Back in the mid-1990s, while on a short college tour, the singer-songwriter Juliana Hatfield found herself looking for windows to jump from if her depression became too much to bear. She didn’t want to kill herself but to “not feel anything anymore,” she said.
Check it out here.
Liu Heung Sheng (or HS as he is widely known) is a Pulitzer-prize winner who came to photography by a circuitous route, but one which has helped him produce the new book China: Portrait of a Country (Taschen), a remarkable study of the rich but virtually unknown history of Chinese photography since 1949.
Check it out here.
eBoy is everywhere. If you’re a geek, you saw their poster for MakerFaire. If you like beats, you picked up the latest issue of BPM. And if you collect toys, you have an opinion on their Peecol figures. Now eBoy has teamed up with JoshSpear favorite ROJO for the production of a limited edition monographic book entitled Schmock.
Check it out here.
Her upcoming book, Annie Leibovitz: At Work, looks to be a behind-the-scenes study of some of her more famous shoots, including the royal shoot referenced above.
Check it out here.
The fact that many of the prisoners Khan describes appear to have been innocent of the vague accusations against them, were imprisoned for years without formal charges or fair hearings and were eventually released by the United States without apology or compensation makes the abuse they suffered during years of imprisonment all the more outrageous. By giving us the perspective of the detainees, “My Guantánamo Diary” provides a valuable account of what we can now recognize as one of the most shameful episodes in the war on terror. It is hard to read this book without a growing sense of embarrassment and indignation.
Check it out here.
The book is out on the 5th of September but we are having a book launch event on Sunday 31st August in London – The Little People Treasure hunt! I will be placing four installations at various locations around London and it is up to YOU to track them down and find them.
Check it out here.
Three of Heller’s dictators considered themselves artists and eagerly participated in marketing their brands. Mao fancied himself a poet and master calligrapher; Mussolini wrote a pulp novel and portrayed himself as a hypermasculine sex symbol. Hitler was an aspiring architect and avid watercolorist before adopting what Heller calls his “sociopolitical art project.” The Führer sought to control all aspects of the Nazi brand, from the swastika “logo” to his own image, with mustache but without glasses. Heller argues that Mao with his “Mona Lisa smile” and Lenin with his proletarian cap functioned in much the same way as “trade characters” like Joe Camel or the Geico gecko, putting “a friendly face on an otherwise inanimate (or sometimes inhumane) product.” Like modern corporate competitors, these leaders borrowed freely from one another, with Hitler taking the straight-armed Roman salute from Mussolini and Mao adopting Socialist Realism from the Soviets.
Check it out here.
Rather than immediately leaping to the woman’s rescue, our protagonist tells the intruder to find a safe haven of his own. It is only when the barbarian refuses to leave that our hero draws his sword, attacking with such swiftness and ferocity that the would-be rapist is cleaved in two. Who said chivalry is dead?
Some readers — those with a complete collection of Hawkwind albums and possibly an old Phototron growing dust in the closet — will recognize this moment from one of the earliest tales of Elric, the brooding, amoral adventurer first set down on paper by Michael Moorcock more than 45 years ago. And to them I won’t need to explain why a long-overdue reissue, titled Elric: The Stealer of Souls. Chronicles of the Last Emperor of Melniboné, Volume I (Del Rey/Ballantine, paper, $15), about the exploits of an aging swashbuckler whose heyday predates the Pentagon Papers, could not have arrived at a more opportune moment.
Check it out here.
In his notebooks Camus excoriates “the newly achieved revolutionary spirit, nouveau riche, and Pharisees of justice.” He names Sartre and his followers, “who seem to make the taste for servitude a sort of ingredient of virtue.”
He mocks their conformism: cowardly, besides, he implies, citing the story of a child who announced her plan to join “the cruelest party.” Because: “If my party is in power, I’ll have nothing to fear, and if it is the other, I’ll suffer less since the party which will persecute me will be the less cruel one.”
Check it out here.
Cody’s Books, the half-century-old Berkeley bookstore that has long been an East Bay institution — one of the truly great west coast stores — has closed its doors forever.
Check it out here.
We’re proud to announce that the Brazilian artist Alexandre Orion is the latest artist to participate in our “Wooster Special Edition” project. Alexandre follows sold out editions from such artists as Faile, Shepard Fairey, Space Invader, BAST, and Darius and Downey.
Check it out here.
Of all the strange and short-lived periods in the history of experimental music in New York, no wave is perhaps the strangest and shortest-lived.
Centered on a handful of late-1970s downtown groups like Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, DNA and James Chance’s Contortions, it was a cacophonous, confrontational subgenre of punk rock, Dadaist in style and nihilistic in attitude. It began around 1976, and within four years most of the original bands had broken up.
But every weird rock scene — and every era of New York bohemia — eventually gets its coffee-table book moment. This month Abrams Image is publishing “No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980,” a visual history by Thurston Moore and Byron Coley.
Check it out here.
Balancing work with a social life can be a challenge even for single photographers, but adding a husband and two kids to the mix can lead to disaster, or worse, a desk job.
Annie Griffiths Belt found the perfect solution, bringing her family along for the ride. After 20 years of marriage and 18 years of parenting, the 55-year-old National Geographic photographer’s plan is a proven success. Her daughter Lily, 18, is about to begin her freshman year of college with plans to become a physician and Charlie, 15, is attending high school.
Check it out here.
Wacky Packages—a series of collectible stickers featuring parodies of consumer products and well-known brands and packaging—were first produced by the Topps company in 1967, then revived in 1973 for a highly successful run. In fact, for the first two years they were published, Wacky Packages were the only Topps product to achieve higher sales than their flagship line of baseball cards. The series has been relaunched several times over the years, most recently to great success in 2007.
Known affectionately among collectors as “Wacky Packs,” with artist Art Spiegelman, as a key creative force, the stickers were illustrated by such notable comics artists as Kim Deitch, Bill Griffith, Jay Lynch, and Norm Saunders.
Check it out here. Via BoingBoing.
Today, May 15th, is the 50th anniversary of the day Robert Frank’s The Americans was first published by Robert Delpire in Paris. That was 1958. Today we realize that The Americans has more in common with beat poetry and club jazz than it has with many other kinds of photography; it’s one of the high water marks of 1950s culture. And throughout an era when photographers communicated with each other and with their audiences mainly through the vehicle of published books, The Americans has had only a handful of competitors (Walker Evans’ American Photographs, Henri Cartier-Bresson’s The Decisive Moment, a few others) for the title of the most important single photography book ever published. For thirty years after its publication it was deeply influential. And although photography has moved on now, the echoes of its impact reverberate still.
Check it out here.
Photography books seem to be finally having their heyday. With access to the distribution, promotion and production of books through online sources, it seems weekly I’m dazzled by another self published photographer and at the same time overwhelmed that I’m being so finicky about putting out my own. One could trace the enthusiasm to the gang at Photoeye, or the Dashwood Books, maybe even more likely is Martin Parr and Gerry Badgers excellent History of Photobooks books or perhaps simply the big publishers Aperture, Steidl, Schaden, Chronicle, Nazreali or the newer ones Loosestrife, Radius, etc., add to the mix fantastic Photobook blog 5b4 and it’s easy to see a small part of ‘why the boom’.
Check it out here.
by Brad Mangin
I was sitting in Finnegan’s Wake, one of my favorite bars in San Francisco with my friend Grover last month when my cell phone began making noise. I was getting a text message from Walter Iooss: “Where can I send you my new book for you to review?”
At this point in the evening, I must confess, I had consumed a few too many beers, so my first thought was that Walter had made a mistake and wanted to send an editor his new portfolio. I texted him back some smart ass remark about being drunk, probably accusing him of the same, and closed the phone, laughing.
A few minutes later, it went off again.
“For SportsShooter.com you wino! I’m sober and going to bed,” Walter said.
Check it out here.
If you were to invite John Gossage to photograph your neighborhood he could probably create an entire book’s worth of work within a few city blocks (or rural lanes). He is a photographer who could probably work anywhere more so than most in that the small details that he asks us to pay attention to are common in our landscape where ever we live.
Check it out here.
If one were to name a few photographers whose work is felt so heavily as an influence on the current generation of photographers going through various MFA programs then Stephen Shore would certainly be on the list.
Check it out here.