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Thomas Struth, born in 1954, stuided with Gerhard Richter and Bernd Becher in Dusseldorf. Starting with urban street scenes, portraits, and landscapes, he is best known for his Museum Photographs and Paradise series. Holding a chair at the Hochschule fur Gestaltung in Karlsruhe from 1993 to 1996, Struth is a leading proponent of German arts and international photography

Published on the occasion of the 2000 exhibition Thomas Struth: My Portrait, at The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. From the publisher: “Struth’s distinctly German perspective goes Japanese: subject, light, composition and catalogue format have been carefully crafted in an intrinsic and stark cross-cultural synchronization. Each plate is framed by white, one to a spread.”

German photographer Struth is among the artists from the celebrated D sseldorf School who studied under conceptualists Bernd and Hilla Becher in the 1970s and 1980s. Their rigid, deadpan style of uniform picture making proved a rich starting point, and in maturity Struth’s work excavates the nature of photography itself. Three new titles encapsulate the work of this important midcareer artist. Portraits, published on the occasion of Struth’s one-man exhibition at the Sprengel Museum in Hanover, contains the artist’s psychologically loaded frontal images of his human subjects. In the words of curator Weski, Struth’s camera is applied like “a two-way mirror,” reflecting both the photographer and his view of the subject with us, the viewer, as the third partner. Still presents an overview of the artist’s work, including his flower pieces, some portraiture, and his early street photos. Dubbed “subconscious places” by the photographer, the city roads, with their austerity and vanishing point perspective, convey multiple layers of history as well as the “photographic moment.” Museum Photographs, with its images of people viewing works of art in museums around the world, explores photography’s rivalry with painting as well as issues like how art changes by being in a museum, how it is displayed, and how we look at it. Including an outstanding essay by Belting, this slim, oversized book contains 17 large plates of the enormous photographs. In spite of its usefulness in bringing these works together and the high quality of the reproductions, this publication underscores an inherent difficulty in publishing Struth’s photography: because it is so much about photography itself, i.e., the photograph on the wall, this “translation” into book form strips away some meaning and a large portion of the effect. Both Museum Photographs and Portraits are recommended for larger art and photography collections, the former for its superior essay and the latter for its comprehensive look at this central series.

The first major monograph on Struth to be published in the United States, Still continues a notable tradition of books by German photographers from August Sander and Albert Renger-Patzsch to Hilla and Bernd Becher, and is a beautiful survey of Struth’s body of work, including stunning close-up views of flowers, restrained urban streetscapes, intimate portraits, and frenzied museum interiors.

Critic Peter Schjeldahl has written in the Village Voice: “Thomas Struth [is] one of a generation of photographers whose work is the latest strength of a German art culture that seems to have no end of aces up its sleeve . . . His urban shots apply Becheresque formulas of static, unpopulated (surely early-morning), shadowless views with a feel for the ?typical’ or ?average’ aspect of a subject. As if in compensation, Struth’s astonishing family portraits burn with human presence.” Struth began in the early 1980s to make steely black-and-white photographs of deserted city streets and decaying buildings. In recent years, his work has diversified in subject, scale, and color to embrace increasingly ambitious subjects and challenging locations. Struth has extended his urban investigation to the inhabitants and spaces of the city, from Milan to Tokyo, while his recent landscapes and portraits complete his unique vision of the alternately public and solitary conditions of being.

The catalogue for an exhibition of the urban landscapes of Struth, held at the Kunstmuseum, Bonn, in 1995. Photographs by Thomas Struth; texts by Stefan Gronert, Rupert Pfab, Christoph Schreier, and Dieter Ronte. 152 pages; 10 full-page color and 68 duo-toned b&w plates + 15 text illustrations; 9.75 x 12.5 inches. Biography, bibliography, exhibition history, checklist. Text in German.

Leaving the cultural spheres of painting, museums, architecture, and portraiture, Thomas Struth’s recent project tackles the world of science, of research institutes, laboratories, and the experimental fields of US spacecraft engineering.

Coming to prominence in his native Germany in the 1970s, photographer Thomas Struth captured the atmospheric power of the contemporary urban landscape in his early black-and-white works. With an intent gaze and exacting lens, Struth expanded his range to include colour portraits, bringing a unique psychological precision to the tradition of portraiture. Perhaps Struth’s best-known works are his majestic, large-scaled museum photographs depicting visitors to some of the world’s great museums and buildings, including The Art Institute of Chicago, the Musee du Louvre in Paris, the Accademia in Venice, and the Pantheon in Rome. These captivating photographs not only transport us to the place depicted, they also provide a chance to re-examine our own selves looking at art. Continuing his interest in series, Struth has created expansive works based on the natural world, often training his camera on a particular contemporary melding of nature with technology and architecture. This volume presents an exploration of the photographs of Thomas Struth and accompanies a major retrospective exhibition organized by the Dallas Museum of Art. It features essays by well-known photography and art experts who chronicle Struth’s career and situate his work in the context of the history of photography and its rise in contemporary art.

Each of Thomas Struth’s “paradises” is a piece of nature devoted to a specific overarching theme. In his photographs measuring up to 9 by 11 feet in size, Struth draws the viewer into the magical semidarkness of forests and jungles, the impenetrable and yet bright green of the trees, bushes, and undergrowth, of tropical plants, rampant jungle vegetation, and mossy brooks. Struth found his paradises in China, Japan, Australia, Brazil, and Germany, where he discovered suitable material in the forests of Bavaria. This book contains the entire series of 25 photographs as full-page plates. In their essays, psychologist Ingo Hartmann and art historian Hans Rudolf Reust each shed light from their own particular angle on our current understanding of so-called untamed nature, its exploitation and mystification, not to mention as a basis for utopias.

Published in conjunction with Struth’s 1990 Renaissance Society exhibition-his first at a North American museum-this catalog documents the early architectural photographs for which Struth initially became known. Like an archeologist, Struth excises generation after generation of architecture layered within the urban infrastructure, and in the spirit of his predecessors and teachers, Bernd and Hilla Becher, this work as a whole serves as an record of the constantly transforming urban landscape. In his catalogue essay, Buchloh writes: “inasmuch as the work establishes itself in the triangle between photography, artistic sculptural practice, and architecture, it comments on their mutual interdependence. The longer one contemplates these images, the more it becomes obvious that Struth is also building an archive of a disappearing world.”

Thomas Struth’s most recent project, “Making Time,” was exhibited at the Prado, Madrid, in the winter and spring of 2007, and is now compiled in this handsome catalogue from Turner. Making Time continues Struth’s established work on the subject of public art venues, and consists of photographs depicting the Prado’s famous collection and its visitors, photographs that were displayed throughout the Prado during his exhibit, as part of the museum’s current ambition to open up fresh perspectives on its holdings. Over the course of two years, Struth made more than 400 images in and around the Prado, showing an “inhabited” public space, and highlighting the interactions between the exhibited paintings and their viewers. This volume also marks the first presentation of Struth’s earlier work, from the spring of 2005, on Velazquez’s great “Las Meninas” (1656), itself a classic study of spectatorship. The result is a multilayered dialogue between Struth, the Prado, its collection and its visitors.

A central figure of the new wave of German photography that first arrived in the 1970s, Thomas Struth has continued to impact the world of photography with his large-scale museum interiors, portraits, and architectural photography. Struth has emerged as one of the most compelling voices in contemporary art’s critique of the subject and the socio-economic order by creating images that are at once visually arresting and subtly political. This new monograph presents another facet of Struth’s oeuvre, assembling a series of flower photographs produced for a unique project. In 1991, Struth was commissioned to decorate a new hospital in Winterthur, Switzerland. He decided to produce a two flower photographs and a landscape for each of the 37 sickrooms. The flower photographs were to be hung on the wall behind the bed, the landscape on the opposite wall. With this project, Struth hoped to bring the captivating environment of the Winterthur area into the interior space of the hospital, connecting patients to the outside word. The images for the hospital shift between documentary objectivity and painterly qualities of light and shadow. Beautifully reproduced here, these pictures brilliantly and colorfully synthesize a tradition of landscape photography that includes Edward Weston, Walker Evans, and August Sander with the tradition of 19th century flower and landscape painting.

From the publisher: “No other artist from the famous Bechers’ class of photography at the conception and the range of his works as Thomas Ruff. The catalogue of works from 1979 to 2001, which is now available, is the first complete compilation of his photographic work, including the current series of “nudes,” which has caused quite a stir and controversial discussions. Preceding the catalog is a series of pictures selected by Thomas Ruff himself. Like his fellow students Andreas Gursky, Axel Hütte, and Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, today the successor to his teachers Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, has essentially contributed to the international acceptance of photography as art.”

This book presents David Chipperfield’s new architectural work realized in Japan, a contemporary place for prayer. The primary material will be photography: Risaku Suzuki’s work documents the architecture, which is in constant dialogue with the surrounding landscape of Inagawa, over four alternating seasons. Her camera conveys the visitor’s experience of the architecture in time and space, rather than an objectified image of a static piece of work. The photographic journey of the Chapel and the Visitor Centre will be followed by an essay written by the architect and stories behind the scene: the parallel processes of collaborations with client, with constructors and engineers, and designers for the exceptional gardens or handmade screens. The buildings are as much the outcome of innovative architectural thinking with deference to the Japanese sensitivity as a technical breakthrough for construction.

Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places is indisputably a canonic body of work―a touchstone for those interested in photography and the American landscape. Remarkably, despite having been the focus of numerous shows and books, including the eponymous 1982 Aperture classic (expanded and reissued several times), this series of photographs has yet to be explored in its entirety. Over the past five years, Shore has scanned hundreds of negatives shot between 1973 and 1981. In this volume, Aperture has invited an international group of fifteen photographers, curators, authors, and cultural figures to select ten images apiece from this rarely seen cache of images. Each portfolio offers an idiosyncratic and revealing commentary on why this body of work continues to astound; how it has impacted the work of new generations of photography and the medium at large; and proposes new insight on Shore’s unique vision of America as transmuted in this totemic series.
Texts and image selections by Wes Anderson, Quentin Bajac, David Campany, Paul Graham, Guido Guidi, Takashi Homma, An-My Leê, Michael Lesy, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Francine Prose, Ed Ruscha, Britt Salvesen, Taryn Simon, Thomas Struth, and Lynne Tillman

This beautifully printed, 380-page monograph delivers a thorough examination of the oeuvre of the British artist and photographer, Craigie Horsfield, born in Cambridge in 1949 and nominated for the Turner Prize in 1996. Horsfield’s deeply saturated, often enigmatic and usually black-and-white photographs reflect a rigorous and refined formal unity and a precise visual vocabulary. They are held together by the notion of relation, according to the artist, in that the individual is inextricably bound to relation and not to separation or alienation. Horsfield often prints his photographs years after they were originally made, so that memory brushes up against the present, and realities conflict. Additionally, he was ahead of artists like Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff and Andreas Gursky in manipulating and enlarging his images to the large scale we see so often today. A breathtaking presentation of one of Britain’s most influential photographic artists, with new scholarship by Slavoj Zizek, among others.

The focus of the NRW-Forum exhibition is on Stephen Shore, a key figure in the US New Color Photography movement.The first part of the exhibition, which is based on the New York Aperture Foundation’s Biographical Landscape retrospective, will provide a comprehensive overview of Shore’s ground-breaking work in the 1970s and 1980s. From an early stage, the work of the US New Color Photography movement influenced the students on Bernd Becher’s photography course at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, a course which was created in 1976. The second part of the exhibition will explore the innovative motifs that Becher’s class developed in the exciting area between their own photographic tradition and that of the US tradition. Participating artists: “Stephen Shore, Bernd und Hilla Becher, Thomas Struth, Volker Döhne, Axel Hütte, Candida Höfer, Thomas Ruff, Tata Ronkholz, Wendelin Bottländer, Andreas Gursky, Martin Rosswog, Andi Brenner, Simone Nieweg, Boris Becker, Kris Scholz, Stefan Schneider, Claudia Fährenkemper, Claus Goedicke, Matthias Koch, Laurenz Berges, Elger Esser, Miles Coolidge, Bernhard Fuchs”

At the end of the 1960s in the USA a group of painters stepped out of the shadows of Abstract Expressionism and turned towards the tradition of painterly realism but, however, in doing so they also exaggerated the illusionism that had been handed down from the 1920s and 1930s. These painters often used the photographic image as a verbatim model but could ‘correct’ the photographs as Chuck Close did in his portraits by placing different photos next to each other in order to give each segment of the picture its own focal point and, in a complex work process, turning photography into painting. Starting from the MUMOK’s extensive collection of 40 works, this major exhibition places the museum’s own holdings in a context of realisms and investigates the concepts behind a painting genre that is determined by the subject matter of the city, streets, automobiles and the American way of life. Time and again the Photorealists emphasised the importance of Pop Art some of which is shown at the start of the exhibition before the presentation of the main protagonists. Artists represented in the exhibition include: Richard Artschwager, Peter Blake, Chuck Close, Thomas Demand, William Eggleston, Eric Fischl, Andreas Gursky, Richard Hamilton, Duane Hanson, David Hockney, Candida Höfer, Jasper Johns, Alex Katz, Jeff Koons, Louise Lawler, Roy Lichtenstein, Malcolm Morley, Tom Phillips, Sigmar Polke, Mel Ramos, Gerhard Richter, James Rosenquist, Thomas Ruff, Ed Ruscha, Markus Schinwald, Cindy Sherman, Thomas Struth, Jeff Wall, Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann.

n the landscape photography chosen for this catalogue, there is one thing that all the pictures have in common: the horizon is missing. The catalogue shows works by 15 international contemporary photographers, each of whom in their own specific view of landscape blends out the separating and and defining horizon. The absence of the horizon as a borderline between heaven and earth, as an orientation mark between above and below, is demonstrated by the illustrated photographs, opening up new and unforeseen perspectives of landscapes that seem familiar to us. Accepted patterns of reception and the self-assurance of man in his place in the world, for which the visible horizon is all-important, are questioned in very different ways. Works by: Dieter Appelt, Boris Becker, Daniel Gustav Cramer, Natalie Czech, Miklos Gaál, Andreas Gefeller, Jitka Hanzlová, Naoya Hatakeyama, Zhao Liang, Taiji Matsue, Walter Niedermayr, Thomas Struth, Adam Thompson, Timm Ulrichs, Thomas Wrede

Die vorliegende Veröffentlichung erweitert diese theologische Fragestellung auf die zeitgenössische Kunst und deren Verarbeitung von Problemen der Gegenwart: Es werden Werke internationaler Künstler zusammengeführt, die sich in ihrer Arbeit mit existenziellen Aspekten des Lebens befassen. Zugleich wird nach den in der Kunst heute noch anwesenden Bildern der alt- und neutestamentarischen Überlieferung gesucht. Die ausgewählten Kunstwerke spüren das Religiöse im Säkularen und das Säkulare im Religiösen auf. In ihnen entwirft der Mensch Bilder von sich selbst in seiner körperlichen und geistigen Existenz. In miteinander verknüpften ikonografischen Linien führt die Publikation Entwürfe von Menschen, ihren Orten und Zeichen zusammen, die ihrerseits spirituelle Fragen stellen. In einführenden Essays werden die künstlerischen und die theologischen Aspekte des Themas erörtert. Hinzu kommen Texte zu den ausgestellten Werken sowie Selbstzeugnisse der beteiligten Künstler. Die Künstler: Dennis Adams, Pawel Althamer,Samuel Beckett, Joseph Beuys, Louise Bourgeois, Sophie Calle, Peter Campus, John Coplans, Hartwig Ebersbach, Jochen Gerz, Roni Horn, Thomas Huber, Martin Kippenberger, Harald Klingelhöller, Willem de Kooning, Maria Lassnig, Via Lewandowsky, Jonathan Meese, Boris Michailow,Juan Muñoz,Bruce Nauman, Gerhard Richter, Anri Sala, Thomas Schütte, Florian Slotawa, Kiki Smith,Robert Smithson, Thomas Struth, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Fiona Tan, Wolfgang Tillmans/Isa Genzken, Patrick Tosani, Mark Wallinger, Andy Warhol, Remy Zaugg

Description: Yet Untitled collects together a dedicated selection of contemporary photography. Presented in a uniquely straightforward fashion, with strong nods to the grid, this volume presents work with a range of concerns and content. Included are photographers who focus on issues of documentation, such as the “Becherklasse” (Bernd & Hilla Becher and their former students Candida Hafer, Thomas Ruff and Thomas Struth); those who deal in the subjective, following in the wake of Otto Steinert; and those who have grouped themselves around Michael Schmidt since the early 80s. Nan Goldin, Lee Friedlander, Bettina Rheims, Tom Wood and Hiroshi Sugimoto are just some of the international artists featured. Brought together over the last seven years by Hannover-based traffic planner Bernd F. Knne, the work in Yet Untitled offers a fascinating overview of recent trends in American and European photography. Accompanying essays and an interview with the collector explore the historical development of contemporary photography on both sides of the Atlantic.

A photographic journey across London, taking in a selection of contemporary art and a curry along the way. Based in London, nvisible Museum is the product of twelve years’ worth of acquisitions by a collector who prefers to remain anonymous. Works are often seminal pieces by young artists early in their careers. Uniquely, the contents of collection are dispersed and nomadic, lent to friends and artists in the collection, and from time to time loaned to art institutions in thematic exhibitions, including the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Migros Museum, Zurich; Kiasma Museo, Helsinki; and Sir John Soane’s Museum, London in 2002. <I>Invisible London</I> is a photographic journey from Heathrow to Brick Lane, taking in some of the city’s public places and moving inside the flats, houses and studios where the collection of nvisible Museum is locatedin subtle and compelling opposition to the gigantism and monumentalism of contemporary art collecting. Combines art and voyeurism with glimpses of an extraordinary art collection. 90 color photographs. Artists represented: Nobuyoshi Araki; Matthew Barney; Richard Billingham; Kate Blacker; Louise Bourgeois; Jake and Dinos Chapman; Tacita Dean; Tracey Emin; Katharina Fritsch; Paul Graham; Douglas Gordon; Richard Hamilton; Tim Head; Damien Hirst; Gary Hume; Callum Innes; Emma Kay; Simon Linke; Adam Lowe; Steve McQueen; Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky; Tatsuo Miyajima; Paul Morrison; Cady Noland; Gabriel Orozco; Simon Patterson; Mark Pimlott; Marc Quinn; Liisa Roberts; Tim Rollins + K.O.S.; Gregor Schneider; Simon Starling; Georgina Starr; Thomas Struth; Sam Taylor-Wood; Mark Wallinger; Rachel Whiteread; Gerard Williams; Yves Klein.

This catalogue accompanies a major museum exhibition of the work of celebrated German photographer, Thomas Struth. The touring show focuses on photographs Struth has made since his last major retrospective, which covered the years 1978-2010. The catalogue comprises 65 works (plus details) and includes all of the 30 works in the exhibition to create the most comprehensive book of Struth’s recent work. Thomas Struth is renowned for his practice of creating singular images, each within strictly segregated subject fields: architecture, portraiture, landscape and, most recently, sites of technological and scientific research. Nature & Politics brings together various of these diverse strands of Struth’s enquiry to present a significant monograph that explores in depth each of these themes, whilst also elaborating the interstices between them. In recent years technology and the constructed landscape have become overarching subjects for Struth. Photographing at sites of new technology – techno-industrial and scientific research spaces, including physics institutes, pharmaceutical plants, space stations, dockyards, nuclear facilities and operating theatres – he has focused on machines which are some of the transformative instruments of our contemporary world and edifices of technological production where the heights of human knowledge are enacted, debated and advanced. These works explore the aesthetics of innovation and experimentation through the recording of structural complexities and allude to the hidden structures of control and influence exerted by these advanced technologies. In the same period, Struth was working on two quite distinct projects. The first was Disneyland, a theme park which was famously constructed by reference to Walt Disney’s memories of his trips across Europe, transforming the passive experience of watching and of fantasy into a latent reality in California. Struth was attracted to this ultimate human-crafted environment, where technology has facilitated the materialisation of images from Walt Disney’s imagination. The second project was the contested landscape of Israel and Palestine where Struth created a series of images which collapsed his strict subject fields, producing urban landscapes, portraits, landscapes and photographs of technology. Each photograph is a fragment which attempts to grasp the circumscribed reality of a region where coexistence has failed. Struth seeks, in his own words, “to open the doors, to scrutinise what our contemporary world has created… what our minds have materialised and transformed into sculpture.” His images penetrate and report on the material spaces of the human imagination, and they are born from an accelerated moment when technology and the image industry have brought physical reality and the imagination closer together.

When recession-plagued New York City abandoned its industrial base in the 1970s, performance artists, photographers, and filmmakers found their own mixed uses for the city’s run-down lofts, abandoned piers, vacant lots, and deserted streets. Gordon Matta-Clark turned a sanitation pier into the celebrated work Day’s End and Betsy Sussler filmed its making; the photographic team Shunk-Kender shot a vast series of images of Willoughby Sharp’s Projects: Pier 18 (which included work by Vito Acconci, Mel Bochner, Dan Graham, Matta-Clark, and William Wegman, among others); and Cindy Sherman staged some of her Untitled Film Stills on the streets of Lower Manhattan. Mixed Use, Manhattan documents and illustrates these projects as well as more recent work by artists who continue to engage with the city’s public, underground, and improvised spaces. The book (which accompanies a major exhibition) focuses on several important photographic series: Peter Hujar’s 1976 nighttime photographs of Manhattan’s West Side; Alvin Baltrop’s Hudson River pier photographs from 1975-1985, most of which have never before been shown or published; David Wojnarowicz’s Rimbaud in New York (1978-1979), the first of Wojnarowicz’s works to be published; and several of Zoe Leonard’s photographic projects from the late 1990s on. The book includes 70 color and 130 black-and-white images, a chronology of the policy decisions and developments that altered the face of New York City from 1950 to the present; an autobiographical story by David Wojnarowicz; and essays by Johanna Burton, Lytle Shaw, Juan Suarez, and the exhibition’s curators, Lynne Cooke and Douglas Crimp. Artist included: Alvin Baltrop, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Dara Birnbaum, Jennifer Bolande, Stefan Brecht, Matthew Buckingham, Tom Burr, Roy Colmer, Moyra Davey, Terry Fox, William Gedney, Bernard Guillot, David Hammons, Sharon Hayes, Peter Hujar, Joan Jonas, Louise Lawler, Zoe Leonard, Sol LeWitt, Glenn Ligon, Robert Longo, Vera Lutter, Danny Lyon, Babette Mangolte, Gordon Matta-Clark, Steve McQueen, John Miller, Donald Moffett, James Nares, Max Neuhaus, Catherine Opie, Gabriel Orozco, Barbara Probst, Emily Roysdon, Cindy Sherman, Harry Shunk & Janos Kender, Charles Simonds, Thomas Struth, James Welling, David Wojnarowicz, and Christopher Wool

The German photographic movement commonly known as the Dusseldorf School of Photography has become synonymous with artistic excellence and innovation. It began in the mid-1970s at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf, under the instruction of the photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher, known for their comparative grids of mundane industrial buildings captured with an objective and clinical eye. This school has not only birthed some of today’s most important and successful photographers, but has also had a fundamental and lasting influence on the history of the medium. The Dusseldorf School of Photography presents over 160 images in a spectacular overview of the breadth of the Dusseldorf School from the early 1970s to today. This impeccable survey is filled with superb reproductions of the best-known photographs by three generations of key Dusseldorf artists: Bernd and Hilla Becher, Laurenz Berges, Elger Esser, Andreas Gursky, Candida Hofer, Axel Hutte, Simone Nieweg, Thomas Ruff, Jorg Sasse, Thomas Struth and Petra Wunderlich. With a scholarly text, extensive artist bios and a plate section dedicated to each of these artists, The Dusseldorf School of Photography offers the first comprehensive assessment of this important photographic movement-one that dominates the salesrooms and museums of our times.

Stephen Shore (b. 1947) is a true artistic innovator whose work has opened up new frontiers for contemporary photography. His photographs of American scenes unveil the exceptional beauty to be found in the everyday. As one of the first art photographers to work in color, Shore pioneered such contemporary genres as the diaristic snapshot (later taken up by Nan Goldin and Wolfgang Tillmans) and the monumentalized landscape (as later practiced by Becher-school photographers Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky). This monograph offers the first complete examination of Shore’s long and storied career, from his residency at Warhol’s Factory to his experiments in conceptual photography; from his landmark series AMERICAN SURFACES to his continued exploration of emerging techniques. Shore’s high-key portraits of America’s chromatic landscape can be found in the permanent collections of major museums all over the world.

Throughout the 1980s and 90s, visionary Geneva gallerist Pierre Huber seems to have had a crystal ball for what’s destined to last in contemporary art. And when he’s gazed into it in amassing his private collection, he’s seen photography, contemporary Chinese art, abstract painting, and other art forms. This catalogue, published on the occasion of an exhibition at the Musae cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, gives others a glimpse of what Huber was seeing at the moment of inspiration: In America he found particular interest in appropriation art (Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman, Louise Lawler) and the wild California scene (Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Jim Shaw); closer to home, he acquired work by some of the most innovative German photographers (Thomas Ruff, Candida H fer, Thomas Struth) and Swiss artists (Sylvie Fleury, Ugo Rondinone, Olaf Breuning). Abstract painting and contemporary Chinese art also make appearances in this impressive overview.

Some people once boldly predicted that photography would displace painting altogether. Others asked whether a photograph could be art in the first place. As it turned out, these two forms of expression have had a stimulating effect on one another during their long years of coexistence. The Image Regained illustrates, with works by outstanding contemporary artists and photographers, the intensity and consequences of this exchange over the past twenty years. Work by Amy Adler, Bernd & Hilla Becher, Rineke Dijkstra, Gilbert & George, Andreas Gursky, Amedeo Martegani, Elizabeth Peyton, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Cindy Sherman, Thomas Struth, Jeff Wall, and others reveals that, more frequently than not, the encounter between painting and photography has rocked our very understanding of the image. Painting, under the influence of photography, is now finding its way back from the abstract to the figurative, whereas photography, in the 80s, claimed for itself the traditional painterly themes of portraiture and landscape. The breaking with conventional modes of perception has by now become programmatic. Paintings, for instance, now explore the properties of photography–the effects of light and shadow as well as blurred outlines for simulating different foci–and are hung next to photographs that suggest a painterly mode of creation. As varied as the artistic directions documented here may be, one commitment remains common: the endeavour to look long and close at our world, and to make the viewer stop and think.

For AutoWork, two teams of curators in the United States and Germany invited internationally renowned artists to work with the BMW group’s corporate identity–in the widest sense of the term: its employees, products, customers, work processes and image, using both photography and film. The artists were granted absolute artistic freedom and complete autonomy. Included among the project’s participants in Germany are Heike Baranowsky, Thomas Struth, Rineke Dijkstra, Thomas Demand, Nina Fischer & Maroan El Sani, Candida H fer, Boris Michailov, Johannes Muggenthaler, Ursula Rogg, and Alexander Timtschenko. Included among the project’s participants in the US are Sharon Lockhart, Noritoshi Hirakawa, Wolfgang Tillmans, Beat Streuli, Todd Eberle, Glenn Ligon, Catherine Opie, Paul Searight, and Gillian Wearing.

Spectacular City presents the work of about 30 leading artists, Dutch and international, who have chosen the urban landscape as their sphere of activity, such as Olivo Barbieri, Oliver Boberg, Balthasar Burkhard, Vincenzo Castella, Edgar Cleijne, Stéphane Couturier, Thomas Demand, Andreas Gefeller, Geert Goiris, Andreas Gursky, Naoya Hatakeyama, Todd Hido, Dan Holdsworth, Francesco Jodice, Aglaia Konrad, Luisa Lambri, Ine Lamers, Sze Tsung Leong, Armin Linke, Taiji Matsue, Karin Apollonia Müller, Bas Princen, Thomas Ruff, Frank van der Salm, Heidi Specker, Jules Spinatsch, Thomas Struth, Michael Wesely, Edwin Zwakman. Aspects of this contemporary urban photography are explored by expert international authors in various essays. The work of these photographers reveals a well-nigh extraterrestrial beauty of urban liminal spaces and sites in transformation. Over recent years they have therefore provided inspiration for a whole new way of looking at the city. Thanks to their gaze, places that were once considered ‘ugly’, such as port and industrial zones, have acquired a new visual quality, which now sometimes even serves as inspiration for the design of public spaces and buildings. The diversity of the works reveals the complexity and versatility of the urban environment, which can perhaps be better described in images rather than in words. The significance of this publication, intended for everyone who is personally or professionally concerned with the contemporary city, lies in the photographer’s provocative, self-willed view of our surroundings.

After training at the Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf, Candida Hofer studied photography with Bernd and Hilla Becher from 1976 to 1982. The influence of the precise, scientifically minded Bechers (under whom Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth and Thomas Ruff also studied), is very apparent in Hofer’s work. Her images are predominantly of public spaces – libraries, auditoriums, lobbies, museums, club houses. Hofer’s recent photographs present a systematic study of rooms in various libraries, some modern and institutional, others centuries old and grand. Her straightforward and detached style seems at first objective and purely documentary, but is ultimately overtaken by incongruous elements and the mimetic nature of her subject matter. People are noticeably absent from her highly formal images. Instead, Hofer emphasizes repeated forms within the rooms such as chairs, tables, bookshelves and light fixtures to create patterns and produce a sense of orderliness. However, despite their conspicuous absence, it is people in whom Hofer is most interested; our culture and lifestyle are reflected in the architecture and interiors we create.