Search results for ""Steidl Publishers""

In 1997 I had what I refer to as my oil epiphany. It occurred to me that the vast, human-altered landscapes that I pursued and photographed for over twenty years were only made possible by the discovery of oil and the mechanical advantage of the internal combustion engine. It was then that I began the oil project. Over the next ten years I researched and photographed the largest oil fields I could find. I went on to make images of refineries, freeway interchanges, automobile plants and the scrap industry that results from the recycling of cars. Then I began to look at the culture of oil, the motor culture, where masses of people congregate around vehicles, with vehicle events as the main attraction. These images can be seen as notations by one artist contemplating the world as it is made possible through this vital energy resource and the cumulative effects of industrial evolution. Edward Burtynsky

Read more less

This is the new and revised edition of Arnold Odermatt’s acclaimed Off Duty, first published in 2010. Does any family not have family photos? Every other picture taken is a family photograph and most are glanced at quickly and just as quickly wiped from memory. In this sea of sameness, Arnold Odermatt’s family photos bear his signature style, standing out for their clarity and order and the detached demeanor of his subjects. Arnold Odermatt, police officer and photographer, achieved fame with his photographic journal of car accidents, Karambolage. His last book, On Duty, documented the small police corps with which he worked for many years, effectively advertising their skills and services. In this book, Off Duty, he shows life after the officer has parked his cruiser in the garage, turned off the scanner and hung his uniform in the closet. Showered and clad in fresh shirts and clean blouses, the photographer’s spouse, son and daughter wait in the living room or garden for their close-ups. Sometimes they wait patiently and at other times they are annoyed – not very different from the reactions of colleagues on duty, who also learned that a good photograph takes time. Odermatt created an impressive document of life within a small village, where the police officer offduty was not exactly private but civilian.

Read more less

Writing from New York in March 1949, Robert Frank sent home to his mother in Switzerland a birthday gift of a book maquette of a series of photographs he had made during a visit to Peru. Frank made an identical book for himself and one of each of these two dummies now resides in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and National Gallery of Art, Washington. A few of these images are well-known in Frank’s oeuvre but previously the entire series had only ever been seen by a small number of people. This book presents for the first time the complete sequence of images, based on the original book Frank had conceived and realised under his direction. Peru is a work of major historical significance in both the artist’s history and the history of photography.

Read more less

This book is a reproduction of an artwork, bearing the same title, by Santu Mofokeng. The work, which is as much a research project as it is a work of art, is comprised of private photographs collected, scanned, and retouched over a number of years by the artist. Each of the original images were commissioned by urban black working and middle-class families in South Africa between 1890 and 1950, a time when the government was entrenching its infamous policies towards those designated as “natives.” Painterly in style, the images evoke the artifices of Victorian photography and reveal something about how the people captured within the frame imagined themselves, asking meditative questions on the meaning of African imagery: “Who were these people?,” “What were their aspirations?,” “Are these images evidence of mental colonization or did they serve to challenge prevailing images of ‘The African’ in the western world?” In this work Mofokeng thus analyses the sensibilities, aspirations and self-image of the urban black population in South Africa and its desire for representation and social recognition in times of colonial rule and suppression. This book contains the complete sequence of slides with reproduced photographs and Mofokeng’s own texts. The Black Photo Album / Look at Me: 1890-1950 also features selections from Mofokeng’s field notes and the original, unretouched photographs, published for the first time.

Read more less