New Books

No Man’s Land II by Mishka Henner
No Man’s Land explores the margins of our urban and rural European environment as experienced by what appear to be women soliciting sex in liminal, post-industrial and rural settings, captured by Google’s Street View cameras.

No Rasta by Jean Keller
The artworks in this book are by Richard Prince. They are based on photographs by Patrick Cariou. The works were shown at Gagosian Gallery in New York in 2008. In March 2011 federal district court judge Deborah Batts ruled that Prince broke the law by using Cariou’s photographs without permission to create collages and paintings based on them. Prince and Gagosian Gallery have been ordered to destroy all the works and exhibition catalogues that they hold and to tell buyers that the paintings were not lawfully made and cannot lawfully be displayed. No Rasta defends the freedom of appropriation and makes the incriminated works available in bookform.

Monument to the Unknown Heroes by Tanja Lažetić
I got into the habit of cutting out newspaper photos of various groups of people who had found themselves in particularly exceptional circumstances. The people in the pictures represent events so out of the ordinary that they found their way into the papers. Although these same events in many instances profoundly impacted the lives of the people in the pictures, we never learn the people’s names.

Orange Cloud and Palm Trees by Tanja Lažetić
I took an image of a nuclear explosion and cut out the section with the fire and the smoke. This I then chopped up into little squares and composed the orange cloud through the book like a very simple jigsaw puzzle. Unlike the fire, the palm trees are always occupy the entire page. They have also been cut out of the same image. They are only details, but we can see that soon very little will remain of them. I wanted the book to be viewed like one would watch a film.

Bilderbuch by Joachim Schmid
What do Elizabeth Taylor, a bicycle seat, Carlos the Jackal, a lobster, Silvio Berlusconi and a toilet brush have in common? Nothing, except that they all ended up in my archive of scanned printed matter gathered from around the world over four decades. Removed from their original news context and presented without any comment, this apparent random, unrelated series of images turns out to be a miscellaneous reflection of popular obsessions, fears and fantasies.
The book was made on the occasion of the Bilderbuch exhibition at Zephyr, Mannheim.

47jährige starb in Pkw-Wrack by Andreas Schmidt
47 year old died in car wreck “kos Kirchhatten. A 47 year old female motorist could only be recovered dead from the wreckage of her car yesterday morning by members from the Kirchhatten auxiliary fire brigade. At 7:30 she had a frontal collision with another car on Dingsteder Strasse, whose driver was travelling from the direction of Dingstede and who, in a right bend and for so far unexplained reasons, got onto the oncoming lane. The 22 year old incurred minor injuries. The material damage was around 15000 DM (Deutsche Mark). Two MHD rescue vehicles, an ambulance as well as the Rescue Helicopter Christoph 6 were deployed.”
A newspaper clipping of a fatal accident and just two photographs are the only elements to be encountered in this seemingly sparse book. The first photograph is the last photograph taken of the unidentified woman alive. The second photograph is the last photograph ever taken of her. All seen together they are the three markers of an individual ellipsis, an untold story that somewhere resonates in all of us.

Fake Fake Art by Andreas Schmidt
Fake Fake Art is a book of photographs by Andreas Schmidt and presents 19 portraits of famous artists like Roy Lichtenstein, Francis Bacon, Andy Warhol, Ed Ruscha and Gerhard Richter and their paintings. But like with so many other of Schmidt’s books, not everything is as it seems.
Schmidt re-photographed a selected number of pages from the book “Real Fake Art”, containing a body of photographs about copy artists working in Dafen, China, taken by German photographer Michael Wolf. Andreas Schmidt proceeded to scan the world wide web for images of the painters whose work had been copied and commissioned a Chinese retouching firm via e-mail and at a total cost of £ 76 to combine the images under his supervision and unambiguous directions. 
Schmidt’s act of personal intellectual creation, although done by a third person, could be described as reflective recycling. It transformes Wolf’s photographs into surprising, often breathtakingly uncanny possibilities. One big question, however, remains : Is it Art, is it Fake Art or is it, as the title suggests, Fake Fake Art?

The Most Expensive Print-On-Demand Photobook Ever! by Andreas Schmidt
The Most Expensive Print-On-Demand Photobook Ever! is exactly what it says on the cover. It is the most expensive print-on-demand photobook ever published by a contemporary artist and costs a staggering £6,115.95 or €8.020,95 or US $10,024.95 for just 20 pages. (Please beware – exchange rates are subject to market fluctuations – please check the correct price in your currency on the day of purchase). Andreas Schmidt tested the Blurb website for numerous hours and also consulted Blurb’s technical department to verify the highest achievable price for a 20 page hardcover 7 x 7″ book one can upload and sell in the Blurb bookstore. The Most Expensive Print-On-Demand Photobook Ever! is the result of his research but it is much more than that. An item of utmost desirability, the book is for sale as an edition of four copies only, and is deliberately aimed at the ultimate elite of photobook collectors. The extraordinary photographs contained in the book are naturally reserved for their very exclusive eyes only.

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