Despite being a consummate polymath, George Kuchar (1942-2011) is best known as a pioneering underground film and video maker with a disarming do-it-yourself aesthetic and a hilariously eccentric sensibility. Quirky and ingenious, heartfelt and campy, Kuchar's movies know no boundaries and are an entirely unique development in the history of cinema. The artist's characteristic instinct for kitsch, his humor and conceptual brilliance, were not confined to the screen alone; they can be glimpsed in all the activities he carried out throughout his life. The George Kuchar Reader, edited by Andrew Lampert, collects a wide swath of previously uncollected and newly unearthed writings and visual work, including essays, comics, drawings, paintings, photographs, film stills, scripts, movie blurbs, correspondence, letters of recommendation for his students, documentation of his UFO sightings, excerpts from his dream journal, selections from his private notebooks and much more.
Allen Jones Figures
Fabulous production, with Allen Jones' wit, energy and creativity on full throttle. Colorful "scrapbook" look to pages of pin-ups and found images, giving way to images of the artist's work--both paintings and the sculpture-furniture (must be seen) completed or in progress. Most illustrations are in color. Concludes with a unique four b&w pages of (other) "Artist's Advertisements". Book's design credited to Jones and Anthony Marshall. 87 pages, plus five pages of acknowledgements.
Guy Bourdin: A Message for You
Guy Bourdin created images containing fascinating stories, compositions and colors. Using fashion photography as his medium, Bourdin explored the provocative and the sublime with a relentless perfectionism and sharp humor, breaking with conventions of commercial photography and capturing the imagination of a generation. The late 1970s, widely recognized as the high note of his career, is the focal point of this new edition, which combines in one book the two volumes of the original 2006 publication. The first part of A Message for You shows the legendary, nearly forgotten images and rarely seen variants of a single model, Nicolle Meyer. She appeared in over 30 of Bourdin's famous campaigns for Charles Jourdan and in iconic French Vogue editorials. The second part of the book explores Bourdin's pictorial landscape in a collage of images that maps his artistic vision. The texts, Polaroids, poems, sketches and contact sheets are interspersed with Nicolle Meyer's recollections.
Miroslav Tichy: Dedicated to The Women of Kyjov
Photography is something concrete, a perception, what you see with your eyes. And it happens so fast that you may not see anything at all! To photograph is to paint with light! The flaws are part of it. That's what makes the poetry. And for that you need a bad camera. If you want to be famous, you have to be worse at something than everyone else in the world! --Miroslav Tichy
After studying at the Academy of Arts in Prague, Miroslav Tichy, born in 1926 in the former Czechoslovakia, withdrew to a life of isolation in his hometown of Kyjov. In the late 1950s, he stopped painting and, during his daily walks, began to take photographs of women with cameras he made by hand. He mounted his prints on handmade frames and added finishing touches in pencil, shifting from photography to drawing. Disregarding the rules of photography, for four decades Tichy created a large oeuvre of poetic, dreamlike views of female beauty.
A former neighbor, Roman Buxbaum, discovered Tichy's hidden work in the 1980s and has been documenting and collecting it ever since. In 2004, the esteemed international curator Harald Szeemann mounted the first solo exhibition of the nearly 80-year-old artist. That same year, Tichy was given the Rencontres d'Arles Photographie Discovery Award and the Kunsthaus Zurich organized a large retrospective. Solo exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art (MMK) Frankfurt followed in 2008. Tichy does not see his exhibitions, for he no longer leaves his house. This beautifully produced, thorough volume collects the work--perfectly.
Pierre Molinier Monograph
Pierre Molinier is discussed and celebrated for his pioneering photographic explorations of corporeality, gender and sexual hedonism. Yet his work has remained inaccessible to most of those people aware of his name and importance. André Breton staged the only proper solo show enjoyed by Molinier in his fifty year career; upon his death in 1976 his photographs were familiar only to a small circle of erotic art connoisseurs. Many of his pictures have never been exhibited and only 160 prints have been published. This groundbreaking monograph, garnered from the artist's archives, unwraps Molinier's oeuvre and fully reveals his artistic obsessions with sexual pleasure, transvestitism and public notoriety, with over 800 pictures, mostly unpublished, plus documents, manuscripts and letters, a chronology and critical biography, and a text by Jean-Luc Mercié.
William Claxton: Jazzlife
Visions of American jazz: Claxton's photographs of legendary jazz musicians
In 1960, photographer William Claxton and noted German musicologist Joachim Berendt traveled the United States hot on the trail of jazz music. The result of their collaboration was an amazing collection of photographs and recordings of legendary artists as well as unknown street musicians.
The book Jazzlife, the original fruit of their labors, has become a collector’s item that is highly treasured among jazz and photography fans. In 2003, TASCHEN began reassembling this important collection of material— along with many never-before-seen color images from those trips. They are brought together in this updated volume, which includes a foreword by William Claxton tracing his travels with Berendt and his love affair with jazz music in general. Jazz fans will be delighted to be able to take a jazz-trip through time, seeing the music as Claxton and Berendt originally experienced it.
Featuring photographs of Charlie Parker, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Muddy Waters, Gabor Szabo, Dave Brubeck, Stan Getz, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis, Charlie Mingus, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, and many more.