Books published by Steidl Publishers

America, as a place and an idea, has occupied Mitch Epstein's art for the past five decades. With the first photographs he made in 1969 at 16-years-old, Epstein began confronting the cultural psychology of the United States. Although he started working in an era defined by the Vietnam War, civil rights, rock and roll, and free love, he responded hardily to each radically different era that followed-from Reaganomics to surveillance after 9/11, to the current climate crisis and resurgence of white supremacy. More than a single era or issue, it is the living organism of American culture that engages Epstein; no matter how much the country changes, he describes something mysteriously and persistently American.Conceived of and sequenced by Andrew Roth, Sunshine Hotel assembles 175 photos made between 1969 and 2018-more than half previously unpublished. Yet the book is not simply a retrospective. It traces both the evolution of an artist and the development of a country, revealing Epstein's formal and thematic shifts in tandem with America's changing zeitgeist and landscape. Sunshine Hotel is a visual immersion that forgoes linearity and a classical layout, as it sets forth Epstein's evolving understanding of his country's pathologies and promise. Co-published with PPP Editions

In this, Robert Frank's newest book, he both acknowledges and moves beyond his acclaimed visual diaries (2010-17), which juxtapose iconic photos from throughout his career with the more personal pictures he makes today and suggestive, often autobiographical text fragments. In Good days quiet Frank's focus is life inside and outside his beloved weather-beaten wooden house in Mabou, where he has spent summers for decades with his wife June Leaf. Among portraits of Leaf, Allen Ginsberg and Frank's son, are images of the house's simple interior with its wood-fuelled iron stove, humble furniture and bare light bulbs, as well as views of the land and sea by the house: snow-covered, windswept, stormy or lit by the dying sun. Frank's Polaroids scanned for the book show various deliberate states of deterioration and manipulation at his hands, including texts that move from the merely descriptive ("watching the crows") to the emotive ("memories," "grey sea-old house / can you hear the music"). As always in Frank's books, his message lies primarily in the photos' lyrical sequence, an influential approach to the photobook pioneered by and today well at home in his 93-year-old hands.

Nichts auf diesen Fotos ist arrangiert, die Timm Rautert ein Jahrzehntlang von Familien in Deutschland gemacht hat. Jedenfalls nicht von ihm selbst: Wie es vorher in den Wohnungen, in denen er die Mütter, Väter und Kinder zwischen 2007 und 2017 besuchte, ausgesehen hat - ob für ihn aufgeräumt, neu angeordnet, oder umgestellt worden ist -, wissen nur die Familien selbst. So wenig Einfluss nahm der Fotograf, dass nicht einmal ein konkreter Ort festgelegt wurde, an dem sie sich innerhalb ihrer Wohnungen fotografieren ließen: Mal sind es Stühle, auf denen sie sitzen, mal eine Tischkante, mal ein Bett, mal ein Sofa. Immer - der heiligen Familie gleich - als Triptychon arrangiert.In den Porträts spielen nicht nur Elternpaare und ihre Kinder die Hauptrolle, auch wenn sie im Mittelpunkt stehen, sondern auch ihre Lebensentwürfe, die in Details erkennbar zu sein scheinen: in prallvollen Bücherregalen und 50er-Jahre-Kommoden, in Altbaustuck und Parkettfußboden. In den Porträts tut sich ebenso die materielle Welt des modernen Mittelstandes auf, in dem heimeliges Sicherheitsbedürfnis auf kreatives Chaos trifft und moderne Inneneinrichtung auf Möbel vom Sperrmüll. Und stets dazwischen: knallbuntes Kinderspielzeug. Rauterts Fotografien zeigen nicht allein Menschen sondern Menschenleben, öffnen die Tür ins Private, zeigen eine Generation.

In the summer of 1955 a relatively naive and uninformed John Cohen crossed the straits of Gibraltar. He arrived in Tangier with a handwritten note in cursive Arabic; the man who had composed it in New York had told him to "keep this paper far from your passport." Cohen had no idea why or indeed what the note said; it was not addressed to a specific person. He was simply instructed to look for a certain man when he arrived, who would then send him to "the others." Cohen's otherwise straightforward trip to make photographs in Morocco thus began with a sense of intrigue and perhaps risk.This was Cohen's first journey outside America to see the world. In his words: "The camera led my way to a distant culture, along with the desire to represent what I could see and sense there, and not be distracted by chronology or thought. My photographs were intended to be a sensual response to light and to the people who inhabited these spaces. These Morocco photos were ... an indication of what was to come."

Close presents 120 portraits of the world's most famous and influential people across the arts and entertainment industries, politics, business and sport-from Julia Roberts and Adele, to Frank Gehry and Marina Abramovic, Barack Obama, Julian Assange and Roger Federer. Between 2005 and 2018 Schoeller photographed his subjects, in his words "to create a level platform, where a viewer's existing notions of celebrity, values, and honesty are challenged." Schoeller realized this goal by subjecting his sitters to equal technical treatment: each portrait is a close-up of a face with the same camera angle and lighting. The expressions are consistently neutral, serious yet relaxed, in an attempt to tease out his subjects' differences and capture moments "that felt intimate, unposed." Schoeller's inspiration for Close was the water tower series of Bernd and Hilla Becher, his ambition to adapt their systematic approach to portraiture. Amidst Schoeller's famous subjects are also some unknown and unfamiliar ones, a means to comprehensively make his project an "informal anthropological study of the faces of our time."

This publication brings together for the first time Anish Kapoor's architectural projects and ideas that span the last 40 years. These are concepts that continue to inform all areas of Kapoor's artistic output, many of which have been realized in works that confound the distinctions between art and architecture, pushing architecture into radical new territory.Kapoor's projects renegotiate the relationship not only between art and architecture but also between the very sense of space within ourselves and that of the external world. The forms he presents to us create spaces that blur the duality of subject and object, of interior and exterior. Monochrome fields of color, mirrored surfaces and fathomless voids all destabilize our place in the world. The more than 2,000 sketches, models, renderings and plans in this book show the journey of these forms to how they might exist in reality as well as the spaces they inhabit or create, both outside and within us.