René Holm

Contemporary Photography from Africa

Stereotypes still dominate the Western image of Africa; we tend to know little about cities like Lagos, Porto-Novo, or Kinshasa. The book presents photographs by African artists who tell stories from everyday life in the metropolises, of the unruliness of nature and industry, of traces of the past and pop culture. Osborne Macharia, for example, interweaves Kenya’s cultural identity with fictional Afro-futuristic plots; Yoriyas documents the small moments of life in his native Casablanca in pictures that have been picked up by the New York Times, National Geographic, and Vogue; Alice Mann’s intimate essays in portraiture, meanwhile, explore ideas about the making of pictures as a collaborative act. With additional works by Ilan Godfrey, Fabrice Monteiro, Kibuuka Mukisa Oscar, Léonard Pongo, and Fethi Sahraoui, the book offers a profoundly original survey of African realities.

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.

The Importance of the Moment in Artistic Photography

Can photographs exist which represent concrete places? In view of the daily flood of images, this question seems superfluous at first. Only on closer inspection does the distance between the visual experience of places and the media images generated from them become apparent. “There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment,” Henri Cartier-Bresson once stated. The present volume examines this decisive moment and explores the question of how artistic photography can describe the gap between spatial reality and photographic image and make the present at the time the photograph was taken visible.

With works by Viktoria Binschtok, Julian Faulhaber, Mareike Foecking, Stephanie Kiwitt, Nikolaus Koliusis, Barbara Probst, and Wolfgang Zurborn as well as texts by Holger Kube Ventura.