The photographer Achim Lippoth (*1968 in Ilshofen) discovered his subject-childhood- while studying art. Geschichten uber das Kindsein / Storytelling presents a comprehensive view of Lippoth's practice. The sensitivity of his photographs make it possible to understand the world of children, and their naturalness is touching, taking viewers back to their own childhood experiences. With great respect for their emotions, their frankness, and their dreams, Lippoth shifts the focus to his young protagonists. Here, adults take on the roles of extras, at most. Lippoth's visual vocabulary does not include staging his photographs, nevertheless, the children's poses anticipate their eventual arrival into the world of adulthood. Far from reinforcing cliched roles or being patronizing, Lippoth's photographs, through their careful use of light and captivating closeups, tell stories of feeling carefree in childhood as well as the stories of the families and of belonging.Exhibition: 19.3.-11.6.2017, Erholungshaus Leverkusen

Manhattan Sunday is part homage to a slice of New York nightlife, and part celebration of New York as palimpsest-an evolving form onto which millions of people have and continue to project their ideal selves and ideal lives. In the essay that accompanies his photographs, Richard Renaldi describes his experiences as a young man in the late 1980s who had recently embraced his gay identity, and of finding a home in "the mystery and abandonment of the club, the nightscape, and then finally daybreak," each offering a "transformation of Manhattan from the known world into a dreamscape of characters acting out their fantasies on a grand stage." Drawing heavily on his personal subcultural pathways, Renaldi captures that ethereal moment when Saturday night bleeds into Sunday morning across the borough of Manhattan. This collection of portraits, landscapes, and club interiors evokes the vibrant nighttime rhythms of a city that persists in both its decadence and its dreams, despite beliefs to the contrary. Manhattan Sunday is a personal memoir that also offers a reflection the city's evolving identity-one that still carries with it and cherishes the echoes of its past.

In the 1890s, Berlin artist, sculptor and teacher Karl Blossfeldt started to photograph plants, seeds and other illustrative material from nature for the purpose of teaching his students about the patterns and designs found in natural forms. His close-ups of the smallest plant parts, magnified up to thirty times their natural size, are startling as the plants appear geometric and sculptural. Published in 1928, his first collection of photographs Urformen der Kunst (later translated into English as Art Forms in Nature) became an international bestseller and remains one of the most significant photo books of the twentieth century. Karl Blossfeldt: Variations is the first book-length monograph to examine the reception of Blossfeldt's work. Drawing on unpublished materials, it analyzes the photographs' replication in teaching mate- rials, pattern books and art books, and also in the pages of the illustrated press. The six chapters of the richly illustrated study trace the paths Blossfeldt's legendary plant motifs described as specimens, illustrations, patterns, analogues, models and abstractions from 1890 to 1945. Thematic excursions into the present, illustrating the rediscovery of Blossfeldt's motifs in design and architecture over the past twenty years, offer a contemporary perspective on the famous German photographer.

Ireland is a collection of 300 contemporary images of the beauties of Ireland, covering every one of the 32 counties. The photographs are taken by two of the country's leading landscape photographers, Peter Zoller and Michael Diggin.

As a little boy of seven or eight, Jacques Henri Lartigue was given his first camera, and soon was developing his own photographs. Born into a prosperous family, from childhood Lartigue acutely observed the social rituals of the upper echelons of society through his photography. The hand-held Kodak camera, first introduced in 1888, granted the young photographer flexibility to capture the fine details of eccentric family members at home, the elaborate social parade in the Bois de Boulogne, on the beach in Normandy and beyond. Classic images of motor cars and high fashion sit alongside previously unpublished photographs from the Lartigue archive. These images of family beau-monde and demi-monde life are not only evidence of a prodigious talent, but also offer an intimate, adolescent perspective of Belle-Epoque Paris, the world of Proust, Debussy and the Nabis, before the outbreak of the First World War. At a young age Lartigue mastered the medium of photography: this exploration of his extraordinary childhood is interwoven with a social and cultural portrait of the Belle Epoque. Bonnard and Vuillard used the camera as a reference point for painting, Eugene Atget documented the architecture of the old Paris ahead of its developers, but Lartigue was the first to harness the immediacy of the snapshot, often capturing his subjects mid-gesture as in real life, creating a new visual language for the 20th century.

Born into a civil service family in India in 1907, Helen Muspratt was a lifelong communist, a member of the Cambridge intellectual milieu of the 1930s, and a working mother at a time when such a role was unusual for women of her class. She was also a pioneering photographer, creating an extraordinary body of work in many different styles and genres. In partnership with Lettice Ramsey she made portraits of many notable figures of the 1930s in the fields of science and culture. Her experimental photography, using techniques such as solarisation and multiple exposure, bears comparison with the innovations of Man Ray and Lee Miller. This book reproduces some of Helen Muspratt's most important photographic images, including documentary records of the Soviet Union and the Welsh valleys. The accompanying text by Jessica Sutcliffe is an intimate and revealing memoir of her mother that offers a fascinating insight into her life, work and politics. -- .

A stunning portrait of the nocturnal moths of Central and South America by famed American photographer Emmet Gowin American photographer Emmet Gowin (b. 1941) is best known for his portraits of his wife, Edith, and their family, as well as for his images documenting the impact of human activity upon landscapes around the world. For the past fifteen years, he has been engaged in an equally profound project on a different scale, capturing the exquisite beauty of more than one thousand species of nocturnal moths in Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, French Guiana, and Panama. These stunning color portraits present the insects--many of which may never have been photographed as living specimens before, and some of which may not be seen again--arrayed in typologies of twenty-five per sheet. The moths are photographed alive, in natural positions and postures, and set against a variety of backgrounds taken from the natural world and images from art history. Throughout Gowin's distinguished career, his work has addressed urgent concerns. The arresting images of Mariposas Nocturnas extend this reach, as Gowin fosters awareness for a part of nature that is generally left unobserved and calls for a greater awareness of the biodiversity and value of the tropics as a universally shared natural treasure. An essay by Gowin provides a fascinating personal history of his work with biologists and introduces both the photographic and philosophical processes behind this extraordinary project. Essential reading for audiences both in photography and natural history, this lavishly illustrated volume reminds readers that, as Terry Tempest Williams writes in her foreword, "The world is saturated with loveliness, inhabited by others far more adept at living with uncertainty than we are."

When Joe McNally moved to New York City in 1976, his first job was at the Daily News as a copyboy, the wretched dog of the newsroom. He was earning the lowest pay grade possible and living in a cheap hotel in Manhattan. Life was not glamorous. But with a fierce drive, an eye for a picture, and a willingness to take (almost) any assignment that came his way, Joe stepped out onto the always precarious tightrope of the freelance photographer and never looked back. Fast forward 40 years, and his work has included assignments and stories for National Geographic, Time, LIFE, Sports Illustrated, and more. He has travelled for assignments to nearly 70 countries and received dozens of awards for his photography. In The Real Deal, Joe tells us how it all started, and candidly shares stories, lessons, and insights he has collected along the way. This is not a dedicated how-to book about where to put the light, though there is certainly instructional information to be gleaned here. This is also not a navel-gazing look back at the good old days, because those never really existed anyway. Instead, The Real Deal is simply a collection of candid field notes some short, some quite long gathered over time that, together, become an intimate look behind the scenes at a photographer who has pretty much seen and done it all. Though the photography industry bears little resemblance to the industry just 10 years ago (much less 40 years ago), what it really takes to become a successful photographer the character traits, the fundamental lessons, the ability to adapt, and then adapt again remains the same. Joe writes about everything from the crucial ability to know how to use (and make!) window light to the importance of creating long-term relationships built on trust; from lessons learned after a day in the field to the need to follow your imagination wherever it takes you; from the random and lucky moments that propel one s career to the wonders and pitfalls of today s camera technology. For every mention of f-stops and shutter speeds, there is equal discussion about the importance of access, the occasional moment of hubris, and the idea of becoming iconic. Before Joe was a celebrated and award-winning photographer, before he was a well-respected educator and author of multiple bestselling books, he was just Joe, hustling every day, from one assignment to the next, piecing together a portfolio, a skill set, a reputation, a career. He imagined a life and then took pictures of it. Here are a few frames.

In his quest for the bizarre and the absurd, Harvey Benge continues to scavenge the urban landscape. Lucky Box - A guide to Modern Living is his fifth book and as always Benge thrives on the everyday moments of ordinary life, as he searches for the ambiguities and tensions that lie behind modern urban living. This is a journey of contrast and conflicts - frequently humorous and often deeply disturbing.

The first book by up-and-coming photographer Simon Eeles (born 1983), named Harper Bazaar's Young Photographer of the Year in 2009, Australiana is the result of a cross-continental road trip Eeles undertook in his homeland after years of working in the US and abroad. Featuring beachside portraits, images of his nieces and nephews playing in his mother's backyard on a small dairy farm in Tasmania, as well as landscape images of the country's vegetation, the volume aims to paint a portrait of a place and a culture geographically separated. Having worked under renowned British fashion photographer Craig McDean, Eeles creates images with sharp, fashion-world glamour, even as he captures a relaxing day on an Australian beach. It is this rich and unusual combination of sensibilities--the outback hardness with New York glitz--that informs this first monograph, an homage to the diverse landscapes and hard light of the faraway continent.

No Circus brings together photographs by Los Angeles-based Randi Malkin Steinberger (born 1960) of buildings tented for termite fumigation around Los Angeles. After moving to the city in the early '90s, she encountered these shrouded structures and began to stop and photograph them, knowing that the tent might be undraped at any given moment. Steinberger was intrigued by the way the colors and shapes of the tents showed off the forms below and highlighted the beauty of the poor plants on the outside, still flourishing, unaware that they were slowly being poisoned. Beyond the intended purpose of fumigation, these tents unwittingly allow us to stop and contemplate not only architectural form and the meaning of home, but also the Southern California lifestyle more broadly.

The most precious natural resource on our planet, water has the power to soothe, hydrate, and heal. World-renowned film photographer Michael Kahn invites us into this meditative realm with more than 60 black-and-white images of pristine waters in North America, Italy, and England, capturing the mists, movement, and quiet depths. He collects his images on traditional black-and-white film and produces luminous silver gelatin prints in his darkroom. The warmly toned photographs, printed in tritone, are interspersed with inspirational quotes that reveal the deep spiritual connection we have with water, and its restorative power.

See/Saw is an illuminating history of how photographs frame and change our perspectives. Starting from single images by the world's most important photographers - from Eugene Atget to Alex Webb - Geoff Dyer shows us how to read a photograph, as he takes us through a series of close readings that are by turns moving, funny, prescient and surprising. Following Dyer's previous books on photography, The Ongoing Moment and The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand, See/Saw brilliantly combines visual scrutiny and stylistic flair. It shows us how a photograph can simultaneously record and invent the world, and reveals a master seer at work. In the spirit of the intellectual curiosity of Berger, Sontag and Didion, Geoff Dyer helps us to see the world around us, and within us, afresh.

The provincial North Macedonian town of Veles placed itself on the world map as an epicentre for fake news production during the US presidential election of 2016. Tech-savvy local youth created hundreds of clickbait websites posing as American political news portals and may very well have contributed to the election of Donald Trump. Bendiksen travelled to Veles to explore this unlikely hub of misinformation. In this new book, photographs of contemporary Veles are intertwined with fragments from an archaeological discovery also called 'the Book of Veles' - a cryptic collection of 40 'ancient' wooden boards discovered in Russia in 1919, written in a proto-Slavic language. It was claimed to be a history of the Slavic people and the god Veles himself-the pre-Christian Slavic god of mischief, chaos and deception. Bendiksen interweaves these two different stories in his own The Book of Veles, representing historical and current efforts at producing disinformation and chaos