Сборники работ

The Former Soviet Union’s Foremost Photographer

Since starting out as a photographer in the mid-1960s, Boris Mikhailov (b. Kharkov, Ukraine, 1938; lives and works in Kharkov and Berlin) has built a wide-ranging and strikingly multifaceted oeuvre. A virtuoso of his art, he has explored a great variety of ways of using the medium to paint a picture of his immediate surroundings that is as unsparing as it is ironic. His unflagging critical engagement of photographic techniques and the work with different cameras and stylistic devices as well as the alternation in his oeuvre between conceptual photography and documentary approaches render him the preeminent present-day photographer whose work reaches back to the Soviet era.

The book - which accompanies his largest exhibition in Germany to date - brings together a selection of works that includes the experimental pictures of his early years as well as his most recent photographs created in Berlin.
With essays by Thomas Köhler, Christina Landbrecht, Inka Schube and Jan Verwoert.

Rarely has anyone photographed reality in such an unprettified way as Boris Mikhailov. He captures the unadorned and the natural; in pictures devoid of aesthetic exhaltation, he concentrates on people and their living conditions.

On his journeys through Russia, Germany and his Ukrainian homeland, Mikhailov has equally observed the poor, the well-to-do, the outcasts and the homeless. Look at Me, I Look at Water was composed in 1999 at the suggestion of the Heiner Mller-Society when Boris Mikhailov's name was found in one of Heiner Mller's notebooks.

With this book Mikhailov is continuing, thematically and conceptionally, what he began with his artist's book Unfinished Dissertation in 1985.

The photographs are accompanied by handwritten Russian commentaries, which together give the impression of a private album which narrates stories from a chapter in the artist's life.

The special thing about Boris Mikhailov as a "book maker" is that he thinks of and develops photography in sequences, in spaces and cuts, in the forms of its montage.

Viewed as a whole, his books and book drafts which often only exist as one original copy create a retrospective of a very unique and intimate kind. The artist's books "Krymskaja Fotomanija" (Crimean Photomania) and "Mountains", each with 128 pages, are shown here in facsimile, accompanied by 80 pages of illustrated text.

Boris Mikhailov is seen as a chronicler of his Ukrainian homeland: the everyday life of the so-called little people on the street, on the beach, at dances anywhere that the politic becomes visible in the private. Drawing on this material, Mikhailov explores both the human condition and the history and decline of the Soviet Union and the consequences of its fall.

About the Author:

Boris Mikhailov was born in Kharkov, Ukraine in 1938. He uses documentary as well as staging and studio techniques to comment on the Soviet Regime and, latterly, the downfall of the Soviet Union. His work has appeared in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), the Kunsthalle (Zurich), and the Sprengel Museum (Hannover). Today, Mikhailov lives and works in both Kharkov and Berlin.

For the acclaimed photographer Boris Mikhailov (born 1938), a society's most significant paradigm shifts are often most clearly perceived in the smallest of everyday transactions. For example, in a café or restaurant in Soviet-era Ukraine, a waiter would have offered you "tea or coffee?" Today, two decades after the fall of the Soviet bloc and the ascent of western capitalism, it's "tea, coffee, cappuccino?" In his latest body of work, Mikhailov addresses this shift by focusing on his hometown of Charkow, in northeast Ukraine. Here, the consumerist invasion of western capitalism is everywhere apparent in huge, colourful advertising banners and billboards, but the promises of the so-called Orange Revolution seem to have been fulfilled for only a few.

Mikhailov writes that "only when one sees misery in a picture, does one begin to notice it in the street," and throughout the 200-plus photographs in this volume, he takes pains to neither dramatize nor ameliorate the conditions of life in Charkow; and so his tough-minded pictures present a bleak but rigorously honest portrait of Ukraine and its inhabitants.

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For Boris Mikhailov, societal changes are most clearly visible in small, everyday events. While the waiter in Ukraine would still be asking "tea or coffee?" during the Soviet era, the question today is "tea, coffee, cappuccino?"

In his newest works (2000 - 2010), Mikhailov tackles precisely these changes and captures-as he has already in "By the Ground / At Dusk" (Oktagon, 1996)-daily life in his hometown Charkow. In this collection of more than 200 colour photographs, the West is perceptible everywhere in the form of huge, colourful advertising banners, but the promises of the Orange Revolution, that everything would get better, have only been fulfilled for few.

Through palliating nothing, transfiguring nothing, Mikhailov attempts to sensitise the view of the observer. The individual pictures and scenes create a large tableau of society that tells us more about Ukraine and its inhabitants than any specialised book.

Brassai (1899-1984), born in Hungary as Gyula Halasz, began his artistic apprenticeship in Berlin before moving to Paris in 1923 and launching a career that would establish him as a key figure in the evolution of twentieth-century photography. Brassai's importance as a photographer was recognized early in his career, affording him a privileged position from which to witness the varied aspects and milieus of Parisian life during the 1920s and 1930s. During and just after the war, Brassai collaborated with other artists and writers, and displayed his own artistic proficiency in multiple domains including theatre, cinema, sculpture, drawing, and writing. The late 1940s marked the beginning of a new period in Brassai's life, during which he married and became a naturalized French citizen. In the 1950s and early 1960s, he travelled extensively and executed his original graffiti compositions that would acquire international fame. Toward the end of his life, the artist returned to reading and writing. Brassai, who remained at the cutting edge of avant-garde, refused to espouse a single style; his rich body of work exceeds definition.

This illustrated biography is based largely on unpublished documents and photographs from the artist's personal archives. The author shares stories told to her by Brassai's wife Gilberte and by several of the artist's friends, including Henry Miller, Miro, Henri Michaux, and Raymond Queneau. Filtering a rich variety of sources, "Brassai" offers a very intimate and multi-faceted view of the artist's life and of the bonds that link him and his legendary images to Paris.

Brassaï (1899–1984) war der erste und ist bis heute der berühmteste Chronist des nächtlichen Paris. Als der vielseitig begabte gebürtige Ungar 1924 nach Frankreich kam, stürzte er sich nicht nur mit Begeisterung in das Pariser Nachtleben, sondern begann auch bald, auf seinen nächtlichen Streifzügen durch die Stadt zu photographieren.

Kaum zehn Jahre später, 1932, erschien sein Buch Paris de Nuit, das ihn schlagartig berühmt machte – ein Klassiker der Photoliteratur und phototechnisch gesehen eine damals unerhörte Meisterleistung. Das Licht, die Existenzbedingung jeder Photographie, reduziert sich in Brassaïs Bildern auf ein paar Bühnenscheinwerfer oder Lampen in den einschlägigen Etablissements, auf spärlich erleuchtete Fenster, eine Straßenlaterne im Nebel, Reflexe auf regennassem Asphalt …

Die großzügige Schenkung von Brassaïs Witwe 2002 an den französischen Staat und die Versteigerung seiner Werkstatt 2006 förderten weiteres Bildmaterial zu Tage und riefen Spezialisten und Photohistoriker auf den Plan. Ergebnis ihrer Arbeit ist dieses große Brassaï-Buch, das sich auf seine Nachtbilder der 30er Jahre konzentriert. Angesiedelt zwischen Reportage, Sozialdokumentation und poetischer Vision, ist Brassaïs nächtliches Paris der Zwischenkriegszeit vor allem auch ein Meilenstein in der Geschichte der Photographie des 20. Jahrhunderts.

The first study exclusively dedicated to Brassaï’s night photographs from the 1930s, his most productive period, reconstituting their genesis and their chronology through Brassaï’s various influences and complexity.

It was the Belle Époque, a time before air travel or radio, at the brink of a revolution in photography and filmmaking, when Burton Holmes (1870–1958) began a lifelong journey to bring the world home. From the grand boulevards of Paris to China’s Great Wall, from the construction of the Panama canal to the 1906 eruption of Mount Vesuvius, Holmes delighted in finding “the beautiful way around the world” and made a career of sharing his stories, colorful photographs, and films with audiences across America. As a young man, Holmes was mentored by John L. Stoddard, a pioneer of the U.S. travelecture circuit, who passed on his well-established mantle when he retired. Holmes roamed the globe throughout the summer and traversed the United States all winter, transforming the staid lecture tradition into an entertaining show. He coined the term “travelogue” in 1904 to advertise his unique performance and thrilled audiences with two-hour sets of stories timed to projections of multihued hand-painted glass-lantern slides and some of the first “moving pictures.” Paris, Peking, Dehli, Dubrovnik, Moscow, Manila, Jakarta, Jerusalem: Burton Holmes was there. He visited every continent and nearly every country on the planet, shooting over 30,000 photographs and nearly 500,000 feet of film. This book represents the best of the Holmes archive, brimming with brilliant color photographs not published in decades. A rare window on the world of 100 years ago, Burton Holmes Travelogues will transport you to a time that has all but evaporated, and inspire you to strike out on a journey of your own.

Highlights from the legendary photo journal

"This has to be the 'must buy' book of the decade - no photographic library will be complete without it. " - mono, UKPhotographer, writer, publisher, and curator Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) was a visionary, far ahead of his time. Around the turn of the 20th century he founded the Photo-Secession, a progressive movement concerned with advancing the creative possibilities of photography, and by 1903 began publishing Camera Work, an avant-garde magazine devoted to voicing the ideas, both in images and words, of the Photo-Secession. Camera Work was the first photo journal whose focus was visual, rather than technical, and its illustrations were of the highest quality hand-pulled photogravure printed on Japanese tissue. This book brings together a broad selection from the journal’s 50 issues.

Texts by:

Pam Roberts was Curator at the British Royal Photographic Society from 1982-2001. She lives in Bath.

This is the most complete volume available on one of the outstanding representatives of new German photography.

Ever since embarking on her first photographic projects in the early 1970s, Candida Höfer has been primarily interested in what could best be termed public space – interiors, such as libraries, foyers, museums, club houses or, more rarely, urban scenarios such as public squares, streets or zoos.

Candida Höfer’s relationship to architecture is fully in keeping with the New Objectivity tradition. Her photographs of public spaces are almost sober and ascetic in feel – especially as she forgoes any spectacular staging of the locations. The emptiness is imbued with substance with a subtle attention to colour, and the prevailing silence instilled with a metaphysical quality.

Even when Höfer’s photographs present significant works of renowned architects or designers, her incorruptible and consistently laconic approach means that the architectural mind in question takes a back seat to the photographer.

Candida Höfer was born in 1944. She was a student at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art and studied film under Ole John before going on to study photography under Bernd Becher. She has taken part in many group exhibitions and has held countless solo shows, most recently at Documenta XI, where her Zwölf–Twelve cycle was displayed. She is one of the greats of the international photographic and art community.

Michael Krüger, who contributes the penetrating introductory text, is Director of the Munich-based publishing company Carl Hanser Verlag, and the author of several critically acclaimed novels.

The definitive book on the legendary photographer's life in New York City, with many never-before-seen images and reminiscences by his closest friends and confidants.  

From the 1930s, when he helped revolutionize fashion journalism, through the 1960s, when he launched headlong into the Pop art era, London-based photographer Cecil Beaton brought to New York City his own perspective - aristocratic, sexually ambiguous, and theatrical. At the same time, New York offered Beaton innumerable opportunities to reinvent himself and his career.

Cecil Beaton: The New York Years features sketches, costumes, set designs, previously unpublished letters, and over 220 photographs and drawings, many in color and never seen before. This volume documents Beaton's most influential relationships with quintessential figures of the New York art scene, including Greta Garbo, his female confidant and muse, and Andy Warhol. Richly illustrated, Cecil Beaton is the definitive portfolio chronicling Beaton's stunning career in fashion, portraiture, and the performing arts.  The book will be divided into five parts:

Beaton in Vogue: Beaton's photography for Condé Nast's Vogue in the 1930s hastened the decline of fashion illustration in favor of today's emphasis on photography. Beaton himself became a celebrity photographer, as famous as his subjects, in the later mold of Richard Avedon and Annie Leibovitz.

Beaton and the Stage: After World War II, Beaton appeared on the New York stage as an actor, and he also designed sets and costumes for such musicals as My Fair Lady and Coco and operas Vanessa and La Traviata, both at the Metropolitan Opera. 

Beaton on New York: Beaton produced many illustrated books on New York City and his tell-all diaries detailed his life among the city's best-known figures. Beaton was also commissioned to produce innumerable photographs of New Yorkers, from Truman Capote to Tom Wolfe.

Beaton on Garbo: Greta Garbo was Beaton's closest female friend  She was also his muse, and his photographs captured her in many different scenarios and moods from the mid-1940s, when she ended her Hollywood career and permanently moved to New York.

Beaton on Warhol: In 1968, Beaton was advised to photograph a group of young New Yorkers, the most famous of which was Andy Warhol and his Factory. In effect, this photo shoot charted the passing of the torch from Beaton to Warhol, two figures who defined their era's concepts of popular culture, celebrity, and sexual mores.

About the Author:

Donald Albrecht is the Museum of the City of New York's curator of architecture and design. He has contributed essays to a number of books about architecture and design, including Andree Putman: Complete Works and Gabellini: Architecture of the Interior.

85 colour plates

The first joint project of photographer Bettina Rheims and writer/art critic Serge Bramly. The cultivated literary confessions of Monsieur X, a perfectly discreet voyeur with an obsessive curiosity about the female body, are set against photographs speaking a far clearer language that tells of female eroticism and exhibitionism as no one else does.

The first monograph of one of the most exciting contemporary photographers, featuring all of his photography series to date and a look behind the scenes

Since the beginning of his career, Swiss-Italian photographer Christian Tagliavini has been fascinated by mise-en-scène photography and Renaissance portraiture. Referencing the painting style of the Old Masters, his carefully-staged photo portraits exude the dignity and composure of 15th and 16th-century courtly culture, meticulously replicating their dimensions, framing, and chiaroscuro effects. After his breakthrough with the series 1503, Tagliavini returns to the art historical theme with his new series, 1406, published for the first time in this book. In his process, however, Tagliavini takes a step further back from the Renaissance artist ideal, presenting himself instead as a “photographic craftsman” who designs each of his costumes and props by hand with a small team.

Particularly elaborate was the work on his most extensive series to-date, Voyages Extraordinaires, for which Tagliavini constructed entire scenes inspired by Jules Vernes’ novels. All of Tagliavini’s series are meticulously composed mise-en-scènes with a stunning, fantastical effect partly reminiscent of his early photographic idols Jeff Wall, Erwin Olaf, and Gregory Crewdson. This Tagliavini monograph includes all of his photographic series to-date as well as the images documenting the evolution of his projects he spent months working on. The result is both a comprehensive Tagliavini catalogue and a fascinating insight into the working process of one of the most original and talented photographers working today.

 About the Author:

Christian Tagliavini was born in 1971 and grew up in Italy and Switzerland. Before his photography career, he worked in engineering and architecture firms and as graphic designer, as reflected in his comprehensive approach.