On the Beach

Aperture has announced its Fall line-up of new books. Over the past several years, Aperture has revived itself and increasingly published new and interesting work. As a subscriber since I was about 15, I have seen Aperture evolve, redefine, and occasionally stumble, over the past decade and was beginning to fear it would fade into photographic history and lose its continued relevance. Given the rapid change and evolution of photography over the years, the mere fact that it has lasted over 50 years, is a testament to its lasting importance.

Among the new titles are Richard Misrach's On The Beach, a reprint of Lisette Model's 1979 Aperture monograph, and new books by Richard Ross, Beate Gütschow, Matthew Sleeth, Dawoud Bey, Thomas Allen and others.


© Richard Misrach, All Rights Reserved

© Richard Misrach, All Rights Reserved

Shannon Ebner

© Shannon Ebner, All Rights Reserved

Dan Torop, the photographer and co-curator behind last summer excellent show A Rabbit as King of Ghosts at Mitchell-Inness & Nash Gallery, recently wrote a great article on the incredible work of the photographer Shannon Ebner.

You can read more about her work here, here, here and here.

Somewhere/Anywhere

© Michael Schmidt, All Rights Reserved

Michael Schmidt, one of Germany's preeminent photographers, has worked quietly for over twenty years documenting the social and political landscape of Germany. Well-known for his ground breaking works, Waffenruhe (1987) and EIN-HEIT (1991), Schmidt's work explores the long-term social and political scars of WWII and the division of Germany. Schmidt recently released a new book entitled Ingendwo (2006), which roughly translates as Somewhere/Anywhere. In this new work, Schmidt explores the small nondescript provincial towns of Germany. Carefully sequenced and grouped, the portraits, landscapes, architectural details of the book present, as Schmidt states, a portrait our subjective loss of “home as a place with identity.” Suffused with a sense of inconsolable emptiness and alienation, Schmidt's work presents a powerful portrait of modern Germany and contemporary life.


© Michael Schmidt, All Rights Reserved

Home says nothing to me. In any case, home is what you carry with you, inside you. You remember places because you spent the most wonderful or the most horrible time there during your childhood. But these places have become more arbitrary, less specific . . . There is no such thing as an objective category that one might call ‘home’ any more. Such things take place subjectively nowadays. - Michael Schmidt