PhotoBooks Germany

Germany has a wealth of magnificent palaces and castles, rich in art and history. Photographed by Paolo Marton and described by a team of local scholars, this collection of photographs records an incredible number of architectural styles, from the Gothic severity of Schloss Gattorf to the fin-de-siecle madness of King Ludwig's Bavarian castles. Many, such as Berlin's Charlottenburg and Wurzburg's Residenz with its splendid Tiepolo frescoes are popular tourist sites. Others, equally grand, are relatively unknown. Here are enchanting pavilions, beautiful formal gardens, magnificent interiors and their priceless contents. The book also contains an introduction to the princely states, maps, a glossary and a bibliography.

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Presenting intimate views on buildings, sculptures and monuments, this book sheds light on the city of Berlin, capturing the timeless atmosphere of a historical metropolis setting out for the 21st century.

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The great German photographer Albert Renger-Patzsch was a contemporary of Moholy-Nagy and Brecht and a close friend of Hermann Hesse, yet his work is little known in the English-speaking world. Born in Wurzburg in 1897, Renger-Patzsch was a member of the movement that came to be known as Neue Sachlichkeit ("New Objectivity"). His most famous book Die Welt ist schon (The World is Beautiful), published in 1928, immediately established him as one of the leading photographers in Germany. This volume brings together sixty-five of Renger-Patzsch's photographs, many of them never before published. Together they help trace the life, career, and influence of one of the century's most important photographers, and will be an essential resource for scholars, social historians, and students of photography.

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A photo album from the living rooms of quasi-communist German terrorists should be of exquisitely narrow appeal, but Astrid Proll, a former Red Army Faction activist turned documentarian, does more than offer old snapshots here. The attempt of her academic-turned-revolutionary comrades to ignite a civil war in Germany, she writes, was both "ruthless and useless," the product of too many drugs and too many rarefied ideas about mass movements and the class struggle. "We overestimated ourselves ridiculously," she writes, "indulging in the illusion that a revolution was thinkable in the prosperous Federal Republic." The Baader-Meinhof gang's misadventures resulted not in revolution but murder, and in the violent deaths of many of the protagonists. Proll's pictures tell the story. --Gregory MacNamee

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Germaine Krull (1897-1985) led an extraordinary life that spanned nine decades and four continents. She witnessed many of the high points of modernism and recorded some of the major upheavals of the twentieth century. Her photographs include avant-garde montages, ironic studies of female nudes, press propaganda shots, as well as some of the most successful commercial and fashion images of her day. Her political commitments led her from communist allegiance to incarceration in Russia as a counterrevolutionary to support of the Free French cause against Hitler to a reclusive existence among Tibetan monks in India. Kim Sichel's study of this remarkable artist reveals a life of deep convictions, implausible transformations, complex emotional relationships, and inspired achievements.

Krull refused to limit herself to one long-term relationship, one geographical region, or one set of religious and moral beliefs. Contemporary critics ranked her with Man Ray and André Kertesz. Younger photographers such as Berenice Abbott looked up to her. Yet until recently the absence of an archive has made a proper evaluation of Krull's contribution to photography and to modernism difficult if not impossible. In this book Sichel examines Krull's autobiographical texts and photographic oeuvre to present and unravel the rich mythology that Krull fabricated around her life and work. The chapters follow the geographical and chronological sequence of Krull's life, moving from Munich to Moscow to Berlin to Amsterdam to Paris to Brazil to Africa to Bangkok and other locations. This book, which accompanies the first major retrospective exhibition on Krull, should secure Krull's rightful place among the masters of twentieth-century photography.

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This superbly illustrated book examines the different levels and purposes of German photography from 1870 to 1970: art, photojournalism, propaganda, advertising, and architectural and fashion photography. Setting the historical background before which the use and abuse of photography takes place, the authors examine the extent that photography was influenced by the German nationalist movement, the changes it underwent during the reign of Kaiser Wilhelm II, its links to the avant garde movements, and its development through the world wars and the Cold War.

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Behind the Iron Curtain, against all odds, photography secretly flourished as an art in the German Democratic Republic. Karl Gernot Kuehn writes eloquently of East Germany from 1945four years before the socialist nation was officially carved out of the former German Reichto 1989, when the dictatorship fell and forty years of isolation ended. Analyzing how Walter Ulbricht and Erich Honecker harnessed the power of photography to shape and reflect the paradigmatic Marxist state, Kuehn reveals how this very same process inadvertently helped nurture individual creativity and the "silent revolution" of the 1980s. Caught offers the first in-depth appraisal of the artistic, social, and political evolution of the GDR through the eyes of the participating photographers. It is an intimate portrayal of a people "caught" in the conflicting dictates of ideology, artistic oppression, a troubled national past, and basic human desires.

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The landscape designs of Dieter Kienast have a great lyrical quality. By reducing his designs to a few essential elements and principles, Kienast skillfully plays with opposing factors such as the natural and the artificial, order and chaos. The continual juxtaposition of town and country, rationalism and romanticism, garden history and modern art, have, by their very simplicity, the power to move.

Through his wide range of materials, encompassing not only plants, but also steel, concrete and glass, and with the cooperation of architects and artists, Dieter Kienast creates spaces which are sensitive to the mood of modern times, and bear witness to them. Amongst the projects included in this volume are the International Horticultural Show in Graz 2000, the EXPO2000 in Hanover and the landscaping around the Tate Modern in London.

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Anyone familiar with the long and tumultuous history of Berlin and also those who have read about the changes wrought by the end of the Cold War, will find Stefan Dauth's photographic portrait an invaluable guide to this city on the cutting-edge. By concentrating on new perspectives of Berlin's most familiar sights, Dauth draws attention to the transformation of a city only recently reunited and re-born as Germany's capital. His stark black and white images reveal the clash of old and new; the Berliner Dome with construction cranes in the background, the Potsdamer Platz, the remains of the Berlin Wall, and the modern bustle of the Kurfuerstendamm built around a baroque memorial church. "Today's professional photography is missing a touch of reality. I work with a city just as it exists in front of our eyes. It's a personal view of changes in Berlin, its people and locations," writes Dauth.

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This colorful tour through the districts of contemporary Dresden offers many unique perspectives of the city’s numerous architectural gems, from Saxon and Baroque masterpieces to the world’s most attractive automobile plant.

Although much of Dresden’s buildings were destroyed during the tragic bombing in 1945, the city has experienced a glorious rebirth, rebuilding many of the damaged structures while creating entirely new and inspiring ultra-modern ones. Organized as a trip around the city, this book uses double-page spreads to highlight the best of the new and old around Dresden’s various districts. Stunning aerial photographs show how Dresden’s unique situation among the hills and the Elbe River have informed its distinctive infrastructure and offer breathtaking views of Switzerland and the neighboring mountains. A map of the route makes this compact book an ideal travel companion.

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