Edition Patrick Frey – förlag

"The point of departure for the book Black Ark with Lee “Scratch” Perry (1936–2021),a Jamaican musical and visual artist who was based in Switzerland, is a detailedinventory of photographs and writings (Spring 2021) from the Black Ark Studios inKingston, Jamaica, where Lee produced his music from 1973 on. He was a seminalpioneer of dub, an electronic subgenre of reggae that uses sampling, looping,remixing, reverb and echoes to create new songs as well as rework and appropriatepre-recorded songs and tracks.Black Ark Studios was one of the cradles of dub. It’s also where Lee “Scratch”Perry’s musical approach found an enduring visual counterpart in the form ofcontinuously evolving mural paintings and drawings as well as shape-shiftingassemblages of records, instruments, found objects, posters, newspaper andmagazine clippings, and appropriated books. The artworks form actual layers uponlayers that are rhizomatically intertwined with the studio building itself as well as withthe furniture inside—and with Perry’s biography and persona.Perry created his very own, dense and eclectic world—a world that is documented inBlack Ark, before it disappears for good: the premises have recently been sold. Thephotographic documentation of the studio was supplemented by efforts to secure andpreserve Perry’s cultural objects as part of a joint project with various culturalinstitutions.Black Ark which reflects the rhythm and layering effects of collage both in its contentand the materials used to craft the book. Perry was involved in the conception of thebook in its early stages. It also interweaves various media and chronologies. The newphotographs of the Black Ark Studios will be juxtaposed with stills from olddocumentaries and archival photos.The idea of a “house” serves as both a working hypothesis and a metaphor. It will bethe starting point and endpoint of various thematic strands, both visual and textual:for example, the book will explore the Black Ark as a “spiritual yard” in the context ofAfrican diaspora, as well as looking into archeomusicological aspects. Furthermore,extended captions by Perry’s biographer will provide the backdrop for a kaleidoscopicpanorama of Perry’s eclectic and ingenious work."

Dieter Hall portrays man thrown back on himself. Ecce Homo, behold the man—without his social attributes, often nude, in splendid isolation. Hall seeks the common denominator—metonymically called the Naked Chair—of mere existence in the images of others’ (mostly male) bodies. He regards things, objects, gardens and landscapes with the same searching gaze. His minutely arranged still lifes—a glass, a flower, a chair – call to mind Bonnard and Matisse. Hall’s bare chairs are recurrent silent echoes of isolation and transience, intensified by the dark shadow the AIDS epidemic cast on his life and work while living in New York. Although his works are not referential in the traditional sense, Hall reacts to the works of other artists, including painter Alice Neel’s psychological realism and the work of photographers like David Armstrong and Peter Hujar. Hall was friends with Hujar and moved in the same scene—until the latter’s early death from AIDS. Photography plays a key part in Hall’s work — though never as an end in itself: it helps him compose his pictures. He selects details—a foot or a hand, for example—and transposes them into painterly renditions, wholly reinventing the subject portrayed in the process. The resulting works, characterized above all by their radical intimacy, tell of isolation and a deep-seated need for connection.

Forty years ago, armed with tape, scissors and a hefty dose of wit, Yello—aka Boris Blank, Dieter Meier and, initially, Carlos Perón—, set out to write their very own chapter of music history. In no time at all they found themselves playing The Roxy club in New York, marveling at the seething sea of bodies dancing themselves into ecstasy to the beat of Yello’s seminal single Bostich. Today, thanks to albums like Solid Pleasure, You Gotta Say Yes To Another Excess and Flag, and singles like Oh, Yeah and The Race, Yello are enshrined amongst the pantheon of electropop pioneers. Blank and Meier recently released their 14th studio album, Point, proving once again that age is no obstacle to musical daring and adventure. Yello owe their enduring success to a steadfast refusal to follow the rules of the music industry. This book celebrates the days when “sound painter” Blank and word wizard Meier first set out to create their Yello world. So, naturally, it doesn’t stick to the beaten track of glossy pop music biographies either. Meier had already displayed a keen eye for pointedly nonsensical aesthetics as an experimental filmmaker and conceptual artist before delving into music. And Blank, tinkering away in the music studio, was also hip to the power of visual representation. For Oh Yeah / Yello 40, the two artists dug deep into their souvenir boxes to come up with an intriguing haul of Polaroids, posters, letters, fanzine reviews, sketches, pictures of their trip to Cuba—and even the handwritten sheet music to Bostich. Oh Yeah / Yello 40 is more than a scrapbook from the days when we were all young. The book harks back to the gleefully playful zeitgeist of the post-punk era in a city which, as only fools may have forgotten, was the cradle of Dada. — Hanspeter “Du?si” Kuenzler

Half a century ago, young idealists dropped out of society and went “back to the land,” one of the largest urban-to-rural migrations in American history. Northern California became the movement’s epicenter, where utopian communes gave rise to radical, handbuilt, sometimes otherworldly homes. Handmade Utopia: Back-to-the-Land Architecture in Northern California traces those still committed to this way of life, capturing their buildings and the stories behind them at the tail end of a generation’s social experiment. Handmade Utopia travels through Northern California, along hidden dirt roads and into redwood forests, uncovering handmade homes concealed for decades. Schmelling’s photography documents these structures today, while Kramer’s oral histories with 38 back-to-the-landers recount how they came to be, complemented by archival materials, historical texts, and locally produced publications from the movement’s heyday. These pioneers taught themselves to farm, embraced alternative lifestyles, and developed architectural approaches that influenced broader building practices— through imaginative design, ecological materials, and energy efficiency. In pursuit of a different way of living, they rethought what a home could be. Only a few remained after the Summer of Love. Now in their seventies and eighties, they raise the question of what will remain. These homes were never constructed for their resale promise, anti-capitalistic to their foundations, and they are rapidly disappearing. Handmade Utopia presents them as artworks in their own right—captured before they are lost.

Einfälle kennen keine Tageszeit (Ideas know no time of day) contains Max Küng’s best reporting from DAS MAGAZIN (such as the piece in which he describes his bike conquest of the Alpe d’Huez, or his seven day trip around the world) and other magazines:The collected columns (naturally including the complete “We love Chris” series). Discovered pictures. Unbelievably important notes. Very finely printed fine print. 100 favorite songs. Suggestions for a few super DJ names. A homage to the Concord. Interviews (Metallica, Britney Spears). An eating splurge through New York. A very old picture of Juergen Teller. Thoughts on the inventor of the saxophone. A self-experiment (watching Swiss television for a week, nonstop). A visit to Locarno (and to China). Quite a few tips, advice with self-help appeal. A little poetry. Portraits of Erich von Däniken and Dries Van Noten. And much much more.

n the series Familiar Territory, farm animals are portrayed together with their owners. But instead of standing in a stall or on a field, they are pictured in the middle of people’s living quarters. The emotional connections that exist between animals and humans find multiple and careful expressions here and are also effectively questioned. The Familiar Territory photographs invoke the tradition of portrait and documentary photography as a way to investigate culture, habitat, domesticity, family and gender roles as well as our relationship to animals. Although the photographs are orchestrated and carefully composed, Jon Naiman has managed to capture a moment of intimacy. The color photos, made with a large-format camera, were taken in various regions of Switzerland, especially in the Bern and Solothurn cantons, in Alpine villages, on farms, in cities and agglomerations.

THE PARTICLES (of White Naugahyde) is the first publication of a play by William Leavitt (b. 1941). Leavitt is one of the pioneers of conceptual art in Los Angeles, helping significantly to establish the genre in the late 1960s and the 1970s. His works make use of narrative elements drawn from LA architecture and popular culture as well as from the movie and television industries. The artist works in various media, including sculpture, painting, drawing, photography and theatre. Framed as a sitcom setting, the narrative of THE PARTICLES (of White Naugahyde) tells the story of a family auditioning for a NASA program, which sends them to a newly planned space colony. The demanding admission process makes them live in a security-free community in the desert together with other applicants. These two weeks in the desert result in anxiety and anti-social behavior among the participants.

Richly illustrated with news clippings and company brochures Haussmann für Weinberg is a fashion, design, and architecture book in equal parts that precisely captures the Zeitgeist and shines a light on an ironic, illusionistic, Swiss Modernism that goes beyond strictly “good form. ”

This picture book is a small window onto a large world.  It shows everyday life in the most varied corners of the African continent, one that does not exist in the coverage provided by Western media. There is nothing spectacular or sensational about this everyday life, but it is always there. It is colorful and also banal, sometimes even contradictory, but it is always precious and genuine.

OFF, a photographic series by Daniela Comani, is an excursus into perception as it relates to the media. With painstaking precision she probes that ever-present device for the reproduction of moving images, the television set, but in off mode: turned off, TV sets seem dead, they become cold objects – and yet concomitantly they serve as surfaces for viewers to project their own fantasies and fears on. Even when the picture is extinguished, the TV is still not bereft of content, for the dark screen reflects the room and the people and objects in it. Daniela Comani doesn’t merely take pictures of inactive TV sets, she shoots them: the flash hits the dark screen like a Big Bang that yields new sights and insights, even as it outshines and obliterates the protagonist’s reflection. At the instant she pulls the trigger, the split-second flash blends with the surface structure of the television sets in the most peculiar ways, producing new images and new shapes in these landscapes with sunset, small format. Daniela Comani’s series is also about design: for this minimalistic mise-en-scène of an assortment of TV sets of varying shape, size and design, the artist has painstakingly removed the brand names in order to bring out the physical idiosyncrasies of each different setup. The objects are portrayed from the front, as though they were people gazing out from the picture at the viewer. The housing of each set serves as a picture frame and suggests the machine’s essential nexus to the picture. The photograph turns the plastic TV sets into two-dimensional pictures, which Comani then mounts on paperboard to create a new three-dimensional object. Each picture is unique despite the serial nature of photography with its technical capability of infinite reproduction. (Renata Stih, Berlin 2011)

Pareidolia is the phenomenon of perceiving non-existing things in inanimate objects, such as human faces or animal heads in rocks. One well-known example is the Face on Mars, also known as the Cydonia Face after the region on the Red Planet where it can be seen. Pareidolia is a misapprehension of an object by the mind, which alters it according to its own imaginings or completes it to form a familiar image. Over the years, the Swiss painter and writer Jean Willi has photographed rocks that seem to have faces, thereby discovering a realm of stone apparently teeming with petrified “souls”. It is often the sunlight that traces a face in the rock, which then disappears when the light changes. Sometimes it’s only two dark spots like eyes, out of which the viewer fashions a face in the mind’s eye. The question is what do we actually see and what do we consciously or unconsciously turn into something familiar. The dawn of art might even be traced to such subjective sightings. Shamans claim they need to make out faces in plants and stones in order to contact certain spirits. Over the course of his work, the photographer’s gaze has changed to a point where he is convinced that faces are displayed in at least two thirds of rocks and stones. Most of us are familiar with the eerie experience of mistaking a branch or crumpled paper lying in the street for a snake or run-over bird (a pigeon or chicken, depending on the urban or rural environment), respectively. Many of the faces in this book seem so real that it’s hard to believe their features are drawn only by nature and the play of light. It goes without saying that none of the photographed rocks has been rearranged and none of the photos retouched. The images were taken on Ibiza, Spain, between April 27, 2015, and January 12, 2017.

Judging from old photographs, you’d think Susi Wyss (b. 1938) was an angel in satin, but the look in her dark-ringed eyes tells a different story. Susi’s richly illustrated memoirs, Guess Who Is the Happiest Girl in Town, are the stuff that other girls’ dreams might be made of. After studying fashion design in Zürich, Susi met an aristocratic couple in Saint-Tropez who initiated her into the world of the European jet set. All the hype and hoopla around the “high life” may seem tasteless and insipid nowadays, but the way Susi sashayed through it back in the day was so exciting and outrageous that artists like the Swiss Manon and photographers like June (alias Alice Springs) and Helmut Newton immortalized her in books and magazines as a feminist spearhead of sexual liberation. She used to hold extravagant dinner parties for the Paris smart set in her apartment. In addition to her delectable home cooking, Susi recounts, “hashish, acid, mescaline, cocaine, threesomes, S&M, massages in the rooftop paddling pool and lots of fun were on the menu. ” Her friends included Paul Getty, Baron Eric de Rothschild, Kenneth Anger, Iggy Pop, Dennis Hopper, the beatnik Brion Gysin and fashion illustrator Antonio Lopez. It wasn’t until her mid-thirties that Susi cashed in on her lifestyle and began working as a call girl, building up an illustrious clientele that included big wheels in politics, business and the arts. It wasn’t long before she was overwhelmed by the demand and had to recruit other young beauties to satisfy her burgeoning business. In a flash Susi had become an internationally renowned madam. Spanning the first forty years of Susi Wyss’s life, Guess Who Is the Happiest Girl in Town also reveals the darker side of her life story: the loss of youth, the deaths of near and dear ones, and the tipping point at which drugs and alcohol ceased to be merely fun. At forty, however, she quit her call-girl career and began writing about her life. If the Dutch “Happy Hooker” / Manhattan madam Xaviera Hollander “could make money with a book about sex,” she figured, “why can’t I?” So when Susi’s sensually slapstick stories don’t strum your heartstrings, they strike much lower, below the belt.

Glamorous impersonations of evil: In the fall of 1999 Edition Patrick Frey published The Nazis, which soon became a legendary cult book. It has long since been out of print and remains highly coveted to this day. While The Nazis showed stills of actors playing Nazis in various Hollywood movies, Polish artist Piotr Uklanksi has now juxtaposed them with the real thing: Nazi party bigwigs, decorated “war heroes” and war criminals. Painstakingly culled from a great many different archives, this follow-up compilation superimposes fact on fiction, the stagey, propagandistic imagery of the Third Reich on the mockup Nazi iconography of Hollywood, revealing an uncanny, even spooky, resemblance between the play-acting and real-life exponents of evil. Real Nazis, using the same format and production values as its predecessor, is the “real” brother that now seems an ugly reflection of that “glamorous” artist’s book The Nazis. So who are the “real” Nazis in this picture puzzle? What qualifies as constituting a bona fide Nazi? Which pictures are “real” and which are “fake”? All of them? None of them?This play of mirrors serves as a radical commentary on our alarming present condition, in which the lines between populist and fascistic politics are increasingly blurring. Then as now: “Beneath all the insignia and accoutrements of evil lurks the iconography of media kitsch and ridicule. It’s all about the power of costumes and the costumes of power, about the glamour of evil, the glistening shine of fake medals made of fake gold. ” Uklanski’s Real Nazis is coming out on the occasion of the opening of the Documenta 14 on June 7, 2017 in Kassel, Germany.

A catalog usually comes out in connection with an exhibition and serves to elucidate, support, supplement and sometimes even criticize the exhibits. It does so by carefully selecting essays about and views of the exhibits, often by referring to other critics and other artists — who are often older than the exhibiting artists. Thus, contemporary exhibition catalogs serve as accessories to memory. These “corpses” of exhibitions past fill whole shelves in the art book sections of libraries, reminding us that just about everything produced in the way of art has at some point been exhibited. These “corpses” of thousands of bygone exhibitions perform a vital function for posterity, tying the artworks directly into the lives of those who produced them. An Acrylic Glass Pyramid and Three Pendulums attached to a Triangle on a Table draws on the life and work of the artist Athene Galiciadis. This book does not follow in the wake of an exhibition, nor were the artworks in the book produced before the book. Created to stand alone as well as side by side, and along specific timelines — the timelines of the artist and of those who inspired her –, they are shown for the first time here. The book contains color reproductions, printed on graph paper, of figures, spirals, patterns and vases, a self-portrait of the artist as well as photographic documents inspired by Emma Kunz, an early 20th-century Swiss artist, healer and visionary. Kunz is chiefly known for her geometrical drawings, which she executed on graph paper with the aid of a pendulum. Based on Kunz’s precise empirical approach to producing knowledge and art, Galiciadis has produced a new series of drawings, whose configurations of shape and pattern draw us into her perceptions and interpretation of the world.

Altar documents the widespread human urge to elevate secular things to the status of “ritual objects” and combine them to form private altars. Whether they’re dust catchers, knickknacks, souvenirs, found objects, meaningful artworks or earnestly and deeply revered objects, they all tell a peculiar story — not in words, but in things — about whoever built the altar. For some time now, Rosa Schamal has been pursuing her fascination with “insignificant” things which, when displayed, exert a sometimes banal, sometimes stirring effect, through the lens of a camera. Peter Schneider’s essay outlines various ways of understanding the implicit order in these “little things”. Manuel Süess designed and laid out the book, fusing text and photos into a harmonious whole. “Nothing has more directly to do with my life than these found, fortuitous, selected things. ” (D. H. in B. , 35 years old)“My loved ones. I wish I could have had them all around me. But then came strife, divorce, illness, death. Here on the dresser they’re all united, regardless of where they ended up. ” (B. Z. from H. , 82 years old)“The essentials often come together in a single object: love, faith, hope, beauty… homeland!” (C. H. from K. , 58 years old)

José de Jesús “Chucho” León Hernández is a part of Mexico City’s nightlife. For over twenty years he has been documenting the city’s vibrant music scene, the carryings-on at underground venues and gay clubs, the newcomers and leavers, rising stars and departing legends. A huge cultural magnet with its population of 20 million, the Mexican metropolis is constantly reinventing its nightlife, providing a stage for those who seek the limelight and perfect hunting grounds for Chucho, whose presence and camera significantly shape the ambiance around him, to chase and capture the creatures of the night. His subjects vary from the young and beautiful to the queer; from drug- and sex-driven exuberance to Mexico’s eternal and omnipresent flirtation with death. Although Chucho’s work is included in some of Mexico’s major collections, it has yet to receive the recognition it deserves. Vida puts José León on the map in Mexico, where international recognition is often a prerequisite for recognition at home. Chucho is influenced by the aesthetics of Mexican Catholicism as well as by fashion magazines and photobooks, which he studies obsessively. Although an autodidact, his works reveal a thoroughgoing knowledge and understanding of the history of photography and an uncanny feel for his surroundings.

Hodel / Schumacher / Clavadetscher were a trio of artists from 1991 till Martin Hodel’s death in 1995. Martin Hodel and Eric Schumacher were students in Vienna in those years, Andrea Clavadetscher in Zürich. They planned exhibitions and projects together, sending drawings back and forth between the two cities or from their travels. Employing a wide range of different media and materials, Hodel / Schumacher / Clavadetscher opened up their art to subcultural phenomena, including, in particular, techno. Luftbad presents their works on paper, an essential aspect of their collaborative work. They would mail each other pictures, repeatedly overpainting and adding to them until they comprised several layers. Each sheet became a thick pictorial palimpsest, a veritable forest of sensual signs. Taken together, they form a pictorial universe in which influences from art history and pop culture, mythology and comic books, fuse as indissolubly as the artistic signatures of the three artists. The book is an exuberant visual labyrinth that invites us to immerse ourselves and enjoy losing our way. Each book cover is unique, individually designed by Eric Schumacher and Andrea Clavadetscher.

Stories of Little and Big Blossoms is about emotional ordeals like being a stranger in a strange land or losing a loved one, told from the perspective of children. Elham, for instance, a little girl from Iran, has to start over again in Germany, where everything – starting with the streets, buildings and playgrounds of her new city – is alien to her. And at school she feels insecure and excluded, and has a hard time making friends. Shirin Azari processes her own childhood experiences in these stories. One night in 1996, her family had to flee Iran – there wasn’t even time to say goodbye to relatives and friends. Over the years that followed, she attended no fewer than eleven different schools in Germany and suffered from never staying in one place for very long. Azari’s own story is the message she seeks to put across, for she learned her lesson the hard way: to struggle, to assert herself and never to give up. The tribulations of Elham, Jonathan, Aylin and her other hapless protagonists, illustrated with Azari’s delicate, poetic drawings, reflect her own uprooted childhood and youth, and the need for the most innocent victims of all, namely the children, to be courageous, assertive and open-minded.

A person’s hair may be likened to the top of a mountain. But while mountaintops are often shrouded from our eyes by clouds around them, a person’s top is almost always visible—especially in latitudes that have given up the daily use of bonnets, hats and headscarves. Hence the understandably heavy pressure on people’s heads—to get the hair just right. Over the course of several decades, photographer Peter Gaechter shot a wide array of hairdos for Zürich hairdresser Elsässer Pour Dames, tracking the changes in—and revivals of —hairstyles in late 20th-century Switzerland. The present publication brings together a selection of his photographs from the catalogues on display at these upmarket salons, showing the latest hairstyle trends from the 1970s to the 1990s. These sculpturesque cuts and coiffures, which were to be reproduced à l’identique on the customers’ heads, were also telltale signs of the times. Whether a punk or “Cold War Kids” cut, a “five-finger” blow-dry, feathery “Charlie’s Angels” wings or “Old Hollywood” coiffure—the multifarious hairstyles of local beauties, “It girls” and actresses featured in this book reflect the “why not?” whateverism of liberal consumer culture as well as concrete changes in society, e. g. in the sudden apparition of a clunky cell phone included in the picture frame as a pixie cut accessory. Gaechter’s photographs also hark back to an age in which photography was still infused with a spirit of professionalism. There are no snapshots here, no affectations of an amateur aesthetic, no strategically trashy elements—Gaechter's pictures target a clientele aspiring to distinction, as could once be said of the photographer’s craft as well.

Post-empire in the new Middle Kingdom: what once was America is now China. After his Insert Coins project (2016) about the decline of Las Vegas, Swiss photographer Christian Lutz set off to explore the world’s new gambling capital, Macao, where everything revolves likewise around money, luxury, surfaces. This former Portuguese colony in the Pearl River delta, now one of China’s “special economic zones”, began its meteoric ascent after the turn of the millennium when the Macao government ended the monopoly on gambling and opened up the market to foreign investors. They erected temples to Mammon, monumental marble- and gold-faced casino resorts algorithmically modelled on generic Venetian and Parisian templates, bringing in thirty million—mostly Chinese—tourists a year. Macao’s regulated microclimate of gambling halls, boutiques and bars is packed with the usual businessmen and politicians in ill-fitting suits alongside upwardly mobile Chinese families in sweatpants and flip-flops. Everything here is sanitized, antiseptic, dust-free. And everything refers to simulacra of simulacra. Lutz’s insistent photographic gaze laconically scans the smooth surfaces of this brave new world—in which the first cracks are beginning to show.

It stares grimly out of its wide-open bloodshot eyes, while the row of tentacles concealing its oral fissure seem to judder voraciously. The membrane covering the next one’s head is so thin you can see its brain bulging out beneath it. Still others have flat reptilian faces or canine heads, trunks, beaks, pointed ears, feelers and/or teeth sticking up through the tops of their heads. Wherever you look you’ll see warts, bristly, pathologically proliferating tufts and mops of hair, staring cyclops’ eyes, droopy ears, impish toothless grins, ginormous eyes with multiple pupils. And in between, details of their sleeves, cufflinks and shirt buttons displaying skulls, as if from a mail-order catalogue of horror. Monsters in Suits neatly lines up this whole cabinet of horrors in a series of mock-official busts. The bigshots of politics and business are captured and caricatured here in dark blue ballpoint. But these aren’t straightforward portraits of Nestlé’s CEO (“Water is not a human right”), the head of the Ku Klux Klan or the ringleaders of far-right youth groups. They are distorted and mixed up by the subconscious into grotesque monsters and bogeymen, each fitted out with the trappings of respectability: namely a suit and tie. They’re ready for business—whatever the cost to the welfare of the world. Here, for once, they show their true colors—and their true mugs.

Swiss-American graphic designer, musician, photographer and performance artist Mike Hentz ranks among the pioneers of new media art. He co-founded the legendary performance group Minus Delta T and the artist groups Frigo, Radio Bellevue and the European Media Art Lab. In the 1990s he realized the project Piazza Virtuale with Van Gogh TV and a great many interactive cable and satellite television shows with Universcity TV. Hentz also taught at art schools in Germany, Switzerland and various Eastern European countries. Works 7 is a very special overview of Hentz’s work: snapshots from all over the world, paintings, collages, graphic and ornamental works, and various artifacts from the artist’s collections, which include everything from old magazines to fabric patterns. Interconnected and mutually illuminating, Hentz’s works are multifunctional, incessantly morphing and re-emerging in all sorts of different contexts: a painting may be hung on a wall or used in a video lecture, a projected snapshot becomes part of an installation, existing works are scanned and reworked. Hentz’s aggregate work-in-progress is reconstructed in an associative order in this encyclopedic, excessive book that highlights every aspect of his wide-ranging oeuvre.

Widerspru?chliche Bewegungsreize picks up where the author’s previous book, Universen (Edition Patrick Frey, 2011), left off and gives visible, palpable form to their artistic work over the past ten years, transporting the reader once again into a teeming pictorial cosmos. In contrast to Universen, however, this artist’s book features huber. huber’s photographs rather than collages and ink drawings. Presented in two-page spreads, the pictorial compositions form ascending and descending series of various lengths in which other images using other techniques are embedded. The upshot is a dazzling tapestry of images, producing a sort of visual dissonance which, in extreme cases, is liable to cause the same symptoms as motion sickness. Brief texts (translated into a total of seven different languages), ranging from succinct descriptions to associative sensory impressions, provide clues to some of the compositions and sequencing whilst also serving as agreeable interludes. A remarkably comprehensive index of nouns (e. g. “apple”, “petri dish”, “salt lake”) and adjectives (e. g. “moist”, “geometric”, “eerie”) helps to render the artists’ enigmatic visual cosmos readable. This new artist’s book goes far beyond the mere reproduction of photographs and once again masterfully reflects huber. huber’s artistic practices in the special medium of the book. – Mirjam Fischer

The book’s title reveals the identity of its protagonist: Kathleen McCain Engman has been posing for her son Charlie since 2009. And yet MOM shows us a face we never really get to know: while we soon become acquainted with her freckled complexion and intense gaze, her position in the images becomes increasingly unclear. Engman first began shooting his mother because she was available, ever-willing to meet the demands of one of her children. But what began as a casual, organic process evolved into an intense collaboration. The result is neither a family album nor a filial tribute but a much deeper and far more complex interaction: one that raises questions about the limits of familiarity, the rules and boundaries of roles and representation, vulnerability and control, and what it means to look and to be seen.