Bøker utgitt av Steidl Publishers

Following Cry Sadness into the Coming Rain (Steidl, 2017), which documents the seared landscapes of the Namib Desert and was shortlisted for the Deutscher Fotobuchpreis 18|19, Margaret Courtney-Clarke now turns her lens to the bushmen of the Kalahari Desert. The inspiration for When Tears Don't Matter comes, in part, from her grandfather's photographs of almost a century earlier during his mandate as Secretary for South West Africa (now Namibia), some of which are reproduced in this book. 10,000 kilometers of formidable terrain takes Courtney-Clarke across remote bushveld, sand and salt pans to drought-stricken conservancies, tenuous farming communities that function as holding tanks for "inconvenient indigenes," "cultural villages" and peri-urban squatments, as far east as she could travel through the Namibian Kalahari Desert.Largely invisible to the outside world, the bushmen today are dispossessed of their land: a "shadow people" sidelined by officialdom, economic inequity and outdated mythologies which present them as living in an "uncontaminated" state. In this complex country where notions of truth and objectivity (and whiteness) are constantly explored, the battle against disenfranchisement is largely unsuccessful. Courtney-Clarke's photographs lie at the crossroads between documentary and activism, and their basis is an unfailing empathy with her subjects-in her words: "What is crucial in this work is to give place to a voice in search of a listener."

Is it a book, an exhibition, a catalogue of the exhibition? Is it mass produced? Is it unique? Dayanita Singh is a book artist who stretches the imagination of what a book can be, transcending the spaces between publishing and art. Book Building traces the journeys of Singh's books, from the first, Zakir Hussain (1986), to her latest, Zakir Hussain Maquette (2019), showing the spectrum of her book-building process, from idea to material object and how she inventively circulates them in the art world and beyond.Both a short history and a deep dive, this is Dayanita Singh's manifesto for the photobook. Taking those she has made with Steidl as a basis, we witness the transformation of books into book-objects which open up new interpretative spaces: Museum of Chance (2014), for example, first became a book-object, then a diptych, a book-case, a suitcase museum and a book museum, before finally becoming the ongoing museum in Singh's Museum Bhavan (2017). Book Building documents Singh's 13 books in images and short texts, along with several DIYs Singh has created with detailed instructions on how to display her books as exhibitions-making us the curators-as well as various performative interventions, from book carts and happenings, to installations and tours. At the heart of Book Building is the collaborative process that Dayanita Singh and Gerhard Steidl have established over 20 years; the belief that a book is always in a process of becoming.

Imagery of crowds and mass gatherings has been the focal point of Michel Comte's work for many years now. Particularly powerful are the yearly Easter blessings in the Vatican City; the papal conclaves with aerial views of all the gathered cardinals have not changed since the Middle Ages. From Shibuya's crossings to New York's Times Square; from the Hajj in Mecca, to Woodstock, the World Cup final, and the Italian Grand Prix; from the March on Washington with Martin Luther King, to Hong Kong in 2019-2020-each of these places attracts enormous crowds approaching a point of imminent danger that have led to catastrophic events in the past.In November 2019 the first cases of COVID-19 were reported in the city of Wuhan in Hubei province; in the months since, our world has changed. Social distancing has become the new norm and our entire perspective towards gathering, meeting and closeness have taken on different meanings. Suddenly, images of crowds look unfamiliar. The dots are drifting apart.