Steidlville

An exhibition of works from Hans van der Meer's European Fields: The Landscape of Lower League Football is currently on show at GunGallery, Stockholm.

At the beginning of the 1995 football season, Hans van der Meer set out to take a series of football photographs that avoided the clichéd traditions of modern sports photography. In an attempt to record the game in its original form — a field, two goals and 22 players — he sought matches at the bottom end of the amateur leagues, the opposite end of the scale to the Champions' League. And he avoided the enclosed environment of the stadium and tight telescopic details and hyperbole of action photography. Preferring neutral lighting, framing and camera angles, he chose instead to pull back from the central subject of the pitch, locating the playing field and its unfolding action within a specific landscape and context. In 1988 he had curated a book, Interland, containing archival images of the Dutch national team between 1911 and 1955. He was heavily influenced by the old tradition of photography in which a wide view of the action often resulted in elements of the locality being present in the image. With the addition of graphic lines, these images were then used in newspapers to illustrate the movement of the ball to the goal.
Van der Meer has applied his democratic viewpoint across the playing fields of Europe over the past decade, having travelled to every country with a significant history of the game. He began by focusing on sites within the Netherlands and in 1998 he published Dutch Fields, followed by a DVD, Flemish Fields, in 2000. His European odyssey has since taken him from small towns in the remote regions of Europe — from Bihariain in Romania to Björkö in Sweden, from Torp in Norway to Alcsóörs in Hungary, from Bartkowo in Poland to Beire in Portugal — and to the fringes of the major conurbations of Greece, Finland, England, France, Germany, Scotland, Switzerland, Holland, Slovakia, Denmark, Ireland, Wales, the Czech Republic, Belgium, Spain and Italy.

Photographed entirely in Brazil, mostly in the rainforest and city surroundings, Native employs the green, gold and pink underlying palette of the country.

“This work began as a personal journey. Metaphorically, I was thinking of a bird that flies back into the forest, searching for its childhood nest. The images here are a creation of my abstracted wishes and dreams. As I was searching, instead of home, I found an empty past, just traces of it. Yet, my journey was filled with new friendships, and discoveries made along the way.” (Mona Kuhn)

An exhibition of works from Robert Adams' Gone? will be on show at the Fraenkel Gallery from 11 March, 2010.

Robert Adams began by photographing suburban landscapes along the edge of the Rocky Mountains. His goal was then, and remains, to acknowledge the disappearance of wilderness but also to discover a basis for affirmation. In the 1980s he went on to revisit semi-rural areas through which he had walked as a boy – landscapes no longer pristine but still notable for their quiet, space and light. The views in this book, none published before, record some of what he found compelling.

A significant overview of Roni Horn's work to date, showing the full range of her practice as a photographer, draughtsman, installation artist and writer.

A Steidl catalogue (co-published with Tate and the Whitney) accompanies the show

Exhibitions of works from several of Dayanita Singh's books will be on show at the following:

2 Sunny House , 16/18 Mereweather Road
Behind Taj Mahal Hotel
Colaba, Mumbai 400 001

Dream Villa 13 Jan 2010 - 16 February, 2010
Gallery Nature Morte, New Delhi

Donovan Wylie Maze and Zoe Leonard Zoe Leonard are amongst the photographers shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2010.

Between 2002 and 2003 Donovan Wylie spent almost a hundred days photographing inside the Maze prison. Through its history of protests, hunger strikes and escapes, this prison, holding both republican and loyalist prisoners, became synonymous with the Northern Ireland conflict. After the Belfast peace agreement in 1998, inmates were gradually released, but the Maze remained open more...

Making books with Gerhard Saturday 7 February, 2010, 5-7pm

To accompany Dayanita Singh's exhibition of Dream Villa at Gallery Morte, New Delhi, the artist will give a presentation about her association with Steidl.
To confirm a seat for this event please RSVP to Geeta - 011 417 40215

Political Pictures. Soviet photographs 1918-1941. The Daniela Mrazkowa Collection

In April 2008 Museum Ludwig – with the help of the State Government of NRW, the Kulturstiftung der Länder, the Kunststiftung NRW and the City of Cologne – succeeded in aquiring the Daniela Mrazkowa Collection. The collection comprises 234 works by the foremost Soviet photographers of the pre-war era. It brings together a broad range of the photographic currents of that time, while giving an outstanding overview of documentary photography and photojournalism in the Soviet Union. The range spans portraits of the intellectual heroes of the Soviet Union in the Pictoralist style of Nappelbaum and Sterenberg, Constructivist photography by for instance Ignatowitsch and Rodchenko, who focused on architecture and industrial innovations, and depictions of workers and the rural populace in the Socialist Realist style adopted by Zelma und Alpert.

Raymond Depardon is showing work from Hear Them Speak at the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris.

The exhibition Native Land, Stop Eject unites filmmaker and photographer, Raymond Depardon, and urban planner and philosopher, Paul Virilio, who propose a reflection on the notions of “taking root” in a given place, and of being “uprooted.” It also attempts to address the questions of identity that are linked to these notions. On this occasion, the Fondation Cartier and Steidl are publishing Hear Them Speak, a collection of colour Polaroids by Raymond Depardon. In the course of some ten journeys, from Central America to South America, from Europe to Africa, Raymond Depardon went out to meet small ethnic groups who are hanging on determinedly to their land and their language: the Kawésqar, Chipaya, Quechua, Mapuche, Afar, Occitans, Bretons, Guarani and Yanomami. Their statements were recorded in their mother tongue and are accompanied by Polaroid photographs. In the resulting portraits, these people express the strong bond that ties them to their land and culture, offering a moving demonstration of the way land, speech and memory are intimately interconnected.

An exhibition of works from Leo Rubenfien's Wounded Cities will be exhibited at the following venue in Lianzhou, China.

5 - 10 December, 2009
5th Lianzhou International Photography Festival
The Granary, Lianzhou
(showing with Wie Kultur, Berlin)

Please join Clic Gallery and Steidldangin publishers in the celebration of the US release of Patrick Demarchelier's monograph Patrick Demarchelier

This monograph is the definitive guide to the photographic career of one of the most prodigious fashion photographers of our time. From his earliest work at Harper’s Bazaar to his now mythic collaboration with Vogue, Demarchelier has single-handedly redefined the fashion photograph and the fashion industry along with it. His celebrity portraits have shaped the public personae of figures ranging from Princess Diana to Madonna.

We are very pleased to announce an exhibition and book launch for John Warwicker's The Floating World: Ukiyo-e

Inspired by the ancient Japanese artists of Ukiyo-e and a polymath’s myriad references, John Warwicker has for over 10 years been one of the most original thinkers in the design and creative industries. As a founding member of Tomato, he established an international reputation in the 1990s and has been formative in shaping popular media. The Floating World: Ukiyo-e is the first monograph of John Warwicker’s work.

Lasting Impressions
The Fine Art & Craft of the Steidl Book

Exhibition:
Musée de l’Elysée
Lausanne, Switzerland
Opening 17 November, 2009 - 21 February, 2010

Everyone knows a beautiful photography book when they see one. But few people realise what a labour of love a fine publication represents, and what diverse and complementary skills combine to ensure the best possible results. For many photographers and curators, the quality of a Steidl publication represents nothing less than the gold standard. It was the intensity of our personal experience of book-making at Steidl, as Musée de l’Elysée curators, which led us to the idea of an exhibition which would unveil the art and craft involved in the production of a Steidl book: the A to Z of the process, from the first rough sketches on a scrap of paper, through the tortured convolutions of “dummy” production, to the (often agonizing) choice of the “right cover” (not to mention the myriad choices of paper, typography and binding). We determined not only to show all these diverse operations in as accessible a manner as possible, but also to give visitors a sense of the experience of daily life at “Steidlville”, where photographers, graphic designers, printers, curators and other photography specialists rub shoulders as they busy themselves with one or another aspect of book production, the combined results of which are destined to expand and enrich the field of art photography.