Simon Menner. Top Secret Images from the Archives of the Stasi

First publication of pictures from the archives of the Stasi, the East German secret police.

Almost 300,000 people worked for the East German secret police, per capita far more than were employed by agencies such as the CIA or the KGB. Not quite fifty years after the Berlin Wall was built, Simon Menner (*1978 in Emmendingen) discovered spectacular photographs in the Stasi archives that document the agency’s surveillance work. Formerly secret, highly official photographs show officers and employees putting on professional uniforms, gluing on fake beards, or signaling to each other with their hands. Today, the sight of them is almost ridiculous, although the laughter sticks in the viewer’s throat. This publication can be regarded as a visual processing of German history and an examination of current surveillance issues, yet it is extremely amusing at the same time. The fact that the doors of the opposite side—the British or German intelligence services, for example—remained closed to the artist lends the theme an explosive force as well as a tinge of absurdity.

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The New York Times - 2013 The Year in Pictures

Wow. MUST SEE these 80 photographs. NY Times Year in Pictures 2013. Stunning, in all senses of the word. http://bit.ly/LCyip13

GUP about - Tony Ray-Jones "American Colour 1962-1965"

Photo © Tony Ray-Jones

American Colour 1962-1965 by Tony Ray-Jones draws from the vast archive of one of the keenest observers of British society and culture, presenting a selection of his early experiments with colour photography. Coming to the States on a scholarship in the early ‘60s with the background of a graphic designer, Ray-Jones threw himself into the street life of New York and witnessed the excitement and sense of departure that was stirring the nation at the time. Developing his own viewpoints, both artistic and personal, he also dove into the newly emerging medium of colour film. This book shows a selection of these ‘isolated sketches’ in colour, as Ray-Jones referred to them, and sheds a new light on a photographer whose later black-and-white work exerted an enormous influence on British documentary photography.

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