Gerhard Steidl (born 1950) is a German printer and publisher. He is the founder of the publishing company

Steidl Steidl is a German-language publisher, an international publisher of photobooks, and a printing company, based in Göttingen, Germany. It was started in 1968 by Gerhard Steidl and is still run by him. Overview The company was started by Gerha ...

. In 2020, he was awarded the

Gutenberg Prize of the International Gutenberg Society and the City of Mainz The Gutenberg Prize of the International Gutenberg Society and the City of Mainz has been awarded since 1968 for outstanding artistic, technical and scientific achievements in the field of printing. The award was initially awarded every three years ...

Life and work

Gerhard Steidl was born and grew up in

Göttingen Göttingen (, , ; nds, Chöttingen) is a college town, university city in Lower Saxony, central Germany, the Capital (political), capital of Göttingen (district), the eponymous district. The River Leine runs through it. At the end of 2019, t ...

, Germany. His father was a cleaner in the presses of the local newspaper where Steidl developed an interest in the technical aspects of printing from an early age. His impetus for a career in printing came when, as a teenager, one of his photographs was used in a poster advertising a production of

Brecht Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht (10 February 1898 – 14 August 1956), known professionally as Bertolt Brecht, was a German theatre practitioner, playwright, and poet. Coming of age during the Weimar Republic, he had his first successes as a pl ...

's '' Mann ist Mann.'' The printing company did what the boy thought was a poor job; he suggested printing the sheet twice, the company agreed to do so in order to get rid of him, and his idea worked fairly well. In the late 1960s, Steidl established the Steidl printing company in Göttingen, which, following the bankruptcy of the publisher Scalo, came to publish photobooks. He also owns a guest house called the Halftone Hotel where each room is named for an artist printed by his company. In 2020, Gerhard Steidl received the

Films

*''How to Make a Book with Steidl'' (2010) – documentary about SteidlHow to Make a Book with Steidl

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Steidl, Gerhard 20th-century publishers (people) 21st-century publishers (people) Businesspeople from Göttingen German book publishers (people) German printers Living people 1950 births