Franziska Opel
Close and Cold

Human, City, Pigeon

Public perceptions of the pigeon have shifted drastically over the past centuries. In the 1700s, it was welcomed as a guest who commanded humans’ unfailing solicitude; today, by contrast, it is often perceived as a nuisance. It has become an animal that defaces squares and buildings. Why does the pigeon in the settings of our daily lives prompt feelings of loathing and fascination, but also indifference? Jens Gerber’s photographs undertake an expedition into the city of the pigeons. Rounded out by essays by Marina Rüdiger and Laurens Schlicht, the book illuminates the subject of the city pigeon from the perspectives of photography, science, and literature, and explores the question of how pigeons shape the built environment and how the latter informs their behavior in turn.

Claudia Fährenkemper (b. Castrop-Rauxel, 1959; lives in Steinheim/Westfalen) photographs enormous as well as minuscule objects using scanning electron microscopes to produce images that are as fascinating as they are disconcerting. The play with extreme scales yields fantastic visual worlds: American desert and canyon landscapes, the giant industrial machinery of open-pit mines in Germany, insects, plant seeds, crystals, and plankton, plus historic armaments from Europe and Japan. The lavishly designed book is the first to gather works from her entire oeuvre, which now spans four decades. Surveying the most important of Fährenkemper’s conceptual series, it reveals unexpected interconnections between disparate motifs on vastly different scales from nature, technology, science, and cultural history.

Claudia Fährenkemper studied at Fachhochschule Köln, today’s Cologne University of Applied Sciences, where Arno Jansen was her teacher, and with Bernd and Hilla Becher and Nan Hoover at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts. Her photographs are held by numerous museum collections, including at the Kunstmuseum Bonn, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Margulies Collection, Miami.

A Mysterious Play of Light and Shadow

While Wolfgang Gäfgen’s (b. Hamburg, 1936; lives and works in Stuttgart and Esslingen) hand drawings and woodprints are widely acclaimed, only connoisseurs are familiar with his photographic oeuvre. The extensive body of analog black-and-white and color photographs spans the decades from the late 1960s to the present and is no less accomplished than the artist’s graphic works and prints. This book, with essays by Christian Gögger, Olivier Kaeppelin, Clemens Ottnad and Michel Poivert, is the first to gather a large selection of these pictures, illustrating the interdependencies between works in the different visual media of expression. Artfully arranged still lifes breathe a spectral animation into ostensibly trivial everyday objects. The human figures that appear now and then seem to be engaged in cultic performances; many of the photographic works are accompanied by ironic quotes from the earlier history of art or allusions to historic myths.