The photobook visually and materially contextualizes arrangements of photographs and brings them into a sensually tangible form. The book format, the materiality of the paper, and the type of binding have just as much of an effect on the viewer as the selection of images, their positioning in the layout, typography, and the texts. The artist and theorist Bettina Lockemann provides an approach to the medium from a research perspective: considering the photobook as an independent subject of art theories, her phenomenological discussion complements methodological lines of thought. An important contribution to the photobook as an independent field of research, Lockemann elaborates precise terms for analyzing this medium. Through a practice-based examination of contemporary photobooks, this guide emphasizes the status of the photobook as an artwork in its own right. BETTINA LOCKEMANN (*1971) is an artist and scholar specialized in artistic documentary photography. After studying art photography and media art in Leipzig and earning a PhD in art history at the ABK Stuttgart she was professor for practice and theory of photography at the HBK Braunschweig for five years. She lives in Cologne.

The phrase "spatial turns" signals the growing importance of space as an analytical as well as representational category for culture. The volume addresses such emerging modes of inquiry by bringing together, for the first time, essays that engage with spatial turns, spatiality, and the theoretical implications of both in the context of German culture, history, and theory. Migrating from fields like geography, urban studies, and architecture, the new centrality of space has transformed social-science fields as diverse as sociology, philosophy, and psychology. In cultural studies, productive analyses of space increasingly cut across the studies of literature, film, popular culture, and the visual arts. Spatial Turns brings together essays that apply a spatial analysis to German literature and other media and engages with specifically German theorizations of space by such figures as Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin. The volume is organized in four sections: "Mapping Spaces" addresses cartography in all forms and in its intersection with culture; "Spaces of the Urban" takes up one of the key sites of spatial studies, the city; "Spaces of Encounter" considers how Germany has become a contact zone for multiple ethnicities; and "Visualized Spaces" concerns the theorization of space in film and new media studies.

Picturing America: Photography and the Sense of Place argues that photography is a prevalent practice of making American places. Its collected essays epitomize not only how pictures situate us in a specific place, but also how they create a sense of such mutable place-worlds. Understanding photographs as prime sites of knowledge production and advocates of socio-political transformations, a transnational set of scholars reveals how images enact both our perception and conception of American environments. They investigate the power photography yields in shaping our ideas of self, nation, and empire, of private and public space, through urban, landscape, wasteland and portrait photography. The volume radically reconfigures how pictures alter the development of American places in the past, present, and future.

Milkyways is a collection of essays by artist Camille Henrot, exploring the ambivalence of motherhood and the process of creation in both art-making and life. Each chapter delivers a cosmos of references in literature, cartoons, art history, psychoanalysis, and more—from ancient maternity myths to modern maternity wards; from Marcel Proust to Maggie Nelson to Hélène Cixous. Alongside illustrations of the artist's work in painting, drawing, and sculpture, Henrot's perspectives in writing oscillate freely between the personal and the societal, the obvious and the more complex, the visceral and the utterly mundane. Milkyways was originally conceived for Republik magazine on invitation by Antje Stahl. Written with Jacob Bromberg, Antje Stahl, and Léa Trudel. CAMILLE HENROT (*1978, Paris) is one of the most influential voices in contemporary art today, with a practice encompassing drawing, painting, sculpture, installation and film. Inspired by references from literature, psychoanalysis, cultural anthropology and the banality of everyday life, she questions what it means to be both a private individual and a global subject in an increasingly connected and over-stimulated world. Henrot has had numerous solo exhibitions worldwide in venues including Middelheim Museum, Antwerp; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; New Museum, New York; and Art Sonje Center, Seoul. She lives and works in New York City.

This volume sets out to challenge and ultimately broaden the category of the ‘photobook’. It critiques the popular art-market definition of the photobook as simply a photographer’s book, proposing instead to show how books and photos come together as collective cultural productions. Focusing on North American, British and French photobooks from 1920 to the present, the chapters revisit canonical works – by Claudia Andujar and George Love, Mohamed Bourouissa, Walker Evans, Susan Meiselas and Roland Penrose – while also delving into institutional, digital and unrealised projects, illegal practices, DIY communities and the poetic impulse. They throw new light on the way that gendered, racial or colonial assumptions are resisted. Taken as a whole, the volume provides a better understanding of how the meaning of a photobook is collectively produced both inside and outside the art market.

Die zwölfte Ausgabe von Candide widmet sich dem Thema Visual Urbanism – ein vollkommen neues Forschungsfeld. Fotograf*innen und Wissenschaftler*innen experimentierten mit anthropologischen, kulturwissenschaftlichen, soziologischen und geografischen Methoden, für eine Reflexion über die meist unkritische Nutzung von Bildern des öffentlichen Raums. Candide 12 sucht Möglichkeiten, diese Ergebnisse in Architektur und Stadtplanung zu integriert. Dabei beantworten Autor*innen drängende Fragen, wie nach der Nutzbarmachung fotografischer Bilder für die Architektur und vice versa.