Steidlville

Voyeurs, be warned: your expectations will be not be fulfilled by this book. It is filled with obscene photos, but, as the philosopher Herbert Marcuse put it: “It’s not the picture of a naked woman that’s obscene but that of a general who shows off his medals earned in a war of aggression.” It’s a confusing collection of curios of everyday violence: press photos of street fights, naked victims of war and tortured prisoners follow staged body-art pictures and all kinds of objects colored by desire, exposure and surveillance.
The book is a complete work of art, offensive in every sense of the word. As an artistic manifesto about violence in the 21st century, it couldn’t be any more current. But Pornografie was first published in 1971 and then became an outstanding and timeless document of political artwork.