This second edition of the book is a complete work of art, offensive in every sense of the word, and as an artistic manifesto about violence in the twenty-first century, it couldn't be any more current, especially given movements like activist art. Pornografie was first published in 1971, and has subsequently become an outstanding and timeless document of political artwork. The Gerrman film-maker Klaus Staeck took news photographs and the advertisements as the basis of this hard-hitting anti-Vietnam War, anti-violence artist`s book.Seven Decaders Books: Klaus Staeck created this book in 1971 as a reaction to the Vietnam War and a protest of the values of the society which allowed the war to continue. Its content is entirely visual and consists largely of blown up press photos and grainy newsreel images as it devel-ops in chapters showing war and its aftermath, protest and its suppression, weaponry and other instruments of violence and con-trol, and finally a long series of advertising images in which violence, sex, security, and fear are manipulated and marketed. Pornografie's content is entirely visual yet Staeck's cinematic mise-en-scene develops so forcefully that the book's rhetoric is entirely clear and it delivers an indictment of undeniable moral power. Visually Pornografie recalls Warhol or the publications of the Japanese Provoke photographers and its approach to mass media and its appropriation of advertising imagery was so innovative that Germano Celant included the book in his groundbreaking study, Book as Artwork 1960/1972, yet alongside this largely cool and conceptual material, Staeck's publication was notably heated and engaged. It is a rare example of an artwork that is both genuine-ly avant-garde and a passionately political, even propagandistic, statement. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.