Amateur

Fabian Reimann's Amateur uses FBI archive photographs to look at the studio of the Soviet spy Rudolph Abel, whose cover as an amateur artist was fifty oil paintings.

When Abel (1903–1971) was arrested in New York on 21 June 1957, agents found the paintings in his studio. He had used his work as an amateur painter and photographer as cover, and his favourite subject was lonely old men in the big city. Reimann researched the case in the FBI's archives. The pictures the agency took of Abel's studio and workspace show a man as adept at priming canvas as at making wiretaps. The book is a 116-page stitched, gatefolded brochure with illustrations, in English and German, designed by Florian Lamm and edited by Kunstverein Hannover.

The book was published in March 2013 by Spector Books, Leipzig, on the occasion of the exhibition Amateur und Überflieger at Kunstverein Hannover.