Górskie Wyprawy Fotograficzne Wyd. 2

For more than half a century, Annie Leibovitz has been taking culture-defining photographs. Her portraits of politicians, performers, athletes, businesspeople, and royalty make up a gallery of our time, imprinted on our collective consciousness by both the singularity of their subjects and Leibovitz’s inimitable style.

The catalogue to an installation at the LUMA Foundation in Arles, France, Annie Leibovitz: The Early Years, 1970–1983 returns to Leibovitz’s origins. It begins with a moment of artistic revelation: the spontaneous shot that made Leibovitz think she could transition from painting to photography as her area of study at the San Francisco Art Institute. The meticulously and personally curated collection, including contact sheets and Polaroids, provides a vivid document both of Leibovitz’s development as a young artist and of a pivotal era.

Leibovitz’s reportage-like photo stories for Rolling Stone, which she began working for when she was still a student, record such heady political, cultural, and counter-cultural developments as the Vietnam War protests, the launch of Apollo 17, the presidential campaign of 1972, Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974, and the Rolling Stones on tour in 1975. Then, as now, Leibovitz won the trust of the prominent and famous, and the book’s pages are animated by many familiar faces, among them Muhammad Ali, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ken Kesey, Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen, Joan Didion, and Debbie Harry, as well as John Lennon and Yoko Ono, captured in their now iconic embrace just hours before Lennon was assassinated.

Throughout the book, the portraits and reportage are linked to images of cars, driving, and even a series on California highway patrolmen. In many ways, it’s a celebration of life on the road—the frenetic rhythms, the chance encounters, the meditative opportunities. And with its rich archival aspects, it is also a tribute to an earlier time and a young photographer enmeshed in a culture that was itself in transition.

Eine Notiz im Werkstattbuch belegt: Spätestens im März 1914 hatte Oskar Barnack das erste funktionstüchtige Modell einer Kleinkamera für 35-mm-Kinofilm fertiggestellt. Damit war nicht nur ein neuer Fotoapparat erfunden. Mit der kriegsbedingt erst 1925 eingeführten Leica (= Leitz / Camera) kündigte sich ein Paradigmenwechsel in der Fotografie an. Nicht nur fotografierenden Amateuren, Quereinsteigern und emanzipierten Frauen erleichterte die Leica den Zugang zum Lichtbild. Sie provozierte auch eine neue Art des Sehens, einen schnelleren, dynamischen Blick auf die Welt aus neuen Perspektiven. Rechtzeitig zum runden Geburtstag der legendären Kleinbildkamera und erstmals in dieser thematischen Breite bietet der mit etwa 1.200 Fotografien bebilderte Band eine umfassende Kunst- und Kulturgeschichte der Leica von den 1920er-Jahren bis in unsere Tage. Essays internationaler Autoren beschäftigen sich unter anderem mit der technischen Genese der Leica, ihrem Einfluss auf den modernen Bildjournalismus und nicht zuletzt ihrer Bedeutung für verschiedenste Strömungen innerhalb der fotografischen Avantgarde. Bis dato unveröffentlichte Dokumente aus dem Archiv der Leica Camera AG runden die facettenreiche 100-jährige Kulturgeschichte ab. Fotos von: Michael Ackerman, Jane Evelyn Atwood, Ilse Bing, Edouard Boubat, René Burri, Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Mark Cohen, Bruce Davidson, Michel Vanden Eeckhoudt, William Eggleston, Richard Fleischhut, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Alberto Garcia Alix, Gianni Berengo Gardin, Ralph Gibson, Bruce Gilden, René Groebli, George Grosz, Ara Güler, Elisabeth Hase, Fred Herzog, Frank Horvat, Thomas Hoepker, Barbara Klemm, William Klein, Robert Lebeck, Saul Leiter, Ulrich Mack, Ramón Masats, Susan Meiselas, Jeff Mermelstein, Joel Meyerowitz, Will McBride, László Moholy-Nagy, Victor Palla, Alexander Rodtschenko, Paolo Roversi, Erich Salomon, Jeanloup Sieff, Klavdij Sluban, Louis Stettner, Christer Strömholm, Alfred Tritschler, Sabine Weiss, Kai Wiedenhöfer, Dr. Paul Wolff, Tom Wood und vielen anderen.

This photography-led book reveals the story of Chernobyl today, with unprecedented access to the Zone, it takes the reader into previously undocumented areas.
Since the first atomic bomb was dropped, humankind has been haunted by the idea of nuclear apocalypse. That nightmare almost became reality in 1986, when an accident at the USSR’s Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant triggered the world’s worst radiological crisis. The events of that night are well documented – but history didn’t stop there. Chernobyl, as a place, remains very much alive today.
In Chernobyl: A Stalkers’ Guide, researcher Darmon Richter journeys into the contemporary Exclusion Zone, venturing deeper than any previously published account. While thousands of foreign visitors congregate around a handful of curated sites, beyond the tourist hotspots lies a wild and mysterious land the size of a small country. In the forests of Chernobyl, historic village settlements and Soviet-era utopianism have lain abandoned since the time of the disaster – overshadowed by vast, unearthly mega-structures designed to win the Cold War.
Richter combines photographs of discoveries made during his numerous visits to the Zone with the voices of those who witnessed history – engineers, scientists, police and evacuees. He explores evacuated regions in both Ukraine and Belarus, finding forgotten ghost towns and Soviet monuments lost deep in irradiated forests. He gains exclusive access inside the most secure areas of the power plant itself, and joins the ‘stalkers’ of Chernobyl as he sets out on a high-stakes illegal hike to the heart of the Exclusion Zone.

Featuring new and iconic images, this follow-up to Prestel’s highly successful A Year in Photography: Magnum Archive includes some of the most striking photography ever collected in one volume. As readers flip the pages they will find themselves traveling from west to east across the globe. Each country is represented in three or four images captured by a single photographer. While renowned figures such as Robert Capa, Bruce Davidson, and Martin Parr are included, readers will also find younger photographers such as Olivia Arthur, Alessandra Sanguinetti, and Mikhael Subotzky, all of whom present dazzling new views of our changing world. Shining a light on the human condition in every corner of the globe, this compilation exemplifies Magnum founder Henry CartierBresson’s vision of “a community of thought, a shared human quality, a curiosity about what is going on in the world, a respect for what is going on and a desire to transcribe it visually.”

How do we see the world around us? The Penguin on Design series includes the works of creative thinkers whose writings on art, design and the media have changed our vision forever.

Susan Sontag’s groundbreaking critique of photography asks forceful questions about the moral and aesthetic issues surrounding this art form. Photographs are everywhere. They have the power to shock, idealize or seduce, they create a sense of nostalgia and act as a memorial, and they can be used as evidence against us or to identify us. In six incisive essays, Sontag examines the ways in which we use these omnipresent images to manufacture a sense of reality and authority in our lives.