Böcker utgivna av Steidl Publishers

Few events have become as iconic as Gery Keszler's annual Life Ball-for all not to forget that AIDS is still present. From Bill Clinton to Whoopi Goldberg, from Naomi Campbell to Elton John, the worlds of politics and fashion unite at amfAR's (the American Foundation for AIDS Research) gala in Vienna, designed each year by a different artist and now one of the most coveted events in Europe. The spectacle invariably turns into an all-night party with several thousand donors dressed in the most stunning and outrageous costumes. This book is Michel Comte's portrait of the glamour and grit of the Life Ball. Comte remembers: "My first journey started in New York. We all boarded a large chartered Airbus. Wherever I looked, there was somebody I knew, had read about or was interested in meeting. The experience onboard reminded me of a sixties rock-'n'-roll charter. People were frolicking through the aisles with glasses of champagne. In Vienna my assistants and I started working early afternoon before the legendary event began. Everyone was creating something special; chaos later turned into the most surreal experience. From the dazzling black-tie dinner to the fashion show, the performances and the late-night party, it all seemed like a crazy mid-summer night's dream. Here is our story."

In the summer of 1955 a relatively naive and uninformed John Cohen crossed the straits of Gibraltar. He arrived in Tangier with a handwritten note in cursive Arabic; the man who had composed it in New York had told him to "keep this paper far from your passport." Cohen had no idea why or indeed what the note said; it was not addressed to a specific person. He was simply instructed to look for a certain man when he arrived, who would then send him to "the others." Cohen's otherwise straightforward trip to make photographs in Morocco thus began with a sense of intrigue and perhaps risk.This was Cohen's first journey outside America to see the world. In his words: "The camera led my way to a distant culture, along with the desire to represent what I could see and sense there, and not be distracted by chronology or thought. My photographs were intended to be a sensual response to light and to the people who inhabited these spaces. These Morocco photos were ... an indication of what was to come."

Jeff Brouws has spent the last 30 years photographing various aspects of the American cultural landscape, often assembling typologies of common architectural forms in everyday environments. In Silent Monoliths he documents a variety of concrete coaling towers standing dormant in isolated brownfields or along active railroad lines. Built between 1907 and '56 these remnants of railroading's past were once used to dispense coal into steam locomotives. Seemingly impervious to the vicissitudes of time, decay or outright removal, these sculptural examples of former industrial brawn recall an earlier technological era most of us never witnessed. Because of this we glimpse-in real time-what Walker Evans once termed the "historical contemporary" of the modern world. Brouws practices an evidentiary form of photography, taking stand-alone portraits of coaling towers in homage to Hilla and Bernd Becher, as well as wider views revealing their broader contexts and landscapes. These two approaches reflect his dual interests in the New Topographics from the 1970s, as well as the compiling of typologies-a style of image making with historic roots traceable to the invention of photography itself as seen by Louis Daguerre's photo of his fossil collection and William Henry Fox Talbot's botanical photograms. Brouws' coaling towers emerge in dialogue with these nineteenth- and twentieth-century predecessors.

Conceived and edited by artist Slavica Perkovic, this book for Lewis Baltz presents letters she asked Baltz's friends to write to him without seeing the images he had secretly made while teaching in Venice. (Baltz had told all he had stopped photographing; he had in fact continued to do so, walking the empty Lido beach to the Grand Hotel des Bains, then closed for renovation.) The first book of new material by Baltz since his passing in 2014, For Lewis Baltz. 8 + 38 texts. 14 images is shaped by the continuing resonance of his oeuvre, his absence and the complex notion of self.

+ - 0 ("plus minus null") is a facsimile of a unique, handmade artist's book crafted by Volker Heinze in 1986. Its photos are the result of the young Heinze's decision to radically capture the world around him-be it cityscapes, rooms casts in warm artificial light, friends or simply objects sitting on a table. Working against the removed perspective of documentary photography, Heinze employs color not as a tool of realism but with experimental flair, and plays with focus and the inevitable "mistakes" of analogue film-all to create an original aesthetic born from the idiosyncrasies of the photographic medium.Heinze originally presented this body of work in two forms: as the large installation The Appearance of the Familiar, composed of individual photos pinned to the wall in the influential 1986 exhibition "Remnants of the Authentic" at Museum Folkwang in Essen. And as + - 0-with its experimental layout, leaves of tracing paper with hand-painted quotes such as "To search for reality is like diving for pearls in an aquarium", and a booklet with excerpts from Martin Kippenberger's 241 Bildtitel zum Ausleihen-now to be published for the first time since its inception more than 30 years ago.Limited edition of 750 books

This is an exacting facsimile-and first re-print overall-of Baron Adolph de Meyer's especially rare book Le Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, first published in 1914 in a handcrafted edition of 1,000. Today only six copies are known to exist, and this Steidl edition recreates a book from Karl Lagerfeld's personal collection.De Meyer's book is a privileged record of Vaslav Nijinsky's performance in the first ballet he choreographed: Le Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun) for Serge Diaghilev's famous Ballets Russes, set to a score by Claude Debussy and inspired by a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé. The ballet debuted in Paris in 1912 and shocked audiences and critics with its eroticism and unconventional choreography. De Meyer's 30 photos capture Nijinsky's animalistic performance as the faun surrounded by prancing nymphs, and are an important record of Léon Bakst's Symbolist sets and costumes.In this new edition Gerhard Steidl recreates the original, published by Editions Paul Iribe & Cie, with as much attention to detail as possible. Le Prélude is a hand-stitched brochure with a hand-folded dust jacket. Iribe's collotypes (photomechanical ink prints) on vellum paper are recreated in offset as quadratone prints tipped-in by hand onto Somerset Cotton paper, mould-made by St Cuthbert's Mill-all in a limited edition of 1,000 books.

The photographer Santu Mofokeng is one of the most vital artists to emerge from South Africa's late apartheid era. From his distinctive portrayals of township life to his acclaimed reassessment of the medium's documentary function, Mofokeng's intuitive and multilayered oeuvre continues to grow in relevance and reach. This illuminatingcollection of texts-with contributions by Rory Bester, Jean-François Chevrier, Joshua Chuang, Patricia Hayes, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, and others-provides an informed basis for engaging with Mofokeng's allusive body of work along with its related concerns. Published to accompany the photobook series Santu Mofokeng Stories, this essential, context-rich reference also features a comprehensive chronology and bibliography, interviews with David Goldblatt and Paul Weinberg, and previously unpublished writings by Mofokeng himself.

Measure of Emptiness is a meditation on the vast spaces of the Great Plains, the heartland of American agricultural productivity, and the centrality of the grain elevator to its social, cultural and symbolic life. In photographs made between 1972 and 1977 with the support of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment of Art, Frank Gohlke traveled back and forth through the central tier of states from his home in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to the Texas Panhandle, seeking an answer to the puzzle of the grain elevators' extraordinary power as architecture in a landscape whose primary dramas were in the sky."In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is," said Gertrude Stein. The Great Plains are characterized by this spaciousness, and by the presence of windowless, rumbling, enormous grain elevators, rising above the steeples of churches to announce the presence of the town and to explain, in great measure, the lives of and livelihoods of its inhabitants. Why did their builders choose that particular form to fulfill and practical necessity? And does the experience of great emptiness shape what people think, feel and do?

crossing sea presents the diverse practices of photography in Southeast Asia over the past decade. Along with documentary photography, photographic practices have expanded as part of the contemporary arts with new experimental and exploratory approaches ranging from re-contextualizing archives, site-specific installation, performance for the camera and collections of vernacular images. Interspersed between the works of 55 Southeast Asian photographers are research extracts, essays and interviews by historians, writers and curators who have been contributing to the understanding of photography from this region. Featured artists include Andia Yoeu Ali, Agan Harahap, Angki Purbandono, Ang Song Nian, Eiffel Chong, Dinh Q. Lê, Miti Ruangkritya, Piyatat Hemmatat, Wawi Navarroza, Jake Verzosa, Manit Sriwanchimpoom, Genevieve Chua, John Clang, Simryn Gill, Vincent Leong, Robert Zhao Renhui, Wong Hoy Cheong, Wawi Navarroza, Yee I-Lann and Yaya Sung.

In 2017 Rodney "Ferris Bueller" Bailey documented the contents of his old room in his parents' house in Queens, NY-full of ephemera collected while growing up in the late eighties and nineties, and largely untouched since. The result of this cathartic process of sorting and recording is this book: part visual autobiography, part time capsule. "My bedroom ... was my sanctuary because it contained all the things that defined me," recalls Bueller, and his mementos include magazines, posters, photos, collages, T-shirts, concert tickets, a Walkman. His extensive collection of sneakers dominates the book, triggers vivid personal memories (expressed in texts throughout the image sequence), and makes palpable a past where the X-Files, Nirvana and Anna Nicole Smith were still current news. Catharsis is both a chronicle of Bueller's sometimes difficult youth and a "record of life before the Internet or social media, before everyone knew what everyone else was doing all the time. [...] The only things that would connect you were clothes, sneakers and music."

Close presents 120 portraits of the world's most famous and influential people across the arts and entertainment industries, politics, business and sport-from Julia Roberts and Adele, to Frank Gehry and Marina Abramovic, Barack Obama, Julian Assange and Roger Federer. Between 2005 and 2018 Schoeller photographed his subjects, in his words "to create a level platform, where a viewer's existing notions of celebrity, values, and honesty are challenged." Schoeller realized this goal by subjecting his sitters to equal technical treatment: each portrait is a close-up of a face with the same camera angle and lighting. The expressions are consistently neutral, serious yet relaxed, in an attempt to tease out his subjects' differences and capture moments "that felt intimate, unposed." Schoeller's inspiration for Close was the water tower series of Bernd and Hilla Becher, his ambition to adapt their systematic approach to portraiture. Amidst Schoeller's famous subjects are also some unknown and unfamiliar ones, a means to comprehensively make his project an "informal anthropological study of the faces of our time."

Hans / Jean Arp's diverse visual oeuvre-primarily consisting of sculptures, reliefs, drawings, collages and prints-is world-renowned, yet his sketchbooks remain relatively unknown. Twenty Sketchbooks seeks to remedy this by reproducing as meticulous facsimiles 20 of Arp's small sketchbooks and spiral-bound pads, made between 1950 and 1966 and today held at the Fondazione Marguerite Arp-Hagenbach, located in Arp's last atelier in Locarno, Switzerland.This publication allows us for the first time to "hold" Arp's sketchbooks in our hands and thereby gain new insight into his working processes. Some sketches reveal themselves as drafts for fully realized artworks, yet the majority are exploratory works in themselves. Twenty Sketchbooks contains over 400 sketches as well as written notes by the artist. The 20 volumes, each produced at its original size, are presented in a handmade box following the design of the carton in which they were found in Arp's archive.Limited edition of 1,000 boxed sets Co-published with the Fondazione Marguerite Arp-Hagenbach, Locarno

Six Decades grants us a privileged look behind the normally closed door of Nobel Laureate Günter Grass' studio. For well over half a century Grass worked unceasingly as a writer, sculptor and graphic artist. While capturing the pulse of each decade of his long life in his novels, Grass also produced theatre pieces, poems, short stories, essays, etchings, lithographs, drawings and sculptures. He was furthermore politically active in his native Germany, set up several foundations, and was passionately dedicated to issues he saw of artistic, social and humanitarian importance.Combining Grass' writings with over 800 reproductions of his visual art, documents and photographs, Six Decades allows us to follow his working processes from book to book, from year to year. He shares with us moments of private happiness and crises through texts and images, many of which were not originally intended for publication, including preparatory sketches, draft manuscripts, book cover designs and work plans.

This publication brings together for the first time Anish Kapoor's architectural projects and ideas that span the last 40 years. These are concepts that continue to inform all areas of Kapoor's artistic output, many of which have been realized in works that confound the distinctions between art and architecture, pushing architecture into radical new territory.Kapoor's projects renegotiate the relationship not only between art and architecture but also between the very sense of space within ourselves and that of the external world. The forms he presents to us create spaces that blur the duality of subject and object, of interior and exterior. Monochrome fields of color, mirrored surfaces and fathomless voids all destabilize our place in the world. The more than 2,000 sketches, models, renderings and plans in this book show the journey of these forms to how they might exist in reality as well as the spaces they inhabit or create, both outside and within us.

This book presents a series of diptychs of Toshiya Watanabe's hometown of Namiemachi in Fukushima-the first photo showing the subject shortly after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, and the second photo of the same subject from the same viewpoint a few years later.Namiemachi was declared off-limits following the nuclear meltdown in Fukushima, yet when Watanabe did gain permission to return he photographed around his family and friends' homes, his former school route and areas where he played as a child. In some of the resulting diptychs only a short space of time seems to have passed between photos, with little changed besides the weather. In others, entire life phases seem to have come and gone-in one pair, a 7-Eleven first stands proudly before becoming a boarded-up relic; in another, a collapsed building is replaced by a vacant lot covered with foliage. "At first," Watanabe remembers, "I felt like time had stopped. But gradually the town fell into ruin, as if going against the current of history."

YKTO contains over 1,800 photographs by Tomoyuki Sagami of buildings and houses constructed in Japan soon after World War II. Presenting images taken between 2006 and 2017 in Yokohama, Kawasaki, Tokyo and other cities (hence the book's title), Sagami creates an archive for future generations of idiosyncratic architectural styles that are disappearing due to changing laws and lifestyles, and the ever-growing Japanese metropolis. Sagami adopted a systematic, impersonal method for his project: while employed to post advertising flyers in various neighborhoods, he photographed the particular area he found himself in, block by block, without any prior knowledge of its geography. The resulting images of homes, shops, streetscapes, gardens and alleys are eerily absent of people and free from any personal emotion or inclination on Sagami's part. YKTO is a timely topography of a rapidly vanishing form of urban existence in Japan.

Since the Great East Japan earthquake of 2011, Toru Komatsu has taken photos of trees in places that suffered damage from the earthquake and subsequent tsunami. Fifty of these images comprise A Distant Shore, which documents the eerily beautiful aftermath of the disaster. On his travels throughout Japan Komatsu was particularly fascinated by monumental rocky crags that seem like islands floating on the land. Mostly scattered with pine trees, the crags are landlocked but were once surrounded by the sea. Typically cordoned off by ceremonial ropes, they are today treated as holy areas embedded with the memory of their past-in Komatsu's words, "I imagine that an island floating on the land still hasn't forgotten the ocean that once surrounded it, even if the sea is now many miles away." Circular cutouts placed before each square photo allow the images in the book to be experienced both as cropped circles and the full square layouts, creating a sense of peering through a peephole or a telescope from the wrong end, and transforming the photos into a setting for a dramatic play while commenting on the limits of our fields of vision.

This book is Gentaro Ishizuka's documentation of the melancholy remnants of Alaska's gold rush of the late nineteenth century. The discovery of gold in the Alaskan wilderness attracted hoards of fossickers and industrialists, each hoping to strike it rich. Yet the subsequent reality was that the rush was unprofitable for most except the lucky (and ruthless) few; in time most diggers moved on to pursue new dreams and nature remained violated by their efforts. Ishizuka's photos of rusted shovels and machinery, dilapidated log huts dwarfed by the landscape, and eerie interiors and still lifes show the ghosts of human activity and how nature is slowly reclaiming her territory.

Selfies are today an inescapable part of our visual landscape and our self-expression, and the ultimate dream of many selfie-takers is to snap oneself with a celebrity. Takumi Hasegawa fulfills this dream in this book, which presents him posing with his personal legends of the international rich and famous. From the worlds of fashion (Anna Wintour, Grace Coddington, Riccardo Tisci) and architecture (Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry), to the arts (Jeff Koons, Yayoi Kusama, Thom Yorke) and luxury moguls Bernard Arnault and Pierre Bergé, Hasegawa's subjects speak for themselves. Yet the resonance of his project is more complex: in When Takumi Met the Legends of the World, designed as an intimate scrapbook or album of memories, Hasegawa's joy in each shot is palpable, but so is a sense of the seductive, false promise of fame.

42nd Street, 1979 contains Langdon Clay's 1979 photos of a quintessential strip of 42nd Street near New York's Times Square, showing its gritty neon charm before it became the more Disney/Las Vegas hub for theater concoctions that we know today. Clay recalls the drab and dusty mood in New York City at the end of the 1970s: the once-exciting political sea change wrought by the Vietnam War and the Haight Ashbury drug experiment had given way to a sense of apathy, intensified by the aftermath of an oil crisis and the lingering Cold War. The particular stretch of 42nd Street between 7th and 8th Avenues had now shifted from the glorious home of gilded movie palaces of the 1940s to the shadowy site of porn theaters which many saw as the area's ruin. Yet here real-estate moguls saw potential to transform this heart of Manhattan into a mecca of tourism, framed by skyscrapers and shaped by commerce and fast pleasures. "It was with this coming change written on every wall that I sought to record for posterity that famous block between 7th and 8th Avenues," says Clay, "My only regret is that I didn't do the south side of the street."

Shortly after William Henry Fox Talbot announced his invention of photography in 1839, the dedicated amateur botanist Anna Atkins, daughter of a prominent British scientist, began to experiment with the new medium. In 1843 she turned to her friend Sir John Herschel's recently discovered cyanotype process to publish her growing collection of native seaweeds-a daring way to introduce photography into book illustration. At regular intervals over the next decade, Atkins printed and issued these bracingly modern, deeply-hued photograms to her "botanical friends" in the form of hand-stitched fascicles of a book she entitled Photographs of British Algæ: Cyanotype Impressions.The first book to be illustrated by photography and the earliest sustained application of photography to science, British Algæ is a landmark in the histories of publishing and photography. Of the nearly two dozen substantially complete or partial copies known to exist, each is distinct in its appearance and often in its number and arrangement of plates. The set of 13 parts she gave to Sir John Herschel-now in the Spencer Collection of The New York Public Library-is especially important and was carefully preserved by generations of the Herschel family exactly as Sir John received it. This sumptuous facsimile edition reproduces the recto and verso of each plate, presenting the work as its creator intended: as bound volumes to lingered over, studied and admired, page by extraordinary page.Co-published with The New York Public Library

This book is the evocative four-year journey of Paul Drake and Helen File into one of the most secretive and heavily fortified borders in the world. For 37 years over 800 watchtowers monitored the surveillance along the Inner German Border; they were the first line of defense against the West and one of the most infamous sites of the Cold War. Continuous games of binocular warfare were carried out by both NATO and the Warsaw Pact across the 500m Schutzstreifen or, as it was known in the West, "The Death Strip."In the ten months between 9 November 1989, when the borders of the German Democratic Republic fell, and the unification of Germany in 1990, over 700 watchtowers were demolished along the Inner German Border. Through meticulous research and with assistance from guards stationed along the border and Berlin Wall, Drake and File have compiled a concise documentation on the watchtowers of the former border. Once an inaccessible and isolated area, the border is now the largest nature reserve in Germany. Drake and File illustrate these remnants of the Cold War in a compelling set of images showing the remaining 75 watchtowers in their current states.