Pornografie – Klaus Staeck, 1971

This artist’s book by Klaus Staeck, completed in 1970 and published in 1971 by Anabas Verlag, is part of the Darwin Bookshop because it offers a caustic, politically charged redefinition of pornography—not of sex, but of violence, media and state power. The title Pornografie is a provocation: what unfolds inside is not erotic at all, but a dense visual essay on the obscenity of authority and the mass spectacle of repression.

Staeck, a key figure in postwar German political art, assembles a barrage of press photographs, protest images, police brutality, and tabloid fragments. Riot police in helmets become recurring motifs, their visors pixelated like censored genitals. The graphic language is stark: black backgrounds, aggressive crops, and a montage style indebted to Dada and Situationism. It reads like a dossier, a piece of forensic resistance against the hypocritical moral codes of the West German state.

Published at a moment of deep unrest—shortly after 1968, amid RAF trials and violent protest crackdowns—Pornografie is not a photobook in the classic sense but a critical object. It weaponises design to ask: What kind of images are allowed to circulate, and which ones are suppressed? What violence is deemed acceptable, and which bodies are punished?

A rare early work by one of Germany’s most radical image-makers, and a chilling document of mediated authoritarianism.

Technical Sheet

Title
Pornografie

Artist / Author
Klaus Staeck

Date
1971

Technique / Printing Method
Offset printing

Medium / Materials
Softcover

Dimensions (cm)
29.5 x 23.5 cm

Language
German

Pages
Unpaginated (approx. 120)

Publisher / Editor
Anabas Verlag / H.C. Schmolck (Editor)

ISBN
3-87038-020-9

Condition
Used — cover has damage, and some pages are detached