Bücher veröffentlicht von Steidl Publishers

Please Please Return Polaroid is Miles Aldridge's ongoing love letter to Polaroid, a process once integral to the craft of many photographers but now more or less extinct, apart from the rare and out-of-date material traded on eBay for exorbitant prices. The sequel to Aldridge's Please Return Polaroid of 2016, this book presents new and vintage Polaroids from his more than 20-year archive in a seemingly random sequence shaped by a dreamlike logic and surprising juxtapositions.Please Please Return Polaroid explores Aldridge's dedication to analogue processes where cut-and-paste is still a manual process, made with scissors, gaffer tape, intuition and not a little patience. Aldridge continues to use Polaroids as part of his work-in-progress "sketches," often scratching, tearing and taping them together, even drawing over them; each mark part of the creative act. Known for creating immaculate photos of a less than perfect world, Aldridge revels in these unpolished images, transforming some into extreme enlargements filling double pages with their re-worked and damaged surfaces. Long live Polaroid!

"The most beautiful summers are often also the most painful. We rarely feel more alive. And at the end of those summers, we're reminded all the more strongly that everything passes. Looking at Philipp Keel's new works in Last Summer there is the absence-apart from a single nude-of people. Instead, there are still lifes and above all pictures of palms, pools, drinks, initially seeming cool and summery, as well as many captured moments and incidental poetry. Common to them all is Keel's eye for specific details and moods, and yet on closer inspection melancholy permeates many of his works. At times, the moment has already passed or is only visible on the blurred margins of our consciousness. What remains is a feeling of transience, perhaps even a faint touch of loneliness.One of the great strengths of Keel's works is that they stay subtle and reserved. We each find in them what we wish to find. In some, the melancholy is light-hearted, little more than a gentle, not unpleasant tug at a taut string somewhere deep inside us. In others there is more to it. Last Summer takes us to a threshold: evening has set in, a solitary view from a veranda with a drink in hand, friends laughing in the background as the day's last light fades. In our mind play the images of a day that passed far too quickly, some flickering, some clear. Perhaps we feel briefly wistful, or perhaps we turn around and go back to the others." Benedict Wells

The work of German-American photographer Evelyn Hofer (1922-2009) is characterized by her single-minded creative drive and dedication to recording the essentials of her subjects. Hofer portraits her vis-à-vis-not only people, but also landscapes and interiors-well beyond the idea of the snapshot, and with great clarity and atmospheric intensity. Hofer spent months in the cities she photographed for her books of the 1950s and '60s, published with renowned authors such as Mary McCarthy and V. S. Pritchett. In titles such as New York Proclaimed (1965) and Dublin, A Portrait (1967) Hofer combines portraits, city and country views, still lifes and larger interior shots to manifest complex images of these metropolises. From this starting point Begegnungen / Encounters explores the multifaceted idea of the "portrait" throughout Hofer's oeuvre-be it in series on New York, Dublin and Washington, images of artists and their ateliers, selected photo-essays for magazines, her extensive projects "People of Soglio" and "Basque People", as well as till now unseen New York photos of Marlene Dietrich's hangar and Andy Warhol's Factory.

Documents author's life in New York City's East Village during its heyday in the tumultuous 1980s.