ISBN: 9783869302072

Hardcover: 160 pages
Publisher: Steidl Publishers (2010)
Product Dimensions: 22.7 cm x 30.5cm

For more than 20 years Kai Wiedenhöfer has been taking photographs in the Middle East, a place where many journalists and photographers have covered the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yet Wiedenhöfer is unique in that he concentrates exclusively on Gaza, and often remains there to take photos long after the media has moved onto more ‘pressing’ news stories. Even in 2009 after the offensive of the Israeli army, Wiedenhöfer was in Gaza. During this time he took disturbingly quiet, almost repetitive pictures of the bleak aftermath of the war that form The Book of Destruction. Wiedenhöfer’s images of crumbling ruins and maimed civilians are a powerful landscape of disquiet and destruction. Kai Wiedenhöfer, born in 1966, studied documentary photography at the Folkwang Universtiy of the Arts in Essen and Arabic in Damascus, Syria. Since 1989 he has worked in the Middle East for the Swiss agency Lookat Photos. Wiedenhöfer is the recipient of numerous awards including an Alexia Grant, a Getty Grant and a World Press Award; for The Book of Destruction he received the Prix Carmignac Gestion du photojournalisme.