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Metropolis (Now for € 29)

Sold out at the publisher but copies are available here.

By 2050 70% of the global population will be living in cities. For his series Metropolis (2007-2015), Martin Roemers sets his sights on 22 megacities worldwide with more than ten million inhabitants in which people often live under difficult circumstances in densely populated areas. Roemers immerses us in these extreme, urban worlds through photographs with long exposure times in which traffic and people merge into a blurred rush of energy. Motionless figures and street merchants are like islands surrounded by the surging tide of colorful crowds. Roemers presents these cityscapes from a slightly elevated perspective so as to emphasize not only the stress intrinsic to this lifestyle but also the admirable resilience of the countless individuals who lead this life day in and day out.
Metropolis features Beijing, Buenos Aires, Cairo, Dhaka, Guangzhou, Istanbul, Jakarta, Karachi, Kolkata, Lagos, London, Los Angeles, Manila, Mexico City, Moscow, Mumbai, New York, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Shanghai and Tokyo.
This book is made possible through grants provided by the Fonds Anna Cornelis, EFL Stichting, Fonds Bijzondere Journalistieke Projecten, Hendrik Muller Fonds and the Mondriaan Fonds.

“Roemers created pictures that convey not only the mass and energy of megacities but also the humanity of the individuals living in them.”
— The New Yorker

Hatje Cantz Publishers, hardcover, 27 x 34 cm., 144 pages, 85 photos in color. Text: English. Introductions by Ricky Burdett, Azu Nwagbogu and Els Barents.
ISBN 9783775740067.

Signed copy € 29,-
Shipping in the Netherlands € 2,50
Shipping in Europe € 5,-
Shipping outside Europe € 18,-
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If you want to order this book please email studio@martinroemers.com.
Within a day you’ll receive an email with invoice including IBAN and PayPal details.

The Eyes of War (Now for € 25)

Sold out at the publisher but copies are available here.

The Eyes of War was nominated by the Deutscher Fotobuchpreis (German Photo Book Award).

The traces of the Second World War have become seemingly invisible over recent years. Yet the full horror can still be felt in the survivors’ stories, their eyes reflecting the terror and trauma of a wartime childhood. Through his images of the blind victims of war, Martin Roemers has unearthed a haunting metaphor for the depths of the human soul. For this book, he made portraits of dozens of people, who had lost their eyesight as children, young adults or soldiers. This publication features forty portraits with accompanying interviews; it remembers the forgotten yet transcends their individual stories of suffering. Former enemies from Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Belgium, the Ukraine and Russia are united in their fate as blind people and as victims of war.
This publication is made possible through grants provided by the Hendrik Muller Fonds, the Mondriaan Fonds and the Stichting Democratie en Media.

“Because these are all frontal photographs of faces in merciless black and white, it seems as though you are walking through an endless gallery of statues in a museum of horrors, a classical antiquity where all suffering has been petrified as a lasting lament. But this is not a museum, and it is not antiquity; it is now, a real world of pain and sorrow and, above all, of courage and acceptance of the inevitable”.
— Cees Nooteboom (from the book introduction)

Hatje Cantz Publishers, 128 pages, hardcover 28×24 cm., 40 duotone photos and 40 interviews. Text: English, Dutch, German.
Introduction by Cees Nooteboom. Photography and interviews: Martin Roemers. ISBN 9783775734004.

Signed copy € 25
Shipping in the Netherlands € 2,50
Shipping in Europe € 5,-
Shipping outside Europe € 18,-
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If you want to order this book please email martin@martinroemers.com.
Within a day you’ll receive an email with invoice including IBAN and PayPal details.

Relics of the Cold War / Iconen van de Koude Oorlog (Updated Reprint, 2020)

The Cold War is over – yet signs of it still exist. For forty years, the Iron Curtain divided the countries of Europe into East and West. The arms race was unleashed, nuclear fallout  shelters were constructed, and everyone braced for the worst. Martin Roemers spent eleven years in search of the traces of this period, traveling through the countries of former enemies on both sides of the line. He explored and photographed abandoned underground tunnels, former barracks, rotting tanks, and destroyed  monuments. On both sides of the Iron Curtain, the same war architecture was built from the same fears. ‘Relics of the Cold War’ depicts a society on the brink of war that would have brought about its own downfall by actually firing its nuclear weapons, but also shows the will for peace, after which the war architecture falls into disuse and decays.

‘A terrific book. Surreal. The pictures are straight out of Dr. Strangelove.’
— Kathy Ryan (The New York Times Magazine)

Sold out at the publisher but a few copies are available here.

The Cold War is over – yet signs of it still exist. For forty years, the Iron Curtain divided the countries of Europe into East and West. The arms race was unleashed, nuclear fallout  shelters were constructed, and everyone braced for the worst. Martin Roemers spent eleven years in search of the traces of this period, traveling through the countries of former enemies on both sides of the line. He explored and photographed abandoned underground tunnels, former barracks, rotting tanks, and destroyed  monuments. On both sides of the Iron Curtain, the same war architecture was built from the same fears. ‘Relics of the Cold War’ depicts a society on the brink of war that would have brought about its own downfall by actually firing its nuclear weapons, but also shows the will for peace, after which the war architecture falls into disuse and decays.
This publication is made possible through grants provided by the Stichting Sem Presser Archief and the Stichting Democratie en Media.

‘A terrific book. Surreal. The pictures are straight out of Dr. Strangelove.’
— Kathy Ryan (The New York Times Magazine)

Hatje Cantz Publishers, 144 pages, 28×26 cm., hardcover, 73 photos in color. Text: English. Introductions by Nadine Barth, H.J.A. Hofland, Martin Roemers.
ISBN 9783775725347.

Signed copy € 79
Shipping in the Netherlands € 2,50
Shipping in Europe € 5,-
Shipping outside Europe € 10,-
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If you want to order this book please email martin@martinroemers.com.
Within a day you’ll receive an email with invoice including IBAN and PayPal details.

Kabul

Sold out at the publisher but copies are available here.

In cooperation with the Royal Dutch Army Museum, Martin Roemers, as an independent photographer, made a series about Dutch troops who were part of a NATO led mission in Kabul, Afghanistan. Part of this project is ‘Kabul Portraits’. Roemers strove for a visual representation of what working in a hostile environment means to a young soldier who has not yet seen much of the world. With an antique box camera he portrayed the soldiers. The tightly framed, unpolished black-and-white portraits full of dust, scratches and tears represent their raw world.

“The Kabul Portraits take your breath away.”
— De Volkskrant

Legermuseum, 48 pages, hardcover 30×24 cm, 28 photos in black & white. Text: English, Dutch. Introduction by Frits Baarda. ISBN 9061160170.

Signed copy € 22,50
Shipping in the Netherlands € 2,50
Shipping in Europe € 5,-
Shipping outside Europe € 18,-
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If you want to order this book please email martin@martinroemers.com.
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The Never-Ending War

In ‘The Never-Ending War’ Roemers portrayed 40 war veterans. Veterans of the Second World War are still classified as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, depending on the side they fought on. His research question was whether veterans, no matter which side they fought on, have more in common than they have different. He made a series of tightly framed portraits of veterans from Germany, Russia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, the United Kingdom and the United States, in which only the eyes are in focus. Roemers talked to each veteran about what they did during the war. These conversations are about survival, regret and trauma. In the project, the balance between the visual portrait and the spoken testimony is equal.
In addition to the portraits the project features 11 photographs of World War II commemoration events.

“Look them in the eye and one senses what they have seen.”
— Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

QV Publishers, 122 pages,  hardcover 30×24 cm, 40 portraits in black & white, 11 photos in color. Photography and interviews: Martin Roemers. Text: English, Dutch.
Introduction by H.J.A. Hofland. ISBN 9080974013.

Signed copy € 27,50
Shipping in the Netherlands € 2,50
Shipping in Europe € 5,-
Shipping outside Europe € 18,-
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If you want to order this book please email martin@martinroemers.com.
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Trabant. The Final Days of Production – Die letzten Tage der Produktion

Sold out at the publisher but copies are available here.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Martin Roemers wanted to make a series about socialist industrial culture in East Germany. In Zwickau, he photographed the production of the Trabant and made portraits of the workers in the ‘Sachsenring Automobilwerke’. The Trabant, a compact car with a plastic body made in East Germany since 1957, was well known beyond the borders of the German Democratic Republic. In the West, the ‘Trabi’ was seen as reactionary and was looked down on for its technical simplicity. Within the GDR, it was unloved and treasured in equal measure, a fixed component of everyday life and a reflection of social status. In 1991, the final Trabant was fabricated after 34 years of production. In 1992 he went back to Zwickau and photographed scrap Trabants as they were broken down for parts and the new car which was built on the former Trabant factory site: the Volkswagen Golf IV.

“There is a surreal sadness in these photos, as the resolutely old-fashioned Trabant, in various stages of production, slides along in scene after scene.”
— The Wall Street Journal

Wasmuth Publishers, 84 pages, hardcover 24×22 cm, 41 photos in black & white. Text: English, German. Introductions by Winnfried Sonntag, Achim Dresler, Kerstin Schwenn. ISBN 9783803033246.

Signed copy € 25,-
Shipping in the Netherlands € 2,50
Shipping in Europe € 5,-
Shipping outside Europe € 18,-
Payment by PayPal, or bank transfer.
If you want to order this book please email martin@martinroemers.com.
Within a day you’ll receive an email with invoice including IBAN and PayPal details.