My studio is located in New York’s Lower East Side, close to the famous Bowery Mission. Homeless guys taking shelter there frequently panhandle in the streets close to the mission. Whenever they get a penny they throw them right out, since none of the stores around the neighborhood would allow these guys to pay with one cent coins anymore. Naturally, the coins end up on the streets where cars press them into the hot asphalt over time.
For the past few years I have been taking pictures of these coins and this book is a collection of 25 of these pictures, documenting the literal devaluation of the dollar.

27¢
limited edition c-print, 20×30″
edition of 100 – signed and numbered
BUY $180

On January 6, 2008 – continuing her message of peace – Yoko Ono took out a full-page ad in the New York Times with a simple, yet familiar message: Imagine Peace. I placed a simple cardboard cutout with the word WAR over her advertising and didn’t remove it until August 19, 2010, the day the last US combat brigade left Iraq.
The sun had yellowed the paper and a trace of the word WAR was left, slowly fading away as sunlight now hits the original ad.

Digital prints (edition of 100, signed and numbered) are available for 65$.

PoD is inherently antiauthoritarian, decentralized, fast and current. PoD takes full advantage of the digital domain, and its economics are based on new digital printing technologies combined with online marketing, retail, and distribution systems. In my opinion it radically redefined the book as an “edition” of production and reshaped my notion of the “book as an unique object”.

In 2010 the popular image hosting service Flickr reported that it was now hosting more than 5 billion images, making it clear that we had arrived in the age of digital distribution. An era defined by social networking, file sharing, on demand publishing and personal broadcasting – tweets, blogs and status updates.

The question arises of what “art (books) in the age of digital distribution” means for the entirely analog medium of the book. How can a static system based on ink on paper keep pace with this new digital paradigm? How can the book stay relevant if confronted with the flux of the web? Can it in the first place, or should it even try?

The work “Cowboys (Untitled)” tries to touch on some of these issues. The book pays homage to Richard Prince’s “Untitled” (Cowboys) – perhaps the best known example of what is now known as “The Picture Generation”, a group of artists shifting their focus from production to reproduction, introducing appropriation to the mainstream art scene. Prince re-photographed billboards featuring the iconic “Marlborough Man” and brought advertising images (like Warhol 10 years earlier) back into the gallery context.

Beginning in 2008 I periodically began searching for every single image that I could find of the most famous of Prince’s cowboys and printed the results for each search using different PoD services. (kodak.com, wallmart.com, blurb.com, lulu.com)

Although the resulting books differ in size, style and page count I see them all as part of the same “edition”. For me as an artist there is no difference between them and the dissimilarity is irrelevant. I am also completely indifferent about the actual quality of the printed books. I don’t care about paper quality or the kind of printer used, as I feel that these factors are not important in my work.

The uniting factor is the act of collecting the images and making them available (not publishing) in printed form. Each of these “snapshots” only mark a point in time. The formal differences mirror the visual difference of our cross browser – cross platform environment online. The images themselves, all based on the same “original” cowboy, show an astonishing variety caused by the various compression formats and pixel sizes, questioning the notion of original and copy.

The romantic notion of the horse riding cowboy recalls the idyllic image of the pony express cowboy in a flip book manner. The images – viewed as a sequence – evoke “The Wild Bunch”, Ford’s “Searchers” and other western movies of my childhood. So in a way this also a very personal and sentimental project…

The book contains the hex dump, a hexadecimal view of a jpg file with the corresponding ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) text translation. This is the way a computer views the image file content from the Random-access memory, byte-by-byte.

There is also a gelatin silver print (diptych, 2X 20/30″) available on request.

Federal booking photographs are automatically entered into the public domain in the United States, and can be obtained by anyone through the Freedom of Information Act. While designed as a tool to index and collect the images of potential criminals in a database, the publication and distribution of these pictures is an astonishing act of invasion of privacy. Institutionalized, but in effect not much different of paparazzi pictures shot from afar.

I googled and downloaded the mug shots of various celebrities and ordered twenty “Mug Shot Mugs”, using Wallmart’s online photo service. These mugs were sent out to twenty people that have been of great influence to me in one way or another or whose work I have admired over the years. Some of the people who received a mug are friends, but most don’t know me very well – or at all.

The mug was an invitation to participate in a project dealing with the notion of lost privacy. All I asked from the participants was to place the mug anywhere in their home and take a picture of it. The way the mug was framed in the picture dictates just how much privacy they were willing to give up.

Click on the images to see the Mug Shot Mug

Colin Brice


Jeff Brouws


Kimberly Brown


Joshua Deaner


Todd Hido


Tim Nichols


Walter Niedermayr


Tom Sachs


Stefan Sagmeister


Joachim Schmid


Andreas Schmidt


Alec Soth


Katherine Streeter


Lawrence Weiner


Michael Wolf


Karen Zuckerman

To commemorate the first 10 years I have lived in New York City, I decided to publish a series of three books in homage to my new hometown. The first one, “Every coffee I drank in January 2010”, pays tribute to one of New York’s greatest feats: the corner deli drip coffee.

Chronicling my coffee intake over one month, I collected the coffee cup lids of each consumed coffee. The lid becomes a white canvas, with the coffee stain revealing an unique pattern of use.

Each page shows the front view and date of the consumed coffee. The backside of the lid is placed on the next page.

A blank page signifies days when I did not get a coffee.

Last page: It was a pleasure to be served.

Detail: January 06, 2010

Every Coffee I Drank in January 2010 by Hermann Zschiegner | Make Your Own Book

In “After/Before Gursky (Bahrain I)” and “After/Before Gursky (Dubai  II)”  I revisited the original sites on Google Earth. Simulating the same camera angle, I took  screen-shots to reveal the amount of Gursky’s digital manipulation.

Left: Andreas Gursky, Bahrain I
2007
C-print mounted on plexiglas in artist’s frame
120 1/2 x 87 1/4 inches

Right: Hermann Zschiegner, After/Before Gursky (Bahrain I)
2009
Digital C-print
11/14 inches
Edition of 10 $300
16/20 inches
Edition of 5 $500

Left: Andreas Gursky, Dubai II
2007
C-print mounted on plexiglas in artist’s frame
120 1/2 x 87 1/4 inches

Right: Hermann Zschiegner, After/Before Gursky (Dubai  II)
2009
Digital C-print
11/14 inches
Edition of 10 $300
16/20 inches
Edition of 5 $500

Detail

This book is the third in a series of artist books dealing with photography in the age of Google image search. With an obvious nod to the work of artists like Hiroshi Sugimoto and Vija Celmins this book explores the white noise pattern of ocean waves.

Using popular web mapping services like Google Maps, TerraServer and Bing Maps I took screenshots of the Long Island shoreline. These areal photographs could be defined as “leftover” information on the periphery of useful satellite images for mapping purposes.

Prints available:

Untitled (Seascape I)
Digital C-Print
16/20 in (15/15 image) $250

Untitled (Seascape II)
Digital C-Print
16/20 in (15/15 image) $250

Untitled (Seascape III)
Digital C-Print
16/20 in (15/15 image) $250

Untitled (Seascape IV)
Digital C-Print
16/20 in (15/15 image) $250

Untitled (Seascape V)
Digital C-Print
16/20 in (15/15 image) $250

Untitled (Seascape VI)
Digital C-Print
16/20 in (15/15 image) $250

Untitled (Seascape VII)
Digital C-Print
16/20 in (15/15 image) $250

Untitled (Seascape VIII)
Digital C-Print
16/20 in (15/15 image) $250

Richard Prince’s ‘Untitled (Cowboy)’ is a copy (the photograph) of a copy (the advertisement) of a myth (the cowboy). My project adds another iteration to this system.

I used Google Image Search to collect every image of Richard Prince’s ‘Untitled (Cowboy)’ I could find online and subsequently had them printed using Kodak’s online printing service on standard 4×6 glossy photo paper.

The images are displayed in acrylic box frames coupled together with small binder clips.

This installation view shows 25 out of 52 photos, each unique due to different pixel sizes and various compression settings of the downloaded images.

25 C-Prints, Acrylic Frames
21/31 Inches
Edition of 3 $850

This self-published booklet is the first in a series of limited edition books dealing with photography in the age of Google image search. This one is homage to Ed Ruscha’s ‘Thirtyfour Parking Lots‘ originally published in 1967.

The original book contains 34 areal views of empty parking lots taken by areal photographer Art Alanis. The aerials were taken during a one-and-a-half-hour shoot on a Sunday morning, when the lots were empty resulting in a survey of the Los Angeles urban landscape of the late sixties.

Ruscha included a detailed address for all but one parking lot, the only text that accompanied the pictures, thus the book became a roadmap to revisit the original places, transforming the original book into a programmatic device for my project ‘Thirtyfour Parking Lots on Google Earth’.

Copies of the book are available here.

A limited edition (100, numbered & signed) of the book,  including an original print (8×10 in) is available on request.
($100)