Phaidon
Photography continues to be a central part of international artistic practice. Over the past ten years it has experienced radical changes, in part due to the rise of digital technologies. Photography is now often engaged in by artists who are not just printing in a darkroom, but using the medium as a single aspect of a larger ouvre, as one of several media under exploration.Vitamin Ph focuses on diverse global developments in 'art' photography through the work of 121 contemporary artists, who were nominated by 78 international critics, curators and artists. These selections will be accompanied by a 5000 word introductory text by TJ Demos, aiming to explore ideas relevant to contemporary photography with reference to the works included in the book. In addition, the work of each photographer/artist will be introduced by a short commissioned text of approximately 500 words. Similar in concept, scope and structure to Vitamin P and Vitamin D, Vitamin Ph presents, in A to Z order, artists who have emerged, or in some instances re-emerged, in the last five years using the medium of photography.
Specifications - Hardcover. 352 pages.
aperture foundation
Though the sense of realism in German photographer Loretta Lux's striking portraits of children remains eerily intact, Lux does not strive to create faithful photographic representations of her young subjects. Instead, each image–invariably comprised of a lone child in a sparse landscape–is painstakingly composed and manipulated to create psychically charged explorations of the nature of childhood and the process of self-discovery.
Originally trained as a painter, Lux continues to draw influence from paintings by Old Masters such as Velasquez, Goya, and Runge. This influence is especially apparent in Lux's compositions. After carefully choosing the models, costumes, and backdrops–sometimes using her own paintings–she digitally combines and enhances each element to form meticulously structured tableaux. The consistently forlorn expressions of her models combined with the hyperreality of the image create portraits that transcend their subjects and remind us that childhood is as chaotic and multidimensional as any other part of life.
Loretta Lux was born in Dresden, Germany in 1969 and currently lives and works in Ireland. Her work has been exhibited extensively and is included in several collections in Europe and the United States, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Norton Museum of Art, the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlung, Munich, Artothek Munich, Photo Museum Munich, and Fotomuseum Den Haag.
Specifications - Hardcover. 96 pages. Measurement: 31 × 27cm
Phaidon
Robert Massin (b. 1925) is a highly influential French graphic designer and writer. He has worked with many famous authors and playwrights, including Eugène Ionesco, Blaise Cendrars, and Raymond Queneau, and for twenty years has been the art director for the pre-eminent French publisher Gallimard. This is the first monograph published in English on the work of Massin, one of the key exponents in the development of post-war graphic design. Wolff charts Massin's wide-ranging career with detailed discussion of some of his most inventive and exciting projects, including the award-winning THE BALD PRIMA DONNA (1964) and LETTER AND IMAGE (1970). Wolff carried out her research in close collaboration with Massin, gaining unrivaled access to the Massin collection in Chartres as well as the designer's personal archives. MASSIN includes preparatory sketches, letters, and finished works, photographed especially for this book.
Specifications - Hardcover. 216 pages.
Noam Griegst
Specifications - Hardcover. 120 pages. Measurement: 21.5 × 28 cm
Bobbito Garcia
Twenty years after its first release, and a decade since the most recent edition, this timeless, definitive volume on sneaker culture is finally back in print. Lavishly illustrated and remarkably comprehensive, Where'd You Get Those? is an insider's account that traces New York City's sneaker culture back to its earliest days. Describing how a small and dedicated group of sneaker consumers in the 1970s and early '80s proved instrumental in establishing current corporate giants such as Nike and Adidas, sneaker aficionado Bobbito Garcia writes with exactitude and affection.
Chronicling the rise of sneakers through the lean years of the '60s, the bulk of the book examines nearly 400 sneakers released in the golden years of 1970-87, via information-packed entries for each model, including all color combinations available, nicknames of particular shoe models, relevant athlete endorsements, and running commentary and stories from a rogues' gallery of fanatics who weigh in on the pros and cons of each sneaker. Through lifestyle chapters such as "Arts and Crafts" (which details the process of customizing sneakers) and "Thou Shalt Not" ("The No-Nos of New York Sneakers"), Where'd You Get Those?interrogates this enduring subculture from every angle. This 20th anniversary classic edition features the cover artwork from the first edition, as well as essays collected from the 10th anniversary edition.
Specifications - Hardcover. 208 pages. Measurement: 26 × 21 cm
steidl
Sean Scully uses pastels to create abstract works in emotive response to color. This beautifully produced two-volume set, which accompanies the traveling exhibition Wall of Light, which starts at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. then travels to The Modern in Fort Worth, Texas and The Cincinnati Museum of Art in Cincinnati, Ohio, and ends at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, brings together 100 of those subtle and ecstatic celebrations, along with four written pieces about them by Arthur Danto, who has been tracking Scully's work for a dozen years. Danto is Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy at Columbia, and has since 1984 also been the art critic for The Nation. His contributions here range from catalogue texts for some of Scully's most significant exhibitions to a Nation piece, and are brought together here for the first time, allowing readers to trace the history and development of a major artist in the writings of one of America's leading art critics. Among Danto's insights are that "Scully's historical importance lies in the way he has brought the greatest achievements of Abstract Expressionist painting into the contemporary moment." He also comes bearing secrets from the artist: "Pastel involves rubbing friable chalk over toothed paper, which in its nature confers a certain sparkling luminosity to the forms, and it is responsive to differences in pressure. The principle of pastel, Scully once told me, is that of putting on makeup.
Specifications - Hardcover. 232 pages. Measurement: 8.3 × 6.3cm
Dave hickey
Working within the strict format of the vertical stripe, Tim Bavington explores methods of designing his paintings, from intuition and chance to architectural systems and bar-coding. In recent years his interest has turned to music.
Specifications - Hardcover. 125 pages. Measurement: 10 × 8 cm
Phil Frost
Initially conceived as a personal project on the walls of Sorrenti’s New York loft, the material in Draw Blood for Proof eventually found its way onto gallery walls as a large-scale installation piece in 2004. Papering the site from floor to ceiling with layers of collected snapshots, contact sheets, prints, Polaroids and ephemera drawn from over fifteen years of work, Sorrenti’s collection was a unique look into the artist’s diaristic creative process, going beyond ideas of public and private production.
Re-photographed as a series of 8x10 Polaroids and reconstituted here, Sorrenti’s montage finds yet another incarnation in book form. Here the images are both documentation and personal exploration, and the layout repositions Sorrenti’s photographs in a series faithful to their placement on the walls of the gallery. This gives the viewer a sense of the raw impact of the original installation but also creates new visual relationships between images as they move across spreads, redefining themselves and one another on the pages. Images obscured in one layout may appear fully and with renewed force on the next. The result is a free-associative experience like memory or dreams, rooted in Sorrenti’s methods but drawing on his cache of personal associations, and the act of perception becomes part of the work.
Specifications - Hardcover. 162 pages.
steidl
“Though these pictures appear like magnificent modern paintings, they are in fact a deeper unconscious social artistic expression of an urban re-development that historical events since the Gründerzeit have fermented and brought to the surface.” Robert Polidori
The soaring, rigid walls of the tenement blocks torn open by the bombing of World War II dominated the German streetscapes of the 1950s. Fire walls, originally integrated in the building and serving as fire shields, suddenly became visible and turned into outer walls. That is how the originally rather technical term got a new meaning: Firewalls as walls spared by the fire.
Those long brick walls often adjoin to vast vacant lots once taken up by buildings that were never reerected after the war. Windows—sometimes bricked up again—cover the walls without any rational order, bearing witness to the troublesome moments of Germany’s history, just like smut, traces of bullets, shrapnel holes, the outlines of previous buildings, and provisional repairs. The remarkable housing boom following the fall of East Germany whitewashed most of the scars and overgrew the occasional graffiti and advertisements originally decorating those walls. A look behind them reveals—like a negative form of the same cast—the imprint of the building’s story.
Specifications - Hardcover. 152 pages. Measurement: 37.5 × 29.5 cm
Phaidon
Eugene Richards is one of America’s greatest living social documentary photographers. His intense vision and unswerving commitment to documenting the plight of the disadvantaged has produced powerful work on topics such as drug addiction, poverty, the mentally disabled, ageing and the personal consequences of war. The Blue Room is his first colour project, a moving, highly personal project that brings together the themes that encompass all of Richards’ work – what he describes as the ‘transient nature of things’. The photographs are portraits of the abandoned and forgotten houses of western America in areas such as the plains of Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico and the Dakotas. In the early twentieth century, railroads lured settlers west with the promises of homesteads and towns rose across the plains. But in the wake of the Depression and the dust storms of the 1930s the towns faltered then failed. Richards enigmatic photographs of these forgotten homes are a meditation on memory and loss – family photographs stuck on a wall, a wedding dress hanging in a bedroom, snow falling on a bed by an open window, a wild horse standing at an open kitchen window. Richards’ contemplative, beautiful photographs inspire us to imagine the lives of the former occupants, and make a quiet statement on the inevitability of the circle of life and death, and the vulnerability of man in the face of shifting economic opportunities and the climate
Specifications - Hardcover. 168 pages.
Thames & Hudson
Curated by William A. Ewing, Edward Burtynsky: Essential Elements provides an overview of Burtynsky’s work across four decades, including both iconic images and previously unpublished photographs. Relinquishing the project-based lens through which the photographer’s work has previously been presented, the major monographs Oil and Water being the most recent examples, this book presents Burtynsky’s photographs in five free-flowing sections which combine and contrast work from throughout his career. This original approach provides a sense of both his visual language and his exploration of the dilemmas at the heart of our globalized world. Each section is interspersed with selected texts which work in concert with the images, to provide a fuller understanding of Burtynsky’s view of the world.
With an introduction by Ewing and an afterword by Joshua Schuster, Essential Elements provides an entirely new way of seeing Burtynsky’s work for those who are already familiar with it as well as an accessible introduction for those encountering his photographs for the first time.
Specifications - Hardcover. 202 pages. Measurement: 27.5 × 33 cm
David Raskin
This pioneering book, the first scholarly monograph devoted to Donald Judd, addresses the whole breadth of Judd's practices. Drawing on documents found in nearly twenty archives, David Raskin explains why some of Judd's works of art seem startlingly ephemeral while others remain insistently physical. In the process of answering this previously perplexing question, Raskin traces Judd's principles from his beginnings as an art critic through his fabulous installations and designs in Marfa, Texas. He discusses Judd's early important paintings and idiosyncratic red objects, as well as the three-dimensional works that are celebrated throughout the world. He also examines Judd's commitment to empirical values and his political activism, and concludes by considering the importance of Judd's example for recent art. Ultimately, Raskin develops a picture of Judd as never before seen: he shows us an artist who asserted his individuality with spare designs; who found spiritual values in plywood, Plexiglas, and industrial production; who refused to distinguish between thinking and feeling while asserting that science marked the limits of knowledge; who claimed that his art provided not just intuitions of morality but a specific set of tenets; and who worked for political causes that were neither left nor right.
Specifications - Hardcover. 196 pages. Measurement: 28 × 23 cm
