For her photographic long-term study, the artist Christa Ziegler traveled from 2007 to 2011 to numerous mega cities, primarily in Africa, Asia and South America. An illustrated book collects hundreds of photographs taken from the perspective of the artist’s walking. Her artistic credo was the direct encounter with urban space and thus with the living conditions of a now overwhelming majority of the world's population. The photographer approaches reality in a manner that is as unagitated as it is attentive. It is the high density in the same format and uniform black and white that shows the big city under the sign of comparability. In its architectural texture, along its edges and furrows, in its system of enclosing and excluding zones, the body of the city makes visible the great pressure that it seeks to balance in the gradient between north and south, east and west.
The extensive illustrated book is accompanied by a loose series of separate text editions with contributions from literary, essayistic, urban planning and cultural historical perspectives. The present collected edition includes the illustrated book “Polis” in a cardboard slipcase, as well as the three newspapers published to date: “Essays on the City / Talking about Cities”, “What about Cairo?” and “Rapid Urbanisation and the Rise of Informal Settlements”.