Books published by Steidl Publishers

Regardless of his sitter-whether family member or influential celebrity-Nadav Kander's portraiture shows what makes that particular individual human. His aim is to move beyond capturing an accurate likeness-to access the emotions within, the uncertainty, the shadow as much as the light, the complex sense of self that otherwise lays hidden. "Revealed and concealed, beauty and destruction, ease and disease, shame and shameless," explains Kander, "These paradoxes are essential to all my work and represent what is common to all my varied subject matter..." This collection, the first book dedicated his portraiture, shows the range and nuance of Kander's work.With his minimal and intuitive approach, Kander shows his interest in universal experience, which transcends the specificity of public persona or status. His enigmatic depictions of actors, artists, musicians, authors, sports icons and political leaders-from Barack Obama, John le Carré, Alexander McQueen, to Tracey Emin, Robert Plant and Prince Charles-are layered and penetrating, revealing unexpected moments of reverie and vulnerability.

Is it a book, an exhibition, a catalogue of the exhibition? Is it mass produced? Is it unique? Dayanita Singh is a book artist who stretches the imagination of what a book can be, transcending the spaces between publishing and art. Book Building traces the journeys of Singh's books, from the first, Zakir Hussain (1986), to her latest, Zakir Hussain Maquette (2019), showing the spectrum of her book-building process, from idea to material object and how she inventively circulates them in the art world and beyond.Both a short history and a deep dive, this is Dayanita Singh's manifesto for the photobook. Taking those she has made with Steidl as a basis, we witness the transformation of books into book-objects which open up new interpretative spaces: Museum of Chance (2014), for example, first became a book-object, then a diptych, a book-case, a suitcase museum and a book museum, before finally becoming the ongoing museum in Singh's Museum Bhavan (2017). Book Building documents Singh's 13 books in images and short texts, along with several DIYs Singh has created with detailed instructions on how to display her books as exhibitions-making us the curators-as well as various performative interventions, from book carts and happenings, to installations and tours. At the heart of Book Building is the collaborative process that Dayanita Singh and Gerhard Steidl have established over 20 years; the belief that a book is always in a process of becoming.

In Kings Road Mona Kuhn lyrically reconsiders the realms of time and space within the architectural elements of the Schindler House in Los Angeles. Built by Austrian architect Rudolph M. Schindler in 1922, the house was both a social and design experiment and an avant-garde hub for intellectuals and artists in the 1920s and '30s.For this project Kuhn collaborated with the Department of History of Art and Architecture at UC Santa Barbara, and gained access to Schindler's private archives including blueprints, letters and notes. Alongside reproducing some of these for the first time in this book, Kuhn reinterprets the dichotomy between memory and record in a series of color photos, and solarized gelatin silver prints, a technique favored by the Surrealists. The enigmatic subject of her solarized pictures is a fictional, ethereal figure inspired by a letter from Schindler to a mysterious woman. Kuhn's impressionistic photos render this female presence physical, even as it seems to be dematerializing: fleeting images that question the very nature of photography as record.