As you’ve probably figured out by now, we’re rather proud of our photography books. The list increases by the day, literally! This winter season we have a particularly thrilling selection of highlights – monographs on the work of some truly influential, award-winning photographic artists. So, let’s take a look…
Torbjørn Rødland: The Touch That Made You — With a highly constructed and at times fetishistic approach to subjects, objects and materials, Rødland makes photographs that are formally acute, conceptually playful psychologically evocative. The images are characterised by their double-edged allegories and underlying lyricism. Featuring essays by Bob Nickas and Hans Ulrich Obrist, among others.
Catherine Opie: Keeping an Eye on the World — A survey of Opieʼs photographs which include portraits and American urban landscapes, ranging from large-scale colour to small black-and-white images. A conceptual framework of cultural portraitism links her various series of people, subcultures and places ever since the early 1990s. Her portraits often document the queer community.
Axel Hütte: Frühwerk (Early Works) / Night and Day — Hütte is a key figure in the Dusseldorf School of Photography. This is a special two-volume catalogue: Early Works is devoted to the years 1978 to 1995, featuring portraits, landscapes and architectonic formations. Night and Day presents 80 large-format nocturnal and daytime pictures from the years 1995 to 2017.
Mahtab Hussain: Going Back Home To Where I Came From — Presenting photographs by Hussain taken whilst on research in Kashmir, examining the construction of the Mangla Dam in the 1960s and the mass displacement it caused. A British-born artist heavily influenced by multiculturalism and cultural diversity, Hussain uses photography to investigate the dynamic relationship between identity, heritage and displacement.
Rineke Dijkstra: WO MEN (Hasselblad Award 2017) — Dijkstra is one of the most significant contemporary artists working in photographic portraiture. Her large-scale photographs focus on the themes of identity, typically capturing her subjects at moments of transition or vulnerability. She is recipient of the 2017 Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography.
Thomas Ruff: Interieurs — Ruffʼs series of ‘interiors’ were created during his student days at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Most of the pictures were taken in the apartments of relatives or parents of his classmates in the Black Forest. Individual elements are shown with simplicity and distance in order to capture the character of the whole room.
Andreas Gursky — A major retrospective monograph of one of the world’s most celebrated contemporary photographers. Gursky has won international acclaim for his large-format photographic works, which elevated photography to an undisputed medium for contemporary art. Published on occasion of Gursky’s solo exhibition at Hayward Gallery in January 2018.
Annette Kelm: Leaves — In her work, which includes still lifes, portraits, landscapes, and architecture, Kelm creates images of modern everyday culture using the techniques of object photography, which portrays things in isolation and uniform lighting, thus giving them a new meaning. Often she reveals the artificiality and construction of a picture’s structure.
Bernhard Fuchs: Fathom — A collection of Fuchs’ second series of portraits and, like all of his other series to date, was several years in the making. We see people, photographed in the existent light of interior spaces, who handle the unspoken dialogue with the photographer in an enquiring manner.
Image credit: Thomas Ruff, image (detail) from the book, Interieurs.