Search results for ""steidl publishers""

Distance and Desire – accompanying the same-titled exhibition in Neu-Ulm – is the first major publication to stage a dialogue between the ethnographic visions of late nineteenth and early-twentieth century African photography and engagements with this imagery by contemporary artists. Presenting an extraordinary range of portraits, albums, postcards, cartes de visite, and books from Southern Africa, as well as recent photography and video art from The Walther Collection, the catalogue includes original thematic essays by leading art historians, anthropologists, and cultural critics. Distance and Desire offers new perspectives on the African archive, reimagining its diverse histories and changing meanings. Distance and Desire investigates typical representations of African subjects, from scenes in nature and romanticized images of semi-nude models, to modern sitters posing in stylized studios, critically addressing the politics of colonialism and the complex issues of gender and identity. Among many diverse topics, the catalogue examines in-depth a series of cartes de visite from the Diamond Fields in Kimberley, the figure of the Zulu, the history of South Africa’s prominent studio photographers, A.M. Duggan-Cronin’s extensive ethnographic study The Bantu Tribes of South Africa, and the archive of elegant family portraits reproduced by the contemporary artist Santu Mofokeng in The Black Photo Album / Look at Me: 1890-1950. The catalogue also reveals how the heritage of African imagery figures in the practices of contemporary African and African American artists, whose compelling photography and video art reworks the archive through satire or appropriation.

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The soaring, rigid walls of the tenement blocks torn open by the bombing of World War II dominated the German streetscapes of the 1950s. Fire walls, originally integrated in the building and serving as fire shields, suddenly became visible and turned into outer walls. That is how the originally rather technical term got a new meaning: Firewalls as walls spared by the fire. Those long brick walls often adjoin to vast vacant lots once taken up by buildings that were never reerected after the war. Windows—sometimes bricked up again—cover the walls without any rational order, bearing witness to the troublesome moments of Germany’s history, just like smut, traces of bullets, shrapnel holes, the outlines of previous buildings, and provisional repairs. The remarkable housing boom following the fall of East Germany whitewashed most of the scars and overgrew the occasional graffiti and advertisements originally decorating those walls. A look behind them reveals—like a negative form of the same cast—the imprint of the building’s story.

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Robert Polidori is known for his large format photographs of habitats and rooms saturated with the traces of human intervention. In EYE and I, he turns the lens around to reveal the portraits of people he has encountered in his work of over thirty years photographing around the world, particularly in the Middle East and India. These instantaneous portraits of mutual recognition reveal the photographed subject and the photographer intersecting with each other in a fleeting gaze of mutual regard. Robert Polidori was born in Montreal in 1951 and lives in New York City. His work has been the subject of exhibitions in New York, London, Brazil, Montreal, among other places. He received the World Press Photo Award in 1997, the Alfred Eisenstaedt Award for Magazine Photography in 1999 and 2000, and Communication Arts awards in 2007 and 2008. In 2006, Polidori’s series of photographs of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina was exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His bestselling books Havana (2003), Zones of Exclusion—Pripyat and Chernobyl (2003), After the Flood (2006), Parcours Muséologique Revisité (2009) and Some Points in Between... Up Till Now (2010) are published by Steidl.

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A new book by Roni Horn, Her∂ubrei∂ at Home is a collection of photographs of the landscape of home in Iceland. Her∂ubrei∂, Iceland’s much-loved mountain, and Stéfan V. Jónsson, who painted the mountain throughout his life, are at the center of this work. His paintings of Her∂ubrei∂ have found their way into the homes of Icelanders around the country making it the cultural and geologic leitmotiv and mascot of the island. Roni Horn was born in New York where she continues to live and work. Recent solo exhibitions of her work include the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Fundacao Serralves, Porto; Fotomuseum Winterthur and Centre Pompidou, Paris. Her recent publications, Dictionary of Water, This is Me, This is You, Cabinet of, If on a Winter’s Night…, Her, Her, Her, & Her, Wonderwater (Alice Offshore), Index Cixous (Cix Pax), Doubt Box (Book IX of To Place) have all been published by Steidl.

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The premise of this book couldn’t be simpler: 130 photographs of Damien Hirst taken by David Bailey during a single shoot lasting eight minutes. Each pose is spontaneous and determined not by Bailey but by Hirst, who mocks the camera with his tongue poked out, mouth open wide and hands pulling at his cheeks. These photos are humble and unrehearsed, and so continue the sprit of Bailey’s Democracy in which Bailey photographed a cross-section of naked subjects, shunning issues of composition, lighting and digital manipulation. Renouncing text and even a title page, 8 Minutes resists formulaic over-designed coffee-table publications. Bailey’s roguish message: what you see is what you get. David Bailey, born in London in 1938, is one of the most successful photographers of his generation. By the 1960s his work, especially for Vogue, had already made him a cult figure. His numerous books include Trouble and Strife, Nudes, If We Shadows, The Lady Is a Tramp and David Bailey’s Rock ’n’ Roll Heroes. Steidl has published Birth of the Cool, Chasing Rainbows, Locations, Bailey’s Democracy, Havana, NY JS DB 62, Pictures That Mark Can Do and Is That So Kid.

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Juergen Teller has spent the last year carrying out a study of the "Reichsparteitagsgelande", the site of the Nurnberg Rallies, and a place he used to visit in his youth. The results are a series of images of stone and flora, photographed over the four seasons of a year, in seed, bloom, demise and finally dormant in the snow. It amounts to a study of mortality, the process of birth, growth and death. The book combines these works with self-portraits and family photographs through the same period, adding the perspective of the personal and quotidian life cycle.

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In a remote landscape near Bordeaux, Mona Kuhn owns a little house: simple, bare and even without electricity. Kuhn travels here each year to entertain family and friends as they drop by. Bordeaux Series contains portraits of these people dear to Kuhn made over the last four years, as well as landscape photographs. Kuhn photographs her subjects in the same room with a red fabric backdrop and a chair, so that the nudity of each sitter is the only indication of his or her idiosyncrasies. A sequel to Kuhn’s Native (2009), Bordeaux Series is a sensual exploration of the contemporary nude.

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After On the Mines, The Transported of KwaNdebele is the second of David Goldblatt’s books re-designed and expanded by the artist for Steidl Publishers. Dating originally from 1989, it talks about the workers of an apartheid tribal homeland for blacks, KwaNdebele, which has no industry, very few opportunities for jobs, and is a long way from the nearest industrial- commercial activity of white-controlled Pretoria. Workers from KwaNdebele catch buses in the very early morning, some as early as 2:45 am, in order to be at their workplaces in Pretoria by 7:00. At the end of the day they repeat the journey in the other direction, to get home at between 8 and 10 pm. Goldblatt takes us on their bone-jarring journeys through the night, which is a metaphor for their arduous struggle toward freedom itself. In photographs devoid of sentimentality and artifice, the grim determination of these people to survive and overcome emerges in almost heroic terms. Brenda Goldblatt, filmmaker and writer, interviewed some of the bus-riding workers who endured not only these journeys but a civil war precipitated by the apartheid government’s attempt to foist a kind of independence on KwaNdebele; a condition which would have made the workers foreigners in the land of their birth, South Africa, and thus deprived them of their limited right to work there. Interviews with contemporary (2012) bus-riders fill out the account. Phillip van Niekerk, former editor of the Mail & Guardian, provides an essay on KwaNdebele, its place in the logic of ‘grand apartheid’ and its half-life in post-apartheid South Africa. David Goldblatt is a definitive photographer of his generation, esteemed for his dispassionate depiction of life in South Africa over a period of more than fifty years. Born in Randfontein in 1930, Goldblatt worked in his father’s menswear business until 1963 when he took up photography full time. Goldblatt’s work concerns above all human values and is a unique document of life during and after apartheid. His photographs are held in major international collections, and his solo exhibitions include those at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1998, and the Fondation Henri Cartier- Bresson in Paris in 2011. In 1989 Goldblatt founded the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg to teach visual literacy and photography especially to those disadvantaged by apartheid.

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The Erasure Trilogy explores the anguish caused by the loss of memory—by forgetting, amnesia or suppression—and the resulting human desire to preserve memory, all seen through the prism of the Israeli-Palestinian confl ict. Memory Trace, the fi rst book in the trilogy, depicts the ruins caused by the Arab-Israeli War of 1948: portraits of those traumatized by violence, devastated landscapes and fragments of buildings. This visual poem suggests the irreparable loss of a lingering past that augurs a painful and diffi cult future. Tracing the ironic consequences of David Ben-Gurion’s dream of settling the Negev and making the “desert bloom,” the aerial photographs in Sheikh’s Desert Bloom reveal the myriad actions that have displaced and erased the Bedouins who have lived in the desert for generations. Here we see the extreme transformation of the landscape through erosion, mining, military training camps, the demolition of villages and afforestation. Through Sheikh’s lens the desert becomes both an archive of violence and a record of human attempts to erase it. Independence | Nakba consists of sixty-six diptychs — one for each year since 1948 — pairing people from both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian confl ict, and of gradually increasing age. The double portraits query the relations between Israelis and Palestinians before the founding of the Israeli State (each image depicts either someone who lived in Palestine before the founding of the Israeli State, or someone whose ancestors did). Desert Bloom Notes, the essential companion reader to Desert Bloom, explores the historical and contemporary clues along the shifting surface of the desert, and what lies hidden, sealed within Sheikh’s aerial landscapes of the Negev.

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Balls and Bulldust explores life and work among the cattlemen of the Northern Territory in Australia. This is not another cowboy story, but rather one about men and women working intensely hard while seeking some kind of solitude and sense of space in the midst of harsh conditions. For some, life in Australia’s outback is a life-long routine. The young are attracted by its romanticism, but are often shattered by its hardships: days are blistering hot, nights are cold; people sleep on “swags” on the ground for weeks; the food is drab; red dust is ever-present; and the men are bound to saddles twelve hours a day, mustering herds of cattle, branding and castrating young bulls. Ludwigson spent three months with these fearless cattlemen early in his career, and returned to his native Sweden with a comprehensive body of work that in time became Balls and Bulldust.

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