ANNELIES OBERDANNER

Au Louvre, Arcadia revisited

Rainer Iglar & Michael Mauracher (Eds.)

Oberdanner’s magnificent photographic book is set in the Louvre and focuses on French art and the Enlightenment. The interiors and exteriors of this iconic museum, the employees, visitors and other people found there, and carefully selected exhibits are combined into scenes, which recreate an ideal, fictitious museum visit. The artist explores the art-historical context and highlights artistic qualities, using surprising close-ups and startling details. Almost as an aside, the captions contain encyclopedic facts about the history of the Louvre itself, the political circumstances of the day, and anecdotes on the personalities portrayed. Texts by Marta Smolin ́ska, Suzie Jungeun Lee.

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Annelies Oberdanner

Wien 2

Photographer Annelies Oberdanner’s second book of images of Vienna, this volume deepens her exploration of this magical city, delving even further into its color and atmosphere. At first glance, Oberdanner’s photos seem to be telling only part of the story, but they reveal a mystery as the viewer studies each image. Don’t expect picture-postcard scenes: she focuses on non-descript areas of town, looking behind the obvious facades at the surprising beauty of bare-branched trees mantled in snow, a potted plant abandoned on a sidewalk, high-rises sprouting from rubble. These unembellished, almost casual, scenes give a truer portrait of Vienna than any glossy guidebook.

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MARKUS OBERNDORFER

Foukauld – Dissapearance

Oberndorfer’s photographs of bunker installations built by the Nazi regime along the beaches of Cap Ferret near Bordeaux are eloquent witnesses of the disappearance, alteration and appropriation of relics from the Second World War. The color photographs in this meticulously designed and presented artist’s book were taken over a period of five years, their muted colours and cloudy contrast metaphors for the transience of analogue photographic material. The bunkers themselves recede inconspicuously into their landscape, marked by corrosion and water damage from the harsh climate. Today, they serve mainly as viewing platforms for surfers and tourists or ideal surfaces for graffiti. Texts by Inge Marszolek and Wolf Langewitz further consider the project and its homage to Michel Foucault’s work on history and memory. A poignant reminder of how history can be so quickly forgotten and absorbed into contemporary life.

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Eva Maria Ocherbauer

La Vie Et La Mort

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HANNS OTTE

Linz

In a tradition of photographic city portraits, Austrian photographer Hanns Otte exposes an idiosyncratic energy of image in his own particular approach to Linz, 2009’s Cultural Capital of Europe. Otte purposely avoid taking “typical” photographs of city’s industrial areas urban centers or shopping malls. Instead, he trains his lens on deserted situations – even highly frequented places such as railway stations, ports, and car parks remain largely anonymous. Rather than showing people, Otte shows the places where they interact. His project is part of a long tradition which has retraced a special topography of social life. Like Otte’s other photographic projects, this collection allows the viewer to see the details of the texture of urban life without interference.

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Hanns Otte

Grossglockner High Alpine Road

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PAINT & POLISH

Cultural Economy and Visual Culture from the West Side

Ryan Kenneth Blocker, Roula Seikaly & Patricia Reed

Paint & Polish finds visual inspiration in the microeconomic culture of Hispanic and African-American nail artists living in the Northwest Side of Chicago. Thriving on its own terms, their economy shares joy equally between client and producer. Jackie Blue, Loretta Gonzalez, Alexis, Yara Fernandez and Glynnus Alexander make up the core group of shop owners; the community of salons comprises mothers and daughters who have found long-term financial stability through craftsmanship and entrepreneurship. Included in this striking softcover volume are oral histories, conversations with the nail artists, and their portraits by Chicago based photographer Helen Maurene Cooper (b,1980). Inspired by these sources and interested in the intersection of race, class and feminism, Cooper’s rich color images and documentary style open a gateway to concerns shared by both photography and the nail art scene, such as gesture, self-expression and labor. Included are writings by Ryan Kenneth Blocker, Roula Seikaly and Patricia Reed.

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ROGER PALMER

Circulation

Glasgow-based artist Robert Palmer combines photography, wall-drawing, video, text and other media into powerful work commenting on representation of landscape, and its relationship to colonial and post-colonial discourse in places like South Africa and Australia. This second monograph for Palmer, which includes 84 gelatin-silver photographs made from 2001-2011, is divided into three sections – Latitude, Circulation and Longitude – made on different journeys. Palmer says his photos are not about describing the world, but “much more about bringing together different fragments of the world into one location, and that location is the photographic picture plane.” The book also includes an essay by Penelope Curtis, Director of Tate Britain, in which she recalls her experiences as Palmer’s travelling companion on a journey through South Africa.

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ROGER PALMER

Phosphorescence

Phosphorescence presents Glasgow-based photographer Roger Palmer’s most recent exploration of the tiny island of Nauru, 60 km south of the equator in the Pacific Ocean. Staying at one of only two hotels on the island, Palmer cycled the island’s roads exploring for 18 days. Composed of 47 color photographs, Palmer shares with the viewer a mostly ravaged landscape from an island that was once the world’s wealthiest welfare state. Phosphate deposits formed from seabird guano used for military bombing technology once financed its 10,000 inhabitants, but after the mining profits dissipated, the landscape was left stripped and devastated. Nauru, now a skeleton of its earlier self, receives financial assistance by operating refugee centers as part of Australia’s Pacific Solution of sending asylum seekers to detention facilities on Pacific island nations. A simple photo essay, with a limited text by Lyn Detabene wrapped around a complex story reflecting on colonial exploitation and human greed.

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Roger Palmer

Overseas

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