Сборники работ

Jim Rakete, der Mann mit dem magischen Namen (kein Pseudonym!), Jahrgang 1951 und gebürtiger Berliner, begann bereits als Sechzehnjähriger die nächtliche Rock-Szene Berlins zu photographieren. Seine Leidenschaft für den Rock ’n’ Roll und das Bühnenleben der Stadt sollte ihn von da an nicht mehr loslassen. Sie überlebte auch Jim Raketes höchst erfolgreiches Intermezzo als Musikproduzent von Nina Hagen, Nena und vielen anderen Repräsentanten der »Neuen Deutschen Welle«. Zwar pflasterten Goldene Schallplatten buchstäblich seinen Weg, letztendlich hat er jedoch das stumme visuelle Medium den Tonträgern vorgezogen. Seine Photosammlung, die wir 1997 erstmals in Buchform der Öffentlichkeit vorstellten, ist einzigartig. Sie umfaßt von Jimi Hendrix über Samuel Beckett bis zu Wigald Boning so ziemlich alle Größen und Größenordnungen, die auf den deutschen Theater- und Musikbühnen in den letzten drei Jahrzehnten des vergangenen Jahrhunderts gastiert haben.

Before the beginning of his exile, Koudelka had already produced two works of great importance. One documented the Prague Spring, while the other, on gypsies, could almost have been an ethnological study had its images not been charged with so much emotion. Unknown in 1970, he has risen to become one of the most powerful photographers of the day. This book shows that in the lands of exile through which he travels with his amazing urge to see, Koudelka’s own particular talent has been affirmed and expanded.

PHOTOFILE brings together the best work of the world’s greatest photographers, in an attractive format and at an easily affordable price. Handsome and collectable, the books are produced to the highest standards. Each volume contains some sixty full-page reproductions printed in superb duotone, together with a critical introduction and a full bibliography. The series has been awarded the first annual prize for distinguished photographic books by the International Center of Photography, New York.

On August 21, 1968, theatre photographer and aeronautics engineer Josef Koudelka took pictures of the Prague invasion by Warsaw Pact tanks and smuggled them out of the country. Magnum circulated them credited to an “unknown photographer” in order to prevent reprisals, Koudelka won the Robert Capa Award anonymously. 40 years later, Koudelka reviewed his archive and presents 249 mostly unpublished pictures from the series in this volume.

130 tritone images

In a career that spanned nearly seven decades, Josef Sudek, one of the masters of twentieth-century photography, created his own solitary world of shadow and light, of theme and variation. The more than one hundred images in this monograph convey the spirit of Prague as well as the spirit of Sudek.

German photography pioneer Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932) photographed plants so beautifully, and with such originality, that his work transcends the medium itself. Over more than 30 years, he took thousands of photographs, revealing a formally rigorous talent whose precision and dedication bridge the nineteenth and twentieth century worlds of image-making and bring a distinctly sculptural aspect to a firmly two-dimensional art form. Beautifully but starkly composed against plain cardboard backgrounds, Blossfeldt's images, relying on a northern light for their sense of volume, reveal nothing of the man but everything of themselves. They are still-lifes, piercingly final statements on their subject, and have endured owing to their technical brilliance and the ongoing fascination of students and photographers. Like their maker, they are quietly and lastingly effective.

A fascination for flora. Timeless photos in which plants become sculptures

German photography pioneer Karl Blossfeldt (1865–1932) photographed plants so beautifully, and with such originality, that his work transcends the medium itself.

Over more than 30 years, he took thousands of photographs, revealing a formally rigorous talent whose precision and dedication bridge the 19th- and 20th-century worlds of image-making and bring a distinctly sculptural aspect to a firmly two-dimensional art form. Beautifully but starkly composed against plain cardboard backgrounds, Blossfeldt’s images, relying on a northern light for their sense of volume, reveal nothing of the man but everything of themselves. They are still lifes, piercingly final statements on their subject, and have endured owing to their aesthetics and the ongoing fascination of students and photographers. Like their maker, they are quietly and lastingly effective.

About the series:

Bibliotheca Universalis — Compact cultural companions celebrating the eclectic TASCHEN universe at an unbeatable, democratic price!

Since we started our work as cultural archaeologists in 1980, TASCHEN has become synonymous with accessible, open-minded publishing. Bibliotheca Universalis brings together more than 100 of our all-time favourite titles in a neat new format so you can curate your own affordable library of art, anthropology, and aphrodisia.

Bookworm’s delight — never bore, always excite!

Karlheinz Weinberger’s day job may have been relatively uneventful ― working in a Siemen’s warehouse ― but the photos he took in his spare time are anything but conformist.

Weinberger’s passion, and the focus of this book, is the rebel youth of 1950s and ’60s Switzerland, who channelled American rock-’n’-roll culture and made it their own with their rolled-up jeans and denim jackets, bouffant hairdos, striped T-shirts, and customized belts boasting images of Elvis and James Dean.

Weinberger’s lusty, free-spirited and self-confident portraits posit the defiant attitude of youth as a response to the conservative post-war era. Swiss Rebels also includes homoerotic images of rockers, bikers, construction workers and athletes, many of whom occupy positions outside of social norms.

This publication is the first to present an overview of Weinberger’s provocative oeuvre.

Captured in three Tokyo parks in the early seventies, Kohei Yoshiyuki’s The Park series features some of the most intriguing photographic works of art ever. Shot at night using flash and infrared film, the photographs show hetero- and homosexuals gathering for furtive sexual encounters in the Shinjuku, Yoyogi, and Aoyama parks. These amorous scenes, however, are unpleasantly crowded; even before Yoshiyuki (*1946) approached them with his camera, the couples had become objects of desire for voyeurs. “It’s not the sex in Yoshiyuki’s photographs that is shocking, but rather, it is the reckless, pent-up fascination of the voyeurs - men so possessed that, for the moment, nothing else exists or matters - and the sense that we’ve all been there,” writes Vince Aletti.

The photographs, which generated a great deal of interest when first published in an austere Japanese edition in 1980, are presented here in duotone quality alongside an interview with the artist conducted by Nobuyoshi Araki.

Stark, impassioned and singularly intense, Josef Koudelka’s work has received deserved acclaim over the past three decades as a uniquely significant contribution to the language of photography.

'Koudelka' is the first book to present over 150 of his most eloquent images in a single volume, from his earliest images – published here for the first time – to his most recent panoramic landscape studies.

Whether photographing avant-garde theatre, gypsies throughout Eastern Europe, resistance to Soviet guns and tanks advancing on Prague, or the environmental degradation of a post-industrial world, Koudelka has consistently produced images that provoke a connection to the larger questions of human existence.

Robert Delpire, Koudelka’s longtime publisher, collaborated with the artist in conceiving and producing this title. The other essayists in 'Koudelka' each explore a different aspect of the artist’s work, illustrating his constant evolution and intensity.

About the Author:

Josef Koudelka began his career as an aeronautical engineer, turning full-time to photography in the late 1960s. In 1968, Koudelka photographed the Soviet invasion of Prague, publishing his photographs under the initials P. P. (Prague Photographer). In 1969, he was anonymously awarded the Overseas Press Club’s Robert Capa Gold Medal for the photographs. Significant exhibitions of his work have been held at The Museum of Modern Art and the International Center of Photography, New York; Hayward Gallery, London; Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art, Amsterdam; and Palais de Tokyo, Paris. In 1992, he was named Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. He is currently based in Paris.

Whether photographing avant-garde theatre, gypsies on the steppes of Eastern Europe or resistance to Soviet guns and tanks advancing on Prague, Josef Koudelka has consistently produced images that provoke a connection to the larger questions of human existence.

This book brings together panoramic photographs from one of his most recent projects, the landscape of the Piedmont region of northern Italy. As Giuseppe Culicchia says in his introduction to this superb collection, ‘Today’s Piedmont is a region that is both wonderful and wounded. And here they are: the wonders and the wounds … Humans are largely absent from Koudelka’s images, because the book’s main protagonist is the land itself.’

• Includes an introduction outlining Piedmont’s history and culture by leading Italian journalist Giuseppe Culicchia.
• Koudelka’s powerful compositions lend themselves brilliantly to the panoramic format of the photographs and the book’s layout.

Josef Koudelka’s photographs of the 1968 invasion of Prague won him the Robert Capa Gold Medal in 1969. He left Czechoslovakia in 1969 and became a member of Magnum Photos. He has lived in Paris and Prague since 1980.

This book is a revised and enlarged version of the original maquette for Josef Koudelka's book Cikani (Czech for Gypsies), prepared by Koudelka and graphic designer Milan Kopriva in 1968, and intended for publication in Prague in 1970. However, Koudelka left Czechoslovakia in 1970, and the book was never published in that original form. Koudelka's stark images depict the poverty and clannishness of Gypsy life, but he does not present their situation as a social problem that should somehow be fixed. Instead, he shows the Gypsies as perpetual outsiders, and their lives as a primal mix of glee and wonder, sorrow and mystery.

This extended version of the seminal 'Gitans, la fin du voyage' consists of 109 photographs taken between 1962 and 1971 in what was Czechoslovakia (Bohemia, Moravia and Slovakia), Romania, Hungary, France and Spain. Sociologist Will Guy, author of the text that accompanied the first publication of Gypsies, has contributed an updated essay, tracing the migration of the Roma from their original homeland in northern India, to their current status one that continues to be contested internationally.