Miscellaneous Books
All books are obtainable either through my shop, some are obtainable directly at the printer’s online bookstore.
American Photographs
Walker Evans’ American Photographs is considered by many to be one of the most important photobooks ever published. Made on the occasion of his one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1938 – the first MoMA exhibition devoted to the work of a single photographer – the book went on to influence generations of photographers.
This remake of a classic explores the possibility that in the past decades, almost everything has been photographed and that in the photographic universe anything we wish to see is readily available to us. Drawing on the constantly growing resource of online photo hosting sites and using the original captions of Evans’ celebrated photographs as search terms, this new edition of American Photographs offers a modern equivalent of Evans’ masterpiece, compiled entirely of found photographs and created with the help of a search engine instead of a camera.
18 x 18 cm, 110 pages, 50 photographs, softcover 28 € – preview
Around the World in Eighty Minutes
A World Expo may have made sense a century ago but since the invention of television the idea seems obsolete. In Shanghai, China, the basic premise is to wait in lines; incredibly long lines. Occasionally, a speaker system announces three hours waiting time for this pavilion, seven hours here, five hours there. Queuing for hours to visit something I never wanted to see is not my idea of fun. Yet here I am, with a group of students I’m obliged to accompany, watching our tour guide hand out hats to make sure we look as ridiculous as every other tour group. Fortunately, it isn’t long before I lose them but what do you do in a world exhibition filled with several hundred thousand Chinese? Over a cup of coffee I forge a plan: Around the World in Eighty Minutes.
The plan is to walk around the site without entering a single pavilion. In front of each pavilion, I take a self-portrait in the style of the modern tourist: camera at arm’s length with the attraction behind me. “I was there,” the picture says. So I don my hat and begin the journey, visiting about eighty countries and spending only a minute in each without even pausing to examine the pictures. I miss a country or two, but that’s to be expected when you travel in a rush.
20 x 13 cm, 178 pages, softcover 25 € – preview
Bilderbuch
What do Elizabeth Taylor, a bicycle seat, Carlos the Jackal, a lobster, Silvio Berlusconi and a toilet brush have in common? Nothing, except that they all ended up in my archive of scanned printed matter gathered from around the world over four decades. Removed from their original news context and presented without any comment, this apparent random, unrelated series of images turns out to be a miscellaneous reflection of popular obsessions, fears and fantasies.
The book was made on the occasion of the Bilderbuch exhibition at Zephyr, Mannheim.
Softcover, 23 x 16 centimeter, 120 pages, digital print, sewn, 24 €
Illustriertes Tierleben
Illustriertes Tierleben – Eine allgemeine Kunde des Tierreichs is a collection of images taken from a daily Berlin newspaper, all of which come from the animal related “human interest” articles that run in the “miscellaneous news” section of the paper. The pictures and relating stories illustrate the relationship between modern humans and fauna. The book includes a selection of 45 photographs, its title refers to Alfred Brehm’s famous Tierleben (Life of Animals), first published in 1863. Digitally printed in China in an edition of 100 copies.
21 x 14.8 cm, 48 pages, colour, softcover, stapled, 12 €
In Dialogue
This book is the result of an experimental process of non-verbal communication. Between November 2008 and January 2009, Marcelo Brodsky and me had a dialogue without any words, without any emphasis on a particular subject, without any pre-conceived ideas — a dialogue about nothing. The two of us took turns exchanging photographs by email, each one a direct response to the previous one, creating a continuous and meandering photographic ping-pong through the visual universe. Despite the lack of obvious subject matter the resulting sequence of photographs creates meaning. For the viewers it is an invitation to retrace the decisions made by two brains working in visual rather than verbal mode.
18 x 18 cm, 40 pages, 36 photographs, softcover 20 €, hardcover 28 € – preview
Joachim Schmid Is Martin Parr · Martin Parr Is Joachim Schmid
In September 2009 Martin Parr sent me his VIP pass to the Berlin Art Forum, that he had recently received and knew full well, he would be unable to attend. I saw this as an opportunity to visit the fair and take photos in the spirit of Martin Parr. I was to be Martin Parr for the 23rd September. For those that know anything about my work, this must be a surprise, as my career in the art world is based entirely on orchestrating other people’s photographs.
I then invited Martin to be Joachim Schmid, and he decided to trawl through the “Martin Parr, We Love You” group on Flickr. This was established a few years ago as a forum for photographers who had been seemingly influenced by his photographic language. So in the spirit of Joachim Schmid, Martin looked for the most “Parr-like” images. The resulting two sets of images are what you will find on the pages of Joachim Schmid is Martin Parr · Martin Parr is Joachim Schmid.
18 x 18 cm, 40 pages, 32 photographs, softcover 20 €, hardcover 28 € – preview
L.A. Women
In December 2010, Los Angeles Police Department released one hundred and eighty photographs that were found in the possession of a serial murder suspect. All of them are photographs of women. These women may or may not be residents of Los Angeles, they may or may not be prostitutes (as were the women in the investigation). They may or may not be murder victims. We don’t know. We don’t even know whether the arrested suspect took these photographs himself.
Without knowing where the photographs come from, most of them wouldn’t be worth a second glance; for you and me, that is. Of course this is different for friends and family of the women depicted. And it is certainly different for the person who took these pictures. From the testimony of one surviving victim we know that the woman was first photographed, then shot, and then raped before she was dumped in the street.
Most of the women were clearly alive when the photos were taken; some are smiling, some are posing. Some appear to be asleep, they may or may not be sleeping the big sleep. Some of them may have been shot soon after or just before the photographer shot the picture. We don’t know.
It is actually the fact that we don’t know anything – apart from the context where these photographs come from – that makes them so eerie. We want to know more but the pictures don’t tell us. We look at them and they look at us. That’s all there is.
18 x 18 cm, 154 pages, uncoated paper, hardcover 60 € – preview
L.A. Women received an honorable mention in the 2011 Photography Book Now competition.
O Campo
O Campo, or in its translation The Field, is a photographic compilation of football fields in Brazilian cities. The images were taken via satellite and they show the rather oddly shaped football pitches that seem to be built wherever possible – the desire for playing the game has clearly surpassed and ignored the limitations of natural topography and FIFA’s laws of the game. According to the official rules and regulations (which are included in the book as an epilogue) you would not be allowed to play football on any of these fields. However, the careers of some of the world’s best football players began on these very same fields despite their askew angles, odd proportions, mis-shapen border lines and pitch markings. Studying the architectural contexts of these fields we also get an idea about the social context where these players come from.
20 x 25 cm, 40 pages, softcover 30 €, hardcover 38 € – preview
O Campo received an honorable mention in the 2010 Photography Book Now competition.
Seventy-Five Are Better Than Thirty-Two
Millions of tourists travel to New York City every year. Many of them visit the Museum of Modern Art. Many of them take photographs inside the museum. Many of them show Andy Warhol‘s thirty-two pictures of Campbell‘s soup cans. Thousands of these snapshots are to be found on photo sharing sites. Seventy-five of them are collected in this book – works of art in the age of digital photography.
Nearly forty years after Warhol made his Mona Lisa paraphrase Thirty Are Better Than One he might well agree today that seventy-five are better than thirty-two.
18 x 18 cm, 160 pages, softcover 30 € – preview
Souvenirs
Thirty-two photographs of spoons that I collected over twenty-five years of travelling.
9.5 x 13 cm, 40 pages, softcover, 6 €
The Coach House / An Inventory
I have been living with Marshall McLuhan’s books for more than thirty years, so when I was in Toronto, in the spring of 2010, a visit to McLuhan’s institute was inevitable. McLuhan was the man who anticipated the internet four decades in advance of its inception, the man “who perpetually stated his loathing and contempt for most of the electronic age, yet a man who perversely and ironically is considered its biggest cheerleader.” Mulling over the impact of McLuhan’s writing as well as the impact of the internet on the perception of his ideas, I decided to test the internet and specifically the search engine, that mnemonic slot machine that the modern world relies upon, using McLuhan as an example. The Coach House, McLuhan’s professional home, a tiny building behind a grand old mansion on the university’s campus, served as my object of investigation. On the anniversary of McLuhan’s death, December 31st, 2010 a Google image search for “Coach House” Toronto produced “about 12,100 results.” The search engine presented a selection of 908 “relevant” photographs. All are now printed in this publication. Five of these images relate in some way to the coach house in question; two of them show the house itself and a further two show Marshall McLuhan at this coach house.
16 x 22 cm, 96 pages, full colour offset print, sewn, 20 €
Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, Thirtyfour Parking Lots, Nine Swimming Pools, A Few Palm Trees, No Small Fires
Between 1963 and 1972, Edward Ruscha published fifteen artist’s books, his first being Twentysix Gasoline Stations; a book which is considered to be the first modern artist’s book, and has become the iconic precursor and a major influence on the emerging international artists’ books culture. Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, Thirtyfour Parking Lots, Nine Swimming Pools, A Few Palm Trees, No Small Fires is a modern remake of some of Ruscha’s famous books, all grouped in one volume. Unlike the original books it relates to, this work was made entirely at my Berlin studio. I didn’t visit Los Angeles to make the book and I didn’t use a camera either. The camera is out there.
18 x 18 cm, 198 pages, softcover 38 €, hardcover 48 € – preview
Vierzig Jahre
I have been collecting photographs for forty years. Some ended up in my works, others were discarded, and the rest I preserved in my collection despite not knowing what to do with them. The earliest of these survivors is a series of nineteen portraits reproduced in this book – portraits that have endured four continuous decades of sifting, disposal and preservation. There must be a reason for this.
20 x 13 cm, 40 pages, softcover 8 € – preview
