Gerry Johansson
Deutschland

352 pages
176 duotone plates
17 cm x 24 cm
Cloth cover with two tipped-in prints
Publication date: October 2012
ISBN 978-1-907946-35-6

Publisher’s Description:

Following the phenomenal success of Gerry Johansson’s 2011 publication Pontiac, this October MACK will release Deutschland.Deutschland completes an eighteen-year series of books for which Johansson travelled through America, Sweden, Germany and Mongolia.

In Deutschland, Johansson has produced a visual encyclopedia, cataloging the rural and urban landscapes of Germany. Presented in alphabetical order, the book is devoid of human presence. Johansson’s images traditionally lack a human element but here it is reduced. Discouraging the speculation reserved for reading photography books, the wonder if the order follows a geographical path, is it telling a story? Johansson’s regimentation of the works asks us to look, very simply, at their content.

In carefully structured greyscale images, Johansson sensitively explores German history through its landscape, picking out the industrial scenes, industrial buildings, residential roads and shop fronts. Johansson’s quiet photographs are carefully constructed, grid patterns recur constantly and each frame is packed with information.

(via MACK - Gerry Johansson - Deutschland)

• 23 September 2012

Pontiac by Gerry Johansson

Clothbound hardcover with tipped-in photo

17.5 x 24.5 cm portrait

160 pages, 111 plates

ISBN 978-1-907946-09-7

Publishers Description:

Sensitive and subtle, Johansson hints at town life through the occasional car or lone figure but for the most part draws the reader’s eye to the simplistic architecture of a small American town. In singling out Pontiac, Johansson offers comment on more than the landscape, photographing a microcosm of the effects of the decline in the auto industry in Michigan. His images offer us the opportunity to analyze the landscape with a characteristic Swedish melancholy, echoing the new topographical photographers of the 1970s.

Pontiac marks the end of an eighteen year project by Gerry Johansson. In 1993 Johansson visited America, taking photographs on his travels from one small town to the next. He traveled through the states again in 1994 and 1996, repeating this photographic process. This work was compiled in Amerika, published in 1998. It was followed by a collection of photographs from his homeland, Sverige in 2005. Critical response led Johansson to narrow his camera’s eye to a single town, Kvidinge, a portrait of a Swedish town, published in 2007. Johansson revisited America in 2010, traveling to Pontiac, Michigan, and this became the basis for his final piece in this series.

(via MACK BOOKS)

• 30 July 2011

Gerry Johansson Deutschland

Gerry Johansson
Deutschland