** 2021 Stock. English Version ** The son of an anthropologist, Lothar Baumgarten spent several years living with an indigenous tribe in the Venezuelan Amazon region. In the late 1960s, he became one of the first artists to introduce representations of minority cultures into the Western cultural sphere. The contributors to this anthology offer different readings of Baumgarten's work, addressing the legacies of colonialism and modern anthropology, and also of documentary photography and site-specific artistic practices.

The title of this book, Autofocus Retina means a configuration of four diamond shaped mirrors connoting the inner mechanics of a camera lens: the photographic eye. Lothar Baumgarten (b. Germany 1944, living and working in Berlin/New York) presents a personal selection of photographs, sculpture, drawings and film, from the late 1960s to the present day. The book follows the creative trajectory of an artist who does not comply with the aesthetic vision of art but who continually questions the logic structuring Western thought and systems of representation. Featuring essays on Baumgarten's work by Hal Foster, Michael Jakob, Craig Owens, Anne Rorimer and Friedrich Wolfram Heubach. Each text has been chosen by the artist himself along with special graphic illustrations and images.