News // 22 News by Edition Lammerhuber
“The hare is my animal, extremely prolific and nimble, elusive and a crossover artist, at home up and down the steppe.“ Joseph Beuys.
Joseph Beuys is regarded the world over as one of the most important artists of the 20th century. But where exactly are his artistic origins? Where did his sources of strength lie? In January 1978, photographer Gerd Ludwig impressively captured how Beuys approached his past – in the city of Kleve and its Lower Rhine surroundings. There, where everything began for Joseph Beuys.
When Frank Mehring came up with the idea in 2021 of creating an installation with six of the Beuys photos by Gerd Ludwig in a large format in the exact same spot in the Lower Rhine landscape in which they were created in 1978, he connected it with a bike path. Freddy Langer took a ride on the bikeway for a day together with Mehring and Ludwig, and dedicated an essay to the tour. It is an amalgamation of conversations between the three gentlemen along the way as well as their bizarre encounters on the route with thoughts on art and ecology as well as reflections upon Joseph Beuys’ attitude towards nature.
In his text, focused on the biographical origins of Beuys in the Lower Rhine region, Mehring analyses how we can recognize the person behind the one-man brand Joseph Beuys and understand his significance for the digital generation today. He highlights how photography had been a vital tool for Beuys to permanently document his short-lived actions in the public space.
In Gerd Ludwig’s photos of Beuys on the Lower Rhine, Mehring sees a type of master key to discovering the very landscape that is at the center of Beuys’ life and work. With the photographs, Mehring deduces how Beuys drew his energy from this region, sharpened his ecological awareness, and developed the artistic vitality that catapulted him to the top of the international art world.
German-American photographer Gerd Ludwig is among the pioneering documentary photographers of our time. He studied under Prof. Otto Steinert at the legendary Folkwangschule (today: Folkwang University of the Arts) in Essen, Germany, and gained recognition in the late 1970s for his captivating reportages in GEO, ZEITmagazin, Stern, and others. Particularly notable are his artist portraits of Friedensreich Hundertwasser and Joseph Beuys.
After moving to the United States, he became a core member of the American magazine National Geographic for three decades. His dedicated coverage of the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster is considered a milestone of modern photojournalism. He is the recipient of the University of Missouri Medal of Honor for his outstanding achievements in journalism and the Dr. Erich Salomon Award of the German Society for Photography. His photographs are exhibited in museums, galleries, and public spaces around the world.
Gerd Ludwig lives in Los Angeles today and focuses primarily on personal long-term projects. His books ‘The Long Shadow of Chernobyl’ and ‘Sleeping Cars’ have been published at Edition Lammerhuber.
FRANK MEHRIG is a Professor of American Studies at Radboud University in Nijmegen. His research focuses on the intersection of art, culture and politics in a transatlantic exchange. Among the numerous publications on the soft power of the Marshall Plan in photographs, films and exhibitions, his monograph entitled ‘The Democratic Gap’ (Winter, 2014), on the American promise of democracy in German emigration history, received the European Rob Kroes Award.
Frank Mehring’s latest work is dedicated to the life and work of the German-American artist Winold Reiss (Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2022). But Mehring’s contribution is not limited to academic circles. As an Americanist and honorary director of the Forum Arenacum museum, he is actively involved in building bridges between university and society. He is particularly committed to projects that use music and art as a key to opening up new perspectives on history and transnational cultures of remembrance for young people.
FREDDY LANGER, born in 1957, is an editor for Frankfurter Allgemeine. He was responsible for the travel column for 20 years and is in charge of photography for the culture section. For his own series entitled ‘Blind Date’, he has been photographing prominent artists, whom he asks to wear a sleeping mask, for more than forty years. He is the author of multiple books on the history of photography alongside his other great passion: hiking all over the world.
BEUYS LAND - Gerd Ludwig, Frank Mehring . 29.7 x 21 cm, 108 pages, 59 photos . German, English . Hardcover . 978-3-903101-99-9 . April 2024 . EUR 49.90
GoSee : edition.lammerhuber.at//beuys-land
03.04.2024
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The flux of images by Dagmar Varady depicts the libraries and workspaces of ‘researchers in the broadest sense’. A selection of 23 photographs in a concertina-fold format conveys the cognitive horizon of the knowledge spaces behind the visual research on the respective genius loci.
In collabration with the German Museum of Books and Writing of the German National Library in Leipzig, the book has been published in a high-quality edition of 345 numbered copies bound by hand and signed by the artist.
Kunst.Werk.Buch denotes a kind of world interior space and implies that there is also a universe within – that of the knowledge contained in the book. Each bird and/or thought that flies moves equally through a world exterior space as well as through a world interior space – the universe book.
“I’m interested in taking a look behind the scenes, the place where the work is created,” says Dagmar Varady.
Material that is quite divergent in content, essays and glossaries on the subject of the reflection upon individual methods of working for the production of knowledge are compiled into a common text in an accompanying publication. The multiplicity of intellectual connections – between architecture, science, art, research, commercial history, garden history, art book collection, and cultural management – makes the process of thinking permeable both outwardly and inwardly. As a work of art and as a work of science, it finds its space in the book. Considering it as an artistic work, it is possible to approach this book similarly to an exhibition.
DAGMAR VARADY is an artist who photographs in the libraries and workspaces of people she has encountered through her art.
PAOLO BIANCHI is a curator, cultural publicist, and creativity researcher who examines fundamental questions about the acquisition of knowledge in his conversation with Roger M. Buergel, using the example of the library at the Johann Jacobs Museum in Zurich.
ROGER M. BUERGEL is an artist, exhibition curator, critic, museum founder and director of the Documenta 12 in Kassel.
HUBERTUS GASSNER is an author who describes in his essay the move of his private library with a focus on surrealists such as René Magritte, Salvador Dalí or Man Ray from Hamburg to Perinaldo, Italy.
MICHAEL HAGNER is a Professor of Science Studies at ETH Zurich, whose research interests include the history of the human sciences and the history of the book.
STEPHANIE JACOBS is a cultural historian and Director of the German Museum of Books and Writing at the German National Library in Leipzig. In her prolog, she places the book in the larger context of cultural practices of knowledge storage.
BERND KAUFFMANN, a fully qualified attorney at law and wanderer between the ‘Order of Things’ and the ‘Perspectives of Things and the World’, was in Weimar from 1992 until 2002 where he served as the President of the Weimar Classicism Foundation until 2001.
WERNER OECHSLIN is the founder of the Werner Oechslin Library Foundation, with a focus on architectural history.
VANESSA SIMILI is developing a portrait of the material archive and art library at the Art Foundry of the Sitterwerk Foundation in St. Gallen.
THOMAS WEISS, is an art historian and was the Director and Chairman of the Dessau-Wörlitz Cultural Foundation from 1994 until 2017, whose essay addresses the microcosm of the private space, in which concentration becomes possible.
PRISMA – Dagmar Varady . 38 x 28 cm . 48 pages, 30 photos . German . Concertina-fold in slip case . Limited edition of 345 signed and numbered copies . ISBN 978-3-903101-72-2 . EUR 250.00
GoSee : edition.lammerhuber.at/buecher/kunst-werk-buch
25.03.2024
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After nearly five years of construction, the renovation of Austrian Parliament finally came to an end in 2023. Only a few days ahead of its official re-opening in January 2023, Lois Lammerhuber had the honor of capturing each of the more than 1000 rooms in the high house with his camera. Floor by floor, he explored this synthesis of the arts – and found some very surprising perspectives.
A building like a sculpture. A building that is home. A building of democracy formed into architecture. A memorial for peace. The very place where life itself is measured. Renovation equates to preservation of value. But renovation also means modernization. It means redefinition. It means a break with tradition, a caesura. It means pausing at a turning point in time. Like a general pause in a piece of music. The ultimate symbol of the country becomes even more visible. Becomes a building like no other. Radically new. Representatively open to everyone. The ultimate agora for all people. And Austrians. A meeting place. Shaping identity. It is where the life we live together as a community is determined.
The book was created to take readers by the hand, guide them through the building, make them feel at home and familiar with it. This book opens up the house … ‘makes the visible more visible’ through light, perspective, contrast and a mathematical-geometric design language … and makes discoveries where everything seems to already be known. This book was created as a visual contribution to helping all Austrians make the parliament building their parliament.
Lois Lammerhuber is a photographer and publisher. He has produced more than 1000 reportages, 250 of which for the magazine GEO, in addition to 80 books as well as hundreds of magazine covers. His photographs have brought him numerous awards, including three Graphis Photo Awards for the world’s best photo reportage of the year. He joined the Art Directors Club New York in 1994.
In 2009, he and his wife Frau Silvia Lammerhuber founded the publishing house Edition Lammerhuber, which has since garnered more than 200 awards from the Art Directors Club New York and the German Photobook Prize, among others. In 2013, 2015 and 2017, Edition Lammerhuber was chosen by the Federation of European Photographers (FEP) as the best photo book publisher in Europe.
In 2014, Lois Lammerhuber received the Republic of Austria’s Cross of Honor, First Class, for Science and Art, followed in 2017 by the Golden Medal of Honor for Services to the City of Vienna, the Prize for Special Merit for Representative and Media Art by the City of Baden, and the Grand Medal of Honor for Services to the Province of Lower Austria. In 2013, he co-founded the Global Peace Photo Award, which has since been held annually at the Austrian Parliament. Since 2018, he has been the Director of the Festival La Gacilly-Baden Photo. In 2023, Lois Lammerhuber initiated the Open Your Eyes Photo Festival Zurich.
AUSTRIAN PARLIAMENT by Lois Lammerhuber . 27 × 27 cm, 264 pages, 165 color photos . German | English . Hardcover, bound in linen, French fold jacket . ISBN 978-3-903101-96-8 . EUR 49.90
GoSee : edition.lammerhuber.at//parlament-oesterreich
11.12.2023
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