Wilhelm Schürmann - Das nötig (MINT CONDITION) - 1990

SCARCE OPPORTUNITY to purchase FANTASTIC EARLY BOOK by the well-known German photographer, collector and curator Wilhelm Schürmann - in BRANDNEW CONDITION.

Important German photobook, probably the best by the artist.

"Schürmann’s city portraits have made him a prominent representative of German documentary photography; they always depict Germany as an objective location. Yet the motifs only seem banal at first glance. Gradually, the images reveal a tentative approach to a space. Schürmann’s work is imbued with a subtle humour, while simultaneously and unobtrusively quoting photographic history."
(Kunstverein Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz)

New, mint, unread - COLLECTOR'S COPY.

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"Today, Wilhelm Schürmann is known primarily as a collector and curator of contemporary art. In the early 1990s he stopped taking pictures altogether. “What I had to say was already in the world.” Nevertheless, it can’t be ruled out that Wilhelm Schürmann might one day take up a camera again: “I once looked at the world and took photos. And I continue to see motives and images in the world that surrounds me.”
(Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation)

Editions Travers Neuchatel. 1990. First edition, first printing.

Hardcover (as issued). 335 x 257 mm. 120 pages. 96 black and white photos. Photos: Wilhelm Schürmann. Layout: Wilfried Dickhoff. Text in German.

Wonderful early book by important German photographer - in perfect condition.

“Show me what you are building and I’ll tell you who you are.” If one goes by this quip by German poet and writer Christian Morgenstern, houses reveal quite a lot about their owners. Be it on a housing estate, a terraced house or an owner-occupied apartment – there’s always a bit of a “where” behind the “who”. And the idea of owning your own four walls is a typically German version of happiness.
Wilhelm Schürmann’s photographs present variants of this dream. His black-and-white shots present homes in the borderland areas of Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands – and the buildings really do have their own character, for Wilhelm Schürmann’s photos of a house always tell a story about the occupants without ever showing them. Instead, what we view is a window sill that is somehow askew, an unorthodox front garden, a strange gables, each attesting to the occupant’s presence. “Self-made architecture” is what Wilhelm Schürmann calls these bizarre products of a human hand. Often it is only details that transform a uniform edifice into a personalized building, giving it a physiognomy entirely of its own – or, to quote Schürmann again, “giving a thing a face”.
“Photographs have a reality all of their own,” says Wilhelm Schürmann, which is all the more astonishing as precisely his sober images of residential buildings and streets seem to be documentation pure and simple in black and white. Several criteria underline the ostensible matter-of-fact thrust: the typological approach, the serial nature of the photos, the carefully composed lack of depth, the sky in uniform gray. It is another element that fissures this gloss, namely humor. That, he claims, is the “most important thing of all” in art. This is why in Wilhelm Schürmann’s images there is certainly no lack of humor: “I love that human factor in images, those bizarre moments in life.” But he leaves it to us to discover these abstruse qualities in the pictures of houses."
(Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation)