mono.kultur #37, JAMES NACHTWEY: SHARDS OF TIME, “To turn our backs is a form of acceptance.”

Our new issue with the legendary war photographer James Nachtwey has been a long time in the making – two and a half years in fact – but as it happens, it could not have been released at a more relevant moment, with a new wave of terror in form of the IS shaking up the Middle East, frontlines between Russia and the West hardening, and Ebola wreaking havoc in West Africa. All of which are themes of the kind that Nachtwey has dedicated his life to for more than 30 years.   Inspired by the press images from the Vietnam War that told a very different story to the official government statements, James Nachtwey found his calling that he would pursue with determination and compassion that are admirable: to document the effects of war, terror and disease. In the hope of raising awareness and inspiring intervention and change, his photographs are neither easy to look at nor easy to forget.   Having witnessed and reported on the defining conflicts and tragedies of the past three decades – from the revolutions of South America and Eastern Europe to the famines in Africa, from 9/11 to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – Nachtwey’s photographs focus on the costs of war: the suffering of civilians, the damage and the scars.   There is no doubt that Nachtwey’s images are a challenge – to the powers that be by proposing an unflinching look at the reality on the ground, at the effects of politics on human lives, but also to us as their audience, by questioning our implication and, quite simply, by opening our eyes to the world.   In a rare and frank interview with mono.kultur, James Nachtwey talked about his struggles with photography, the different realities of war, and why images have the power to create change.   Graphically, the issue is at its most reduced, giving ample space to let the power of words and images unfold: coming in two separate booklets, it presents a personal and uncommented selection of James Nachtwey’s work in one, and a highly intriguing and challenging conversation in the other.

Mono.Kultur #36: Ricardo Bofill.

mono.kultur #36
RICARDO BOFILL: THE FUTURE OF THE PAST

“I’m interested in my own history of errors.”

‘It is enough to say that Ricardo Bofill is one of Europe’s most famous and prolific architects of the last century. To add any more is to inevitably leave out too much.’ With these words we begin the journey of our new issue mono.kultur #36 into the mind and work of Spanish architect and enfant terrible Ricardo Bofill.

And indeed, where to begin with an architect as over the top as Ricardo Bofill, notorious since the 1970s for his vast city-like housing estates that look like surreal experiments in crossbreeding desert caves with Star Wars; an architect who has designed over 1000 projects in the space of five decades, from perfume bottles to city plans, and pretty much everything in between; who has worked in a style – or a hundred styles – that is as unique as it is impossible to describe; who founded a leftist collective that would eventually end up building airport terminals; whose life reads somewhat like a fairytale itself, taking us from fascist Spain under Franco’s rule to the celebrity frenzy of our modern times, with the Bofill clan holding a somewhat unique position among Spanish tabloids? To add any more is to inevitably leave out too much.

In short, Ricardo Bofill is a gloriously fascinating character with a penchant for the extra-large, in life as well as in work, and we are terribly pleased to dedicate mono.kultur #36 to the Spanish master.

With mono.kultur, Ricardo Bofill talked about fifty years of architecture, the vagaries of ambition and how Modernism killed the city.

Visually, the issue offers a disorienting journey of architectural splendour with plenty of previously unpublished images from the archives of Ricardo Bofill (as well as the odd film still of naked bodies). Using partial high gloss varnish throughout, it is a pleasing juxtaposition of the natural and the artificial, the intellectual and the sexual, the rigorous and the decadent.

Spring 2014 / English / 15 x 20 cm / 48 Pages
Introduction & Interview by Carson Chan
Images courtesy of Taller de Arquitectura
Design by Vela Arbutina & John McCusker
Publisher: Kai von Rabenau

Price: € 5.00

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Mono.Editionen #3: Taryn Simon

So here it comes: mono.editionen #03 with Taryn Simon. A pretty little package in those lovely photographers’ glassine envelopes, containing not only a reprint of our original issue #15 from 2008, which we might have already mentioned we feel to be a little jewel in magazine design; but also an interview addendum with Simon talking about her latest work A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, as well as ten plates thereof, printed as a set of separate cards.

containing
— mono.kultur #15: Taryn Simon
— Interview Addendum
— 10 Plates from ‘A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters’

D 12€

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