A meticulous and attentive treatment of the photographic image is a primary concern of the publishing house in all program areas. Additionally, the medium of photography has the status of an independent discipline. Artistic positions are just as much of interest as photo-journalism reportage. The criteria are authorship and artistic independence.

In 1912, the French banker and philanthropist Albert Kahn (1860–1940) founded “The Archives of the Planet,” an extensive collection of photographs and films that today contains 72,000 autochromes and 183,000 meters of film. Between 1909 and 1932, Kahn sent documentarists to sixty countries on four continents to capture on film and in autochromes the everyday life and the art, culture, and religion of different societies. He was convinced that the knowledge of foreign cultures promoted mutual respect among people. The Cosmopolitics of Visual Memory: Albert Kahn and the Archives of the Planet offers insights into this fascinating collection of visual records. Texts by Jay Winter, Paula Amad, Kjetil A. Jakobsen, Trond E. Bjorli, and Gilles Baud-Berthier discuss the role of the then new media in establishing a cosmopolitan and pacifist worldview as well as Henri Bergson’s influence on Albert Kahn. In addition, Trond Lundemo reflects on the medial conditions of analogous imagery, seen from our perspective of the digital age.

Over the past two decades, Olafur Eliasson has regularly traveled to Iceland to photograph the island’s landscape and natural phenomena. This ambitious, on-going venture—almost cartographical in its scope—has resulted in approximately eighty photo series to date and a plethora of individual photographs of glaciers, waterfalls, rainbows, sunrises, volcanoes, and geysers. Far from only documenting the world, Eliasson’s vibrant images reflect on our relationship to nature and our physical existence within space.

An artwork in its own right, this book presents Eliasson’s highly personal selection of full-color images from his immense body of work, granting the reader a rare peek into a significant source of inspiration for much of the artist’s work in other media — the Icelandic landscape.

For most people locations that hold a particular importance for the development of our society and for the advancement of science and technology remain hidden from view. CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is best known
for its giant particle accelerator. Here researchers take part in a diverse array of fundamental physical research, in the pursuit of knowledge that will perhaps one day revolutionize our understanding of the universe and life on our planet. The Swiss photographer Andri Pol mixed with this multicultural community of researchers and followed their work over an extended period of time. In doing so he created a unique portrait of this fascinating “underworld.” The cutting-edge research is given a human face and the pictures allow us to perceive how in this world of the tiniest particles the biggest connections are searched for. With an essay by Peter Stamm.

In Le Corbusier: Secret Photographer Tim Benton reflects on the famous architect’s use of photography, starting with the young Charles-Edouard Jeanneret’s attempts to take professional photographs during his travels in central Europe, the Balkans, Turkey, Greece, and Italy. While Le Corbusier always claimed that he saw no virtue in taking photographs, he actually bought three cameras and took several hundred photographs between 1907 and 1917, many of them of publishable quality. In 1936 he acquired a 16mm movie camera and took 120 sequences of film and nearly 6,000 photographs with it.

This previously unpublished material is the basis for the publication. It reveals Le Corbusier to be a sensitive and brilliant manipulator of a wide range of photographic styles. Le Corbusier: Secret Photographer provides dramatically new insights into Le Corbusier’s visual imagination, his changing attitudes towards nature and materials in the 1930s, and his distrust of progress.

China’s spectacular growth has brought not just prosperity, but also serious damage to the environment. For photographer Andreas Seibert, the present state of the Huai River is a clear example of these problems. Several stretches of the river have been so seriously polluted by toxic waste that people are advised not to even touch the water. Seibert has traveled along the river from source to mouth in order to record how it changes from a stretch of water rising amidst unspoiled nature into a large and poisonous river. Pictures taken on his travels present the poor hinterlands which are generally forgotten in discussions on China, and show the people who live on and near the river—in a habitat on the brink of destruction.

News represents a further development of the much-acclaimed work of artist Thomas Flechtner. Whereas in Snow he looked at snow as a metaphor for timelessness, calm, distance, and loneliness, and in Bloom Flechtner used atmospherically condensed studies of plants to examine the boundless colorfulness and movement of grown nature, for his new project News Flechtner collected newspaper front pages over a period of one year, scattered plant seeds from very different countries over them, watered them, and, finally, exposed them to the sun. He recorded the way the “news” was gradually bleached and overgrown with plants in more than one hundred color photographs. Flechtner contrasts the anarchy of nature with the agenda of mankind, while also questioning the fleetingness of memory and the demands made on it in shaping today’s world.

All three publications by Klaus Merkel–The Reading of Time in the Text of Nature, Album of Stones and Trees like Stones–are available in the exclusive Trilogy of Stones and Time. Presented in a premium cardboard slipcase, this limited edition is signed by the artist and will be a great addition to every photo and art book collection.

For over thirty years Klaus Merkel has been photo- graphing stones, rocky landscapes, and trees that he combines in pairs of images. He portrays the astounding harmony between the animate and the inanimate, between natural and designed manifestations. His previous publication Album of Stones featured Milan Cathedral’s forest of figures and pinnacles next to the sandstone columns of Utah’s Bryce Canyon. In the same way, Trees like Stones presents fascinating connections between natural forms and artwork, such as the millennia-old bristlecone pines in Nevada’s Great Basin National Park and the decaying stupa temples of Burma. The book thus invites the reader to examine and compare the manifold similarities of diverse structures, whether between a petrified wandering dune and a gaping trunk of an olive tree in Agrigento, Italy, or between a mushroom rock in the Libyan desert and a Namibian quiver tree.

Ever since the first days following the disastrous events that took place in Japan in March 2011, photojournalist Kazuma Obara has been visiting the sites and the people affected. He even visited the Fukushima power plant itself, where he talked to the workers involved. The series of portraits and interviews he produced is published for the first time in this publication.

Obara’s photographs offer touching insights about the consequences of the events surrounding Fukushima. Recollected in this book, they offer a long-term perspective and pose the question of responsibility. They bring to mind just how far-reaching the consequences of this catastrophe are, for the people on site as well as worldwide. This book thus offers a view that goes beyond the pure facts on site—Beyond Fukushima.

Dan Graham, one of North America’s most important contemporary artists, is best known today for his sculptural works and installations. His photographic works are generally not so well known, despite the fact that he first became famous for his photographic series Homes for America, pictures of typical American suburbia. To this day the theme of architecture and its surfaces in the context of postmodern everyday culture represents an extremely important facet of his work.

This publication presents new photographs by Dan Graham together with original photographs from the Homes for America series. The new images exhibit stark similarities to the old pictures, as they were taken in the same locations, the same deserts of suburban streets and housing that Graham photographed in the sixties. Creating a fascinating, multilayered reference system of repetitions and differences, both spatially as well as temporally, it raises questions about architecture and public space and their function in society.

Design: Integral Lars Müller

Swiss Photobooks from 1927 to the Present offers a new overview of the history of Swiss photography. The focus is on seventy selected photobooks, from classics to long-forgotten publications or brilliant works by contemporary photographic artists. The individual books are presented with lavish series of illustrations and texts by highly-esteemed authors, while five longer essays position them in their respective eras. An extensive bibliography completes this volume.

Swiss Photobooks is a chronologically organized reference work that traces photography’s transition from a document to a subjective or artistic means of expression. It also pays homage to the photobook, which has repeatedly shown itself to be an ideal medium for the presentation of photographic work.

With this compact presentation published on the occasion of its fortieth anniversary the Fotostiftung Schweiz adds to its earlier standard works on the history of Swiss photography and in the process provides a new key to understanding an important aspect of contemporary visual culture since the 1920s.

Design: Integral Lars Müller

“The buzz word is swarm intelligence, which has acquired an unforeseen reality in the era of Facebook and Twitter. The behavior of a collective without a center has become a social phenomenon, which is not only of interest to natural scientists, but also particularly to politicians and economists.” (Peter Pfrunder in his contribution to the book)

Swarm is a breathtaking photographic series exploring the flock movements of migrating birds. The photographs offer a unique view of the beauty but also the complexity and diversity of shape variations. A swarm sitting on the ground mirrors the surface of the earth like a skin, but as soon as it lifts up it becomes a fluid three-dimensional system in constant flux. This aerial ballet reveals a rhythm of upward explosion and downward, cascading movement. At times the forms seem to explode, blooming like flowers or expanding outward like fireworks. At other times they appear more stable, slowly drifting like a negative image of stellar constellations. Swarm looks up into the sky and follows flight through the dynamic landscape of streams of air.

With contributions by Peter Pfrunder, Gordon H. Orians, Deborah M. Gordon, and Wallace Stevens

Design: Integral Lars Müller

The islands of Naoshima, Teshima, and Inujima in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea are places of pilgrimage for friends of contemporary art and architecture. Alongside works in public spaces and site-specific installations, the islands also feature numerous museums and collections of contemporary art. They are home to buildings by architects such as Kazuyo Sejima and Ruye Nishizawa (SANAA), Tadao Ando, and Hiroshi Sambuichi, as well as works of art by Richard Long, Christian Boltanski, and Mariko Mori, among many others.

This publication offers a comprehensive documentation of this unique cultural landscape surrounded by Japan’s inland sea. The photographs by the Dutch photographer Iwan Baan that move between tiny details and grand panoramas create a comprehensive portrait of the islands and their fluid transitions between nature, art, and architecture. Numerous texts introduce readers to the individual areas and projects either on permanent display or that have taken place temporarily on the islands. Essays explore the history and historical predecessors of the islands, the role of architecture and art in the context of this unique landscape, and the island as a cultural concept and phenomenon.

With photographs by Iwan Baan

Design: Integral Lars Müller

Christian Lutz continues his photographic study of power structures with “Tropical Gift”. He took portraits in Nigeria of people who live by and with the economic force that dominates everything there, the oil and gas industry. The photographs observe the protagonists’ everyday lives and professional world from very close up, the rich profiteers in the capital and the indigenous population in the oil region, the Niger delta. The pictures tell their own story of business with these coveted raw materials subtly, but highly expressively.

In 1960, Brasilia was celebrated as the realization of an urban planning vision based on designs by Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer. At the same time, the sectoral city of Chandigarh was rising according to plans by Le Corbusier. The “test tube city” arose as an export of modernity from a Western planning euphoria that displayed utopian traits. In both cities, foreign architecture entered into a harmonious relationship with indigenous culture, forming new and independent identities. This publication addresses the question of how modernism has been appropriated in both cities, and how the people who live in them deal with it. Commonalities and differences are identified and images of everyday urban life showcased. On the initiative of the publisher, the young photographer Iwan Baan has taken stock of contemporary life in both cities. 

With commentary in the form of essays by Cees Nooteboom on the photographs and by Martino Stierli on the architectural and planning history.

Steven Holl has set up a documentation centre for the Norwegian author Knut Hamsun (1859 –1952) on Hamarøy, in northern Norway. This unconventional building reflects the author's no less unusual personality. The centre in the barren landscape of Hamarøy, where Hamsun lived and worked, the silence and solitude, challenge visitors to involve themselves with him and his work. The book records the connection between Hamsun, the architecture and the landscape. Photographer Iwan Baan relates the landscape and the building to each other, and historical documents illustrate Hamsun's contradictory life and influential work, et al. the novel Hunger (1890), with which Hamsun achieved his fame. In 1920 the poet was awarded with the Nobel Prize for Literature.

With photographs by Iwan Baan

Silvia Bächli and Eric Hattan spent four months, from March to June, in Seydisfjördur in eastern Iceland. The landscape they explored on their daily walks is dominated by snow, which shapes the atmosphere in and around the fjord with its changeable forms: turquoise meltwater, frost patterns, a few glass-clear bright colours in the whiteness, walls of snow by the edge of the road, drifts, icicles and at last the first brown snow-free places — things are slowly turning green. The artists create a unique portrait of Iceland’s magnificent landscapes with their photographs, in all its detail, thus chronicling the passage of time and the approach of the warmer season. 

Over a period of twenty years, the artist Barbara Heé has photographed Lake Silser and Chaviolas Island again and again. The resulting panoramas present a subtle portrait of this mountainous landscape in Switzerlands Upper Engadine valley. The depth and composition of these black-and-white photographs are captivating. The doubling caused by reflection in the lake and the everchanging lighting create spaces of magical presence. Precise observation of similar motifs opens up a world of sculptural forms that goes beyond the mere likeness. This volume of photographs presents, in the sense of an artists book, the complete series of photographs taken between 1987 and 2007, and which have been incorporated into Barbara Heé’s artistic work as a sculptress, painter, and draftswoman.

With an essay by Claudia Jolles

Europe’s new eastern borders stretch from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea: 1.600 heavily guarded kilometers between former “fraternal countries.” The photographers Yann Mingard and Alban Kakulya spent a long time on the road; one of them traveled down from the North and the other up from the South in an effort to document the places and landscapes that mark the end of the Western world. On their journey, they photographed the landscape as well as the border posts with their soldiers and their refugees seized at the frontier, and documented a reality defined in faraway Strasbourg, Brussels, and elsewhere. Explanatory maps and satellite images are juxtaposed in this book with the striking photographs. Articles by political scientists, security experts, sociologists, human rights specialists, and philosophers, as well as literary texts round out this photographic survey of the EU’s Eastern European external borders.

With contributions by Ellie Barnavie, Daniel Bolomey, John W. Donaldson, Gianni Haver, Jon Levy, LUST, Martino Pesaresi, Ian Russell, Laura Serani

In 2009, the Dolder Grand celebrated its first birthday since reopening, following a four-year remodelling carried out according to plans by Foster+Partners. The photographers from the Zurich studio nave, Nadja Athanasiou, Michael Bühler, and Peter Lüem, documented the entire project throughout every stage of the refurbishment, charting in detail the scope of the hotel’s metamorphosis. The resulting photographic narrative is not simply a linear documentation, but a rich and complex tapestry in which text and image are interwoven with a lyricism that brings the architecture to life on the pages of the book. Journalist Judith Wyder’s texts provide a manyfaceted insight and complement the photographs with anecdotes and background information. Dutch novelist Cees Nooteboom has contributed an essay in which he describes the hotel as a microcosm and a home away from home, musing on how guests tend to take possession of the hotels they stay in.

With contributions by Judith Wyder and Cees Nooteboom

The photographer Lukas Felzmann was fascinated by the very thing that some driving past would find boring, flat, and disconsolate: the vast Sacramento Valley, located just a hundred miles from San Francisco. Felzmann discovers with his camera the hidden charms of that seeming nonplace. For him, exploring a place means both walking around and lingering quietly, until the valley opens up like a book, with stories that cry out to be read and discovered. With his camera he traces how time, determined here by the growth of the plants, slows on the plane, and how the horizontality of the surface becomes a reassuring balance to the hectic city of millions nearby. The photographs show the diversity of the plane: the original landscape in its natural state, the large swaths put to agricultural use, the modern provincial towns, and the transitional areas in between. Photographs of water in all its facets run through the book, just as water runs through and forms a valley.

With marginalia by Angelus Silesius and John Berger

Forests, according to folklore, are places of mystery and fear the haunts of fierce animals and fiercer men. Yet for our ancestors the forests were sources of food and fuel, managed spaces. The forest of Pen Gelli in Wales was used by charcoal burners in the Iron Age and after, while Strata Florida served the needs of a Cistercian Abbey: the maple forests of Vermont reclaimed land used until the 19th century for sheep-farming. In these forests photographer Pete Davis has been exploring the dichotomy in forest fact and fable for over a decade, marking the changes worked by time, weather and human intervention. This is not a vision of the green splendour or the dark mystery of the forest, but rather the intimacy and subtlety marked by change and time.

With an appreciation by Conway Lloyd Morgan

Anonymous snapshots are the ideal projection screen: they inspire the imagination to invent stories. The photographer and artist Luciano Rigolini demonstrates, however, that these images, freed from their context, can also convey a visual experience. Rigolini pieces together his findings from flea markets, archives, or the Internet to create a new, independent work - a grammar of seeing and perception. Consciously or unconsciously, we become primarily aware of form and structure in the compiled snapshots, and the specific content of the images becomes inessential. This results in a fascinating aesthetic play that radically questions our habits of seeing. In this cleverly arranged sequence the photographs can no longer be read as simply likenesses of reality. They turn out to be artifacts that construct reality. What You See presents a multiplicity of surprising, confusing, and surreal photographs from a rich fund of anonymous photography.

With an essay by Peter Pfrunder

High-population centers of enormous size are springing up in China with dizzying speed. With them comes an increased demand for migrant workers in the construction sector, factories, and mines. In growth centers like the Pearl River Delta in Southern China, million people have already set out from the underdeveloped provinces to earn their living there. The photographer Andreas Seibert accompanied the workers repeatedly in order to document their everyday lives and their journey to the high-population centers. Their stories are told in a collection of striking photographs that provide a close-up portrait to complement the current discussion of economic growth in China. With its combination of text and images, this volume conveys a unique impression of the scale of this modern migration of peoples.

With texts by Jeff Kingston, Andreas Seibert, Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao

Over a period of three years the photographer Christian Lutz accompanied a member of the Swiss Federal Council on diverse official occasions throughout the world. In Protokoll he observes the mise-en-scène of authority within the hierarchies to which the political decision makers and their delegations are subjected. He isolates the clichés that rule the world and records the unsaid and unobserved with his camera. His images show a reality that differs from the official photographic reports. The photographs present a concentrated critique that calls into question a deeply ingrained system of representation and causes readers to alternate between laughter and astonishment.

The best in Swiss photography 2007

With Bloom, Thomas Flechtner continues to go his own way as an artist. In his internationally acclaimed debut publication Snow, he took viewers by surprise with a compelling visual metaphysics of snow as the exploration of a psychological state. After exhibitions in London, New York, Bilbao, and Tokyo, Flechtner is now free to pursue a new passion, the unbridled color and movement of organic nature, which he examines with lyrical lightness and tremendous precision in these densely atmospheric studies of plants. As a photographer, Flechtner goes in search of the essence of nature, abandoning the ostensible safety of distance and allowing proximity and for the first time also movement.

Hanna Saliba ranks among the most innovative restaurateurs in Germany. His restaurant Saliba in Hamburg, which serves Syrian cuisine, is renowned far beyond the city’s borders for its magical culinary experiences. Some of the restaurant’s guests —Hans Hansen from Hamburg, the Munich designer Pierre Mendell, and the publisher of this volume — developed the concept for this book together with Saliba as an expression of their enthusiasm for Arab cuisine, particularly for the diversity and sophistication of its incomparable hors d`oeuvres called Mazza. “Eating with the eyes” is to be taken literally. Arabic calligraphy complements the feast for the eyes and makes the book much more than a collection of recipes for amateur cooks and professional chefs.

With a preface by Udo Steinbach
With photographs by Hans Hansen

In 1962 the young photographer René Burri, on the staff of the renowned photo agency MAGNUM, and known for his reportage and portraits, presented the architect, Le Corbusier, with a fold-out book, made with his own hands, containing photographs dating back to 1953, that he had taken of the architect in various situations.

This very personal gift is now a highly prized original owned by the Corbusier Foundation in Paris. The photographs it contains show Corbusier at the height of his creativity—in conversation, alone in his studio, at the construction site. They also convey the unmistakable atmosphere of his designs. This scrupulous facsimile reproduction comes with a text by René Burri and commentaries by the Corbusier connoisseur and editor Arthur Rüegg.

The photographer and artist Klaus Merkel searches for — and record in striking black-and-white photographs — structures in nature and architecture that, no matter where they are, exhibit overlapping patterns and con figurations, significant deviations and parallels, and resonate in juxtaposition. In this extension of that program, he has turned his attention to stones and rock landscapes and their patterns. It is a process that he insists takes patience, sometimes years, both in allowing the force of the photograph to make itself felt over time and in seeking the perfect pair, the photograph that will reverberate with another in tandem.

With an essay by Klaus Merkel

Jules Spinatsch was at the World Economic and also attended the G8 summits at Davos and Evian. But rather than street fighting and handshakes, Jules Spinatsch shows winter nights in Davos, complete with floodlighted barbed wire, containers being used as barricades in Genoa, lonely TV reporters outside broadcast vehicles and sleepy guards in New York. Temporary Discomfort shows people waiting for the big event, which is revealed as meticulously planned down to the last detail.

With texts by Martin Jäggi and Jamie Patrick Shea

Published in collaboration with Swiss Televison (SRG SSR idée suisse).
With essays by Peter Pfrunder und Michail Shishkin  

Switzerland has world-class photographers in Robert Frank, Werner Bischof and René Burri. Photosuisse is now taking a look at contemporary Swiss photography, which enjoys an international reputation with names like Thomas Flechtner, Annelies Strba, Balthasar Burkhard, Luc Chessex and Georg Gerster. Photosuisse is a “musée imaginaire” of current Swiss photography, putting forward some quite different viewpoints between the covers of a book. However diverse the positions presented might be, they share the specific precision of the photographic eye. Photosuisse sees itself as a photographic reader. It provides detailed information about 28 viewpoints, and an essay investigates whether there is a specifically Swiss way of shooting the world. The book is accompanied by two DVDs with film portraits of the 28 artists. These were produced by Swiss Television (SRG SSR idée suisse) as the book’s editor.

With contributions by Manuel Bauer, Stefania Beretta, Balthasar Burkhard Olaf Breuning, Luc Chessex, Olivier Christinat, Christian Coigny, Hans Danuser, Nicolas Faure, Alberto Flammer, Thomas Flechtner, Katrin Freisager, Georg Gerster, Michael v. Graffenried, Monique Jacot, Alain de Kalbermatten, Peter Knapp, Urs Lüthi, Gian Paolo Minelli, Minkoff/Olesen, Jean Mohr, Reto Rigassi, Luciano Rigolini, Gaudenz Signorell, Annelies ˇStrba, Beat Streuli, Alberto Venzago, Christian Vogt

Jean-Pascal Imsand’s work eludes any attempt at classification, and contains an apparent paradox. While his photo-montages are much admired for their aesthetic and narrative qualities, yet are often
political in nature, the precision of content demonstrated in his socio-documentary reportages does not exclude mythical interpretation.

With essays by Dieter Bachmann, Jean-Christophe Blaser, Martin Gasser, Sylvie Henguely, Fabio Pusterla

Lukas Felzmann’s Landfall is far more than just a compilation of strong single images. Roads that peter out in the middle of nowhere, buildings that no long make sense, flotsam and jetsam that defy oblivion: Felzmann’s scenery and objects quietly and unobtrusively open up their profound symbolism in the field of tension between desire and memory, hope and pain, dream and reality. Broad landscapes and deep horizons become expanses on to which all kinds of visions can be projected.

With an essay by Peter Pfrunder

In Thomas Flechtner’s photographs, snow becomes a metaphor for timelessness, stillness, peace, distance, and loneliness. Both civilization and the untouched countryside succumb to the gentle weight of this element. These images make the viewer long for silence and transparency.

Klaus Merkel’s coupled photographs mirror the physical and spiritual patterns of both natural and architectural structures. They demonstrate fundamental and universal formal laws in their compelling revelation of inseparably intertwined nature and culture. The pictures are grouped according to such themes as stratification, crystallization, the vegetable world, and inside/outside.

The animals have come to be photographed for a beauty contest.

Markus Jakob tells the tale of these illustrious rendezvous. The protagonist of the story is the timid donkey. In Balthasar Burkard’s portraits all the animals are equally beautiful.

“Click” is the first in a series of artist’s books for children.