society live. In these towns there is no running water, the houses are in ruins, the streets unpaved, without street lighting, there are no supermarkets or entertainment infrastructures. But despite living in this conditions, they call it the Paradise.“

(WITTY KIWY BOOKS )

Looking for the Masters in Ricardo’s Golden Shoes is a collaboration between a photographer intrigued by the evolution of photography and her friend Ricardo, who became both her muse and her model. Begun in July 2013 at the Rencontres d’Arles Photography Festival as a joyful celebration of the photographers exhibited that year, it quickly developed into a deeper, more challenging project.

Balet became profoundly interested in what it is that gives a photograph its iconic status, particularly in today’s frenetic communications world in which vast flows of images are consumed. Fascinated by the way in which the internet has both decontextualized images and has diminished our ability to pay attention to what we view online, she began to closely investigate the images that have built the foundations of our photographic visual culture.

(Dewi Lewis)

(First edition, second printing)

“Right from the start, almost every appearance he made was catastrophic… Catastrophe is his means of operation, and his central instrument of governance.“
Adi Ophir

Violence, calamity and the absurdity of war are recorded extensively within The Archive of Modern Conflict, the largest photographic collection of its kind in the world. For their most recent work, Holy Bible, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin mined this archive with philosopher Adi Ophir’s central tenet in mind: that God reveals himself predominantly through catastrophe and that power structures within the Bible correlate with those within modern systems of governance.

The format of Broomberg and Chanarin’s illustrated Holy Bible mimics both the precise structure and the physical form of the King James Version. By allowing elements of the original text to guide their image selection, the artists explore themes of authorship, and the unspoken criteria used to determine acceptable evidence of conflict.

Inspired in part by the annotations and images Bertolt Brecht added to his own personal bible, Broomberg and Chanarin’s publication questions the clichés at play within the visual representation of conflict.

(MACK)

Norman Seeff wurde 1939 in Südafrika geboren. Nach seinem Medizinstudium Ende der 1960er-Jahre wanderte er in die USA aus. Dort schlug er sich zunächst eher erfolglos als Fotograf durch, wurde Freund von Patti Smith und Robert Mapplethorpe, fotografierte Andy Warhol und
stieg rasch zu einem Star der Fotografenszene auf. Schließlich wurde er in Los Angeles Artdirector von United Artists und dem Jazzlabel Blue Note. In seinen eindringlichen Porträtaufnahmen lichtete er Jonny Cash, Ray Charles, Miles Davis, die Rolling Stones, Steve Jobs, Frank Zappa oder Zubin Mehta ab – um nur einige der vielen Berühmtheiten zu nennen, die sich von ihm fotografieren ließen. Rock’n’Roll, Blues, Jazz oder New Wave: Seine Bilder leben von ihrer spontanen Lebendigkeit und schenken uns in der Rückschau einen tiefen Einblick in die Bild- und Musikkultur der 1960er- bis 1980er-Jahre: In dieser ersten großen Monografie erleben wir, wie Norman Seeff die Künstler und Künstlerinnen in privater Umgebung oder dem Studio aufnahm: offen, neugierig und mit ihrer ganzen Persönlichkeit.

In this new body of work,  Beyond Maps and Atlases, Bertien van Manen turns to Ireland. Van Manen says, ‘At first, working in Ireland I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. My husband had died. I dispensed with the people and reflected on the atmosphere. I was guided by a feeling and a search, a longing for some kind of meaning in a place of myths and legends. There was mystery and endlessness at the edge of a land beyond which is nothing but a vast expanse.’

Where can it be found again,
An elswhere world, beyond
Maps and atlases,
Where all is woven into
And of itself, like a nest
Of crosshatched grass blades?
Seamus Heaney

Van Manen rolled into photography almost by accident, taking pictures of her children with an old camera. As her work became more public she was soon drafted into the world of fashion photography. In 1977 she tired of the industry, and on discovering the documentary photography of Robert Frank and Josef Koudelka, van Manen began to explore the developing relationship between herself and her subjects, keeping a closeness and developing a personal, organic style of photography.

(MACK)

Ulrich Wüst ist ein kühler Beobachter seiner Zeit, der sich an gesellschaftlichen und politischen Gegensätzen reibt. Kleine Absurditäten des Alltags stehen in deutlichem Widerspruch zur kollektiven Betonung des öffentlichen Lebens als wichtigem Teil der sozialistischen Ideologie. Der Fotograf kompiliert in über längere Zeiträume entwickelten Bildserien die Abwesenheit einer Bürgergesellschaft in der DDR und erforscht so das kollektive Gefühl der Privatheit – bis hin zur inhaltlichen Leere und Sinnlosigkeit.
Seine Aufnahmen von künstlerischen und politischen Ereignissen, von Freunden und Familie sowie von Gegenständen des alltäglichen Lebens formulieren ein persönliches aber zugleich übergreifendes Dokument von Zeitgeschichte. Ulrich Wüsts Fotografie folgt einem klaren Bildprinzip – visuell ausformuliert, in den Kompositionen bis ins Detail durchdacht und eindeutig architektonisch beeinflusst. Das Spezifische an seinen Bildern ist die Dialektik zwischen vermeintlicher Objektivität und subjektiv-subversiver Detailgenauigkeit. Die Fotografien – intim in Inhalt und Größe – ordnet Ulrich Wüst in handgefertigten Leporellos für eine persönliche Nutzung an. Diese ungewöhnliche Form der Präsentation bezieht sich auf die topografischen Ansichtsalben des 19. Jahrhundert.

( Kehrer )

Go where we may, rest where we will, Eternal London haunts us still.
– Thomas Moore

Giacomo Brunelli has been commissioned by The Photographers Gallery, London to produce a body of work about the capital. The result is Eternal London which is to be exhibited at the gallery throughout March and April 2014. In the photographs Brunelli uses his distinct film-noir style to create a unique and evocative view of the city. The images are framed around the silhouettes of people and animals. Though many London landmarks feature including Tower Bridge, Trafalgar Square, St. Paul’s Cathedral and the statue of Winston Churchill depicted alongside Big Ben, they are presented in a surprising and very particular way.

Brunelli photographs during daily early morning walks, randomly choosing a person to follow before focusing his camera on them. Working discreetly, he often uses a removable viewfinder, to be able to photograph his subjects from waist height and other unusual angles, such as directly from behind or using extreme close-up. He protects their anonymity by obscuring their faces whilst exploiting light, shadow and contrast to imbue his images with a dramatic atmosphere and a deep sense of mystery.

Giacomo Brunelli’s first book, The Animals, was published by Dewi Lewis in 2008 to great critical acclaim and has long since been out of print. Brunelli has exhibited widely and has received several awards including the Sony World Photography Award, the Gran Prix Lodz, Poland, and the Magenta Foundation’s ‘Flash Forward 2009’. His work is held in many private and public collections including the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, The New Art Gallery Walsall, Uk Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts and Portland Art Museum, USA.

( Dewi Lewis)

Walker Evans was one of the most important and influential artists of the twentieth century, who produced a body of photographs that continues to shape our understanding of the modern era. Evans worked in every genre and format, in black and white and in color, but two passions were constant: literature and the printed page.

While his photographic books are among the most influential in the medium’s history, Evans’s more ephemeral pages remain largely unknown. From small avant-garde publications to mainstream titles such as Fortune, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, Architectural Forum and Life, he produced an innovative and independent counter-commentary on America, often setting his own assignments, editing, writing and designing his pages.

( Steidl)

»Meiner Erfahrung nach sind die beiden wesentlichsten Merkmale des Krieges Horror und Absurdität«, sagt Christoph Bangert, der deutsche Fotojournalist, der seit zehn Jahren Krisen für internationale Publikationen wie die New York Times dokumentiert. Nachdem er in seinem von den Medien gefeierten Buch War Porn (Kehrer 2014) den Umgang unserer Gesellschaft mit schrecklichen Bildern untersucht hat, setzt er sich nun in seinem neuen Werk hello camel mit der bitteren Absurdität des Krieges auseinander. Unserer klischeehaften Vorstellung des modernen Krieges als rasantes, dramatisches und heroisches Ereignis stellt er seine ruhigen und aufgeräumten, jedoch ebenso eigenartigen und fremden Bilder der Kriege in Afghanistan, Gaza, Darfur, Libanon und dem Irak entgegen. Gleichzeitig ist hello camel eine Dokumentation menschlichen Bestrebens, im Angesicht von Gewalt und Chaos so etwas wie Normalität zu schaffen.

Kehrer Verlag

“This is the closest we have to an Americans for our time… CAPOLAVORO!… already hailed critically as a classic… One of the best photo books in a lonnnnng time”

Known for his haunting portraits of solitary Americans in Sleeping by the Mississippi and Broken Manual, Alec Soth has recently turned his lens toward community life in the country. To aid in his search, Soth assumed the increasingly obsolescent role of community newspaper reporter. From 2012-2014, Soth traveled state by state while working on his self-published newspaper, The LBM Dispatch, as well as on assignment for the New York Times and others. From upstate New York to Silicon Valley, Soth attended hundreds of meetings, dances, festivals and communal gatherings in search of human interaction in an era of virtual social networks.
With Songbook, Soth has stripped these pictures of their news context in order to highlight the longing for connection at their root. Fragmentary, funny and sad, Songbook is a lyrical depiction of the tension between American individualism and the desire to be united.

( MACK )

[…] traditional American landscape photography has become a rather moribund photographic trope […] a sanctified, cliched reverence has become the norm. In Halpern’s California work, I see him removing himself from the comforts of the past and endeavoring to strike out afresh, rethinking his conditioning and antecedents to break free of this particular mould.
— Chris Killip

Beauty and its implication of promise is the metaphor that gives art its value. It helps us rediscover some of our best intuitions, the ones that encourage caring.
— Robert Adams

The early settlers dubbed California The Golden State, and The Land of Milk and Honey. Today there are the obvious ironies – sprawl, spaghetti junctions and skid row—but the place is not so easily distilled or visualized, either as a clichéd paradise or as its demise. There’s a strange kind of harmony when it’s all seen together—the sublime, the psychedelic, the self-destructive. Like all places, it’s unpredictable and contradictory, but to greater extremes. Cultures and histories coexist, the beautiful sits next to the ugly, the redemptive next to the despairing, and all under a strange and singular light, as transcendent as it is harsh.

The pictures in this book begin in the desert east of Los Angeles and move west through the city, ending at the Pacific. This general westward movement alludes to a thirst for water, as well as the original expansion of America, which was born in the East and which hungrily drove itself West until reaching the Pacific, thereby fulfilling its “manifest” destiny.

The people, places, and animals in the book did exist before Halpern’s camera, but he has sewn these photographs into a work of fiction or fantasy—a structure, sequence and edit which, like Los Angeles itself, teeters on the brink of collapsing under the weight of its own strangely-shaped mass.

Gregory Halpern was born in 1977 in Buffalo, New York. He has published a number of books, including A (2011), Omaha Sketchbook(2009) and East of the Sun, West of the Moon (2014), a collaboration with Ahndraya Parlato. He also edited, along with Jason Fulford, The Photographer’s Playbook: Over 250 Assignments and Ideas (2014). He holds a BA in History and Literature from Harvard University and an MFA from California College of the Arts. In 2014 he was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.

(MACK)

,,In the morning of the 6th of August 1945, one hour before the Enola Gay – the airplane which carried the atomic bomb – the officer Claude Eatherly flew over Hiroshima, because he had to check the weather conditions. In other cities, thousands of people got saved because it was raining that day.

Ken Graves’s idiosyncratic photographs capture the humour and pathos of America in the transitional era of the 1960s and 1970s. Looking in from the margins, Graves highlights the contradictions inherent in America and its culture moulded equally by idealism and decline. He simultaneously examines and dismantles those myths, and plays out the tension of the American dream against the backdrop of a gritty reality.

Graves uses photography as a tool to document everyday surrealism, the improbable episodes and happy accidents which unfold before the camera. Like Garry Winogrand, Graves is concerned with building a distinct photographic language – literary in tone, and always belied by a politics of vision. In searching out public displays of Americana, Graves focuses on the simultaneity of anticipation and collision, reaching beyond the hyperreal of the fairgrounds and the holiday occasions, revealing instead the wonder, humour and strangeness of the everyday.

Ken Graves was born in Oregon, US, in 1942. He is the coauthor of American Snapshots (Scrimshaw Press, 1971) with Mitchell Payne, and Ballroom with Eva Lipman (Milkweed Editions, 1989). His photographs appear in the collections of MoMA, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others.

(MACK)

“…I know it happened, and I have enough information about it to reconstruct the whole scene to my own satisfaction, but the person to whom it happened is somewhere so far off that I only know it’s me because I can see his face, and because I’m the one remembering.”John Darnielle, Wolf in White Van

In Lago, Ron Jude returns to the California desert of his early childhood as if a detective in search of clues to his own identity. In a book of 54 photographs made between 2011 and 2014, he attempts to reconcile the vagaries of memory (and the uncertainty of looking) with our need to make narrative sense of things. Using a desolate desert lake as a theatrical backdrop, Jude meanders through the arid landscape of his youth, making note of everything from venomous spiders to discarded pornography. If one considers these traces to be a coded language of some sort, Jude’s act of photographing and piecing them together becomes a form of cryptography – like a poetic archeology that, rather than attempting to arrive at something conclusive, looks for patterns and rhythms that create congruity out of the stuttering utterances of the visible world. According to Jude, “these harmonies, when we’re lucky enough to find them, are probably the closest we can get to discovering actual ‘meaning’ and grasping the potency of place.”

(MACK)

This is a fully revised and updated edition of Martin Parr’s highly successful book Autoportrait which was first published in 2000. Redesigned, it features a playable ‘labyrinth’ puzzle on the front cover and includes a large number of new images taken since its first publication. The book shows the remarkable shift from analogue to digital photography that has taken place over the period.

For the last thirty years, when Martin Parr has travelled on assignment throughout the world he has had his portrait taken – whether by a local studio photographer, a street photographer, or in a photo booth. The result is a true celebration of portrait taking – ranging from elaborate studio sets reminiscent of the heyday of the Victorian studio photographer, through to digitally manipulated images of Parr as Mr Universe, or images horrendously re-touched by a studio in their attempts to flatter him. Presented in chronological order, the photos follow Parr as he ages gently on his travels across continents. As with all Parr’s projects the book is not only hilarious but also comments on a world beyond the frame – not only in the apparent cultural differences between countries but also in its broader social and political references. It also reflects on identity and self, questioning the whole notion of the photographic portrait.

(Dewi Lewis)

Die 1941 geborene Fotografin mit dem Künstlernamen Sarah Moon wuchs in England und Frankreich auf. Nachdem sie einige Jahre in Paris als Model gearbeitet hatte, begann sie 1968 zu fotografieren. Auf ihre ersten Kampagnenbilder für Cacharel folgten unzählige Werbefotografien unter anderem für Dior, Chanel, Comme des Garçons und Christian Lacroix. Außerdem fotografierte Moon Modestrecken für Magazine, drehte Kurz- und Dokumentarfilme sowie den Spielfilm Mississipi One. Als erste Frau fotografierte Sarah Moon für den renommierten Pirelli- Kalender. Zu ihren jüngsten Arbeiten zählen Bilder und ein Kurzfilm für Dior homme. Ihre oft in unscharfem Schwarz-Weiß oder blassen Farben gehaltenen Bilder – Moon arbeitet oft mit Polaroid-Film – locken den Betrachter in ein Reich der Träume, Mythen und Ängste; sie spiegeln auch Paradiesisches: unbekannte Landschaften, verzauberte Städte. Ihre Mädchen- und Frauenporträts, die Modeaufnahmen insbesondere, wirken wie Blicke in die Zeitlosigkeit. Sarah Moons Arbeiten wurden in Museen und Galerien rund um die Welt gezeigt, darunter im Center of Photography, New York, im Maison européene de la photographie, Paris, dem Kyoto Museum of Contemporary Art und dem Londoner Royal College of Art.Die Werkschau im Haus der Photographie der Deichtorhallen Hamburg ist die bisher umfangreichste Ausstellung von Sarah Moon.

Das Buch hat einen festen Kartoneinband mit Leinenrücken und Prägung und wird von einem Beiheft mit Texten und Installationsansichten der Hamburger Ausstellung begleitet.

( KEHRER)