Description

Dirk Alvermann – Streiflichter 1956-65
Publisher: Steidl, 2012
Hardcover, 128 pages, German
Size: 24.8×18.6cm
New in seal

Costs, benefits and the debt crisis – those are the determining factors when we talk about Europe today. With his five highlights across the continent, Alvermann reminds us of the richness and diversity of European culture and history. The first of his short photographic stories leads to Warsaw. In October 1956 Alvermann went there to tell of a restless city, where the gentle rustling of the Vistula could still be heard in the shadow of Soviet tanks. For the second story, he cheated his camera in 1962 to Tirana in the isolated Stalinist Albania. In his Naples story, Alvermann meets a Mafia boss and only barely escapes the Carabinieri when he tries to photograph the evacuation of a harbor area at night. Like a fairy tale from ancient times, his pictures of the Spanish peninsula Peñiscola tell of small mountain villages and fishing ports without hotel strongholds and concrete. And his short story from Sheffield in the 1960s is also reminiscent of a glorious past, when the pride of the workers in the steel forge had not yet been driven away by the service concept. As differently as history is told, the political roots of Europe are explained directly in the picture.

Dirk Alvermann, born in 1937, published political photo reports and illustrated books such as “No Experiments – Images for the Basic Law” (1961) from the 1950s. In 1966 he moved to East Berlin, GDR. In 1979 he put an end to his photographic work with his legendary book »I love you« and from then on worked as a documentary filmmaker and writer. The facsimile Algeria (in Protest Box, edited by Martin Parr) has been published by Steidl. The German edition Algeria will follow in spring 2012.