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PUBLISHER
Steidl

BOOK FORMAT
Clth, 11.75 x 12.25 in. / 112 pgs / 74 color.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date
Out of stock indefinitely

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: FALL 2014

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9783869307091 TRADE
List Price: $58.00 CAD $77.50

AVAILABILITY
Not available

TERRITORY
NA ONLY

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STEIDL

Mona Kuhn: Private


Mona Kuhn: PrivateFor her fifth book with Steidl, Mona Kuhn has entered the heart of the American desert and returned with a sequence of pictures that is seductive, enigmatic and a little unsettling. Private proposes a world in which concrete reality and the imaginary are one. Plants and animals on the edge of survival, sun-drenched landscapes and wind-sculpted earth are intercut with a series of nudes that push Kuhn's renowned sensitivity to human form into unexpected directions. The result is a book somewhere between the poetry of T.S. Eliot, the cinema of Robert Altman and a lucid dream.

Featured image is reproduced from Mona Kuhn: Private.

PRAISE AND REVIEWS

pdnonline.com

Dzana Tsomondo

Kuhn made the photographs in Private entirely on film with a Hasselblad, in part because of the unavailability of electricity while she was traversing the desert alone or with her subjects. To edit the work she would mount “little prints on a huge wall” in her workspace and look them over daily, taking out anything that started to bore her, lacked a certain depth or simply didn’t fit the evolving narrative. Through this sort of attrition she whittled two years’ worth of photographs down to the most compelling and cohesive set of images. “It’s a slow process, six to eight months, but that [process] is when the work will tell the artist what it wants to be,” Kuhn says.

rangefinderonline.com

Andre Crump

Well known for her famous semi-saturated and rich depth-of-field nudes, this publication by Mona Kuhn takes the same set of photographic skills to the desert, which she captures with a similar perspective. Beautiful images of empty buildings, empty housing developments, arid landscapes and native flora and fauna are interspersed with her trademark clothing-free models, all within the same color palette, focus and context.

Photo Book Magazine

Rory Duckhouse

The images reveal themselves through their subtleties, through tone, colour and clever image arrangements. The images are enigmatic and call for repeat viewing to unravel their subtle meaning. The desert is a space that has been photographed many times, but Kuhn reveals a more sensitive side that link it to mortality and the role of humans in this wild space.

Issue Magazine

Paul Ruscha

Perhaps it was just an excuse to show you what is so exhilarating, and that is the desert in the dark – a mystery surrounded by black, and what you cannot see in the few feet ahead of you. That is what is appealing about your books. The images of the people which inhabit them are mysterious; the attending images of their rooms; the textures of the walls; the jungle foliage; the dry, desert landscapes… all those things to me are such a wonderful place to visit through the vision of someone you admire for what they see, unlike the direction I take in the way that I approach photography.

The Last Magazine

Kevin Greenberg

For a new monograph, Private, Kuhn’s fifth publication for Steidl, the photographer focused her gaze on the bleached tones and broad expanses of light that bathe the Mojave Desert, a few hours drive from her Los Angeles home. In a series of thoughtful and intimate compositions, Kuhn catalogs flora and fauna, most of it coarse-grained and engineered for survival. Landscapes are windswept and invite introspection. Hard light falls on no-nonsense structures that are built to last.

Punctuated throughout these pages are female nudes, bathed in the same supple light and shadow, their faces mostly serene. As in previous series by Kuhn, the artist employs glass as a secondary lens and means of filtration and dissolution of identity, shooting her subjects from outside of structures, allowing their features to soften and meld with the reflections of the surrounding terrain.

The sequencing of the images in Private is expertly tuned to tease out the complex relationship between the vulnerability of the nude female form and the rugged natural context which Kuhn employs as a backdrop. Kuhn’s models are mostly supine, the softness of their luminous skin a foil and a complement to the jagged, indomitable geology of the landscape in which they find themselves. Against this backdrop, the self is by turns magnified and diminished into a dreamy, sensual phenomenology.

Photo-Eye Blog

Christopher J Johnson

A separate reality; a place of sepia, endlessly erudite, that is, despite itself, a thirst: of the eye, the hand in its search for texture, and the spirit that does not always long for separateness, but wholeness through affinities; all of this is Mona’s Kuhn’s Private.

Mona Kuhn: Private

STATUS: Out of stock indefinitely.

FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 2/12/2015

Mona Kuhn Book Signing at Arcana

Mona Kuhn Book Signing at Arcana

Join Arcana Books on the Arts in Culver City this Sunday, February 15 from 4-6PM for a book signing with photographer Mona Kuhn, whose new book, Private, is just out from Steidl.
continue to blog


MONA KUHN MONOGRAPHS + ARTIST'S BOOKS

Mona Kuhn: Kings Road

MONA KUHN: KINGS ROAD

Steidl

ISBN: 9783958297555
USD $65.00
| CAD $88

Pub Date: 3/1/2022
Active | In stock


Mona Kuhn: She Disappeared into Complete Silence

MONA KUHN: SHE DISAPPEARED INTO COMPLETE SILENCE

Steidl

ISBN: 9783958291805
USD $50.00
| CAD $69.95

Pub Date: 1/22/2019
Active | Out of stock


Mona Kuhn: Bordeaux Series

MONA KUHN: BORDEAUX SERIES

Steidl

ISBN: 9783869303086
USD $65.00
| CAD $87

Pub Date: 9/15/2011
Active | Out of stock


Mona Kuhn: Evidence

MONA KUHN: EVIDENCE

Steidl

ISBN: 9783865213723
USD $65.00
| CAD $87

Pub Date: 5/1/2007
Active | Out of stock


Mona Kuhn: Photographs

MONA KUHN: PHOTOGRAPHS

Steidl

ISBN: 9783865210081
USD $45.00
| CAD $63

Pub Date: 6/2/2004
Active | In stock