Hans-Peter Feldmann

Published by Walther König, Köln

 

This sixth volume in Hans-Peter Feldmann's (born 1941) ongoing, much-loved and now-classic artist's book series offers a chaotic compendium of movie stills, photojournalism, ads, amateur photos, pornography, art, scientific imagery, archival imagery, found photographs and much else, dipping into the iconographic whirlpool of our times and bringing up a world both familiar and incongruous. From the very first page (there is no title page), Feldmann's carefully composed sequencing and design invites the reader to interpret the black-and-white photographs as a narrative--something that is only intermittently possible, but compelling and almost inevitable--like a photo book in comic-book form. Most of the images include faces, and occasionally, familiar figures such as Mohammed Ali, Isabella Rossellini or Henry Miller loom out from the image continuum, among those whose anonymity endows the book with a sense of vast scale and reach, as if traversing the entire history of photography.