Books published by Kehrer Verlag

The tourist season is over, the promenade is empty and Brexit is at the door when Benita Suchodrev returns to the British coastal town of Blackpool to photograph the hidden reality behind the famous Amusement Mile. She leads us to local churches, soup kitchens, youth shelters, old age homes and impoverished neighbourhoods, meets bizarre characters, underage mothers, drug-addicts, artists, and hermits. She photographs strangers on train platforms, homeless in torn rags feasting on ham sandwiches and coffee under a dark overpass, closed storefronts and deserted alleys on a rainy night.

The concept of identity often seems like a container that can be filled with very different, even contradictory contents. With Particles, Boris Loder transforms the notion of identity as a container into sculptural photographs. His cubes contain found objects that reflect the character of various sites in Luxembourg in compressed form. In this way, assumptions about urban planning intentions are contrasted with actual use. Fast food on a sports field or a drug stash near a renowned bank allude to socio-geographical realities that only very rarely surface in popular notions of Luxembourg.

At least 141 people were killed along the Berlin Wall or died as a direct result of the border regime between 1961 and 1989. In her book, Irish photographer Ethna O''Regan (b. 1971) takes the viewer on a visual journey using landscape as a metaphor in order to create a feeling of remembrance for the victims of the Berlin Wall. She has produced photographic series in Ireland, America, Germany, and the Ukraine and has exhibited them internationally.

Alles ist mit einer dicken Schicht aus feinem Staub u¿berzogen. Der Boden brennt, und u¿ber einer riesigen Fla¿che ha¿ngen giftige Gase und Rauch. Mitten in dieser apokalyptischen Landschaft graben Menschen mit bloßen Ha¿nden im Erdreich. U¿berall im indischen Bundesstaat Jharkhand wird Kohle abgebaut. Die Einheimischen nennen sie den »schwarzen Diamanten«. Das Gleichgewicht zwischen Mensch und Natur ist sehr empfindlich. Die Fotos dieser Serie veranschaulichen, wie schwer es fu¿r den Menschen ist, alte Muster zu durchbrechen: Wider besseres Wissen setzen wir den Raubbau an der Erde immer weiter fort.Seit 2008 fotografiert Sebastian Sardi Minen. Mit seinem Projekt Black Diamond portra¿tiert er die Kohlearbeiter aus na¿chster Na¿he und erforscht gleichzeitig die Zwiespa¿ltigkeit der menschlichen Natur.

In the early 1990s Dutch photographer Ad van Denderen travelled to Welkom, a small mining town in South-Africa, to document the last days of apartheid. 25 years later his critically acclaimed photo book Welkom in Suid-Afrika was discovered by Lebohang Tlali, who grew up in Welkom''s neighbouring township Thabong. Welkom Today combines new and historic photographs by Van Denderen, Tlali, as well as images from family albums, newspaper archives, and essays. In a multivocal, non-hierarchical way, the project opens up to multiple histories and perspectives, across generations and backgrounds.

A career started in the beauty industry gave Ann Massal the feeling that Plato''s take on beauty as truth was long dead. She subsequently decided to study photography to try to express her very own view. With similarities to the crazy world of Alice in Wonderland, Massal''s pictures are never expected. Using a vast array of techniques - dripping, bleaching, cutting, rotting - she distorts images to offer us her outlook on beauty: ambiguous, sinful, and always colourful.

As a passionate observer and chronicler of everyday street life in New York, Helen Levitt (1913 2009) spent decades documenting residents of the city''s poorer neighbourhoods such as Lower East Side and Harlem. Levitt''s oeuvre stands out for her sense of dynamics and surrealistic sense of humour, and her employment of colour photography was revolutionary: Levitt numbers among those photographers who pioneered and established colour as a means of artistic expression. The book features around 130 of her iconic works.

Joachim Hildebrand travelled through the seven states of the American Southwest, in which the Wild West is located both geographically and in our imagination. Today, where the wilderness has been displaced by ''civilization,'' Hildebrand discovers entirely different scenes than those generally associated with the Wild West and the American frontier. Setting his sight on blurred contours, contradictions, borders, and transitions from urbanity to landscape, Hildebrand deconstructs the myths of the Wild West and the ''manifest destiny'', which are so essential for the self-understanding of the USA.