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Locked in enormous bank vaults and largely removed from public scrutiny for more than a decade, the little known collection of the Man Ray Trust comprises more than 4,000 works by Man Ray. The 320 photographs and drawings selected for this publication are among the rarest of Man Ray’s works, and will be a revelation to even his most devoted admirers. At the core of Man Ray: Trees + Flowers – Insects Animals is a series of landscape photographs made by Man Ray from the 1920s through the 1950s, many of which bear the distinct influence of Eugène Atget. With subjects including castles and ruined buildings, street scenes, and the objects from which he drew inspiration for other artworks, the photographs and drawings in this book represent an intermediary step in Man Ray’s creative process. The title of the series, Trees + Flowers – Insects Animals, was discovered by the editor scrawled across the backside of a photograph, and provides a key to this most unusual collection. These photographs function as a subject index to the themes and motifs that Man Ray employed in his better known works. They are, on the one hand, a record of his travels and observations in Europe and the United States. On the other hand, they are the relic of a moment preserved by Man Ray for later use and interpretation.

Darren Almond wuchs zwischen Kohleminen und Verkehrsknotenpunkten, mitten im Nordwesten Englands auf. In seiner Jugend war er ein begeisterter Trainspotter. Seitdem thematisierte er die Eisenbahn in vielen seiner Arbeiten, von Bahnhofsuhren, die er zu riesigen Skulpturen ausdehnt, zu Textexperimenten, die formell an die geprägten Zeichen an Schienenfahrzeugen erinnern. Journey Time, eine Filmtrilogie über außergewöhnliche Züge, ist sein wahrscheinlich ambitioniertestes Projekt in diesem Bereich und wird als Meilenstein seiner künstlerischen Laufbahn angesehen. Almond filmte die Wuppertaler Schwebebahn mit einer auf den Kopf gestellten Kamera, hielt eine Wiener Geisterbahn in expressionistischen Schwarz-Weiß-Bildern fest und dokumentierte eine Reise auf der höchstgelegenen Bahnlinie der Welt. Almond setzt moderne Transportmethoden als Metapher für den menschlichen Existenzkampf um. Der Katalog enthält die wesentlichen Bilder aus allen drei Filmen.

Starting in 1976, Andy Warhol shot several rolls of film every week and selected images for his book Andy Warhol’s Exposures, published in 1979. He had intended to title it Social Diseases but his concept was heavily watered down by his publishers at the time and many of the selected images were removed. This book presents the previously unpublished and unexhibited photographs,over 70 unique vintage black and white photographic prints, that Warhol originally selected for his book. It has been edited and introduced by Bob Colacello, who was also executive editor of the original book. “There is a sense of intimacy as well as of voyeurism, of funny-looking, insecure, wistful Andy, through flattery and attentiveness, trying to connect. Yet, because he was not just any photographer but a famous artist, a star, there is often a sense that the looking is being done at the man with the camera as well as by him. In some cases, the subjects are clearly performing for their fellow luminary, or close friend, or boss. As spontaneous as these images may seem, they are intrinsically staged, with Warhol himself as both chronicler and catalyst of the moments he is documenting. And what moments they are! Only Andy could get David Hockney in extra-brief running shorts, or Susan Sontag batting her eyelashes across a fancy restaurant table at Gloria Vanderbilt, or Halston’s Venezuelan window dresser and lover, Victor Hugo, sitting under Goya’s Red Boy in Kitty Miller’s Park Avenue parlor …. ” (Bob Coacello)

In January 1962, still in his early twenties, David Bailey fulfilled a dream that dated back to his years in Singapore, serving in the Royal Air Force. Heading to the USA, home of the jazz musicians that had inspired him and the source of his original ambition to be a trumpet-player, Bailey was on his first foreign trip for Vogue, together with his model and girlfriend, Jean Shrimpton. The impact of the early Bailey/Shrimpton collaborations set new standards that helped put Britain back on the world map of popular culture. And the attack on the generational chasm Bailey spearheaded is underlined by the warning he was given that, as a representative ofVogue, he was not to wear his leather jacket in the St Regis Hotel. (Of course he ignored the advice). The ground-breaking series Bailey photographed in wintry New York with his recently acquired 35mm camera was special. He immortalised his excited response to the freedom it allowed, the licence to quit the confines of the studio and shoot rapidly on the streets. These photographs occurred at that pioneer moment, shortly before Bailey, who was already alert to Pop Art, met Andy Warhol, and a year before his friends the Rolling Stones first launched their own transatlantic invasion. Bailey's historic visual breakthrough is manifested in the energy of these images, yet at the same time they convey a certain innocence – the photographs of these “absolute beginners” have a charm and freshness that continue to resonate today.

Bettina von Zwehl has built an international reputation for her subtile and unnerving photographic portraits. Her concise series of images are highly controlled both in terms of their minimalist aesthetic and the exacting conditions she imposes on her subjects. Von Zwehl photographs them as they wake from deep sleep, hold their breath, recover from physical exertion, are drenched in rain or listen intently to music in a darkened room; orchestrating a climate in which the sitters relinquish control of the way they are represented. The portraits reveal not the conscious projection of an identity but a space between the subject’s private and thoughtful world and their public appearance. With their pared-down backgrounds and balanced compositions, von Zwehl’s portraits have the texture and poise of Renaissance paintings. Their stillness is arresting and demands the kind of attention and absorbtion from the viewer that we see depicted. We are directed to the slightest of details: blemishes on the skin, wrinkles, stray hairs, raised color in the cheeks, a striking variety of profiles. Surveyed in this comprehensive monograph, the fifth in the Photoworks Monograph series, Bettina von Zwehl’s work forms a delicate and exquisitely detailed catalogue of human physiognomy.

This book will for the first time enable Ernest Cole to be seen in the perspective of international photography where he surely deserves an honoured place, not simply for his remarkable courage and determination in the face of state oppression but for the perceptiveness of his seeing eye and his ability to put what he saw into photographs of remarkable rigour, subtlety and elegance. These qualities were often subordinated to the need for the strongest possible anti-apartheid statement in his acclaimed book House of Bondage, published in 1967. Many of the photographs have never been published before and others, which were cropped in the book for their maximum political effect, will now be seen un-cropped for the first time. Ernest Cole the Photographer accompanies an exhibition with the same title, produced by the Hasselblad Foundation.

The Walther Collection is a private international art collection dedicated to collecting and exhibiting contemporary photography with special emphasis on the works of African and Asian artists. The inaugural exhibition of the collection will open to the public in June 2010 in the village of Burlafingen near Ulm, Germany. It is a dynamic collection, constantly growing and driven by four core activities: collecting, curating, exhibiting and publishing. Each activity is designed to present the works of the artists and to engage them in dialogue with the general public and the specialized field of contemporary art. The Walther Collection encompasses more than 700 works of widely noted as well as exciting new African and Asian artists, which makes it one of the most comprehensive collections of African photography worldwide. These extensive holdings are contextualized and complemented by historically significant contributions to the art of photography mainly from Germany and the United States, which expand the understanding, conception and history of the medium. The exhibitions and their curators at The Walther Collection will change once a year. Each year, based on a different curatorial emphasis, the collection will be examined and new constellations of the holdings and the new acquisitions will be presented. The Walther Collection will present in the inaugural exhibition a series of four projects in the nine galleries of its three buildings under the curatorial direction of Okwui Enwezor. It will integrate the work of three generations of African artists and photographers and a selection of the work of classical German photographers: Seydou Keïta (Mali), Malick Sidibé (Mali), J.D. ’Okhai Ojeikere (Nigeria), Rotimi Fani-Kayode (Nigeria), Santu Mofokeng (South Africa), as well as August Sander and Bernd and Hilla Becher (Germany). The exhibition series will centre on the issues of portraiture, identity, body, sexuality and performance. In total 230 works of 31 artists from 13 nations, among them South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia, Mali, Benin, Cameroon and Senegal, are presented. This comprehensive exhibition book contains the full page reproductions of all works on display. It will include contributions by Okwui Enwezor, Virginia Heckert, Kobena Mercer, Chika Okeke-Agulu, Gabriele Conrath-Scholl and Deborah Willis as well as a conversation between William Hartshorn and Artur Walther.

This book presents a survey of fabric works by Swiss artist Caro Niederer. Her starting point is often a personal snapshot taken during travels abroad or in her local neighbourhood. By transferring this source imagery into other media, such as paintings, silk prints or woodcuts, Niederer plays with the subtle shifts of form and meaning that occur in such physical transformations. Since the early 1990s Niederer has collaborated with textile workers in China to produce precious hand-made silk carpets and embroidery. As the images move from the artist to the local craftsmen the images – as in the children’s game of Chinese Whispers – undergo an inadvertent yet sometimes radical cultural transformation. By reproducing her motifs over time, Niederer creates delicate self-reflexive connections: “My practice is like an open spiral that moves with time. My work revolves around the subject of memory and the question of what remains that is valuable”.

In this collection of 120 black-and-white photos, Roni Horn takes us on a journey through a locker room in Reykjavik, Iceland. With minimal movement between the camera and subject in succeeding frames, and through the use of a slow-shutter technique, this finely crafted body of work provokes the viewer to contemplate the subtleties of each image. A blur behind a portal suggests that someone else is in the locker room with the viewer. Room numbers, open and closed doors, and intersecting hallways give clues to the surroundings, and as we turn each page of the book, we sense the subtle shifting of time and space in photographs that reflect a sculptor’s attention to the details of surfaces, repetition, and form.

In 2007 the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California asked Jim Dine to make a work in response to a part of their antiquities collection at the “Villa”. Dine carved three large scale wood sculputes, painting them with very bright colors in the ancient Hellenistic way, and surrounded them with a long poem attached to the wall. The entire process was documented for this book with photographs by Diana Michener, Gerhard Steidl and Jim Dine.