Search results for ""Steidl""

“I treat the boy down at the post office like the president of Russia, and the president of Russia like the boy down at the post office.” (David Bailey) Eye presents a selection of Bailey’s photographs spanning from 1962 to 2008. Mostly black-and-white, some in color, they feature influential directors, artists, fashion designers and musicians, including Andy Warhol, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Yves Saint Laurent, John Huston and Ellsworth Kelly. Despite the broad cross-section of subjects and the different creative spheres they inhabit, Bailey approaches them all with the same, egalitarian attitude – each is as important, or unimportant, as the next. This approach, often expressed by Bailey’s lack of props and minimal lighting, enables the photographer to tease from his subjects traits which often absent from more formal portraits – the warm benevolence of I.M. Pei for example, the exuberance of John Galliano, or the brooding look of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Crowned with cover art by Damien Hirst, Bailey’s Eye reveals unexpected facets of the creative minds who have defined and in many cases continue to shape the culture in which we live.

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Chuck Close immediately liked the idea of a book without words. As a child, his severe dyslexia stood in the way of reading, making images all the more important. To this day, he remembers a visual encyclopedia from his early years and the feeling of being overtaken by the intensity of its pictures. The idea was also compatible with Close’s ongoing interest in revealing the process of his work, which he accomplishes largely through visual presentation, using very few words, if any. Scribble Book: Self Portrait is a self-portrait that emerges step-by-step out of the printing process, one plate and one color at a time. The viewer follows a series of 9 individual plate proofs along with a corresponding series of 9 progressive proofs. By comparing the plate proofs against the progressive proofs, the viewer may ascertain not only the effect as one color is added to another to create the final 9-color etching, but also the compositional decisions and careful modifications made by Close at each stage of the project.

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Robert Frank’s film One Hour is a single-take of Frank and actor Kevin O’Connor either walking or riding in the back of a mini-van through a few blocks of Manhattan’s Lower East side. Shot between 3:45 and 4:45 pm on 26 July, 1990 the film presents the curious experience of eavesdropping involuntarily on strangers. It appears to be a document of a journey but is also a kind of stream of consciousness retracing the same patterns and spaces. This book is a reprint of a little-known Frank publication first issued by Hanuman Books in 1992, a tiny book, comprising mainly a transcription of the dialogue heard but also two pages of credits: half a dozen production or crew workers and 27 actors. Unravelling the apparent documentary nature of the film, there is also an acknowledgement that the film has a script (by Frank and his assistant, Michal Rovner), that a conversation heard in a diner is written by Mika Moses, and that Peter Orlovsky’s lines (intercepted by Frank roughly halfway through the hour, in front of the Angelika Cinema on Houston Street) are “total improvisation”.

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Paris – A Short Return is the first time that the significant body of photographs which Robert Frank made in Paris in the early 1950s have been brought together in a single book. His visit to Paris in 1951 was his second return to Europe after he had settled in New York City in 1947 and some of the images he made during that visit have become iconic in the history of the medium. The 80 photographs selected by Robert Frank and Ute Eskildsen suggest that Frank’s experience of the “new world” had sharpened his eye for European urbanism. He saw the city’s streets as a stage for human activity and focused particularly on the flower sellers. His work clearly references Atget and invokes the tradition of the flaneur.

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