Drittel Books

Michael Gessner
Masse

156 pages / 80 images
22 × 27 cm
Edition of 200

ISBN 978-3-9818866-2-7
Softcover € 38

Preorder now

Michael Gessner’s Masse sheds sharp new light on the signifiers of surveillance embedded in everyday life. Conceived as a sociological exploration of mass behaviour in the digital age, the photo book invites contemplation on the myriad ways in which individuals are monitored – and in which they monitor themselves – as they transition through the blurred boundaries between the digital and the physical.
Masse opens with an image revealing a set of shiny bronze doors. The eye is drawn to a black box angled above its entrance. What does it see? And who is watching? Though the questions remain unanswered, the tone is set for the following pages, which reveal Gessner’s artistic dexterity as he moves seamlessly from hyper-stylised shots of hardware to classic architectural photos, collaged Fitbits, smudged impressions tracing the movement of fingerprints on a screen, and cropped streetscapes in Berlin, Seoul, and New York. Rooftop satellites, radio towers and CCTV cameras are extracted from their surroundings and examined in a detached, exacting style. Scattered throughout, a series of six abstract works depicts shards of a circuit board splintering into ever smaller fragments – as traces of the surveillance society come into focus, so too does the digital copy of the self become increasingly nuanced. Across Gessner’s works, the restrained seduction of his visual language, executed with unfaltering precision, contrasts starkly with the complexity of the subject his camera examines. Lured into a conceptual panopticon, the viewer looks in from the edge and gazes out from the centre of the mass; at once the observer and the observed.

Land’s End
The “Topography of Terror” Site
as Reflected in Contemporary Photography

Featuring photographs by Joachim Brohm, Michael Disqué, Klaus Frahm, Andreas Gehrke, John Gossage, Volker Heinze, Kai-Olaf Hesse, Lockemann/Neudörfl, Margret Nissen and Michael Schmidt

112 pages / 60 images
23 × 28 cm
Edition of 500

ISBN 978-3-9818866-1-0
Softcover € 30

Order now

The “Topography of Terror” is a one of the most significant memorial sites of recent times. How is the past inscribed in the landscape? How do we regard a place that once housed the central instruments of terror of the Nazi regime? How has this no-man’s-land, once at the frontier of East and West, changed over time?

Land’s End features ten artists who photographed what is now the Topography of Terror site between 1981 und 2014, including John Gossage, Michael Schmidt and Joachim Brohm. The connection between photography and memory is obvious: photographs, like our memories, are drawn from reality, yet they convey a pictorial materiality all of their own. In their role as editors, Andreas Gehrke and Michael Disqué adopt an artistic approach to address the site, a place that was initially rendered unrecognizable by demolition and repurposing, rediscovered in the 1980s and embedded in the historical memory by the Topography of Terror Foundation.

The photographic surveys, depictions and descriptions in Land’s End reveal changes in the landscape and the medium of photography alike. Viewed as a whole, the images do not create a panoptic overview of the area, but rather an approximation of the site within our collective memory. Thus, Volker Heinze’s quest for new forms of representation appears alongside Michael Disqué’s exploration of the photographically tangible, and Margret Nissen’s documentary commissions are set against Lockemann/Neudörfl’s highly conceptual compositions. Photographs by Klaus Frahm und Kai-Olaf Hesse show the area in a state between stagnation and architectural revival, while Andreas Gehrke consistently finds new systems and configurations in the Robinia grove that established itself on the site, bestowing it with its own spatial, aesthetic quality, above and beyond its historical significance. The collected images are given context by an in-depth essay by Dr Philipp Reinfeld and a historical study by Ulrich Tempel.

Andreas Gehrke
Landeszentralbank 2000 – 2016
Meiningen

56 pages / 22 images
16.5 × 21.5 cm
Edition of 400, numbered

ISBN 978-3-9818866-0-3
Softcover € 20

Order now

This architectural portrait of the vast Landeszentralbank in Meiningen echoes the visual language and format that characterises Andreas Gehrke’s acclaimed trilogy depicting vacant post-war modernist buildings in Germany, although the nature of this book’s subject represents a departure from that series.

Completed in 2000, Hans Kollhoff’s post-modern fortress housed the Landeszentralbank’s Head Office in the state of Thuringia until 2016, when it was closed to be repurposed for its second functional life – this time as a storage facility for contemporary art. Gehrke’s photographs capture the complex in an interim phase, showing anew the spaces and surfaces of a building not immediately discernible beneath the weight of its monumental and technical qualities. In doing so, the work serves not just as a portrait of a building lived according to its originally intended function, but also as a reading of the space that speaks to its life to come. Accompanying the 22 images is an essay by Terence Riley, internationally renowned critic and former Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at MoMA in New York.

Raul Walch
Azimut

132 pages / 73 images
20 × 27 cm
Edition of 500

ISBN 978-3-9815735-9-6
Softcover € 38

Order now

Many paths lead to Europe. The most dangerous is the sea route. For his work Azimut Raul Walch travelled to Europe’s southern periphery; to the heart of the greatest humanitarian catastrophe of our age. Azimut is an attempt to rethink artistic contemporaneity. It’s a presence that neither comments nor judges, but rather expands perspectives, participates and produces. Azimut is political; it is narrative and full of poetry. It doesn’t talk about people, it listens to them.

In the Winter of 2015, Raul Walch travelled to Lesbos. This, the first of several visits, marks the beginning of Azimut. In nautical terms the Arabic word refers to the intended course, or azimuth, of a journey from beginning to end. In navigational terms the north is a reference point. For those who have chosen the route across the sea, the north encompasses both hope and horror. Time and again Walch has explored global migration flows – investigating and deconstructing their materiality.

As Olafur Eliasson’s student at the Institut für Raumexperimente (Institute for Spatial Experimentation), Walch adopted a broad approach to artistic practice. The question as to whether an artistic idea can become a product remains pertinent throughout his work. In Azimut he takes it one step further: can an artistic idea save lives? From discarded tarpaulin he fashioned colourful kites. The temporary architectures of Arrival Cities have long become symbols of instability and uprootedness; in Azimut they are structures of freedom and empowerment. Where there are kites there is humanity. The next step is to turn them into Rescue Kites; lighthouses flying above the water to direct the ships; fluorescent mosaics in the wind that oppose the politics of nationalism.

Andreas Gehrke
Brandenburg

160 pages / 82 images
24 × 29 cm
Edition of 500

ISBN 978-3-9815735-8-9
Hardcover € 48

Order now

“In principle, the area surrounding Berlin is quite beautiful. The environs of few other German cities possess such a rich character. It emanates an austere allure which, almost Japanese in its subtlety, often leaves a profound impression. But time and again it also appears unfamiliar, and looms rather than it pleases.”
Karl Scheffler, Berlin—The Fate of a City, 1910

In his latest book, Brandenburg, Andreas Gehrke composes a considered portrait of the sparsely populated state that encircles Berlin. A region that has been described as bleak, austere and unforgiving, Gehrke’s Brandenburg is marked by moments of incongruity. Drawn to the undefined, the seemingly desolate, he depicts places characterised by transition, absence and indeterminacy.

For over six years Gehrke worked on this project. Consistently renouncing notions of pure documentary photography, his images never make outward reference to historical shifts and processes. Instead they form a series of subtle allusions to the structural and social changes that have befallen Brandenburg in recent decades. Using formal photographic means he imparts each image with a sense of dignity and aesthetic rigour, inviting the viewer to linger over his detailed compositions.

With this publication, Andreas Gehrke has produced a document that transcends the realm of temporality. Brandenburg isn’t a depiction of ‘home’: it examines the aesthetic identity of the region from a detached, analytical perspective. Gehrke’s photographic study is complemented by an essay on landscape by the Swiss sociologist and founder of promenadology, Lucius Burckhardt.

Sara-Lena Maierhofer
Dear Clark,

132 pages / 74 images
19 × 24 cm
Edition of 500

ISBN 978-3-9815735-7-2
€ 42.00

Order now

Christian Karl, a bit ordinary, hardly impressive. The names he designed for himself were more beautiful, more resonant: Christopher Crowe, Clark Rockefeller. He created his own reality, and everyone fell for it. With each new name he left his previous life behind. As though it had never existed. Almost without a trace.

Erasing the past, tailoring a new identity, becoming somebody else; not just anyone, but a Rockefeller. The old, long buried self used to be Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter from Bavaria. But he vanished a long time ago in a journey from Germany to the States. His initials were lost in a series of taken names; his skin appropriated a handful of aliases, all grandiose and luxurious in lifestyle. In 2008, after three decades of spurious identities, the lie collapsed and with it the man. Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, aka Christopher Crowe, Clark Rockefeller to name but a few; to many a swindler, a con man, a crook; to others, a gifted storyteller, a man with a polished accent who dared to be whatever he wished.

Sara-Lena Maierhofer discovered Clark in a newspaper article in 2008. She became fascinated by the man with multiple skins and decided to approach him. After Clark refused to meet her, she decided to study him from a distance; to conduct her own criminal investigation based on the existing pieces of forensic evidence- the bits of newspaper, pictures, even Clark’s early childhood drawings, and her letters to him. Still Maierhofer needed to go further. In an attempt to penetrate the multiple layers of his lie and reach the core of his personality, she chose to approach him through fiction, following Clark’s lead. She imagined him in a world of clones and doubles, one where the borders of truth and lie collapse against the rigid confinements of the image.

Natasha Christia

Noshek
Good Kid

160 pages / 117 images
16 × 22 cm
Edition of 100
Signed and numbered

ISBN 978-3-9815735-6-5
Softcover € 38.00

Out of print

Good Kid roams the streets of Berlin, bearing witness to its many comings and goings. He reflects upon its long-time allure as a refuge for exiles and outliers – the godless, rational city. Presenting us with friends, acquaintances and scenes that exemplify its distinctive quality, Good Kid strives to capture the traces of a fading essence. Only then does he realise that his mission is a mirror, and any attempt to determine the identity of Berlin is inextricably linked with finding his own.

Noshek’s Good Kid is a love letter of sorts to Drittel’s home base of Berlin – an ode to the city, to the friends who live here and to 35mm analogue photography: point and shoot. With over 100 black & white and colour images, this book paints an intimate – but radical – view of the Berlin zeitgeist and its architectural backdrop.

Martin Eberle
Voyager – The Grand Tour

320 pages / numerous images
22.5 × 29 cm
Edition of 300

ISBN 978-3-9815735-5-8
Three volumes slipcased € 120

Order now
Order through amazon

With our latest publication we bridge the gap between science, photography and cultural history. In the three band volume Voyager – The Grand Tour, author and photographer Martin Eberle shines a light on the various aspects of the legendary NASA Voyager mission from the 1970s:

– Volume one, Voyager – Mission, tells the scientific background of the mission and its extraterrestrial message,
– volume two, Voyager – Golden Record, exhaustively compiles the images present on the disc,
– the third part, Voyager – The Grand Tour, assembles images from Eberle’s photographic journey to the scientific institutions in California, which to this day still supervise the probes on their voyage into the unknown.

In 1977, NASA launched two probes – Voyager I and Voyager II. On board of each one was an identical “Golden Record”, which carried messages, images and sounds of the Earth and its human inhabitants into outer space. It aimed to provide extraterrestrials with a subjective notion of what at the time was considered to be ‘terrestrial’.

Despite having disappeared from both the outer reaches of the solar system and the cultural consciousness, the Voyager programme now receives a unique bibliophilic memorial. With the sober insight of the 21st century, photographer Martin Eberle documents and recapitulates this self-intoxicated pinnacle of the space age in three meticulous volumes. Places, protagonists and technologies are vividly revisited, and the mission’s self-referential messages to the Earth’s inhabitants are resolved pictorially and textually.

Julian Faulhaber
Catalogue

76 pages / 43 images
26 × 35 cm
Edition of 500

ISBN 978-3-9815735-4-1
Softcover € 29.90

Order now
Order through amazon

Since the late 90s, Cape Town has become the location of choice for commercial photography and film shoots. The place is a shapeshifter – its streets and beaches, hills and homes made to mimic just about everywhere in the world.

Collected by Julian Faulhaber during several years he spent working in and amongst these shoots, the photographs of Catalogue reveal the world behind the perfect images we encounter on our screens and in glossy magazines.

Like a powerful advert, Catalogue, promises meaning: an answer, a solution, a way to sate human desires. But unlike an advert, that meaning is never quite revealed. It is always just out of reach, a turn of the page away, or just out of shot.

Martin Eberle
galerie berlintokyo

76 pages / 70 images
22.5 × 28cm

ISBN 978-3-9815735-3-4
Softcover € 28

Order now
Order through amazon

"Just as it was already over and the legendary galerie berlintokyo was officially closing, their operators organized two last big parties. One took place in the Kurfürstendamm Club Big Eden, only three months after the closure of the gallery in May 1999. It was a great success, not only because Rolf Eden himself showed up, but because that night brought together everything the galerie berlintokyo had stood for in previous years: irony, subversion, subversion of subversion, punk rock, dopey confusion, the nineties disguised as the eighties." Gerrit Bartels (Tagesspiegel)

What remains is the memory and Martin Eberle's photos from 1996 to 1999, the years in which the basement in Rosenthaler Straße shaped the Club life of Berlin-Mitte. Drittel Books presents the book galerie berlintokyo, a mix of gallery, club, record-label and basement who's concept and goal it was to combine art, music and party in order to make the evening rock as much as possible. The pictures are photographed as part of a real, shared experience, with close proximity, as part of the event, focused on the moment.

Andreas Gehrke
Der Spiegel 1969–2011
Hamburg, Brandstwiete

Der Spiegel 1995–2011
Hamburg, Dovenfleet

2 × 48 pages / 19 images
16.5 × 21.5 cm​
Edition of 300, numbered

ISBN 978-3-9815735-0-3
Double volume € 28

Out of print

Part of photographer Andreas Gehrke’s powerful narrative series on dormant modernist buildings. Vacant work spaces that once hosted business enterprises playing a significant role in shaping the political, social and economic face of post-war Germany.

This is a pair of volumes that cover the former offices of Germany’s renowned organ of investigative journalism, Der Spiegel. The first book is about the Brandstwiete tower block in Hamburg by architect Werner Kallmorgen, which was home to the magazine from 1969–2011. The second book covers the Dovenfleet tower block in Hamburg, also by Kallmorgen. It was built in 1967 and housed part of the US technology and consulting giant IBM for 28 years before the Spiegel publishing group moved in between 1995 and 2011.

Andreas Gehrke
IBM Campus 1972–2009
Stuttgart-Vaihingen

56 pages / 23 images
16.5 × 21.5 cm​
Edition of 300, numbered

ISBN 978-3-9815735-1-0
Softcover € 20

Out of print

Part of photographer Andreas Gehrke’s powerful narrative series on dormant modernist buildings. Vacant work spaces that once hosted business enterprises playing a significant role in shaping the political, social and economic face of post-war Germany.

Designed by Germany’s most celebrated post-war modernist architect Egon Eiermann, this campus complex near Stuttgart was home to the Germany offices of US technology and consulting giant IBM from 1972 to 2009.

Andreas Gehrke
Quelle Versand 1956–2009
Nürnberg
64 pages / 27 images
16.5 × 21.5 cm​
Edition of 300, numbered

ISBN 978-3-9815735-2-7
Softcover € 20

Out of print

Part of photographer Andreas Gehrke’s powerful narrative series on dormant modernist buildings. Vacant work spaces that once hosted business enterprises playing a significant role in shaping the political, social and economic face of post-war Germany.

Founded in 1927, Quelle was Germany’s biggest mail order catalogue company and one of its largest department store chains. This purpose-built building by former Bauhaus student Ernst Neufert in Nuremberg was Quelle’s mail order HQ from 1956 until the company’s insolvency in 2009.

Andreas Gehrke
Der Spiegel / IBM Campus / Quelle Versand

Special collector's edition
including four signed and numbered archival pigment prints (15 × 19 cm)

16.5 × 21.5 cm​
Edition of 25, numbered

Andreas Gehrke
Brandenburg

Limited Artist Book
150 pages / 74 images
Ditone ® Archival Pigment Prints

29 × 32.5 cm
Edition of 24
Signed & Numbered

Price on request

Brandenburg: No longer the pastoral idyll and symbol of German history depicted by Theodor Fontane, the region has faced a challenging reinvention since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Looking to unveil the many layers of history that have settled over the state, Andreas Gehrke embarked on a journey – to compose a considered portrait of Brandenburg. For years he has worked on the project, compiling what could be described as a Brandenburgian Iconography. His Brandenburg is defined by moments of incongruity. Moments in which the view is adjusted or brought to a focus, moments that constantly question what it is we see, or what we believe we see.

Gehrke’s images invite the viewer to linger, provoking contemplation of the detail-rich compositions. They do not form an explanatory, linear narrative, rather unfold kaleidoscopically: each motif is offset by the next. In this way, page after page, a complex whole is revealed. The overall picture, however, is not a cliched collection of dilapidation and decrepitude, but a subtle series of allusions to the historical, structural and social changes Brandenburg has experienced since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Combining the personal, political and geographical, his images create a semantics of the region’s unique characteristics, offering the reader an unsentimental history of Brandenburg, beyond the realm of temporality.

Christina Landbrecht

Andreas Gehrke
5XNYC

Limited edition print collection
5 archival pigment prints (8 × 10“)
each signed and numbered

31 × 22 cm
Edition of 25, numbered

Box set € 320

Order now