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.

On the occasion of the upcoming 90th birthday of Franz Gertsch, MASI Museum in Lugano invites the artist to plan an exhibition devoted to his oeuvre. This has led to a remarkable and striking meeting between Gertsch''s outstanding woodcuts and the wood engravings by two artists whom he regards as much more than simply pioneer revolutionaries of xylography, Paul Gauguin and Edvard Munch. Despite their historical distance and stylistic divergences, these three artists display profound and unexpected affinities, which extend far beyond the technique they share.

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.

This is the first publication to explore the work of Priya Ramrakha (1935-1968), the pioneering Kenyan photojournalist whose archive was recovered after over forty years. Hailing from an activist family of journalists, Ramrakha was one of the rare African photographers to chronicle the anti-colonial and post-independent struggles across Africa and one of the first to be employed by Time/LIFE. His iconic images defied stereotype, censorship and editorial demand, and captured key moments ranging from Mau Mau in the early 1950s to Africa''s independence movements through the 1960s.

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.