Books published by publisher Schirmer

Each of Thomas Struth’s "paradises" is a piece of nature devoted to a specific overarching theme. In his photographs measuring up to 9 by 11 feet, Thomas Struth draws the viewer into the magical semidarkness of forests and jungles, the impenetrable yet bright green of trees, bushes, tropical plants, and mossy brooks. Struth found his paradises in China, Japan, Australia, Brazil, Germany, and, more recently, in Peru, Florida, and Hawaii. With 11 new pictures, the expanded new edition of his Paradise book contains the entire series of 36 photographs as full-page plates. In their essays, psychologist Ingo Hartmann and art historian Hans Rudolf Reust each shed light on our current understanding of so-called untamed nature, its exploitation and mystification, not to mention as a basis for utopias.

French patinter and illustrator Bernard Durin (1940-1988) discovered the beauty of insects for himself and for his art during a walk in Provence in 1972. During the following decades he made around 60 portraits of insects, using rare and fascinating specimens entrusted to him by the etymologists of the Museum of Natural History in Paris. Superior in detail to photography and highly esteemed by natural scientists and art lovers alike, 48 of these portraits adorn this book. Going far beyond the centuries-old tradition of documentary representations of animals, Durin succeeded in portraying each insect as an "individual personality." Gerhard scherer wrote the introduction and the texts accompanying the plates.