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Timm Rautert: Anfang/Beginnings

Book Hero Magic crafted this summary to help describe this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Summary
Beginning in 2007, photographer Timm Rautert embarked on a decade-long documentary project capturing his students, their partners, and young children within their home environments. Comprising 40 triptychs, each featuring a family group flanked by their living spaces, the work explores the concept of the modern "holy family" set against the backdrop of middle-class Germany. Rautert's minimalist technique creates a neutral stage that reveals the complex social nuances of family beginnings.
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Book Hero Magic created this recommendation. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! IS THIS YOUR NEXT READ?

This book will appeal to readers interested in contemporary photography, social documentary, family studies, and those engaged with modern cultural and social dynamics in Europe.

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This volume presents a portrait series begun in 2007 by German photographer Rautert, in which he photographs his students with their partners and young children within their apartments. Exploring the concept of a modern-day holy family, each of these middle-class families is presented as a triptych.

Book Hero Magic formatted this description to make it easier to read. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Description

In 2007, Timm Rautert, then professor of photography at Leipzig's Academy of Fine Arts, began photographing his students with their partners and young children among the designer furniture, second-hand treasures and kids' toys of their apartments. So began a decade-long documentary experiment that shows German families in their revealing home environments and their beginnings as a family unit, with all its complex social connotations.

Timm Rautert: Anfang/Beginnings consists of 40 triptychs, one of each family. At the center is the mother/father/child group; to the left and right the living spaces seem to fold outwards, like a winged altarpiece. Rautert thus questions the idea of the "holy family" today through the prism of a specific generation's middle class. His sitters gaze towards us (the children do their best), with varying degrees of formality.

Rautert's technical approach is appropriately pared back, creating a neutral stage on which his subjects pose and helping him to seize, in his words, "that selfsame moment to look at that which I perhaps did not immediately grasp." A photographer must take part, must understand; that's the secret to a successful portrait, even if that understanding sometimes does not dawn until later.

Timm Rautert: Anfang/Beginnings

Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9783958295285

Publisher: Steidl Publishers

Format: Hardback

Date Published: 23 May 2019

Country: Germany

Imprint: Steidl Verlag

Audience: General / adult

DIMENSIONS

Weight: 1640g

Pages: 76

About the Author

Timm Rautert was born in 1941 in Tuchola, West Prussia, and today lives and works in Berlin and Essen. Rautert studied under Otto Steinert at the Folkwang School of Design in Essen, and from 1993 to 2007 was professor of photography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Leipzig. His books with Steidl include When We Don't See You, You Don't See Us Either(2007), No Photographing (2011), Josef Sudek, Prague 1967 (2016), Vintage (2017) and Germans in Uniform (2018). In 2008 Rautert was the first photographer to be awarded the Lovis Corinth Award.

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