Gunnar Smoliansky Livres

One of the most important literary works of the 20th century, Ulysses is also one of the most realistic novels ever written. The characters visit shops and pubs that can be located precisely in the streets of the city in which Joyce grew up.

This is the first monograph to cover the five decades of Gunnar Smolianksy's prolific photographic career. With an idiosyncratic style, he favors the abject commonplace: a fly next to a glass of water, a threadbare tassel, a worn out office chair, a close-up of a fork and a few crumbs, a broken swing... With a quiet focus on small (and sometimes pathetic) moments, he also finds beauty: a plant taking root in a glass of water on a window sill, a watery reflection in a highly-polished floor, a single cloud hovering above the horizon between water and sky... Smolianksy is one of the leading voices of Swedish photography. For the past 50 years, he has taken the occasional commission as a freelance photographer, but has remained steadfastly focused on his own work. This long-overdue monograph accompanies a major retrospective of his work at the world-famous Hasselblad Center in Goteborg, Sweden.

Take the guesswork out of BTEC assessment with sample student work and assessor feedback for all pass, merit and distinction criteria.

This book contains more than 400 pictures of Gunnar Smoliansky's hands, each a spontaneous composition crafted by the photographer in his traditional darkroom. The inspiration for this series was unexpected and Smoliansky pursued it with an artist's rigor, creating a complex series, each image a nuanced variation on a theme. Some pictures are deceptively simple, hardly recognizable abstractions; others are realistic, revealing even the texture of Smoliansky's palm; while others still are almost violent inky overlappings. By bypassing the tool of the camera and reinterpreting the photogram, Smoliansky revisits one of the earliest means of photographic picture making and creates a gestural space between photography and drawing.

Promenade Pictures collects a suite of humble yet profound pictures taken by Gunnar Smoliansky in the 1970s and '80s during long walks throughout Stockholm and its surrounds. The figure of the flâneur in literature and art history is often a self-indulgent one, but Smoliansky rejects any hint of decadence. His sole concern is to discover the modest abstractions of the everyday: the fluid lines of a gnarled tree trunk; the graphic shapes of streets, shadows, stairs and tiles; the delicate landscape of crumpled bed sheets. Smoliansky's vision is as patient as it is single-minded: he stubbornly draws out and refines the geometric beauty of objects we would otherwise miss. Smoliansky created these photos, as all of his work, with an analog camera and developed the prints in his own darkroom. In these pictures he lays particular emphasis on the painterly tonalities of the prints, from warm sepia to cool black and white, in order to recreate variations of daylight. This new Steidl edition of Promenade Pictures is an expanded version of a smaller book, originally published by Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 1986.