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 T.S. Eliot, the cinema of Robert Altman and a lucid dream.