Fall/Winter 2012/2013 - Steidl

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Erich Hartmann and Ruth Bains Hartmann
From a Summer Notebook
“Here are pages from a photographer’s summer notebook, the sights he wishes to remember, the feelings he wishes
to record… These pages from my notebook encompass that same time, those same places, seen through a different
eye, recorded in a different language…” Ruth Bains Hartmann
So begins From a Summer Notebook which combines the photos of Magnum photojournalist Erich Hartmann with the
words of his writer wife Ruth Bains Hartmann. This book is a record of a shared summer holiday in coastal Maine, not
an album of incidents but a distillation of a particular time and place through images and words. Long married, much
travelled, often separated by work, but together here in the same place during a calm interval of privacy, photographer
and writer reveal separate realities and parallel memories that together form one statement. Photographs of their family
summerhouse and the quiet Maine countryside through which they roam without plan or destination are not described
but enhanced by the writer’s memories of past summers, and perhaps of time itself. Both separate and personal, these
images and words are a quiet celebration of a fondly remembered summer.
Erich Hartmann (1922–1999), a Magnum photojournalist for fifty years, was renowned for his work in the arts, his
interpretation of the industrial landscape and his revelation of the beauties of technology.
Ruth Bains Hartmann, was a book editor in a New York publishing house before turning to freelance research and
writing, often working in collaboration with her husband on major projects such as “Our Daily Bread” and “In the Camps”.
After his sudden death in 1999 she assumed direction of his photographic estate for which she has curated numerous
exhibitions and edited Where I Was, a book of his personal photographs.
Erich Hartmann and Ruth Bains Hartmann
From a Summer Notebook
Book design by Ruth Bains Hartmann,
John P. Jacobs and Sarah Winter
32 pages
7.9 x 11.8 in. / 20 x 30 cm
13 photographs
Four colour process
Clothbound hardcover
€ 24.00 / £ 18.00 / US$ 30.00
ISBN 978-3-86521-840-7
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