Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, one of the most influential artists of his generation, lived and worked resolutely according to his own idealistic principles, determined to "make this a better place for everyone." He combined elements of Conceptual art, Minimalism, political activism, and poetic beauty in an ever-expanding arsenal of media, including public billboards, give-away piles of candy and posters, and ordinary objects--clocks, mirrors, light fixtures--used to startling effect. His work challenged the notions of public and private space, originality, authorship and--most significantly--the authoritative structures in which he and his viewers functioned. Editor Julie Ault has amassed the first comprehensive monograph to span Gonzalez-Torres's career. In the spirit of his method, she rethinks the very idea of what a monograph should be. The book, which places strong emphasis on the written word, contains newly commissioned texts by Robert Storr and Miwon Kwon among other notables, as well as significant critical essays, exhibition statements, transcripts from lectures, personal correspondence, and writings that influenced Gonzalez-Torres and his work. Ample visual documentation adds another important layer of content. We see works not just in their completed state, but often in process, which for Gonzalez-Torres could mean the process of disappearing as viewers interacted with them. A crucial reference.

Arts & Photography

Kwon, Miwon

STORR, Robert

Individual Artists

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One of the seminal artists of contemporary photography, Philip-Lorca diCorcia produces work that exists on a wide spectrum of fictionalized documentary. Yet a thematic and conceptual unity, most often realized in serial form and particularly suited to monograph format marks each series in his oeuvre. With Thousand, diCorcia effectively inverts his own tendency: the monograph is now the work itself. The sheer volume of material, which spans over 20 years of personal and artistic creation, shifts notions of context, narrative, and individual perception. Flipping through the pages of Thousand is not so much a retrospective or summation of the artist s life as it is an exercise in the construction of memory. An unwashed pan soaking in the sink precedes an unknown woman resembling an odalisque; the familiar linoleum aisles of a generic supermarket give way to a verdant swatch of lawn. These images are bothalien and deeply familiar, and just as one moment in our lives may recall another, these photos echo among one another, within the book, within the canon of diCorcia's work, and within our personal experience. The Polaroid proves to be the perfect souvenir unique and subject to reinterpretation, like memory itself. Philip-Lorca diCorcia was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1951. He received his MFA in Photography from Yale University in 1979. Published volumes accompany his solo exhibits at the Museum of Modern Art (Philip-Lorca diCorcia, 1995) and PaceWildenstein Gallery, New York (Streetwork 1993-1997, 1997; Heads, 2001; A Storybook Life, 2003). His work is included in the collections of the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others. He has been named a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and has received multiple grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. DiCorcia lives and works in New York City.

Philip-Lorca diCorcia: Thousand

Spanning 20 years and two continents, Liquid Light 1983-2003 draws from over 2,000 photographs taken by the media world legend, Fabien Baron. Made on the coasts of Eastern America, Western Europe and the Mediterranean, at sites to which Baron returned year after year, these works transform concrete, geographical sites into abstract tableaux. Gathered together in book form, they achieve a meditative rhythm of incremental change. While each image varies in its detail of weather, hour and light (along with lens and film stock), the series maintains a fundamental compositional device: water and sky bisected by horizon. The images are deceptively still, chromatic abstractions gleaned from a sea and sky that are never stationary and never entirely empty.

Fabien Baron: Liquid Light 1983-2003

History & Criticism

In her second book, acclaimed photographer Brigitte Lacombe offers revelatory portraits of Barack Obama, Brice Marden, Joan Didion, Kate Winslet, Daniel Day-Lewis, Miuccia Prada and many of her most influential contemporaries. Lacombe's honest and intelligent collection of portraits is a documentation of artists, writers, directors, actors and political figures. These compelling photographs, in color and black-and-white, capture private and public moments, intimate and theatrical. Some moments include: Bob Dylan on his ranch in Malibu (2004), Nelson Mandela in Johannesburg (2002), Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest in Myanmar (1996), David Mamet writing in his Vermont cabin (1997), a direct Richard Avedon (2001), Louise Bourgeois in pigtails (1995), Bruce Nauman at his ranch outside Santa Fe (1998), Meryl Streep and Dustin Hoffman on the set of Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), Martin Scorsese directing Leonardo DiCaprio in The Aviator (2003) and The Departed (2006), Robert Redford as a director on Ordinary People (1979), President Clinton traveling in Africa for his foundation (2007), Claude Levi-Strauss at the College de France (1999) and the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India (2003).

Brigitte Lacombe: Anima / Persona

Danish documentary filmmaker and photographer Adam Jeppesen's Wake was assembled over a period of several months in the backwoods of Finland. Rather than fall pray to Nordic melancholy while in seclusion, Jeppesen constructed a poetic, dreamlike sequence from his archive of past images that, in its arrangement, reflects the emotional and aesthetic clarity afforded by solitude. Composed of personal work made while traveling on assignment for the past seven years, this monograph is a personal psychological study. As the title suggests, the images in this volume inhabit the liminal space between darkness and twilight, the torpid state between sleeping and waking. The specificity of people, places and things gives way to light, color and texture. This series is infused with a quiet drama, an impression that something just out of reach lies below the surface of each image.

Adam Jeppesen: Wake

Studio assesses nearly two decades of Paolo Roversi's hugely influential studio portraiture. Within the confines of his Paris studio, Roversi photographs using an 8 x 10 Polaroid format, often allowing the images to fade before affixing them to their substrate. His long exposures at close range harness an aesthetic that dates back to the earliest days of studio photography, but with a renewed urgency that wavers somewhere between history and apparition. Stripped of the usual accoutrements of studio portraiture, Roversi's subjects push back with a vulnerable intensity that reveals as much of the photographer as of the model. The images collected here function not only as a series of individual portraits but also as a collective self-portrait of the artist and the place that stands at the center of his work. First published in 2005 in a limited edition, this new edition of Paolo Roversi's sumptuous and critically acclaimed book presents a distinctive body of work in an accessible trade edition. Paolo Roversi was born in 1947 in Italy. In 1970 he began collaborating with the Associated Press. His first assignment was to cover Ezra Pound's funeral in Venice. During the same year, Roversi opened his first portrait studio in Ravenna, photographing local celebrities and their families. In 1971, he met Peter Knapp, the legendary Art Director at Elle magazine, and at Knapp's invitation, he visited Paris in November of 1973, where he has remained since. His photographs have appeared in numerous publications, including French and Italian Vogue. He lives and works in Paris.

Paolo Roversi: Studio

British photographer Glen Luchford first caught the public eye in the late 1990s, with his avant-garde fashion campaigns for Prada. With its elaborate lighting and atmosphere of conspicuous artifice, Luchford's highly cinematic imagery exemplified the merging visual languages of fashion and art photography, launching the photographer as one of his generation's most imaginative talents. Part of Steidldangin's new British Influence series, this monograph presents 80 photographs from the past two decades, beginning with Luchford's earliest images, which prefigure the gritty, found-light aesthetic that defined the first half of the 1990s, from the quiet black-and-white portraits of musical icons such as Ian Brown, to more aggressive street shots of Kate Moss that catch the spirit of a seedy New York en route to gentrification. In later work, Luchford's from-the-hip naturalism gave way to an almost Hitchcockian style of portraiture. This monograph presents works in a range of media, from 35 mm black-and-white to 8 x 10, to digital formats, and features an interview with Luchford's long-time friend and artistic collaborator, painter Jenny Saville. From the very start of his career, Glen Luchford reinvigorated British fashion photography through his work for magazines such as i-D and The Face. He has shot campaigns for advertising clients such as Yves Saint Laurent and Calvin Klein and has exhibited with painter Jenny Saville. Luchford's work has been exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Photographer's Gallery in London, and at The Museum of Modern Art in New York (as part of the 2004 exhibit Fashioning Fiction).

Glen Luchford

Photography & Video

In March 2002, Alber Elbaz debuted his first collection for Lanvin, the oldest couture house in Paris. One decade later, Lanvin has become one of the most celebrated fashion houses for its uniquely modern vision and desirable designs. Alber Elbaz: Lanvin documents the journey of one collection, from the first sketch to the final runway show. These images not only unveil the continuous process of design, the behind-the-scenes work in progress, but also the human side of creating a collection. "Each collection is always different, but the process of creating is always the same," says Alber. The monograph is the result of a close collaboration with Pascal Dangin, who edited and created a book that transcends Elbaz's vision and sensibilities. Photographer But Sou Lai's poetic and sensitive images mirror Alber's work.

Alber Elbaz: Lanvin

Graphic Design

Gautier Deblonde has photographed artists' studios in America, Europe and Asia for the past eight years. He is particularly drawn to the studio as a subject, capturing the work in progress with all the traces of creation, but without the artists themselves. As documentary photographs, the images are rich in detail--full of sculptures half finished, brushes scattered on the floor and shelves of inspirational material. Though the artists are conspicuously absent, there's a lingering sense of their presence, as if magic lies in every tool, waiting to be brought to life. Left alone in the space, it feels as if time stops. Atelier provides a privileged glimpse behind the scenes to the source of artistic creation. Seventy studios have been captured in panorama, including the private spaces of Georg Baselitz, Wim Delvoye and Ai Weiwei among others. Photographed methodically, the compositions appear together as a meditative study on the studio, leaving the viewer to interpret the artist's intention and imagine the space come to life.

Atelier

Gautier Deblonde

This monograph is the definitive guide to the career of one of the most prodigious fashion photographers of our time. From his earliest work at Harper's Bazaar to his now mythic collaboration with Vogue, Patrick Demarchelier has single-handedly redefined the fashion photograph and the fashion industry along with it. His celebrity portraits have shaped the public personas of figures ranging from Princess Diana to Madonna. Demarchelier is everywhere at once, with a photographic sensibility that is as iconic, incisive and as varied as his subject matter. Featuring more than 400 of Demarchelier's most telling photographs, this volume provides an invaluable fashion reference point, all the while charting the course of our own cultural obsession with celebrity and beauty. Born outside Paris in 1943, Patrick Demarchelier relocated to New York in 1975, where he began his editorial career with Harper's Bazaar and Hearst Publications. His photographs appear regularly on the covers and in the pages of publications such as Vogue and Vanity Fair, among many others. He was the 2007 recipient of the Eleanor Lambert Award from the Council of Fashion Designers of America. He continues to live and work in New York.

Patrick Demarchelier

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