LITERARY

Juergen Teller: Zwei Schäuferle mit Klofl und eine Kinderportion Schnitzel mit Pommes Frites
Steidl Books

Hello?! Juergen Teller is one of the hugest fashion photographers in the world. Marc Jacobs, Helmut Lang, Calvin Klein, Yves Saint Laurent, and Commes des Garçons have all hired him, and he has gotten over as a real artist, too, because his photos are sexy, airy, smart, and strange.

Teller’s a prolific maker of photo books, and this is his second stellar outing this year (the first was called Märchenstüberl). The focus of this book is the Teller family business, a company that makes parts for stringed instruments. Through photographing the employees, Teller finds a way to synthesize his glitzy job with his roots in viola bows. The tone of the pictures is warm and playful but self-consciously framed. Like Walker Evans’s WPA portraits on a trust fund and in color. Awesome.

There are also some photos here of Teller’s buddy Kate Moss naked and pregnant, which are mindblowing. Apparently she almost X’d him as a friend for this. Whatever, I think she looks hot when she’s fat.

JAMES FLUCK


Witness Iraq: A War Journal February–April 2003
Edited and coproduced by Marcel Saba
powerHouse Books
That was quick.

This book contains photos from Operation Enduring Ooookayyyee. All the major press sources are represented (Associated Press, Aurora, Corbis, Gamma, Getty Images, Magnum Photos, Polaris, Reuters, etc.), but the agenda of the publications that typically use them is gone. So there is neither conservative nor liberal here, just a lot of photos of what happened in Iraq in April, as matter-of-fact as you please. We learn that Iraqi women wear pretty robes and carry AK-47s, that charred corpses in burned-out cars are creepy, and that it kind of looks like fun to be a soldier sometimes. They all have big sleep-outs in trenches, they get to rip up a huge palace and vandalize all those statues, and they play poker in gas masks. It’s the ideal life for a twelve-year-old boy (except for the stepping on land mines and being shot at by snipers in a dust storm).

JAN PEOPLES


The Berlin Years
By Marcel Dzama
McSweeney’s

It would be easy to hate Dzama and McSweeney’s because they are all just so fucking clever and special and don’t they get so much done and aren’t they just righteous and living the dream? Meanwhile most of you are stuck in some job that you think will get you somewhere but it won’t, and you want to be a writer but you don’t have any ideas, or an artist but you can’t draw.

Marcel Dzama can draw and he has ideas. A million fucking ideas, actually, that explode in the bewildering world he creates in his works (which he draws with root-beer syrup). His cast of characters includes tree-men, 1920s flapper ladies, and men in bear suits. He just sits up there in Winnipeg (fucking Winnipeg) drawing all this weird and beautiful stuff, and then Dave Eggers calls him from his little utopian writing commune in San Francisco and they each talk about how great the other one is and then Dave gives Marcel a book deal. Meanwhile you’re waiting for the fucking bus and your umbrella is broken.

TIERNEY WILLIAMS

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