Hartmann Projects – förlag

The verdict of the five-year NSU (National Socialist Underground) murder trial was announced in Munich in July 2018. The so-called NSU Trial is a milestone in postwar German jurisdiction that deeply challenged the understanding of democracy of all those who were directly and indirectly involved. Beate Zschäpe, the sole survivor of the NSU terror cell, and four supporters were eventually sentenced to prison terms. For eleven years the NSU committed right-wing-extremist-motivated murders in Germany, claiming the lives of ten people. The series of murders ended with the discovery of the corpses of Uwe Böhnhardt and Uwe Mundlos in 2011. Only then did the judiciary discover the connections between the victims, who had long been under suspicion themselves, and the right-wing extremist movement. From fall 2014 to spring 2017 the Hamburg-based documentary photographer Paula Market traveled through Germany, following in the footsteps of the NSU and documenting people and places associated with the NSU. Her photos of crime scenes and holiday retreats of the murderers are juxtaposed with portraits of victims, lawyers, and institutions. Markert’s photographs are combined with twelve selected text fragments and excerpts from interviews, providing a multifaceted impression of the events and, above all, of the many inconsistencies that remain incomprehensible to this day-questioning the due diligence obligations of the state and the role of the Federal Republic of Germany’s domestic intelligence service. This printed and bound book is intended to save the trial and the victims from the rapid digital oblivion of our times!

This small, gorgeously designed and carefully edited book--available in grey and beige cloth--presents all 20 photographs of a new body of work that Cindy Sherman completed in 2016. In these photographs, reminiscent (conceptually but not formally) of her earlier Film Stills, Sherman enacts variations on the theme of aging Hollywood actresses of the 1920s. The series was inspired by her interest in early German Expressionist silent movies, which led her to further studies of the first wave of the Hollywood star system in the 1920s. Here, Sherman's "actresses" are presented in the style of studio publicity shoots, against backgrounds that were carefully composed for each of the characters. With heavy make-up, elaborate hairdos, precisely chosen and arranged wardrobe and dresses, Sherman creates female characters that provoke a rich array of cultural associations.

“State of Nature” shows the extent that natural­-disaster protection has become part of the European landscape. Claudius Schulze traveled about 50.000 km across Europe, photographing seemingly picturesque landscapes from a crane platform with a large­-format camera. But each of those idyllic scenes contains imperfec­tions: alpine panoramas are crossed by snow sheds, the North Sea coast is fur­rowed by breakwaters. In each of the pho­tographs, protective structures rise into the landscape. But these pictures are not about defining the boundary between culture and nature. On the contrary: the pho­tographs demonstrate how much the two spheres penetrate each other.

Rauschen', German for noise, is the result of a photographic expedition, hiking along the A3 Autobahn between the German-Austrian border and the Ruhr Area. Christoph Naumann’s first book documents a space and landscape that otherwise do not receive no such close attention: the immediate surroundings of the autobahn.

The book to the 2018 Triennial of Photography Hamburg. Every three years since 1999, this large international festival (with 80 exhibitors and over 300 artists) presents an overview of contemporary developments in artistic and documentary photography. The large Hamburg exhibition institutions (Kunsthalle, Museum für Kunst & Gewerbe, Deichtorhallen, etc.) participate in the Triennial with their own exhibitions. The book’s subtitle is also the contextual focus of the event curated by Krzysztof Candrowicz. The world in the twenty-first century is characterized by constantly accelerating processes of change; mankind is currently undergoing an enormous phase of upheaval. Digitalization, climate change, waves of migration, population explosion, and globalization demand new solutions and ways of thinking. Under the motto “Breaking Point: Searching for Change,” the seventh Triennial of Photography Hamburg takes up this debate. What answers can artists contribute to the discussion? What are the tasks of photography? The works collected in this book as well as the texts by the authors and museum curators have taken up these challenges and reflect on the subject of the “breaking point” in a manner that is highly complex, imaginative, and inspiring.

Fifty years after 1968: The student protests seen from the perspective of the Berlin police force. Over the past decade Arwed Messmer has been working with photographic documents from public archives, using them as the visual basis of his artistic work. In the Police Historical Collection in Berlin he examined the holdings of images taken by the police within the scope of their usual documentation during the student protests of the 1960s. These images, which are published here for the first time, show a different view of the historical events than the press images that dominate our visual memory to this day. For this project Arwed Messmer digitized over one thousand black-and-white negatives, editing them in a sequential narrative structure that breaches the boundary between photography and film.

This new photo book(let) series presents analogue photographs and picture archives. Intuition, pure chance, odd encounters, and the slow passage of time helped in discovering the images and archives. All of them have their own remarkable stories: the story of the individual photographer, the story of the photographic subject, the story of each archive and its discovery, and not least the visible story of the unavoidable deterioration of analogue photographs, caused by production, use, and storage. All of the images are reproduced unretouched and thus bear the traces of their history, from the depths of their emulsions to their surfaces. Axel Herrmann (1946–2010) began documenting his exciting life as a commercial pilot in 1967. Although his occupation was flying, his passions were photography, traveling, and, starting in the early 1970s, his wife Heide, a stewardess whom he met shortly after beginning his career as a pilot. Until 1979, when their son Daniel was born, they led the lives of jetsetters, in a way that the advertising agencies of the era could have hardly invented more authentically. The good-looking pilot and the attractive stewardess traveled around the world together, to faraway places like Hawaii, Tokyo, New York, Rio de Janeiro, Bangkok, Hong Kong ... During the layovers, which back then were much longer than today, they stayed in luxurious hotels and had time for lengthy excursions, beach holidays, and sightseeing-long before modern mass tourism made traveling far less exclusive. Axel Herrmann always had his camera with him and had a good sense for situations and the right moment. The colors of the his favorite Kodachrome film allow the private memories to shine nostalgically even after five decades. He photographed his wife and favorite model in airplanes, working, in front of tourist attractions, on the beach, at pools, against sunset backdrops, in hotels, with friends and relatives. After his wife’s death in 2002, he destroyed a large part of his film and photo archive. The images shown here were also almost lost. However, Axel’s son Daniel, who was doing his final project at the HFG design school in Offenbach, scanned part of his father’s slide archives and gave them the title “Continental Breakfast.” Only these scans and around one hundred original slides have survived. His project made this book and the exhibition about the unusual life of his flying parents possible.

Gerhard Vormwald, (*1948, Mannheim) died in Paris in 2016. He became first known internationally in the 80's. With his surreal pictorial stagings and montages, he visually leverages gravity and our imagination even before the creation of Photoshop. In his montages, people float, water eats up, things dance in space to surreal choreographies. This book gives an overview of his found and invented visual worlds - from early documentary images (On the Road), to architectural montages (Concrete Illusions), image pairings (Blind Date Essentials), surrealistic (Autonomy of Things) and negative (Black Light) alienated still lifes and a few of the pictures of his advertising work. The poetic „unrealization“ of the world, which Vormwald pursued with fervour, proofs his cheerful lust for the absurd and mysterious. The reason why he is almost forgotten today can be explained by his bulkiness and that his pictures cannot be reduced to an easily recognizable trademark. It would certainly be worthwhile to dive even deeper into his extensive archive for future publications and exhibitions!

The book Huts Hedges Heaps (Ingar Krauss’s second publication with Hartmann Books after 39 Bilder of 2016) is about human order in nature. The laconic photographs of small, rural gardens that Krauss shot between 2010 and 2017 particularly in Brandenburg show concentrated traces of human efforts to create order, which take on graphic and sculptural dimensions in the pictures’ structure. In the Black Forest he produced pictures of wood piles, whose man-made forms seem even more abstract because they organically fit into the structures of their natural surroundings, recalling the work of Land artists. The huts, hedges, and heaps are connected to the American New Topographic movement of the 1970s insofar as they “fulfill everything that people wanted in a picture in those days, overturning an observation into a ‘higher’ order of some kind; the monumentalization of the everyday, not by resorting to monumentalizing genres, but by the captivating composition of the image,” as Ulf Erdmann Ziegler writes.

Eight years after their by now legendary publication ‚Poppy – Trails of Afghan Heroin’, Robert Knoth and Antoinette de Jong finished their next long-term project ‘Tree and Soil’. After the nuclear disaster in 2011, they have photographed and filmed the changing landscapes in the closed zones around Fukushima over a period of five years. They documented evacuated farmhouses, gardens, agricultural fields and the surrounding hills and forests and interviewed former inhabitants of the area. For this book they combine their own landscape photography with historical material from naturalist and explorer von Philipp Franz von Siebold’s collection. In the early 19th century Siebold had the opportunity to travel throughout the country and to take home not only vast quantities of artefacts, plant and animal specimens but also a treasure throve of woodblock prints made by artists like Kawahara Keiga. Siebold’s collections –-held in the Netherlands by Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden – illustrate how Japanese culture is deeply rooted in and inspired by nature. He perfectly represents the Age of Exploration in which explorers travelled the globe to uncover the secrets of the natural world. This era can be seen as a prequel to the anthropocene, in which our planet has been profoundly changed by human activity. In ‘Tree and Soil’ Knoth and de Jong underline the intrinsic beauty and value of nature, connecting the past and present by documenting and interpreting the transformations of the deserted landscapes around Fukushima.

Beatrice Minda examines private interiors in the context of historical events in her work. In Myanmar, which was isolated for decades by a rigid military dictatorship, she photographed houses and living spaces in both cities and remote regions. She captured the traces of the inhabitants’ lives and the signs of change. In Dark Whispers the ambivalent aspects of the British colonial period and its consequences are reflected and illuminated by texts on the history of the houses as well as historical photographs and are complemented by a sensitive text by Burmese poet Ko Ko Thett. Minda’s photographs focus on the atmospheres of past lives and the forms of representation with which the inhabitants once sought to fulfill themselves. Often they are objects that have remained untouched for decades and bear witness to the cosmos of a vanished world. But there are also large gaps between then and now. An uncanny emptiness animates these spaces. Dark whispers echo through them-a memento mori to the many unspoken words of Burmese history.

The Autobahn is an asphalt carpet thirteen thousand kilometers in length that covers all of Germany, both interfering with the landscape and interconnecting the country. Jörg Brüggemann photographed it for five years, from 2015 to 2019. While mobility concepts are constantly changing and being discussed, the Autobahn has remained the same in its form- but for how much longer? Brüggemann’s pictures might soon be seen as historical documents. The highway is probably Germany’s most monumental built structure and an integral part of its cultural identity and history. Designed in the 1920s and its first segments constructed under the Nazis, it was given a musical tribute by Kraftwerk in 1974. The Autobahn stands for the unconditional belief in the future of the postwar period, German engineering, driving without speed limits, but also for traffic jams, lineups of trucks, and multivehicle accidents. Brüggemann shares his fascination and doubts through his pictures. They pose questions about the present and future of mobility. How appropriate and sustainable is this gigantic infrastructure today, where unlimited growth and individual freedom on the one hand and ecology and public interest on the other hand meet in visible contradiction every day?