Search results for ""Steidl Publishers""

"Hi, my name is Jimmy," a crow said to the boy, Jim Dine, when his parents took him to the zoo. The two Jimmys got connected by a secret link. "Lots of things scared me when I was a little boy but this scared me and it also...I understood it." The encounter with the bird was perceived by the boy as a mixture of fear, fascination and a deeper understanding of his unconscious world. The artist later transformed his remembrance into a fascinating series of black-and-white photos. Are they symbolic, profound, mystic or just pictures of beloved animals? An everyday unspectacular bird might appear to the beholder as a character of mythology, as a jester at the medieval court, as a strange messenger of a world behind the scenes. Jim Dine speaks to the birds, and the bird answers, because they are on intimate terms.

Read more less

Social and cultural transition is often hard to gauge. New York in the 1980s and the first half of the ’90s was clearly a different place than it is now: the city was more violent, the street stranger, and Times Square still wonderfully sleazy. Andrew Savulich’s subject is this perpetually changing metropolis, and his images are a unique mix of spot news and street photography, capturing crime scenes as well as everyday life. The startling immediacy of the moment prevails in his black-andwhite images on which he provides handwritten captions. What at first seems like objective commentary soon reveals Savulich’s dry ironic tone, at times bordering on black humor.

Read more less

The five comprehensive volumes of The Unknown Abbott present hundreds of unseen and till now unpublished images from the sweep of Berenice Abbott’s seminal career. New York—Early Work contains rare images of New York after the Wall Street Crash of 1929 made by Abbott with a small hand-held camera as sketches for large format photographs. The American Scene showcases photographs from Abbott’s journeys through America in 1933, 1934 and 1935, hardly seen since that time. Deep Woods presents Abbott’s 1943 and 1967 images of the Red River Logging Company in California’s High Sierra Mountains, her first such documentary project. Greenwich Village collects for the first time the spectrum of Abbott’s photographs of Manhattan’s beloved Lower West Side neighborhood, her home when she left Ohio in 1918 and again in the mid-1930s. Finally, U.S. 1, U.S.A., including Abbott’s first experimental work in color, records her ambitious trip down the length of U.S. Route 1 in 1954, a precursor to Robert Frank’s The Americans.

Read more less

Outposts / Kandahar Province presents Donovan Wylie’s photographs of Forward Operating Bases constructed in the Kandahar Province of Afghanistan. From 2006 to 2011, Canada sent nearly 3,000 military personnel to Afghanistan in support of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force. Serving alongside infantry and artillery, military engineers designed a network of outposts throughout the province. Built on natural promontories with multiple lines of sight, these outposts formed a protective visual architecture. They were frequently positioned on defensive locations established during earlier conflicts and represent reincarnations of past histories under new powers. The resulting images are the latest phase in Wylie’s interrogation of the architecture of modern conflict. The work was made on behalf of the Imperial War Museum in London and with generous support from the Bradford Fellowship in Photography.

Read more less

“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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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”.

Read more less