For her fifth book with Steidl, Mona Kuhn has entered the heart of the American desert and returned with a sequence of pictures that is seductive, enigmatic and a little unsettling. Private proposes a world in which concrete reality and the imaginary are one. Plants and animals on the edge of survival, sun-drenched landscapes and wind-sculpted earth are intercut with a series of nudes that push Kuhn's renowned sensitivity to human form into unexpected directions. The result is a book somewhere between the poetry of TS Eliot, the cinema of Robert Altman, and a lucid dream.

Mona Kuhn was born in São Paulo, Brazil, in 1969 of German descent and is currently based in Los Angeles. She received her BA from The Ohio State University, before furthering her studies at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1996. She is currently an independent scholar at The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Kuhn's first monograph, Photographs (Steidl 2004), was followed by Evidence (2007), Native (2010), and Bordeaux Series (2011). Her work has been exhibited and/or included, among others, in the collections of The J. Paul Getty Museum, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Museum of Photographic Art in San Diego, and The International Center of Photography in NYC. In Europe, her work has been exhibited at the Royal Academy of Art in London, England, at Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, Germany, and the Leopold Museum in Vienna, Austria.