Sidewalk Salon

1001 Street Chairs of Cairo

Manar Moursi & David Puig

Sidewalk Salon: 1001 Street Chairs of Cairo is an original portrait of Cairo seen from its sidewalks and its thousands of street chairs.

The book is composed of polaroid images which aim to bring to the fore the creative practices of street design and unplanned interventions in public space that give Cairo its distinctive character. If strictly speaking Sidewalk Salon is a photographic documentation of street chairs, in a larger sense it deals with the material and human dimensions of the city. A varied set of texts - interviews, fiction, poetry and essays - intend to complement the catalogue of photographs and bring the reader closer to the chair users and their perspectives of the city in flux.

The publication also includes 3 map inserts and posters offering a glimpse into Moursi and Puig’s journeys on foot through the city, in which they documented street chairs by indexing on maps the locations of the seats which they photographed.

Add to your order

KATHARINA SIEVERDING

1964–2008 in Austria

Soon after she began as a young artist documenting Joseph Beuys, Katharina Sieverding developed into a full-fledged member of the supremely influential community of Dusseldorf-based artists – including the Bechers and Sigmar Polka, among others – with her ground-breaking, monumental photo-collages. This beautifully produced monograph is an appraisal of Sieverding’s complete works to date, the first book ever to bring her work in well-deserved detail to American readers. Born in Czechoslovkia, Sieverding has long made huge, deeply political photo-based works that anticipated the direction taken by Americans like Barbara Kruger and Richard Price. Her work is edgy and evocative, with strong graphic qualities, historical references, and sly political commentary. Both as an artist and a teacher/mentor to others, her influence is unsurpassed among her peers. With excellent interpretive essays in English and German.

Add to your order

Otto Snoek

Why Not

The compelling and often hilarious work of Dutch photographer Otto Snoek explores the relationship between the promise and usually unsatisfying reality of urban life and mass culture, as evidenced during festivals, soccer games and parties throughout the city of Rotterdam. This large-format collection of color and black-and-white photos is brought together under an embossed hardcover binding. The images betray humanity’s vanities and compulsions, with strange compositions that catch people in unflattering expressions and moments. Snoek unerringly exposes the increasingly commercial character of urban life. University of Rotterdam philosopher Henk Oosterling includes an essay that riffs on high-tech connections versus public disconnection.

Add to your order

Jean-Marc Spaans

Traces of Light

Add to your order

HEIDI SPECKER

In Front Of

Ulrich Domröse (Ed.)

Photo-based German artist Heidi Specker examines the circumstances and conditions of the portrait in her newest photo-series, In front of—a suite of 68 black-and-white and color portraits of people and animals, close-ups of body parts, or hands holding postcards or artworks. Interspersed with photographs of details of an empty studio between takes, the images draw the viewer into a dreamy and pensive atmosphere. The clean design of the modest, well-edited catalog puts these intimate portraits front and center while creating a sense of mystery and anticipation that keeps the viewer’s interest on edge. Heir to the long history of German portraiture, especially that of the modernist photographers Renger- Patzsch and Otto Steinert, Specker creates an atmosphere that takes her portraits one step further to reveal the power structures and interdependencies between photographer and model during a sitting. With a preface by Thomas Kohler and a brief essay on the artist’s technique by Ulrich Domröse.

Add to your order

MARGHERITA SPILUTTINI

Spacious

Margherita Spiluttini is considered to be one of the top ten international architectural photographers today. She was prominently represented at the 1991, 1996 and 2004 Architectural Biennale in Venice exhibiting her photographs of private and public buildings by unknown as well as celebrated architects. Spacious is a comprehensive survey of her work for the past 25 years, revealing her ability as a photographer and artist.

Add to your order

MARGHERITA SPILUTT INI

Archive of Spaces

Margherita Spiluttini is one of Europe’s most renowned architectural photographers firmly anchored in an art context. Archive of Spaces, published in conjunction with her exhibition at the Landesgalerie Linz, focuses on the visual perception of architecture as a constructed space and place. Dovetailing commissioned works with freelance work since the early 1980s, Spiluttini has produced a body of work characterized by meticulous, clear-cut and unpretentious imagery and an approach to architectural and landscape motifs that considers man’s attempt to control landscape or the built environment. Rather than showcasing the buildings and structures with spectacular views, Spiluttini depicts them in the context of their everyday surroundings. Produced in cooperation with Die Photographische Sammlung / SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne. Texts by architectural historian Sigrid Hauser, curator Gabriele Hofer- Hagenauer, architect Otto Kapfinger, architectural historian Carsten Ruhl and curator and scholar Christiane Zintzen.

Add to your order

Ernst Spycher & Christoph Braendle

Metaphor Vietnam Present Memories

Add to your order

HELMUT STEINECKER

Tichá

Tichá (which means silence) is a border village in southern Bohemia, one wooded hillside away from where photographer Helmut Steinecker lives. In his simultaneously lush and restrained photographic essay Tichá, Steinecker conveys the aura of this formerly restricted zone along what was once the Iron Curtain and is now referred to as the Green Belt. He captures a sense of silent anticipation in his photographs of the village, the landscape and its ruins from almost half a century of a divided Europe, and captures the village—as the old bombedout buildings are removed one by one, beginning to settle into a new identity halfway between ruins and kitsch. Framed in a tactile green silk fabric cover Steinecker’s color images are both objectively concentrated and emotionally affecting. A narrative text by writer Thomas Ballhausen with recollections of the once ironclad threats opens up further dimensions in this eloquent photographic essay.

Add to your order

MAXIMILIAN STEJSKAL

Folklig Idrott

Marie-Isabel Vogel & Alain Rappaport (Eds.)

Maximilian Stejskal (1906–1991), an ethnologist and gymnastics teacher from Helsinki, carried out a study for his PhD thesis on “folk athletic” contests amongst Finland’s Swedish-speaking male rural population between 1929 and 1937, and then again in 1948. Each year, Stejskal set off on his green Italian bicycle with two bellows cameras and glass photographic plates in a rucksack across southeastern Finland and Finnish Estonia. He systematically collected images of fast-disappearing “folk athletics,” recording elderly farmers’ and craftsmen’s tales of the exercises and tests of strength and courage with which they proved their virility in their youth. Their sons, relatives and farmhands were asked to perform the exercises in front of Stejskal’s camera. This slender, oversized publication includes a selection of these bizarre and often humorous images, enlarged and reproduced as full bleeds with titles such as “Crawling away from your sins” and “Upend the apprentice,” making this a source book of strangely compelling performative imagery. With texts by Maximilian Stejskal, Marie-Isabel Vogel and Alain Rappaport in English and Swedish.

Add to your order