Hard cover, first edition, with no dust jacket as issued, Published by Steven Albahari, Volume one (1st edition one of 4500 copies).

The Journal of Contemporary Photography: Culture & Criticism: 1

Arts & Photography

Photography & Video

Scalo Verlag Ac

Swiss photographer Balthasar Burkhard‘s oeuvre continues the tradition of his compatriots Robert Frank and Jakob Tuggener, their ever-questioning search for the truth hidden in the surfaces of the world and their contemplative precision. This monograph provides the first comprehensive overview of his work from the 1970s to 2004. Burkhard’s black-and-white photographs are characterized by rich details, perfect focus, and a mastery of craft that translates technical perfection into conceptual precision. Burkhard transforms the objective reality of his motifs into autonomous visual worlds with an immediacy and tender-sharp sensuality of their own. He carefully chooses detail and large-scale views of the visible world that are capable of asserting their presence in the most intimate realms of the viewer‘s mind. With an essay by Matthias Frehner "Burkhard very intensely focuses on the same topics for a long time. He often simultaneously works on nudes, landscapes, still lives, portraits, and animals. It is rather common for the artist to return to an idea after years or decades as if he had been thinking about it just yesterday." – Matthias Frehner

Balthasar Burkhard: Omnia

Burkhard, Balthasar

Individual Artists

Sometimes, but very rarely these days, one can announce a real discovery in contemporary photography — a book that will emphatically place its author on the international map on the same level as such giants of photography as Robert Frank and Nan Goldin. After the international success of Lux et Nox Scalo is proud and excited to announce the definitive mid-life retrospective book on Australian artist Bill Henson. The book combines all groups of work that Henson has created up to the present: from his early Ballet pictures (1974), to his body and nude portraits (1977–1986), from his photographs of street-crowds (1979–1982) to his Baroque Triptychs (1983–84), from his fantastic combinations of pictures taken in the Australian Suburbs and Egypt (1985/86) to his Los Angeles and New York nightscapes (1987–88), from his famous cut-out collages shown at the centenary Venice Biennale in 1995, to the portraits of adolescents and his magical color compositions for the Paris Opera (1990/91), and, most recently, a haunting selection of his images of children adrift in the wilderness of night (1997-2004), many of these appearing for the first time. Bill Henson is a continent in photography to be discovered. This book will be one of Scalo’s major contributions to the understanding of contemporary photography. Published on the occasion of the artist’s retrospective at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, opening January 2005 and touring to the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne in April. 
Essays by Judy Annear, Jennie Boddington, Edmund Capon, Dennis Cooper, Peter Craven, Isobel Crombie, John Forbes, Michael Heyward, Alwynne Mackie, David Malouf, Bernice Murphy, Peter Schjeldahl, and an interview with Bill Henson by Sebastian Smee.

Mnemosyne

Henson, Bill

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) and Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) became friends in the mid-1930s in Paris. Both were seeking a way out of surrealism that would lead back to reality. Giacometti returned to life studies, Cartier-Bresson exchanged his brush for a camera. The content of this volume revolves around the many mutual resonances in the work of these two great artists. The book opens with shots of Giacometti taken by Cartier-Bresson over a period of three decades. At the same time, the inner workings of the artists’ friendship is illuminated by a comparison between the two as draughtsmen—both searching for the ’instant décisif’—and by the question of how the photographs of one and the paintings and drawings of the other are used in por-traiture. This is a unique encounter of two giants of 20th century art and photography!In their essays, Tobia Bezzola, curator at the Kunst-haus Zurich and Yves Bonnefoy, poet and writer, not only follow the traces of this exceptional friendship with accuracy, but also place the work and visual dialogue between the two creative voices within the frame of the history of surrealist and Modern Art.This book was produced in collaboration with Henri-Cartier Bresson, the Alberto Giacometti Foundation and the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris.

Henri Cartier-Bresson And Alberto Giacometti: La Decision De L'oeil / The Decision Of The Eye

Photographer Manuel Bauer has photographed the Dalai Lama for years. The privileged access granted him by His Holiness and his entourage have enabled Bauer to offer us these powerful images, oscillating between the spiritual and the personal, the public and the intimate, the epic and the anecdotal. About the Swiss-born photographer the Dalai Lama says: "Manuel Bauer is more than simply a professional: he is a close friend of mine. He also knows a great deal about Tibet, about the Tibetan community, and he has spent years making himself familiar with our culture. He understands Tibet comprehensively, as he does the exile community; and he knows me very well too. It is this knowledge that allows his pictures to say so much about their subjects." Bauer paints a unique and irreplacable portrait of one of the most remarkable figures in recent history. And the book contains numerous quotes from and interviews with the Dalai Lama, plus a full timeline about Tibet’s yesterday and today. "From the early morning until late into the night, and even in our dreams, we experience all kinds of perceptions. We go from being relaxed to being anxious, we feel sometimes anger, sometimes desire, sometimes compassion. Those are transitory states of mind that come and go, from moment to moment. But there must indeed be something that is aware of all this, a continuity of cognition that keeps on experiencing it even after we fall asleep. Yet that something is usually hidden to us, as if behind a curtain. So we need to remove that curtain.""Promoting science is very important. After all, it is looking for the same thing as Buddhism: the truth! I am more and more convinced that Buddhist monks, too, should study modern science. They could use science to help understand the nature of atoms and quarks, which would in turn help them to grasp the physical aspects of the Buddhist definition of the transitory nature of all things. That is very important. On the other hand, modern science is not very advanced in the understanding of consciousness, although consciousness, or awareness, is a major physical aspect." 
There is no doubt that some Tibetans will appreciate this book which I have seen and approved, that they will like it. Others, of course, may be more disturbed by it, and that’s only normal. People are so different: just think of Buddha, or Jesus Christ, and of how many people have admired these great masters. And yet at the same time there have also been critical voices among the choruses of praise. This is simply human nature.—Dalai Lama

Journey For Peace: His Holiness The 14th Dalai Lama

RICARD, Matthieu

Schmidt, Christian

Argentine artist Guillermo Kuitca is a key figure in contemporary art. His work is inspired by architecture, dance, film, and cartography. The Theatre Collages were created between 2003 and 2004 based on plans of famous theatres and opera houses. By carefully reassembling the elements of their interiors, Kuitca transforms their balconies and rows of seats into undulating abstractions and elaborate forms. The predictable regularity of the auditorium seats is broken up by a dynamic rhythm reminiscent of musical notation that plays with the dynamic relationship between the stage and the audience. The second part of the book is dedicated to The Ring (2003–2004) a four-part series based on Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle. Kuitca used album covers of historic recordings of these operas to create collages that powerfully evoke the voices and the music behind the famous names and titles.

Guillermo Kuitca: Theatre Collages

Kuitca, Guillermo

A highly-collectible, limited-edition artists book designed by the artist in collaboration with designer Irma Boom, and featuring an essay by Caoimhin Mac Giolla Leith. This is an art work in its own right. Five volumes held together by magnets, it provides the opportunity to flip through the artists recent films and savour her beautiful drawings.

Ellen Gallagher: Murmur

Gallagher, Ellen

Dance means motion. The body is the mostimmediate and intimate means of expression; its beauty and elegance are capable of defying age and commonplace notions of beauty. Esther Haase (born in 1966 in Germany and living in Hamburg) celebrates physicality and the sheer joy of life in her photographs. Haase, who regularly works for international magazines, belongs to a generation that has „seen it all" and knows how to play with everything. They grew up to be self-confident women in charge of their sex appeal with ease and self-determination. As a former ballet dancer and a true child of the stage, Haase uses costumes, backdrops, and poses to create baroque and glamorous images celebrating the pleasures of the body. Her photographs are proof that even in times of anxiety you can say yes to joy and sensuality. Whether her models are young or old, whether they conform to commercial standards of beauty or not, Haase makes them look alive, joyous, and irresistibly sexy.

Sexy Book

Haase, Esther

In the early 1990s, the idea of contemporary art in China simply did not compute to a foreign audience. But in 1993, ten contemporary Chinese artists debuted at the 48th Venice Biennale. They were immediately hailed as progenitors of a Chinese „avant-garde." Their brightly colored, Pop Art-inspired paintings played with socialist motifs, parodied Mao, and gave a visual expression to the feelings of disaffected Chinese youth. They were everything western audiences expected of contemporary art from the People‘s Republic of China. But a number of critics were rather guarded in their opinions. Was this another flash-in-the-pan phenomenon just as Soviet art had been in the 1980s? Could a Chinese avant-garde maintain a distinct identity of its own and shake off its penchant for imitation? The answer is clearly „yes." The emergence of a market for their art transformed the lives of these avant-garde pioneers from rags to riches, from outcast to hero, from social pariah to cutting-edge cool in a Chinese society adapting to a new era. They did not change but China has changed. The ideology they once had to fight now propagates a cultural climate of laissez-faire that is tantamount to encouragement. Set against China’s official program of modernization, Nine Lives paints a compelling picture of artists working beyond the pale of official culture, who started a new cultural revolution that is sweeping China today. 
Nine Lives introduces nine artists (Wang Guangyi, Geng Jianyi, Fang Lijun, Gu Dexin, Li Shan, Zhang Xiaogang, Xu Bing, Zhang Peili, and Wang Jianwei), their personal histories and views on China today. Karen Smith‘s highly accessible introduction to an emerging art scene in a society unknown to most of us makes good reading not only for art-world insiders, but for anyone curious about recent history and its effect on the booming Chinese society. The book opens with a glossary for readers unfamiliar with Chinese history and culture, and a time line placing each of the nine artists within the context of the Chinese art world and political history.Karen Smith was born in Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom. She graduated from Wimbledon Art School in 1987 with a BA in fine art. A year later, she moved to Asia, settling in China in 1993, curious to explore its practically unchartered art scene. She calls Beijing her home, and is one of the foremost authorities on China’s contemporary art scene, both in China and abroad.

Nine Lives: The Birth of Avant-Garde Art in New China

Smith, Karen

History & Criticism

Michael Raedecker The Show Like many, if not most painters of his generation, Michael Raedecker is a scavenger of images as indebted to modern cinema, advertising and print-media as he is to the rich history of European painting to which he, a Dutchman, is an obvious heir. This heritage, however, has grown in importance over the years as he engages with an expanding list of traditional genres: landscape, interior, still life, vanitas painting, even modernist abstraction. The point of departure for any given work is usually a detail from a catalogue, filmstill or magazine, which he then refines in the form of a sketch, and this becomes the blueprint from which a painting is patiently elaborated. The frequently ephemeral nature of the source material contrasts with the invariably time-consuming nature of the picture-making process, a unique combination of painting and embroidery in which pictorial illusionism is constantly undermined by the insistent physicality and contrapuntal play of roughly sluiced paint and painstakingly threaded yarn. Recreating this found imagery in the medium of embroidery and painting, Michael Raedecker deliberately avoids any hint as to the epoch and content of his motifs. Thus he imparts to his works an aura of surreal timelessness. Doing so his paintings become archetypes, pregnant with allusions to the surface on which the history of the genres is projected. The catalogue has been published on the occasion of the exhibition: Michael Raedecker – The Show at Hauser & Wirth, London, June 4 – July 23, 2005 With a conversation between Alison M. Gingeras and Michael Raedecker and an essay by Caoihmin Mac Goilla Leith. Hardcover 56 pages, 17 color and 7 b/w illustrations 9.4 x 11 in. (23.8 x 27.8 cm)

Michael Raedecker: The Show

Raedecker, Michael

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