Hongkong im Jahr 2020: Das ist medizinischer, wirtschaftlicher und vor allem auch politischer Ausnahmezustand – alles zugleich. Die Vielschichtigkeit dieser Krise lässt sich kaum in Worte fassen. Aber dafür in Bilder. Elisabeth Neudörfl hat sich auf den Weg in die lebhafte Metropole gemacht, um die Situation vor Ort fotografisch festzuhalten. Sie traf auf eine Stadt, die tief geprägt war von Protesten und ihrem Kampf um Demokratie, der Unnachgiebigkeit der Macht und dem Aufziehen der Covid-19-Pandemie. Neudörfls Bilder entstanden u.a. auf den Demonstrationsrouten und an den Universitäten. Und überall blickt man auf eine Dystopie: geschlossene Läden, Straßen ohne Verkehr, menschenleere Metrostationen. Allein die Graffiti spiegeln die Auseinandersetzungen und die Veränderungen in der Stadt. Mit diesen Aufnahmen vermag man sich selbst ein Bild der Katastrophe zu machen.

The phrase "spatial turns" signals the growing importance of space as an analytical as well as representational category for culture. The volume addresses such emerging modes of inquiry by bringing together, for the first time, essays that engage with spatial turns, spatiality, and the theoretical implications of both in the context of German culture, history, and theory. Migrating from fields like geography, urban studies, and architecture, the new centrality of space has transformed social-science fields as diverse as sociology, philosophy, and psychology. In cultural studies, productive analyses of space increasingly cut across the studies of literature, film, popular culture, and the visual arts. Spatial Turns brings together essays that apply a spatial analysis to German literature and other media and engages with specifically German theorizations of space by such figures as Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin. The volume is organized in four sections: "Mapping Spaces" addresses cartography in all forms and in its intersection with culture; "Spaces of the Urban" takes up one of the key sites of spatial studies, the city; "Spaces of Encounter" considers how Germany has become a contact zone for multiple ethnicities; and "Visualized Spaces" concerns the theorization of space in film and new media studies.

Picturing America argues that photography is a prevalent practice of making places, determining how we situate ourselves in the world. As a prime site of knowledge and change, it enacts our perception as well as transformative conception of American environments.

A great deal of attention continues to focus on Berlin’s cultural and political landscape after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but as yet, no single volume looks at the divided city through an interdisciplinary analysis. This volume examines how the city was conceived, perceived, and represented during the four decades preceding reunification and thereby offers a unique perspective on divided Berlin’s identities. German historians, art historians, architectural historians, and literary and cultural studies scholars explore the divisions and antagonisms that defined East and West Berlin; and by tracing the little studied similarities and extensive exchanges that occurred despite the presence of the Berlin Wall, they present an indispensible study on the politics and culture of the Cold War.

The photobook visually and materially contextualizes arrangements of photographs and brings them into a sensually tangible form. The book format, the materiality of the paper, and the type of binding have just as much of an effect on the viewer as the selection of images, their positioning in the layout, typography, and the texts. The artist and theorist Bettina Lockemann provides an approach to the medium from a research perspective: considering the photobook as an independent subject of art theories, her phenomenological discussion complements methodological lines of thought. An important contribution to the photobook as an independent field of research, Lockemann elaborates precise terms for analyzing this medium. Through a practice-based examination of contemporary photobooks, this guide emphasizes the status of the photobook as an artwork in its own right. BETTINA LOCKEMANN (*1971) is an artist and scholar specialized in artistic documentary photography. After studying art photography and media art in Leipzig and earning a PhD in art history at the ABK Stuttgart she was professor for practice and theory of photography at the HBK Braunschweig for five years. She lives in Cologne.

Die zwölfte Ausgabe von Candide widmet sich dem Thema Visual Urbanism – ein vollkommen neues Forschungsfeld. Fotograf*innen und Wissenschaftler*innen experimentierten mit anthropologischen, kulturwissenschaftlichen, soziologischen und geografischen Methoden, für eine Reflexion über die meist unkritische Nutzung von Bildern des öffentlichen Raums. Candide 12 sucht Möglichkeiten, diese Ergebnisse in Architektur und Stadtplanung zu integriert. Dabei beantworten Autor*innen drängende Fragen, wie nach der Nutzbarmachung fotografischer Bilder für die Architektur und vice versa.