The Frankfurter Allgemeine Magazin headlined "A picture that makes us squirm. Thomas Kellner has seen the Grand Canyon as closely as perhaps no man before him. The photographer takes the canyon apart and recomposes it into an extreme landscape format." Freddy Langer, An Image That Makes Us Sway, in Frankfurter Allgemeine Magazin, Männer Spezial, October 2020, 2020, 76-79.

Los Angeles. Thomas Kellner's photo book The Big Picture, with its leporello almost 10 feet long in the book and a text by Freddy Langer (FAZ), has been nominated for this year's Lucie Foundation Photo Book Award in Los Angeles in the limited edition photo book category. Kellner's largest image of the Grand Canyon from 60 35mm films, or 2160 individual shots on film as a contact sheet was on view at the Kreuztaler Kulturbahnhof at the beginning of the 2020 pandemic, at the American Museum in Bath, England in 2019, and before that at Kellner's studio on Friedrichstraße for the 20th anniversary.
The Lucie Awards for Photography have been presented since 2003, and the Photo Book Award since 2017. Iranian founder Houssein Farmani, who himself studied photography and film in Los Angeles, established this photography-central foundation in the early 2000s to promote photographic talent and the next generation of photographers. The Lucie Awards are an annual highlight for the industry, and the Photo Book Prize is an important equivalent for photography books.
Kellner's image of the Grand Canyon has the absolutely adequate book format in the leporello image format, which as such is already once, but rarely found. That alone makes the book, limited to 500 copies (300 of which are in German), a collector's item if you haven't caught a glimpse of the original.

"In The Big Picture, you can expect a similar experience when you unfold its huge panorama of the Grand Canyon, made up of 2,160 individual 35mm film frames. It forms a large mosaic on eight accordion-folded pages, and it is indeed a magnificent presentation." Paul Anderson, Thomas Kellner - The Big Picture, in The Photobook Journal. 2021

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