Steidl Film: The Bookmaker
Scene from “How to Make a Book with Steidl”: Fashion tsar Karl Lagerfeld (centre) also has his books published by Steidl (right)
18 November 2010
Robert Frank, Joel Sternfeld, Ed Ruscha and Robert Adams: Great photographers and artists stand queue and wait patiently until the master has time for them. For little is as ennobling as being published by Gerhard Steidl. How that happens is now told in a remarkable film.
Göttingen, Düstere Strasse. Meaning “Dark Street,” the address does not sound very promising. Nonetheless people pilgrimage here from all over the world. Steidl-Verlag is a very special starting address for fine art photographers: if you publish here, you have made it. So, to merely be an owner of the publisher’s internal brochure How to Make a Book with Steidl is already a special achievement for many. Gerhard Steidl has been managing his publishing house for over 40 years – successfully – despite the fact that it is difficult to make money with fine art photography in Germany. Steidl therefore has positioned itself on the international market.
How to Make a Film about Steidl
You need Flashplayer to watch this video.The documentary film by Jörg Adolph and Gereon Wetzel bears the same name as the brochure. The result is both an actual description of how a Steidl book (specifically iDubai by Joel Sternfeld) is made and a portrait of the on-the-go, frequent-flying publisher who personally looks after his clients and is constantly flying back and forth between Göttingen and New York or Paris or Los Angeles. The two filmmakers accompanied him on his journeys over the course of one year. They reveal absurd situations, yet also quiet moments and describe a man who gives the impression of an ornery old man one minute and boyish charmer the next.
The person of Steidl unites extreme time management with meticulously controlled chaos; no decision is made without him, he personally checks every sheet that comes out of the printing machine. The publishing house is his realm; here he is the ruler in the white lab coat, the only one who appears to know in which of the hundreds of files things should be sorted.
How to Make a Book with Steidl was awarded the Golden Dove at the German competition of the 53rd DOK Leipzig. At the Duisburg Film Week, the flick received the Goethe-Institut’s documentary film award.
Speaking of which, the Goethe-Institut also knows how to make books with Steidl. In cooperation with the publishing house, they launched a series about contemporary artists in countries such as Turkey and South Africa. Books have also been published on two Goethe-Institut projects, National Culture Revisited (see Five Minutes on National Culture: “Hello, You Old Swede!”) and The Wall in the World.
