A photographic celebration of German typographer Otto "Otl" Aicher Photographs by Timm Rautert (born 1941) taken between 1972 and 1991 celebrate the renowned German graphic designer and typographer Otto "Otl" Aicher, who developed the popular Rotis font family. Accompanying texts by design historians examine the role of Rotis within the cultural history of West Germany.

In 1974 the young Timm Rautert travelled to Pennsylvania to photograph those who would normally not allow themselves to be photographed: the Amish, a group of Anabaptist Protestant communities. Four years later Rautert returned to America, this time to the Hutterites who live so stringently by the Ten Commandments and the bible's restrictions on images that they have their identity cards issued without photographs. Both these two series were influential on Rautert's later work and No Photographing brings them together for the first time.

Timm Rautert has been an experimental photographer, a photojournalist, a portraitist and, since 1993, a professor. Following his 1974 book, Deutsche in Uniform, recently reissued, he has continued to photograph his countrymen, devoting much of his time to extensive series, including one from the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in 2000. When We Don't See You You Don't See Us Either refers in title to the portraitist's vocation of seeing and being seen, and offers Rautert's career for the same defining scrutiny, a portrait of its own. This definitive portfolio spans more than 35 years of distinguished work, much of which has never before been published for English-language audiences

"Timm Rautert met Josef Sudek for the first time on a study trip to Prague in the spring of 1967. The photography student and the seventy-one-year-old Sudek instantly took to each other, and Rautert began photographing the artist at his studio and home. He accompanied him on his strolls in parks in Little Prague on the left bank of the Vltava river as he searched for adequate perspectives, and documented his work process in and outside the darkroom. The Sudek series is an extraordinary chronicle of a fascinating personality and place in the run-up to the Prague Spring, and marks the beginning of Rautert's career during which the portrait and people at work were always of major importance to him." -- publisher's description

Paper Passion Perfume captures the unique bouquet of freshly printed books. Designed by boutique perfumer Geza Schoen in close consultation with Gerhard Steidl and in collaboration with Wallpaper* magazine, the perfume expresses that peculiar mix of paper and ink which gives a book its unmistakable aroma, along with the fresh scent which a book opened for the first time releases. Schoen spent days in the depths of the paper-filled Steidl headquarters in Göttingen, sifting through books, papers samples and inks, to find inspiration for a perfume that is true to books, wearable, and which ages well in time - just like a good book. It took Schoen seventeen trials to preserve in his words, "the right balance between the smell of paper as such and an enjoyable perfumistic aesthetic". The elaborate packaging of Paper Passion Perfume does more than justice to the perfume within. The packaging is a real book with a hidden cut-out compartment in which the bottle sits. The first pages of the book contain texts on the pleasures of paper and the Paper Passion project by Nobel Laureate Günter Grass, Karl Lagerfeld, Geza Schoen and Wallpaper* Editor-in-Chief Tony Chambers. The end product is a unique perfume, an homage to the luxurious sensuality of books and in Karl Lagerfeld's words, "the silent smell of paper".

Otl Aicher's writings are explorations of the world, a substantive part of his work. In moving through the history of thought and design, building and construction, he assures us of the possibilities of arranging existence in a humane fashion. As ever he is concerned with the question of the conditions needed to produce a civilised culture. These conditions have to be fought for against apparent factual or material constraints and spiritual and intellectual substitutes on offer. Otl Aicher likes a dispute. For this reason, the volume contains polemical statements on cultural and political subjects as well as practical reports and historical exposition. He fights with productive obstinacy, above all for the renewal of Modernism, which he claims has largely exhausted itself in aesthetic visions; he insists the ordinary working day is still more important than the "cultural Sunday". Wolfgang Jean Stock

"What is presented here is a selection from hundreds of photos. Our respective authorship is not specific, particularly since, in individual cases, we can no longer figure out which one of us clicked the shutter"--Page [5].

Otl Aicher (1922-1991) was an outstanding personality in modern design, he was a co-founder of the legendary Hochschule fur Gestaltung (HfG), the Ulm School of Design, Germany. His works since the fifties of the last century in the field of corporate design and his pictograms for the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich are major achievements in the visual communication of our times. "An integral component of Aicher's work is that it is anchored in a "philosophy of making" inspired by such thinkers as Ockham, Kant or Wittgenstein, a philosophy concerned with the prerequisites and aims, the objects and claims, of design. Aicher's complete theoretical and practical writings on design (which include all other aspects of visual creativity, such as architecture) are available with this new edition of the classic work. If Aicher prefers the analogous and concrete to the digital and abstract he does it with a philosophical intention. He relativizes the role of pure reason. He criticizes the rationality of Modernism as a result of the dominance of purely abstract thinking. Anyone who prefers the abstract to the concrete does not only misunderstand the mutual dependence of concept and view. In Aicher's judgement he is also creating a false hierarchy, a rank order that is culturally fatal. Things that are digital and abstract are not greater, higher and more important than things that are analogous and concrete." Wilhelm Vossenkuhl

Otl Aicher's writings are explorations of that world. They are a substantive part of his work. In moving through the history of thought and design, building and construction he assures the possibilities of arranging existence in a humane fashion. As ever he is concerned with the question of the conditions needed to produce a civilization culture. These conditions have to be fought for against apparent factual or material constraints and spiritual and intellectual substitute offers. Otl Aicher has a taste for dispute. For this reason this volume contains polemical statements on cultural and political subjects as well as practical reports and historical exposition. Aicher fights with productive obstinacy above all for the renewal of Modernism, which he says has largely exhausted itself in aesthetic visions. He insists that the ordinary working day is still more important than "cultural sunday." Wolfgang Jean Stock