Snow
Max Sher
The Velvet Cell
English
Hardcover
First edition of 500
120 pages
210 × 280 mm
2024
ISBN 9783911782005
‘Snow’ by Max Sher offers an intimate photographic exploration of Kars, a Turkish city steeped in centuries of complex history. Once the capital of Armenian kingdoms and later a strategic frontier for Byzantines, Seljuks, Ottomans, and Russians, Kars embodies the cultural and political entanglements of empires. This journey examines the city’s layered past, from colonial transformations to ethnic migrations, and reflects on shared human experiences beyond borders. Inspired by Orhan Pamuk’s novel ‘Snow’ and anchored in Alexander Pushkin’s ‘Journey to Arzrum’, the project captures Kars’ snowy landscapes, diverse people, and enduring resilience, resisting Orientalist narratives by revealing its universal connections.
(Source: librairiesanstitre.com/products/9783911782005)
About the Artist
Max Sher is a photographer and visual artist based in Berlin since 2021. Born in St. Petersburg, raised in Siberia and educated in Siberia and France as a linguist, he took up photography in 2006, first as photojournalist, then also as an artist. He is primarily interested in the representation of built environment, architecture, and infrastructure, as well as in investigating local/problematic histories. His work was exhibited as part of solo and group shows at AFF Gallery Berlin, Museum der Trostfrauen (Berlin), Calvert22 Gallery London, Format Festival (UK), Noorderlicht Festival (Netherlands), Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Alexey Shchusev Museum of Architecture, Triumph Gallery, PERMM, Yeltsin Center, among others. As a photojournalist, Sher has worked on assignments for The Guardian, Der Spiegel, The New York Times Magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek, Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin, Die Welt, Le Monde, Libération, and other printed and online media. Sher has published a number of photo books and zines, including A Remote Barely Audible Evening Waltz (Treemedia Publishers, 2013), Palimpsests (Ad Marginem Press, 2018, supported by the Heinrich Böll Foundation), 245 Khrushchev Housing Entrances (self-published in 4 editions, 2018-20), Dictatorship of the Seven Seas (2018), and Infrastructures, a joint photobook with Sergey Novikov published in 2019 under their own small publishing brand RecurrentBooks with the support of Heinrich Böll Foundation. Sher’s latest photo book Snow was published by The Velvet Cell in early 2025 with the support of Friedrich Ebert Foundation. Since 2021, he has been working on a new project titled Empire, tracing histories of imperialism within geographical Europe.
www.maxsher.com
(Source: www.maxsher.com/pages/about)
About the Publisher
The Velvet Cell is a German-based photobook publisher run by visual artist Ricardo Nunes and was established by Éanna de Fréine in 2011. They are rooted primarily in the themes of urbanization and the human-altered world. Their approach is single-minded: to create beautiful, interesting and informative books that bring delight to people, and help to see the world in new ways. In the 14 years they’ve been around, they have become known as a source of quality photography projects– by both established artists, like Alejandro Cartagena, Toshio Shibata or Peter Bialobreskzi and up-and-coming artists. They pride themselves on the care and thoughtfulness that goes into every stage of the book-making process, and strive to reflect the diversity of visual arts publishing today.
https://thevelvetcell.com/
(Source: https://thevelvetcell.com/info)
