TORSTEN HATTENKERL

Twenty

Following Hattenkerl’s inventive first book, Autoportraits – people photographed in front of their cars – the Leipzig-based artist moves on to these touching portraits of women in which he captures, somehow, the presence of absence. In this hardcover catalog divided into 20 black-and-white detail enlargements and 20 long-shot color photos, viewers see women in the middle of their lives, focused on something, on someone, on the now; but in their thoughts perhaps already preoccupied with tomorrow, the day after, or even yesterday. In the gaze of each woman, Hattenkerl finds the expressive magic.

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Torsten Hattenkerl

Autoportraits

In a world of camera ubiquity and digital overload, Torsten Hattenkerl’s Autoportraits are a refreshing step forward for the European photographic tradition. A future of portraits. People in poses. Eschewing the exactitude of the current European affinity for large-format detail, Hattenkel’s portraits of car owners (with the object of their affection) have a warm familiarity while they propose a larger statement about a nation of one. These 37 color plates of people standing in front of their cars are as modern as they are retro, while Hattenkerl’s subjects are as brilliantly individual as they are terrifyingly uniform. The pictures ask “Who are we?” while answering “Who are we without our cars?” Seventy years after August Sander, the traffic of everyday life has moved off of the sidewalk and onto freeways, while the world of advertisements urges us to believe we’re nothing without our vehicle(s). Hattenkerl’s trained his sharp eye on the confluence of culture and cars while executing a brilliantly simple concept. If we are no one without our cars – who exactly are we?

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TORSTEN HATTENKERL

Allmineral

Eleven years ago Leipzig photographer Torsten Hattenkerl was given an unusual commission, to create a running document about the international mineral processing company Allmineral and their many global locations. The request was not only to record the plants and workers but to explore the towns and communities that supported the plants. From Africa to Europe to Asia the hardware remained the same but the landscape, people and flavor change drastically. The earth turned bright rust, landscapes turned urban or rural and factory offices were full of color or almost empty. Suprisingly the final product, sort of a 21st century annual report, is a deeply engaging portrait of a global corporation and the cultures it works within. The oversized volume begins in black and white but quickly moves on to color where the tempo of the book really is set. Media theorist David Sittler contributes an engaging essay to top off an excellent publication.

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HAUBITZ + ZOCHE

Facelift

Facelift is an art project that clearly gives expression to the ambivalence inherent in the medium of photography, an imaging technique that both creates scenarios and therefore illusions, and serves as a realistic, documentary method at the same time. Here, the fundamental choice of motif and the special photo detail point to an analytically artistic posture that reflects the theme of staging on a meta-level. The artificial construction of a deceptive appearance of real architecture in urban space is not presented in order to unmask, i.e. to deconstruct it, but rather to show it in terms of its own—definitely depictive—reality and to constitute it pictorially. Thus, the constructed photos by collaborative artists Sabine Haubitz and Stefanie Zouche are less commentary than imagistic information about the realness of diverse realities. Texts by Martin Hochleitner and Andreas Neumeister.

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Haubitz + Zoche

Sinai Hotels

Coral Beach, Sultan’s Palace, Magic Life Imperial, Fort Arabesque: the names of the hotels in this enchanting, full-color book promise luxury in a tropical paradise. But the reality found by German artist duo Sabine Haubitz and Stefanie Zoche is surprising and far more interesting. The photographers went to the Sinai Peninsula and documented the ruins of twenty-two hotels that are mere shells, abandoned mid-construction because of declining tourism, fears of terrorism or bad financing deals and subsidy scandals. The permanently deep-blue sky and noble cliffs of the desert contrast sharply with these concrete skeletons and empty swimming pools, with cheesy pseudo-medieval details and vast empty plazas. Some will make you think of Luxor’s Valley of the Kings, others a post-nuclear landscape. Haubitz + Zoche’s work owes a clear debt to Bernd and Hilla Becher’s photographs of industrial architecture as anonymous sculpture, but these two young artists have found their own deeply evocative subject.

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Kurt Hörbst

5070

Photographer and father-to-be Kurt Hörbst used his large-format camera to follow his wife at close range during her pregnancy. The reportage-like photographs taken in different locations seem strange given the slow pace of the medium, depicting in almost filmic sequence feelings such as loneliness, uncertainty and joyful anticipation, unrest and calm, curiosity, anxiety and pride. These very personal images—more like snapshots than posed portraits— conceal the slow, cumbersome process of photography with his large-format camera. The book, heavy in hand, references both the form of the camera and the size of the newborn baby itself. Hoerbst, a self-taught photographer and the founder of Austria’s Prager Fotoschule, has exhibited at Ars Electronica and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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BARBARA HEÉ

Waters

In Hinwil, southwest of Zürich, Swiss artist Barbara Heé (b. 1957) asked her close friends what their favorite place was in the nearby vicinity of Mount Bachtel. Without exception, they each recalled a different waterfall they had experienced—and identified as “theirs.” Heé tracked down the spots they had described and documented those falls for several months, after storms, floods and summer dry spells. The near magical time of twilight captivated her, and her photographs probe the mysterious phenomenon of twilight and the falls, portraying many small elements—a cold wind blowing, the phases of the moon and pouring rain—that capture nature’s mysterious whims. Out of the thousands of photographs that she took of the falls, none were cropped or edited, making the apparent fairies, gnomes and ghosts within the selected photographs in the pages of Waters an elemental, almost supernatural portrait of nature.

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HEIMAT PHOTOGRAPHY IN AUSTRIA

A Politicized Vision of Peasants and Skiers

Elizabeth Cronin

In Austria, what is generally referred to as Heimat (home or homeland) photography featured local sights: peasants, churchgoers, skiers and rural alpine landscapes. As these traditional, romanticized images came to be identified with the idea of a nation, they were used by the Standestaat of 1930s Austria to promote a national identity that grew into fascism. Author Elizabeth Cronin proposes “to consider the history of the genre as a whole” in this study that utilizes selections from the collections from the Albertina and Photoinstitut Bonartes to explore Heimat photography as a “crucial part of 1930s visual culture.” Her essays discuss the work of the genre’s principal exponents—Rudolf Koppitz, Peter Paul Atzwanger, Simon Moser, Stefan Kruckenhauser, Wilhelm Angerer, Hans Angerer, Hans W. Hannau and Adalbert Defner. This telling research into the power of imagery allows us to see how images can be easily manipulated and redefined depending on the political climate of a time and the forces in power.

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ROBERT HEINECKEN

Copywork

Robert Heinecken (1931–2006), who headed the photo program at UCLA for three decades, was one of America’s most influential contemporary, conceptual photographers. Heinecken rarely used a camera; his definition of photography encompassed everything related to the photo, as his interest was on the relation of methods and formalism—often in an irreverent and humorous way—to popular media. This comprehensive overview of Heinecken’s work from the 1960s through the 1990s features a complete reproduction of one of the artist’s best-known works: Are You Real series (1964–1968) in addition to his numerous forward-thinking bodies of work. Also includes extensive illustrations and writings that make this book indispensible to any art library, public or private.

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MATTHIAS HERMANN

A-Z

In remembrance of the time when photography involved chemistry, mechanical cameras and an element of mystery, Vienna-based Austrian photographer and artist Matthias Herrmann (b. 1963) returns to the photo studio with an eye toward traditional still life. But these are not the perfect traditional flower-in-a-vase still lives by Robert Mapplethorpe or Irving Penn. Instead, Herrmann strews his images with professional photography equipment—various color filters and film packaging along with alluring studio lighting—in short, anything that says non-digital and reflecting on photography’s 150-year history of technique. Along with over 100 color and black-and-white images, Herrmann folds in a little writing and art—entries from his own journals; a poem by fellow artist, collaborator and friend AA Bronson, past member of General Idea; plus four exquisite watercolor portraits by Spanish artist Sito Mújica. “This is about the vanishing of classical photography as we knew it, symbolized in its packaging, paraphernalia and fetishes,” as Matthias Herrmann writes in one of his journal entries.

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