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04. Photobooks
Exclusively curated by Josef Chladek, this photobook selection brings together works that linger on the land with patience and attention, inviting a slower way of looking. Fields, roads, edges appear in August Sander’s Rheinlandschaften, Lewis Baltz’s Park City, and Bryan Schutmaat’s Sons of the Living. Places shaped by use and time, by what remains and what has disappeared, make themselves felt throughout. The land is sometimes measured, sometimes intimate, always present, always returned to.
Josef Chladek (b. 1968, Vienna) holds a master’s degree in Physics from the Vienna University of Technology and lives and works in Vienna, where he builds an extensive library with a strong focus on photobooks. With over 25 years of experience across major Austrian media, he co-founded FC Chladek Drastil GmbH in 2013, developing digital and publishing projects for media houses, book platforms, and photography-related initiatives.

Photobooks description from https://josefchladek.com/


Rheinlandschaften: Photographien 1929-1946 (Schirmer Mosel) 1975August Sander
“'Rheinlandschaften' was the first book to be published by the newly founded Schirmer/Mosel-Verlag in 1975. The photographs in 'Rheinlandschaften' were taken between 1929 and 1946. After his first publication, 'Antlitz der Zeit', was confiscated by the Nazis, August SANDER turned to more politically innocuous landscape photography and created pictures of unusual atmospheric charm and high technical quality - 'portraits', as it were, of his immediate homeland, which are among the few remarkable pictorial creations in Germany in those years.


Agrarlandschaften (Schmalfeldt J.H. & Co) 1979Heinrich Riebesehl
"There is a repetitive quality to Riebesehl’s compositions and although the beauty of the agricultural landscape is acknowledged, it is their function as a productive mechanism that is celebrated. As Riebesehl analyzes the modified landscapes of North Germany, his images seem to have a melancholic beauty, which further alludes to the changing function of these landscapes as they alter under progressive agricultural modernisation." (Claxton Projects)



Park City (Artspace Press and Castelli Graphics) 1980Lewis Baltz
"During 1978 and 1979 Lewis Baltz, one of America's foremost contemporary photographers, undertook to document the building of a rapidly growing ski resort and second-home development east of Salt Lake City in Utah's Wasatch Mountains. His concern was to record the construction of Park City as an example of the urbanization of the American West. When Baltz first saw the landscape around Park City, it appeared utterly chaotic, devastated by decades of abuse and neglect. Littered with fragments of iron, glass, wood, and wire -- the residue of mining wastes abandoned years earlier -- much of the land could support only meager vegetation. The scene suggested the aftermath of cataclysmic, purposeless violence. During the two and one half years that Baltz photographed Park City, the wasteland was covered with houses and commercial structures; ironically these only increased the sense of starkness and desolation." (From the publisher)



American Prospects (Times Books in association with the Museum of Fine Arts) 1987
Joel Sternfeld
Joel Sternfeld travelled the country for around eight years with an 8x10 view camera and colour film, a sojourn that produced his first and best-known book, American Prospects... The particular quality brought by Sternfeld to the 8x10 colour-landscape aesthetic... is a clear sense of narrative... In American Prospects, each picture suggests an arcane drama being played out—an elephant stranded on a road in Oregon, or a pumpkin stall in Virginia behind which a house burns fiercely. These narrative hints are suggestive, sly, often ironic, frequently mysterious, making American Prospects less a series of photographs than a series of tales—unfinished, elliptical certainly—that add up to a cogent and persuasive view of America...

Parr/Badger, The Photobook (from Sternfeld´s website)



Troubled Land (Grey Editions) 1987
Paul Graham
¨Troubled Land deals with the small but insistent signs of political division embedded in the landscape of Northern Ireland. At the heart of the Irish conflict lays the land — who owns it, who controls it, whose history it expresses. Paul Graham’s quietly radical book keeps this material truth in mind as it uniquely combines landscape and conflict photography, seducing us with bucolic views in which telling details only gradually appear: painted kerbs, distant soldiers or helicopters, flags and graffiti, paint-splattered roads, each tacitly aligning that location to its Republican or Loyalist allegiance.¨
(from the reprint available from April 2022 at MACK)


Reservate des Augenblicks (Hatje Cantz Verlag) 1998
 "Tram stations, ski runs and panoramic terraces - the Alps are a playground for winter sports fans and enthusiastic mountain climbers: a populated Alpine leisure park. In his tableaus from close-up photos Walter Niedermayr documents the effects of Alpine tourism on the mountain world. But his pictures on the 'injuries' to the landscape are by no means pure photographic depictions of reality; he works in a subtle way with minimal changes of angle and viewpoint, and uses scarcely perceptible alterations to combine individual pictures into disturbing photo arrangements, achieving an intensity of seeing.¨(from the publisher)



The New West (Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König) 2000Robert Adams
The open American West is nearly gone. The New West is a photographic essay about what came to fill it—freeways, tract homes, low-rise business buildings and signs. In five sequences of pictures taken along the front wall of the Colorado Rocky Mountains, Robert Adams has documented a representative sampling of the whole suburban Southwest. These views have a double power. At first they shock; normally we try to forget the commercial squalor they depict. Slowly, however, they reveal aspects of the geography—the shape of the land itself, for example—that are beyond man’s harm. Adams has written that “all land, no matter what has happened to it, has over it a grace, an absolutely persistent beauty,” and his photographs show this. (from the Steidl reprint)



Ruhr (Steidl) 2007


Joachim Brohm
Joachim Brohm’s photographic series Ruhr documents the German Ruhr area during its industrial decline from the late 1970s to the mid-80s. With this work Brohm became one of the first to engage with the issues raised by American photography – the landscape photography of the nineteenth century and the topographical photography from 1970 onwards – and transport them into a European context. Ruhr is an integral link between USA and European photography and its special significance is revealed with this first complete monograph.

Roads and Paths (König) 2009Bernhard Fuchs
Bernard Fuchs follows his "Autos" monograph with this catalogue of roads and paths. These routes all lead somewhere, perhaps away from civilization, but, as Fuchs makes plain, are certainly civilizing entities themselves, the artificial medium by which nature is found. "In Bernhard Fuchs Roads and Paths, the vacant roads and byways of a rural region of Austria create lyrical metaphors for various aspects of life’s journey. Fuchs creates a sense of ambiguity at the moment of exposure. Whereas the viewer is not certain if they are looking at the future of the journey to come. Or in the past, of the journey taken." - Douglas Stockdale for The PhotoBook

 (from https://www.setantabooks.com/)


A Road Divided (Nazraeli) 2010
Todd Hido
A Road Divided expresses that unconventional ‘natural’ beauty, particular to Hido’s work: the open road on a rainy day, seductive in its promise of freedom, but reigned in by fences and traffic signs. Order and containment despite a perceived desire for breaking out. Persistent in Hido’s work is the idea of coming back (to an emotion, if not a place) despite leaving, but this time with the weight of experience, maybe even a sort of resignation to the cyclical nature of the mind.



Pastoral (Contrasto) 2013
Alexander Gronsky
In his photographic account Pastoral, Alexander Gronsky portrays the outskirts of Moscow: the places where humanity takes refuge to find solace far from the cities, colliding with urban expansion and frailty of nature. The space explored lives “in between”, suspended in the nothingness of the unknown and what stands “on the other side”.


The Yellow River (Jiazazhi) 2014Zhang Kechun
"Carrying out this photograph project is because of the inspiration after reading the novel River of the North written by Zhang Chengzhi. Attracted by the powerful words in this novel, I decided to take a walk along the Yellow River to experience and feel the father-like broad and wide brought from this river, so that I could find the root of my soul .while along the way, the river from my mind was inundated by the stream of reality. The river, which once was full of legends, had gone and disappeared. That is kind of my profound pessimism. Nevertheless, as a vast country with a long history, its future is always bright. There is a descent in the matrix; there is her own nutrition to feed her babies; there is the power of creation to cultivate them strongly. The weak moaning finally will be drowned by the shout for joy. From this point of view, it seems, all shall be optimistic."


240 Landscapes (Journal) 2015
Helge Skodvin
I have been photographing these cars as they are parked. In front of a house, in a driveway, in a parking lot, in a garage, alongside a road, in a courtyard, in a street. In their natural habitat. With these photographs, I want to show how we live, how our surroundings look. I wish to portray the everyday landscape. A photographic documentation of the landscape we inhabit. (Helge Skodvin)




Brandenburg (Drittel Books) 2017Andreas Gehrke
In his latest book, Brandenburg, Andreas Gehrke composes a considered portrait of the sparsely populated state that encircles Berlin. A region that has been described as bleak, austere and unforgiving, Gehrke’s Brandenburg is marked by moments of incongruity. Drawn to the undefined, the seemingly desolate, he depicts places characterised by transition, absence and indeterminacy.



Cloppenburg (Koenig Books) 2019Laurenz Berges
"After almost thirty years I now have this work about the place where I grew up in front of me again. As I look at the photographs I took back then, I feel a sense of wonder tinged with a little sentimentality but also delight. I have never broken off my connection with this city and region, and each time I have visited since then I have noticed astonishing changes and realised that everything, however ordinary, is subject to a process of permanent change. I use my photographs to assure myself that change has indeed taken place and to preserve my memories." (Laurenz Berges in the foreword)



För (Trespasser) 2024
Agnieszka Sosnowska
Agnieszka Sosnowska’s debut monograph, För, is an intimate portrait of the artist’s life and community in a remote corner of East Iceland. Sosnowska was born in Poland and raised in Boston. Coming of age between two countries and disparate cultural identities, she felt neither fully Polish nor American during her youth. It wasn't until adulthood that she moved to Iceland and found the place where she truly belongs. Here, Sosnowska lives a quiet life, residing on a farm with her husband and working as a teacher in a rural k-12 school. In this tight knit world, she uses a large format view camera to photograph the land and people with tenderness and unwavering commitment. Set amidst the harsh elements and rugged beauty of the Nordic landscape, För is a book of gratitude and love  – a story about finding home and a chosen family that carry through the seasons of life.

Sons of The Living (Trespasser) 2024
Bryan Schutmaat
Sons of the Living is a photobook about the land and people along the highways of America’s deserts. Photographed over the course of a decade in the American West’s arid and sweeping terrain, this work depicts a human capacity for endurance. Schutmaat offers an updated view of the “open road” that addresses a new era of uncertainty and anxiety. Amidst a backdrop of environmental decline, economic dispossession, and societal neglect, Sons of the Living draws attention to trouble on the road ahead and searches for our hope to withstand it.


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