Acknowledged as a master of twentieth-century photography and the greatest British photographer, Bill Brandt left an indelible mark on the medium during a career that spanned more than 50 years. Trained in Man Ray's Paris studio, Brandt returned to England and produced a body of work that ranged from portraits of upper-crust society to views of the poverty of the industrial north. During the Blitz of World War II Brandt created an epic picture of blacked-out London, with images of bomb-damaged landmarks and residents sheltering in underground subway stations. After the war, he began a series of nude studies using lens distortions and unusual points of view to interpret the female form in new ways. He also photographed the movers and shakers of the English art scene, from Alec Guinness to David Hockney, and, for a series called Literary Britain, he toured the country tracking down landscapes that had been influential to important British writers. Mark Haworth-Booth, curator of photography at London's Victoria and Albert Museum, provides a contextual overview and information on Brandt's working methods and biography. David Mellor, professor of art history at the University of Sussex, offers cogent interpretations of the larger significance of Brandt's themes and preoccupations.

Bill Brandt: Behind The Camera (Aperture Monograph S)

Arts & Photography

Mellor, David Alan

Individual Artists

Aperture

“These ‘guests’ are spooks for our time, a New Age vision of the body as energy that is also a specter of nuclear fusion.” —Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle “[Bucklow’s photographs] create the impression of presences that seem both three-dimensional and immaterial—more like auras than physical objects. I am reminded of photographs taken a century ago featuring see-through presences that purported to be wraiths or spirits. Bucklow doesn’t make any such claims: but the fact that the head is usually the lightest part of the image suggests that he is trying to portray something other than the body—intelligence, awareness, the spirit; call it what you will.” —Sarah Kent, Time Out London Known for his silhouettes made using a pinhole camera, Christopher Bucklow’s first monograph, Guest, collects for the first time many works from the Guest and Tetrarchs series. It also documents his earlier photographic work and video images made within the Canopic Fusion Reactor—a pinhole camera the size of a building, built in St. Ives in Cornwall, England, for the total eclipse of the sun, visible there in 1999. Coinciding with the publication of Guest by Christopher Bucklow, the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York City will host a celebration of twelve years of Blind Spot Magazine and Blind Spot Books in September 2004.

Guest

HAMBOURG, Maria Morris

David Alan Mellor

Hambourg, Maria M.

powerHouse Books

Gathering notice in newspapers under the headlines "He paints to Rock and Roll, " Robyn Denny became one of the leading London painters in the 1960s-a pioneer of a significant kind of Hard Edge abstraction which was distinctly different to the dominant American abstraction of the time. Yet for more that a quarter of a century now, the course of Denny's work has been publicly uncharted. But just as there is currently under way a more considered historical reassessment of twentieth century abstract art, so Denny's extraordinary odyssey-through his idiosyncratic Action painting, Hard Edge, and Postmodern lyrical-colourism - is finally being rediscovered. This publication will re-examine the little known Denny of the late 70s to the present, setting it alongside his more renowned painting from the 60s. The book will give context and a frame of critical understanding to the career of one of the most elusive figures in the art of the half century.

Art of Robyn Denny

Denny, Robyn

History & Criticism

Black Dog Publishing

Cecil Beaton (1904–1980) was a man of many facets and extraordinary skill. He was a successful theatre designer, a writer, a fashion and society photographer, as well as a gardener. As a photographer, he was world-famous. The secret of his success was probably his ability to capture with his photographs a whole era, as a kind of master of ceremonies to the British Empire. Always self-assured and stylish, he depicts with his customary elegance and panache the high and low of the century: The British Royal family, the nobility, the London bohemian scene, and the New York underground. Since the Nineteen-Twenties, his work has been unique in depicting the international "Zeitgeist." Without doubt, Cecil Beaton’s photographic work is one of the most important contributions to the history of art and photography of the 20th century. This marvelous volume which offers a comprehensive and complete presentation of Beaton’s work and life will now be available again in a hardcover edition

The Essential Cecil Beaton

GARNER,Philippe

Photography & Video

Schirmer/Mosel

Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 film Blow-Up is a masterfully constructed and paced exploration of the enigmas that challenge our interpretations of both the moving and the still image. Photography plays a key role at the very core of the film, providing the metaphorical site for the director's questioning of the relationship between reality and perceptions. This book provides a fresh and stimulating study of Antonioni's masterpiece. It reassembles and re-tells - through onset stills and the original blow-ups - the film's key narrative and pictorial strands in a focused visual investigation that is complemented by the authors' analytical essays. These texts draw on new research and effectively situate the film in the social and creative contexts that informed Antonioni's screenplay and art direction - on the one hand through an account of the milieu of fashionable photographers and models and the media through which they became so vivid a phenomenon, and on the other hand through the revelation of the artistic and literary reference points that so pervasively enrich the film.

Antonioni's Blow-Up

Steidl

Cecil Beaton. Retrospectiva

Lunwerg Editores

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Books by Mellor, David Alan