LEWIS BALTZ

The Politics of Bacteria, Docile Bodies, Ronde de Nuit

Lewis Baltz is an artist whose work has always sythesized broader cultural issues. Breaking from his past serial formats, this striking exhibition catalog tackles the job of documenting the artists monumnetal color installations created from 1991 through 1995. Baltz moves from the phsical landscape into the virtual and veiled landscape of contemporary global culture. Featured are all three trilogies, “Ronde de Nuit”, Docile Bodies” and The Politics of Bacteria” Essay by curator Cornelia H. Butler.

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TINA BARA

Lange Weile

A selection of 400 black-and-white photographs taken by Tina Bara between 1983 and 1989 in East Berlin, the old GDR and other travels comprises this artist’s book. Documentary photographs on a clandestine trip to Russia, forbidden scenes from the VEB Buna chemical plant, and observations of punks and other young rebels are interwoven with intense full-body and portrait photographs of her friends as well as a “photographic love story.” Combined with texts in the form of subtitles, this poi- gnant body of work captures a cinematic-like quality. Bara also shares her search for feminine identity within the subversive, melancholy rebellion against East Germany’s dictatorial system. Her photographs convey the collective need to break out of a monotonous system repressive of individuality and self-will that no longer exist. This visual diary captures a moment right before the collapse of an entire political and ideological system.

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ANDOR VON BARSY

Photographer in Rotterdam 1927-42

Though known mostly for his films, the German-Hungarian photographer Andor von Barsy’s (1899 – 1965) began in 1930 to take dynamic photos of the harbors of Rotterdam, aiming his camera at cranes and bridges to capture a dynamic image of modern steel construction. This groundbreaking exhibition catalog commemorates the first public showing ever of these vital, almost-abstract photos from the eye of an early modern artist. Von Barsy’s best-known movies (such as 1928’s De stad die nooit rust and 1930’s experimental Hoogstraat) are featured at the International Film Festival Rotterdam 2011. The impeccably printed catalog includes around 100 photographs, with an introduction by art historian and critic Frits Gierstberg, head of exhibitions at the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam.

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Delphine Bedel

All that Is Solid Melts into Air – Notes on Tourism

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CHARIF BENHELIMA

Harlem on My Mind – I was, I am

Living in Harlem from 1999-2002, Belgian-Moroccan photographer Charif Benhelima creates this personal and powerful document of Harlem, degraded and almost deserted, a landscape of spattered walls, shadowy figures, dirty streets and battered buildings. Using Polaroid 600 film and camera (and occasionally a red filter), the photographer composes works that speak to the continuing condition of African Americans in today’s United States – yet also uplift the viewer with their originality and almost prayerful spirituality. The title of this exhibition catalog by the highly regarded Benhelima recalls the Metropolitan Museum’s overly rosy Harlem on my Mind show in 1967, but this body of work provides a compelling counterpoint for the 21st century.

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JUTTA BENZENBERG

Ahead with the Past

The poverty-stricken nation of Albania was the most mysterious of Iron Curtain countries; closed-off to visitors, it was governed by ruthless dictators who were followers of Chairman Mao. But in the years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, even Albania has changed dramatically. Twenty years after their first collaboration, German-born socio-documentary photographer Jutta Benzenberg and Albanian author Ardian Klosi look again at this perplexing country through photographs and narration that balances sensitivity and subtle humor with the occasional flash of ruthlessness. Benzenberg has been documenting Albania since she photographed prisons and migrants in 1991, but her archive was destroyed by fire in 2007. In this beautifully produced book, she begins again, like the Albanians, with determination.

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JÜRGEN BERGBAUER

Studies After Nature

A formidable student of perception, German photographer/artist Jürgen Bergbauer presents photographs of “objects” (that is, rocks) found on the side of the road. Bergbauer organized these “objects,” 157 of them to be exact, by composition and utility, and then made 665 photographs of them, digitally isolating them from their backgrounds, turning them into “modules” that can be placed differently in space. A step away from traditional photography, these works allow for different kinds of perception-as graphic, simulation or icon placed on an empty storage space. Bergbauer is at the beginning of his career; this hardcover will surely be the first of many interesting studies. This book rocks!

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WOUT BERGER

When I Open My Eyes

For over thirty-five years, Wout Berger has lived on the IJsselmeer, a freshwater lake in central Netherlands. It is the first thing he sees each morning and his artistic subject matter, besides the landscape and atmosphere of his daily life. From a tripod fixed by his bedroom window, Berger began to photograph whatever he saw. First recorded were the differences—every sailboat, every spectacular sunset, but, eventually the project became more refined. Berger began to capture the amorphous shapes of waves, fog, rain and clouds fading into the photographic surfaces. Recalling both Impressionist light studies and Olafur Eliasson’s photo series of his home country of Iceland, Berger’s subject, however exquisite and incandescent, eventually morphs from the IJsselmeer to the imperceptible transitions between the photographs themselves.

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The Big Top

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More from the Eakins Press Pocket Albums

BILLY BÜHLER & DOMINIQUE FREY

Skuter

Zürich-based independent filmmakers Billy Bühler (b. 1987) and Dominique Frey (b. 1988) traveled to the Indonesian island of Sumatra in the fall of 2015 to film a documentary about the palm oil industry and its resultant deforestation rampantly spreading across the nation. While on location they noticed the island was swarming with skuters (Indonesian for “scooters”). Setting out to document this phenomenon, the filmmakers photographed people on motor scooters, many on their way to and from work, through the window of a moving car on a two-day trip from the Aceh highlands to Medan, the capital of North Sumatra. At once a photojournalist’s book of people on motor scooters, sometimes carrying whole families, and an inside look at an affordable form of mobility that has become a permanent fixture of daily traffic, Skuter celebrates everyday life on the archipelago.

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