NEW YORK, NY.- This is the first publication to comprehensively explore art collector and philanthropist Sir Mark Fehrs Haukohl’s collection of work by European women photographers. One of the largest of its kind, the collection comprises 220 works by nearly 90 emerging and established women photographers from 17 countries in Western and Eastern Europe.

Covering photo-based art made between 2000 and 2020, Haukohl’s eclectic selection questions traditional notions of nation, identity and gender, with an emphasis on representations of the body and associated themes of beauty, femininity and objectification. Artists including Yto Barrada, Uta Barth, Carolle Bénitah, Melanie Bonajo, Vanessa Beecroft, Valerie Berlin, Natalie Czech, Eva Koťátková, Vera Lutter, Josephine Pryde and Shirana Shahbazi employ wide-ranging materials and conceptual approaches to expand our changing understandings of what constitutes womanhood, Europe (for many, in the context of the legacy of Soviet rule), and the medium of photography itself.

For me, the images in the Haukohl Collection had not to be limited to photographic impressions of women; but more importantly, how do women look at the topics of portrait, still life, landscape, and do they use performance and conceptual ideas in photography? -- Sir Mark Fehrs Haukohl

Manfred Heiting is a designer and editor of photo publications and a collector of photobooks focusing on the period between 1839 and 1990. He has designed and edited Photography 1922–1982, 50 Years Modern Color Photography. 1936–1986 and Between Science and Art. 50 Years German Photographic Society, 1951–2001. Steidl has published his extensive surveys of German, Soviet, Japanese and Czech photobooks, as well as Dr. Paul Wolff & Alfred Tritschler. The Printed Images 1906–2019 (2021) and Shigeru Onishi’s A Metamathematical Proposition (2021).

Rebecca Mark is the director of the Institute for Women’s Leadership and a professor in the Department of Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University. Her research addresses southern cultural studies, particularly representations of memory and trauma, and her books include The Dragon’s Blood: Feminist Intertextuality in Eudora Welty’s Fiction (1994) and Ersatz America: Hidden Traces, Graphic Texts, and Mending of Democracy (2014). Mark’s honors include the Eudora Welty Prize, the Public Humanities Achievement Award from the Mississippi Humanities Council and the Weiss Presidential Fellowship.