Search results for ""author simon baker""

Life, Death and Everything in Between presents key photographs by Don McCullin. The book aims to be neither a retrospective nor definitive publication, but to present a selection of images valued by McCullin with the benefits of both hindsight and wisdom, encapsulating his prolific, varied and ongoing career. The book opens with McCullin’s documentary photographs made in London in the 1950s, followed by reportage made in conflicts across Europe, Africa, the Middle East and South-East Asia. More recent photographs in the book link the legacy of the Roman Empire in the Mediterranean and the latest, previously unpublished landscapes made near his home in Somerset.

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This is the story of the greatest empire the world has ever known. Simon Baker charts the rise and fall of the world's first superpower, focusing on six momentous turning points that shaped Roman history. Welcome to Rome as you've never seen it before - awesome and splendid, gritty and squalid. From the conquest of the Mediterranean beginning in the third century BC to the destruction of the Roman Empire at the hands of barbarian invaders some seven centuries later, we discover the most critical episodes in Roman history: the spectacular collapse of the 'free' republic, the birth of the age of the 'Caesars', the violent suppression of the strongest rebellion against Roman power, and the bloody civil war that launched Christianity as a world religion. At the heart of this account are the dynamic, complex but flawed characters of some of the most powerful rulers in history: men such as Pompey the Great, Julius Caesar, Augustus, Nero and Constantine. Putting flesh on the bones of these distant, legendary figures, Simon Baker looks beyond the dusty, toga-clad caricatures and explores their real motivations and ambitions, intrigues and rivalries. The superb narrative, full of energy and imagination, is a brilliant distillation of the latest scholarship and a wonderfully evocative account of Ancient Rome.

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In the years between 1930 and 1980, some of the best-known photographers from around the world came to London and made its streets, buildings and communities their subject. For some, the British capital was to become home; for others it remained a foreign city, as enigmatic perhaps as any they had visited. Each brought their own distinctive perspective,subverting or perpetuating national stereotypes, seeking out the typical or the exotic, attempting to penetrate the fabled British reserve with their lens. Together their work creates a portrait of a great world city, changing and mutating, a restless and fascinating muse. This remarkable book, accompanying a major exhibition at Tate Britain in London's Olympic year, demonstrates the breadth and variety of the responses London provoked from visiting photographers during the period, from portraits to reportage, from social realism to whimsy and humour, the changes in their technique and attitude demonstrating developments in photography itself. Essays by selected critics will address both the photographers' contributions and the history of London. Artists represented feature some of the greatest names in twentieth century photography, including Eve Arnold, Dorothy Bohm, Bill Brandt, Henri-Cartier Bresson, Bruce Davidson, Elliot Erwitt, Robert Frank, Leonard Freed, Emil Hoppe,Inge Morath, Dora Maar, Irving Penn, Willy Ronis and Al Vandenberg.

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As featured in The Guardian, Wall Street Journal and The Sunday Times An expansive and timely survey on contemporary British photographer and artist Nick Waplington, with work spanning his entire 40-year career – his first comprehensive retrospective volume London- and New York-based artist Nick Waplington uses photography to capture the complex and far-reaching aspects of our lived experience. He rose to prominence in the early 1990s with Living Room and has since become known for his unfiltered depictions of people and places, and the sociopolitical backgrounds that define them. From the chaos, violence, and euphoria of riots, protests, and free parties to the surreal, hypnotic quiet of his large-format landscapes, Waplington’s work (in all its messy humanness) transcends stereotypes and confounds expectations, and this book is no exception. Including never-before-published images, offering new insight into both well- and lesser-known projects, as well as Waplington’s painting and artistic practice, the book opens with a newly commissioned introduction from Simon Baker, one of the leading curators of contemporary photography in Europe and director of the Maison Européenne de la photographie (MEP), Paris. This is the most extensive survey of Waplington's work to date, and includes previously unpublished photographs, as well as paintings, sketchbooks, and other artworks that complement his practice.

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The book examines three distinct strands of photographic practice: the documentation of performance works, by artists such as Yves Klein, Yayoi Kusama and Merce Cunningham; how performers and photographers have worked collaboratively, such as Nadar and the mime artist Charles Deburau, or Eikoh Hosoe and the choreographer Tatsumi Hijikata; and the work of photographers who have a strong performative element to their practice, such as Charles Ray, Boris Mikhailov and Erwin Wurm. It further explores the construction of self-identity in the work of artists such as Samuel Fosso, Lee Friedlander, Tomoko Sawada, Cindy Sherman and Andy Warhol, as well as the playful, innovative approaches to portraiture adopted by Keith Arnatt and Masahisa Fukase. The result is a fascinating new insight into the ways in which we think about the role of photography in performance art, and of performance within photographic practice. In his introductory essay, Simon Baker provides an insightful overview of the inter-relationship between performance and photography, while a further text examines how performance photography has been used as a tool to explore subjectivity and identity. The work of photography duo Harry Shunk and Janos Kender, who documented a number of the most exciting and important performances of the 1960s and 1970s, is also discussed. With around 300 illustrations of more than ninety key bodies of work, this is the definitive publication on photography and performance, two of the most popular and intriguing art forms of our time.

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How photographers from Nan Goldin to Leigh Ledare have portrayed intimacy and eros between themselves and their subjects Love Songs brings together series dating from 1952 to 2022 by established and emerging contemporary photographers that explore love, desire and intimacy in all their complex and contradictory ways. Among the major series reproduced here are Nan Goldin’s seminal 1986 photobook The Ballad of Sexual Dependency; Nobuyoshi Araki’s Sentimental Journey (1969) and Winter Journey (1989–90), which present the beginning and end of the relationship with his wife Yoko, from their honeymoon to her death; RongRong&inri’s tender and poetical Polaroid series Personal Letters (2000); and Leigh Ledare’s Double Bind (2010), a complex account of a love triangle between himself, his ex-wife and her new husband. These and the other series in Love Songs together make a portrait of love in all its risk, complexity, sensuality and tenderness. Photographers include: Nobuyoshi Araki, Motoyuki Daifu, Nan Goldin, Emmet Gowin, René Groebli, Hervé Guibert, Sheree Hovsepian, Clifford Prince King, Leigh Ledare, Lin Zhipeng, Sally Mann, RongRong&inri, Collier Schorr, Hideka Tonomura and Karla Hiraldo Voleau.

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Mona Kuhn: Works is the first retrospective by one of the most respected and widely exhibited contemporary art photographers of today. Throughout a career spanning more than twenty years, Kuhn’s underlying theme involves humanity’s longing for spiritual interconnectivity. She is renowned for developing close relationships with her subjects, resulting in images of remarkable intimacy. Kuhn employs a range of playful visual strategies that reveal glimpses into the psyche as it is expressed through the human form, ultimately reinterpreting the nude in the canon of contemporary art. This new volume features images from throughout Kuhn’s career, including previously unseen work, and will introduce her distinct aesthetic to a wide, popular audience. Accompanied by insightful texts by Rebecca Morse, Chris Littlewood, Darius Himes and Simon Baker and an interview with Elizabeth Avedon, the reader is provided with insights into Kuhn’s creative process and the ways in which she works with her subjects and settings, and achieves the visual signature of her imagery. Mona Kuhn: Works is an essential volume for anyone with an interest in the human form in contemporary art.With 155 illustrations in colour

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