In Half-Frame, Marcy Robinson transforms simple objects into awe-inspiring forces. A rare half-frame camera discovered in a closet during Robinson's teen years inspired the title. The instrument, originally her grandfather's, uses only half the area of a 35-millimeter frame. Robinson exploits this to establish a unique viewpoint. She freezes the details of everyday scenes using plays on light and proportion that make photos, beds, window shades, traffic cones, chandeliers, paintings, grassy knolls and trees appear larger than life, yet diminutive and fragile. She makes the ordinary extraordinary: a wooden telephone pole spears a cloudy blue sky, a ghostly rectangle of dirt crosses the sinking black lines of a gutted swimming pool, the face of Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz peers out from a lone coffee mug standing before a window of dark iron bars; or tiny dead deer lies across the never-ending yellow lines of a highway. The disproportion of such tender objects against dark or vast scenery, like the deer stretched out on the infinite ribbon of the interstate, strikes the eye like a flame. This collection--never before seen--gives the viewer a unique gift: new eyes with which to gaze on our environment. The result is that neither the small nuances nor the intimate relationships they denote to the artist go unnoticed.

Marcy Robinson: Half-Frame

Arts & Photography

Individual Artists

Steidl/Dangin

In this collection of 120 black-and-white photographs, Roni Horn takes us on a journey through a locker room in Reykjavik, Iceland. With minimal movement between the camera and subject in succeeding frames, and through the use of a slow-shutter technique, this finely crafted body of work provokes the viewer to contemplate the subtleties of each image. A blur behind a portal suggests that someone else is in the locker room with the viewer. Room numbers, open and closed doors, and intersecting hallways give clues to the surroundings, and as we turn each page of the book, we sense the subtle shifting of time and space in photographs that reflect a sculptor's attention to the details of surfaces, repetition and form.

Roni Horn: Her, Her, Her And Her

Boulevard is a visual tale of two disparate cities: Paris and Los Angeles. In the early 1970s Adam Bartos began to use color photography to document the contemporary urban landscape, infusing his images with a quiet calm and finding composition in even the most random corners. He often focused his lens on his native New York and published a monumental series of photographs examining the modern architecture of the United Nations. In the late 1970s and then again in the early 1980s, Bartos traveled to Los Angeles and to Paris. These two influential trips would have a strong and lasting impact upon his vision. And yet, until recently, Bartos had never considered the two cities--or bodies of work--together. In this book, an intriguing dialogue takes place before our eyes. As we venture through the scarcely inhabited hotel rooms, backyards, gas stations, and, inevitably, city streets, we are struck by the graphical relationships, the surprisingly similar color palate between the two. There is a magnetism and repulsion operating here polar opposites--in art and life--that at unexpected moments converge and suddenly attract. Novelist, essayist and travel writer Geoff Dyer examines the two.

Adam Bartos: Boulevard

DYER, Geoff

Paolo Roversi is known internationally for his romantic, intense, and ethereal fashion images and portraits, photographs that quiver on the edge of their own seemingly fragile existence. A typical Roversi picture appears as if captured in the process of becoming--it develops on the page before our very eyes or, depending on perspective, it might simply vanish into the ether. Since 1980 Roversi has worked primarily with 8-by-10 inch Polaroids, and rarely on location. Studio is a milestone in his burgeoning bibliography. Designed as a series of 60 gatefolds, at first glance the book appears to be a collection of empty pages. The experience of looking is akin to that of peeling away the leaf from a Polaroid--out of the blackness an image is revealed as if by magic. In images that represent nearly two decades of work, the collection offers a self-portrait of the artist and a window into the place where he creates his art. These photographs are a mix of both the published and the highly personal, but all have the intimacy engendered by that place where Roversi feels most at home.

Paolo Roversi: Studio

Graphic Design

With the eye of a painter and the freedom of a photographer, Guy Bourdin created images full of fascinating stories, compositions, and colors. Using fashion and fashion photography as his vehicle, he explored the realms between the absurd and the sublime, taking cues from the theater and Surrealism. Along the way he became famous for his suggestive narratives and fantastic aesthetics--he broke conventions of commercial photography with a relentless perfectionism and sharp humor. Given total creative freedom, Bourdin captured the imagination of a generation. The late 1970s, recognized as the highest note in Bourdin's career, are the focal point of this two-volume edition. Volume I is dedicated to the legendary, nearly forgotten images he made with Nicolle Meyer as his model, and to their rarely seen variants. Meyer appeared in over 30 of his famous campaigns for Charles Jourdan and in iconic French Vogue editorials. Volume II is a road trip through Bourdin's visual landscape, a collage of images mapping his artistic search and vision. Texts, Polaroids, poems, sketches and contact sheets unfold in time with Nicolle Meyer's memories, and inscribe moments of Bourdin's working process that would otherwise be lost. To this day, Guy Bourdin, remains an enigma, and he leaves a provocative and compelling legacy. A Message for You examines that oeuvre and, perhaps more importantly, it provides insight into the complex workings of the photographer's mind.

A Message for You

Nicolle Meyer

Shelly Verthime

Daddy, Where Are You? collects more than 70 portraits of this Los Angeles-based photographer's family. Set mainly in and around her mother's home in Georgia, where Gearon grew up, this series takes as its subject the interaction between the photographer, her children and her mother. These beautiful but strikingly raw photographs also document a story with a more expansive emotional force: the closeness and the profound distance between our loved ones and us. It is this psychological tension, as well as her direct confrontation with one of photography's enduring themes, that distinguishes Gearon from her contemporaries. Daddy, Where Are You? combines revealing tableaux, garnered from Gearon's observations of family outings and routines, with a sequence of portraits of her mother. Together they capture the impossibility of truly understanding the nature of those we love.

Tierney Gearon: Daddy, Where Are You?

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