JEANNE MANDELLO

Views of the World
Perspectives of an Exiled German Jewish Photographer 1928–1996

James Bauer & Sandra Nagel (Eds.)

A rich photographic history is being unearthed in a series of exhibitions on the history of women photographers working during the Weimar Republic. Views of the World, a wonderful mix of historical documentation and images, features the life of German-Jewish photographer Jeanne Mandello (1907–2011). Trained in 1920’s Berlin, Mandello emigrated to Paris in the 1930s, making France her home until the Nazi takeover when she found refuge in Brazil, before returning to Europe in the late 1950s. Recognized as a modernist and experimental photo-based artist, her work weaves a fascinating history that takes one through the Bauhaus and into urban landscapes of South American and post WWII Europe. The catalog accompanies a two-person exhibition held at the Das Verborgenes Museum, Berlin (Sept. 2016 – Feb. 2017). This compact document, curated by noted photo historian and curator Uta Eskildsen, places Mandello among the female pioneers of 20th-century photography.

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PETER MARTENS

American Testimony

The late Dutch photographer Peter Martens found life in the United States to be as ruthless and difficult for many as it is in developing and war-torn countries. Known as a versatile street photographer, Martens was inspired by the American tradition of engaged documentary photography as a form of advocacy for the disadvantaged and outcast. From his first trip to the U.S. in the early 1970s, it became his favorite place to work: he found there the clearest illustration the confusion and lovelessness that he regarded as characteristic of modern Western society. This deeply personal journey through the streets of New York is one of two mock-ups that Martens had left edited but unpublished before his death in 1992. Now, for the first time this poignant body of work has been published in this raw but elegant tribute to Martens’s vision.

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PETER MARTENS

Few Loving Voices

In Peter Martens’ classic grainy photographs from the 1970s and 80s, Bogotá, Bangkok, Calcutta, Hong Kong and Ouagadougou are revealed as sites of global injustice. The central figure in Marten’s visual universe is that of the human form prostrate among his fellow man—praying, crippled, deformed, begging, ecstatic, morally broken or even lifeless. The flanking figures of authority—uniformed guards, military and religious leaders—represent guidance and oppression, dominance and support. This book, assembled by the artist before his death in 1992, has been held unpublished in the archives of the Nederlands Fotomuseum for the last twenty years. It features the best of this under-recognized sociodocu- mentary photographer’s creative oeuvre—photojournalism as a testimony of the downtrodden.

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TAIJI MATSUE

Surficial Survey

Yoko Mori (Ed.)

Japanese photographer Taji Matsue works to record the earth’s surface— both the natural and the manmade—with the dispassionate eye of a geographer, his trained profession. Inspired by American historical traditions from 19th century landscape photography of Carleton Watkins to the New Topography of Lewis Baltz, Matsue has become known for his unique aerial photographs of the urban landscape: Chicago from the Sears Tower, for example. Matsue’s large- scalephotographs consistently and consciously eschew depth in order to more graphically record the image. Also featured are Matsue’s video works and “moving photographs” that are first viewed as still images but, when observed over time, begin to subtly change. This beautifully constructed book was recently included in Martin Parr and Gerry Badger’s, The  Photobook:  A  History,  Part  1

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JEAN-PIERRE MAURER & ROBERT MÜLLER

Morgan Is Sad Today

The photo series by Jean-Pierre Maurer and Robert Müller captured the zeitgeist of 1960s Mod London. Exhibited only once—in the Kunstgewerbemuseum Zürich, in 1968, without any commentary other than a text by Ettore Sottsass— the series has now been republished. The title, Morgan Is Sad Today, comes from a song from the movie Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment (1966), which marked the introduction of the Free Cinema and a new form of movie making. The featured full-bleed, grainy black-and-white images preserve the feel of the myth-obsessed London of the 1960s, when Zürich Beat bands still posed for record covers wearing suits with skinny ties and leather ankle boots. Sottsass’s text hews close to what the time period embodied without glorification or denigration, and with a subtle sense of amusement. A time capsule of an era when music, fashion and the arts were being redefined by a young generation desperate to create a reality all their own.

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CHRISTOPHER MAVRIC

Wildfremd: Street Portraits from Graz & Vienna

Following in the footsteps of the great street photographers Brassaï, Lisette Model and Diane Arbus, among many others, young Vienna-based photographer Christopher Mavric gathers a selection of portraits taken on the streets of Vienna and Graz. His first book, Wildfremd features passersby, dwellers and denizens in their respective, distinct environments, waiting, lingering or stranded on a bench—each in their own habitus, some wholly contemporary and some entirely of yesteryear—captured in black and white and color. “Photographs are always more authentic when people don’t have time to think about how they look. Many of these captured situations seem absurd, and the people in it peculiar. But they’re not. It is all workaday, and the people are quite ordinary—they’re the people we encounter every day… .”

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ME MYSELF & THEM

Peter Bogner (Ed.)

There is nothing more intriguing than the artist’s self-portrait. How do artists see themselves, and in what context do they allow the viewer to enter into their very personal worlds? A thought-provoking exhibition catalog, curated by Brigitte Konyen, not only combines the work of 23 contemporary Austrian artists but also features statements and essays by each. The only restriction was that the artists had to be working in some type of photographic or film medium. Me Myself & Them creates a lively approach to the definition, importance and meaning of exploring the self through photography, with the artists’ statements offering a rare look into their motives of dealing with issues such as identity and self-representation. Featuring artists Sissi Farassat, G.R.A.M., Matthias Herrmann, Leo Kandl and many more. Essays by Brigitte Konyen, Manisha Jothady, Timm Starl and Angela Schwank.

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ELFRIEDE MEJCHAR

Road Trip

Elfriede Mejchar, the grand dame of Austrian photography (b. 1924), helped write the history of Austrian photography with her series of photo-documentary studies on the outskirts of Vienna in the 1960s. As a professional photographer for the Austrian Federal Office for the Protection of Monuments she helped capture for posterity many of the country’s art treasures in various regions of Austria. At the same time, i.e., roughly between 1960 and 1990, she compiled a collection of landscape photographs from the roadside (collected during her travels through Austria) which feature wild sculptures in the form of electricity pylons, scarecrows, car wrecks, and the dilapidated façades of houses. Mejchar has once again embarked on a journey, this time through her personal archive—which has been re-examined and shaped here into an impressive and visually stunning epic. This hardcover volume also includes text by Alexandra Schantl.

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MARILYN MINTER

A brief exhibition catalog for the controversial Marilyn Minter, who, since her retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 2005, is considered a major protagonist in the American art scene. Represented in key collections such as MoMA, LA MOCA and the Whitney, Minter has attracted wide attention with work such as her virtuoso spectacles of erotically charged sensuality: in her paintings, photographs and video works, high heels, pearls, sweat, and skin are rendered in larger-than-life compositions. The catalog encompasses nearly 40 works, beginning with Minter’s early photographs which portray her drug-addicted mother, and including the video “100 Food Porn Commercials,” and the Food Porn paintings. Other works were created after 2000, right up to the large-format works Glisterine and Chesire from 2011.

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MANABU MIYAZAKI

The Pencil of Nature

Masashi Kohara (Ed.)

A must-have for all lovers of classic nature photography. Just as French scientist Étienne-Jules Marey first invented a photographic gun to shoot images of flying birds in rapid sequence, so too have many other photographers drawn analogies between hunting and shooting a camera. The title takes its name from a publication by the British photography pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877). In the original Pencil of Nature, widely considered the first photo book, Talbot referred to photography as a way of taking portraits that are self-“drawn” in light. For Manabu Miyazaki, known in his native Japan as “the photojournalist of the natural world,” images of uncannily humanistic animals act as mirrors of a contemporary society grown distant from nature.

In Miyazaki’s case, however, it is the animals themselves who do the shooting. Unmanned cameras, equipped with infrared sensors, shine a spotlight on wild animals hidden by the veil of the forest—when animals trip a sensor, they trigger the camera lens, resulting in breathtaking, unstaged shots. Miyazaki’s unusual photographic equipment, documented in a fascinating photographic index, is an assemblage of various everyday items and parts—what Claude Lévi-Strauss called a “bricolage.” Examples include a waterproof strobe encased in PVC piping, a camera with a homemade electrical coil to prevent the fogging of the lens, and a waterproof cover for an infrared sensor made from a Tupperware container.

This publication accompanies the Izu Photo Museum’s remarkable 40-year retrospective of Miyazaki’s work. The book encompasses the artist’s major series, beginning with Animal Trails and including Eagles and Hawks, Ural Owls, Death in Nature, Animal Apocalypse and Persimmon Tree. With an introduction and artist interview by essayist Masashi Kohara.

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