Gerhard Steidl and Robert Frank — Photobooks as Democratic Art Objects

Born in 1950 in Göttingen, Germany, Gerhard Steidl founded his publishing house and screen-printing workshop for graphic art and posters in 1969. Today Steidl publishes the largest worldwide program of contemporary photobooks and a select literature list in German.
He furthermore conceives and curates international exhibitions. In 2020 Steidl became the first non-photographer to receive the Outstanding Contribution to Photography prize at the Sony World Photography Awards, and was awarded the Gutenberg Prize by the International Gutenberg Society in Mainz. In 2021 he received the Grand Cross of Merit of Lower Saxony, and the publishing house the Deutscher Verlagspreis (German Publishers Award).

Steidl is the initiator and founding director of Kunsthaus Göttingen, which opened in June 2021. In 2022 Steidl was guest lecturer at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Hildesheim, Germany. In 2023 he ranked among the Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeitung’s “50 Most Important Germans in Fashion” and held the Richard Benson Lecture on the Reproduced Image at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. In August 2023 Steidl was appointed a full member of the German Photographic Society.

In 2024 he curated Jim Dine’s exhibition Dog on the Forge at the Palazzo Rocca as part of the Venice Biennale, and Steidl Book Culture. Magic on Paper at Ground Seesaw Seochon, Seoul, South Korea. Furthermore in 2024, Steidl received the Cultural Award from the German Photographic Society.