In this accessible and eloquent book-length essay, Urs Stahel, writer, curator, and co-founder of the Fotomuseum Winterthur, muses on the very nature of photography. Chapters on industrial photography, staged and conceptual photography, and the current crisis of photojournalism provide a panoramic overview of the possibilities and challenges of photography in all of its variety, from the casual snapshot to art and commercial photography. Destined to become a standard work, this essay is a must-read for anyone interested in thinking about photography.

Fondazione MAST presents the catalogue accompanying the first large-scale anthology in Italy covering more than four decades of Andreas Gursky's oeuvre. Together with the artist, the curator Urs Stahel has devised a concept that takes in fact the acronym of the Fondazione and develops it further. MAST stands for Manifattura di Arti, Sperimentazione e Tecnologia (Art, Experience and Technology), and accordingly the visual spaces that Gursky creates in the photographs selected for the exhibition echo these thematic worlds. They open up peculiar perspectives on the world of work, the economy and globalisation, they reveal striking views of production sites, goods handling centres, temples of consumption, transport hubs, energy and food production, and the financial industry. Challenging our thinking as well as our eyes, his large-scale images help us frame the contemporary landscape and define our experience of the world. The volume--published on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of Fondazione MAST in Bologna and of the undredth anniversary of the G.D company--includes 41 spectacular large-format photographs and a critical essay by Urs Stahel, shedding light on the research and practice of a leading international artist whose work has significantly pushed the boundaries of photography for four decades.

Edited by Helene Bostrom. Text by Urs Stahel.

For roughly a decade, from 1992 to 2002, Joachim Brohm undertook a photographic project of long-term urban observation. At the same location on the outskirts of a German city, he took hundreds of pictures of redevelopment, recording the place as it was transformed from a 1950s commercial/industrial district into a gentrified post-industrial services center and living area. In a meditative response to these changes, Brohm cartographically captured the premises, their buildings and materials, and chronologically documented the developments during this period. Brohm's pictorial idiom--characterized by a dissolved center, with layering and composition referencing the continuation of space beyond the frame's limits--is both documentary and deconstructive. His photographs simultaneously depict and dissolve the outside world, lending the transitory, hovering state of reality and meaning a powerful pictorial form.

To enter Roni Horn's realm requires courage. But you only become aware of this after the fact, when it's already too late to back away, to erase the ever-repeating images from your mind. Attracted by the endless pictures of water or blurring images of clouds and clowns, seduced by dozens of young girl faces and pairs of eyes, you enter her realm somewhat unsuspectingly. And then the lock clicks behind you, almost silently, and you are standing all alone in front of a work that upon closer inspection suddenly seems rather dry and reserved, perhaps even repetitive. But somehow you know it's not. In this volume Elisabeth Lebovici, Bell Hooks, Thierry de Duve, Urs Stahel, Paolo Herkenhoff and Barbara Kruger contribute essays on the elusive work of Roni Horn. Through their essays begins a dialogue with a work that at first seems eloquent because of its sequential polyphony, but grows increasingly complex with the realization that it breaks almost immediately with any suggested narratives.