Title: Staeck:Pornografie
Photographer(s): Various photographers
Edited: Klaus Staeck
Writer(s):
Designer(s):
Publisher(s): Edition Kölling/Anabas Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, Germany
Year: 1971
Print run:
Language(s): German
Pages: 388
Size: 20 x 25 cm
Binding: Softcover
Edition: 2nd Steidl, Göttingen, Germany, 2007, printed from the original offset films, archived at Steidl
Print:
Nation(s) and year(s) of Protest: World,1970
ISBN:
Here is a bewildering collection of curious of everyday violence: press photos of street fights, naked victims of war, and tortured prisoners follow staged body-art pictures and a wide array of objects colored by desire, power, exposure and surveillance. With a name that refers to x-rated images and the obscene, the works shown in Pornografie may be far from a voyeur's expectations. Indeed, it is filled with obscene photos, but as the philosopher Herbert Marcuse put it: "It's not the picture of a naked woman that's obscene but that of a general who shows off his medals earned in a war of aggression." The book is a complete work of art, offensive in every sense of the word, and as an artistic manifesto about violence in the twenty-first century, it couldn't be any more current, especially given movements like activist art.