The Living Theatre.

The Living Theatre. Photographs by Fan Ho. Modernbook, Palo Alto, 2008. 176 pp., 150 duotone illustrations, 9½x11". Signed copies available. Regular edition also available here.

"Award-wining photographer Fan Ho has won 280 awards from international exhibitions and competitions worldwide since 1956. Ho has been elected Fellow of the Photographic Society of America, Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, England; Honorary Member of the Photographic Societies of Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, Brazil, Argentina, Singapore and etc, and was honored with One-Man-Shows in the above countries. Ho’s works can be seen and have been published in many International Photographic Annuals all over the world.

[...]

Fan Ho has written five books, one of them containing all his award-winning prints that is currently a permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco.

[...]

Further, Fan Ho is an accomplished and acclaimed Hong Kong film director. He won the 'Best Film Award' in Banbury International Film Festival in England. Three of his films have received the 'Official Selection' of the International Film Festivals of Cannes, Berlin and San Francisco; and five of his films have been selected in the 'Permanent Collection' of the National Film Archives of Taiwan and Hong Kong. He has also been elected as 'judge' of the Taiwan Golden Horse Film Festival and Hong Kong Oscar Film Award-

It is this diverse cultural background that makes Fan Ho’s creative style so unique, full of lyrical beauty, dramatic power, and poetic grandeur."


About the Limited edition:

"Cloth-bound, 9.5x11 inches, 176 pages, 150 duo-tone plates.

A Limited Edition of 100 copies, signed and numbered, with an 8 x 10 inch print by Fan Ho. The book and matted photograph will be placed in a matching clamshell box.

Also included, a dvd of never before seen short -film, Big City, Little Man directed by Fan Ho in 1963."


PS. Apologies for a few days of no posts, have a horrendous cold.

Paper Astronaut. The Paper Spacecraft Mission Manual.

Paper Astronaut. The Paper Spacecraft Mission Manual. By Juliette Cezzar. Forword by Buzz Aldrin. Rizzoli Publishers, New York, 2009. 208 pp., 120 color and black &white illustrations, 20 projects, 8x10".

"From the creator of Paper Pilot and Paper Captain, Paper Astronaut is a beautifully illustrated voyage into deep space, combining stunning archival photographs and colorful technical drawings with expertly designed die-cut models that readers can actually cut out and assemble.

Published for the fortieth anniversary of the moon landing in 1969 - and introduced by Buzz Aldrin - the book includes histories of twenty feats of aeronautic engineering drawn from half a century of space programs around the world, from Apollo 11 to the Soviet space station Mir and China’s Shenzou 7 capsule, and featuring the most iconic designs of fifty years of space exploration.

Each spacecraft is accompanied by amazing stories, fascinating facts and statistics about the universe around them, and mesmerizing photographs of the vessels in space.

Sixty-four pages of the book are devoted to finely crafted die-cut paper models of the featured rockets, presented with clear instructions for assembly and helpful advice for deploying your galactic fleet."

Paolo Roversi: Studio.

Studio. Photographs by Paolo Roversi. steidldangin, 2009. 120 pp., 57 illustrations., 11½x12½".

" 'Studio' features nearly two decades of Paolo Roversi’s hugely influential studio portraiture.

Within the confines of his Paris studio, Roversi photographs using a 8 x 10 Polaroid format, often allowing the images to fade before fixing them to their substrate. His long exposures at close range harness an aesthetic from the earliest days of studio photography, but with a renewed urgency that wavers somewhere between history and apparition.

Stripped of the usual accoutrements of studio portraiture, Roversi’s subjects push back with a vulnerable intensity that reveals as much of the photographer as of the model. The images collected here function not only as a series of individual portraits, but also as a collective self-portrait of the artist and the place that stands at the center of his work.

First published in 2005 in a limited edition, this new edition of Paolo Roversi’s sumptuous and critically acclaimed book presents this distinctive body of work in an accessible trade edition."

Water Does Not Soak in Rain.

Water Does Not Soak in Rain. Photographs by Atta Kim. Texts by Atta Kim, Jonathan Mill, Richard Vine, interview with the artist by Iris Inhee Moon. Hatje Cantz, 2009. 400 pp., 300 color illustrations, 11x11".

"Water Does Not Soak in Rain surveys 25 years of works from the internationally-acclaimed South Korean photographer Atta Kim.

Since the mid-1980s, Kim (born 1956) has evolved and practiced a singular life-philosophy through a personal synthesis of the teachings of German philosopher Martin Heidegger, Armenian mystic G.I. Gurdjieff and Zen Buddhism.

The works that Kim produced after ten years of formal training in these teachings - which include his series In der-Welt-sein (1991), Deconstruction (1995) and The Museum Project (1995-2002), in which he created a private museum by placing figures in Plexiglas boxes - are described by him as 'byproducts' or expressions of this Weltanschauung.

The guiding motto or aphorism of the On-Air project is simply this: 'all things eventually disappear.' Kim's most recent series compresses 10,000 images of a city into one image, and represents the project's culmination."


See more image from the book here. The On-Air project resulted in a 2006 exhibition at the International Center of Photography, New York.

Daylight Noir.

Daylight Noir. Raymond Chandler’s Imagined City. Photographs by Catherine Corman. Introduction by Catherine Corman. Preface by Jonathan Lethem. Text by Raymond Chandler. Charta, 2009. 128 pp., 54 duotone illustrations, 8½x8½".

"Daylight Noir: Raymond Chandler’s Imagined City comprises photographs of all those ominous, forbidding Los Angeles locations so hauntingly described by Chandler in his novels.

From Malibu Pier to the Hollywood Sign, from Union Station to the Beverly Hills Hotel, from MGM Studios to Musso and Frank’s Grill, these locales form the geography of Chandler’s imagination, and conjure a world not yet entirely vanished.

Clive James wrote of Chandler’s fascination with Los Angeles that 'when he said that it had as much personality as a paper cup, he was saying what he liked about it.' But Chandler was also drawn to the Hopperesque loneliness of the city, to that sense of isolate existences that never merge.


In these photographs, Catherine Corman (editor of Joseph Cornell’s Dreams) has given us, as Jonathan Lethem writes in his preface,'a supremely evocative catalogue of haunted places... these streets and buildings we have erected in order to give order to our solitudes.' "

Hackney Flowers.

Hackney Flowers. Photographs by Stephen Gill. Nobody, London, 2007. Unpaged, 65 color illustraitons, 11¼x8¾". Special edition of 100 copies, signed and numbered with c type print in slip case.

"Stephen Gill has again used his surroundings as the inspiration for this beautiful and evocative series.

Hackney Flowers has evolved from his series and book Hackney Wick. This times Gill has collected flowers, seeds, berries and objects from Hackney, East London, that were then pressed in his studio and re-photographed alongside his own photographs and found ephemera, thus building up multi-layered images extracted from the area.

Some of the base photographs were also buried in Hackney Wick, allowing the subsequent decay to imprint upon the images, stressing this collaboration with place. A parallel series also runs within this finely produced volume, showing members of the public in Hackney with floral details on their person.

This is a warm, poetic and visually exciting book containing images that leave an overwhelming sense of colour, emotion and rhythm extracted from a single borough of London."

An Awesome Book.

An Awesome Book. By Dallas Clayton. Awesome World llc, 2009. 64pp., full colour illustrations, 6x9". Found via Julia Rothman's twitter.

"Based on the simple concept of dreaming big 'An Awesome Book' is the inspiring debut work of Los Angeles writer/artist Dallas Clayton.

Written in the vein of classic tales by Dr. Suess, Shel Silverstein, and Maurice Sendak it is a sure hit for all generations young and old."

You can flick through the book in its' entirety here.

Dallas Clayton has also set up the Awesome World Foundation. "The foundation was formed in an effort to promote children’s literacy by encouraging kids to dream and dream often.

The foundation's goal is to donate one book for every copy of An Awesome Book sold by Awesome World llc. Books are delivered directly and distributed to schools, hospitals, libraries, camps and shelters both domestically and worldwide."

Sarah Moon (photofile series)

Sarah Moon. Photofile. Photographs and text by Sarah Moon. Thames & Hudson, 2009. 144 pp., 72 illustrations, 4¾x7½".

"Sarah Moon is a contemporary photographer of international renown.

A former model, she has taken award-winning photos for such magazines as Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Nova. The images she has created for several brands, among them Chanel, Comme des Garçons and Cacharel, all share her poetic sense of place and personality.

This new book in the acclaimed Photofile series traces and showcases her career from its beginnings in the 1960s to the present day."


Check out the other books in Thames & Hudson's Photofile series.

Mercedes Helnwein in Lula magazine

Stills from short film on Lula magazine's website of artist Mercedes Helnwein preparing for her exhibition 'East of Eden'. Click here and then click on 'Dark Star' to view short film. (Found via Karolina).

"Mercedes Helnwein was born in Vienna, Austria, daughter to renowned painter and art provocateur Gottfried Helnwein. With a deep fascination developing early on in her childhood for both the visual arts as well as literature, she began to dedicate her time equally among the two.

She moved to Ireland with her family, where she spent her teens drawing, writing and listening to the blues. Her influences, which range from Southern Gothic traditions to the cartoons of Robert Crumb, to nineteenth Century Russian literature, American motel culture and the Delta blues, eventually landed her in a style distinctly her own - unsettling, direct and quietly humorous.

In 2000 she added Los Angeles as a second home and officially began her career by contributing some of her drawings to a show hosted by Jason Lee, one of the first to collect her work. Teaming up w/friend and photographer Alex Prager, Mercedes Helnwein continued by exhibiting regularly around L.A. in unorthodox one-night shows, which attracted the attention of the media as well galleries, and lead to her exhibiting her shows 'Last Chapter of Dreaming', “Strange Days” and “Local News” in Berlin, Dublin & New York in 2006 and 2007.

In 2008 Simon and Schuster published her first novel 'The Potential Hazards of Hester Day'."

-- read more here and learn more about Mercedes Helnwein here.

Many voices speak.

Photograph by Tim Walker.

"Many voices speak. Yours like water calls.
Yours is like rain, when through the night it falls.
Softly purls in a fumbling dive,
slowly, hesitantly, torturedly alive.
Trickles and strains, trembling like a ground, towards my skin,
behind every sound, wraps itself softly, closes me in, fills my ears, whispering
memory's refrain.
I don't want to sit silent where I can't come near you.
I want to dwell and live where I can hear you.
Many voices speak.
Through them all I hear only yours like the night rain fall."

Many voices speak by Karin Boye. From 'Karin Boye: Complete Poems'.

El Baño de Frida Kahlo.

El Baño de Frida Kahlo. Photographs by Graciela Iturbide. RM Verlag, 2008. 190 pp., 21 black & white illustrations, 6¾x8¾".

"In 2005, the bathroom of Casa Azul, Frida Kahlo’s private home, was reopened for the first time since her death 51 years ago. On this occasion Graciela Iturbide embarked on a voyage of discovery of the Mexican artist’s private life, documenting the fundamental “witnesses” of her human and artistic career during this week-long “journey”: medical supplies, artificial limbs, corsets, hospital gowns and stuffed animals, a portrait of Stalin and her hot-water bottle.

Often paint-soiled, these objects testify to Frida’s inability to separate her private and artistic lives and to extricate her physical pain from her creative solace.

The fusion of these elements is symbolised by her bathroom, a central place in her life, where she started each day and to which she often returned, using it as the setting for several of her works (including her famous self-portrait in the bath).


The first part of Graciela Iturbide’s project - a colour version with a more documentary slant - has been displayed at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC.

The photographs published in this book are the result of a second “dialogue” between the two Mexican women, which took place in 2006.

In this encounter, the photographer sought to establish intimate contact with the artist, coming face to face with her legend and her identity, which she has documented in 12 black-and-white photographs, ending with a self-portrait in a pose adopted by Frida in one of her famous works."

Paul Caponigro. On Prior Lane: A Firefly's Light: The Cushing Interviews.

Paul Caponigro. On Prior Lane: A Firefly's Light: The Cushing Interviews. Photographs by Paul Caponigro. Lumiere Press, Toronto, 2008. 69 pp., 23 illustrations, 9x7".

"An acclaimed master of the medium, for more than fifty years Paul Caponigro has cultivated an extraordinary artistic vision.

His primary subject matter - landscapes and still lifes - are transformed into metaphysical “equivalents”; the real world, acutely seen and rendered, becomes a transcendental domain.

On Prior Lane: A Firefly's Light is a synthesis of conversation and pictures, a meditation on the source of personal meaning and spiritual discovery."

I Can Read Movies.

I Can Read Movies: a series of imaginary retro paperback book covers for film novelisations. By Mitch, Spacesick. Found via the Telegraph.

"The series features cult movies redone as vintage paperback covers similar to the Penguin book cover art of the 1950s + 60s.

Spacesick was partly inspired by Moss’s Movie Poster Remakes series, and all the musty old textbooks and digests that he used to love flipping through as a kid."

-- from grain edit

These covers are just absolutely sensationally wonderfully done!

There are quite a few more of them over at the Spacesick flickr so go there and threat yourself.

Picasso: Drawing With Light.

Picasso: Drawing With Light. Photographs by Pablo Picasso. Found via designrelated's twitter.

"Pablo Picasso's Flashlight Centaur: LIFE photographer Gjon Mili visited Picasso in 1949.

Mili showed the artist some of his photographs of ice skaters with tiny lights affixed to their skates jumping in the dark - and Picasso's mind began to race.

The series of photographs that follows - Picasso’s light drawings - were made with a small flashlight in a dark room; the images vanished almost as soon as they were created."


Magical, beautiful, and wonderfully inspiring. To see more images from this series of photographs go here.

Cy Twombly: Photographs 1951-2007.

Photographs 1951-2007. Photographs by Cy Twombly. Text by Laszlo Glozer. Schirmer/Mosel, 2009. 264 pp., 182 color illustrations, 9½x12½".

"Printed on matte paper using a dry-print process that imbues them with velvet and almost grainy hue, the photographs of Cy Twombly, best known for his paintings, drawings, and sculpture, are reminiscent of pictorialist fin de siècle photography.

Generating visions by the simplest of means, however, they are utterly contemporary."


About the two Collector's Editions:

"Collector's Edition I is presented in a grey slipcase with a color dry print on cardboard, Studio, Lexington, VA, 2002, printed in 2008. 50 copies plus 10 copies a.p., all prints embossed with the artist's initials 'CT', on the back numbered and stamped 'Fotografia Cy Twombly.'

Collector's Edition II is presented in a red slipcase with a color dry print on cardboard, Unfinished painting, Gaeta, 2006, printed in 2008. 50 copies plus 10 copies a.p., all prints embossed with the artist's initials 'CT', on the back numbered and stamped 'Fotografia Cy Twombly.' "


Shadows and light. Texture. Interesting indeed...

Paris.

Paris. Photographs by William Eggleston. Steidl, 2009. 184 pp., 70 color illustrations and 50 drawings, 8½x11".

"In response to an invitation from the Fondation Cartier, William Eggleston has spent three years working on a major photography project on Paris.

This series of photographs shows the city’s many facets: picturesque and cosmopolitan, sublime and vulgar, humdrum and extraordinary.

Harking back to a long tradition in which grand masters of photography such as Eugène Atget and Henri Cartier-Bresson chose this city as their subject, Eggleston engages in a dialogue with his predecessors via the unique photographic style for which he is well known.

Published on the occasion of his exhibition at the Fondation Cartier, the publication takes the form of a workbook and places his photographs next to the drawings inspired by them. Presented to the public for the first time, these pieces offer a unique insight into the creative process behind Eggleston’s work."

Beautiful beautiful day

Image from Elsa Billgren's blog.

"See the mighty clouds, whose distant lofty tops
proud, shimmering rise, white as white snow!
Calmly they glide on, at last in calm to die below,
slowly dissolving in a shower of cool drops.

Majestic clouds - smiling onward they go straight
through life, through death in brilliant sun,
in ether so clear and pure, dark care unknown,
with quiet and grand contempt for their fate.

Would I were granted, festively proud as those,
to climb where the bustle of worlds does not tread
and bear the sunlight's golden wreath around my head
no matter how angrily round me the storms' roar goes."

Clouds by Karin Boye. From 'Karin Boye: Complete Poems'.

Ed Van Der Elsken: Sweet Life.

Sweet Life. Photographs, text, and layout by Ed Van Der Elsken. Harry Abrams, New York, n.d. (1966). 179 pp. Large square quarto. Clothbound in photo-illustrated dust jacket. Gravure reproductions by Tokyo Gravure Printing. (describes original edition).

"The life of photographer, film-maker, artist and world traveller Ed van der Elsken was closely linked with his work. He did not hide behind the camera but used it to establish direct contact with the people he liked to photograph most: eccentric types in big cities, often down-and-outs.

Nevertheless, his photos are not meant as an indictment against the evils in this world. They should be seen as homage to strong personalities whose attention he deliberately attracted before quickly taking their picture. That is why many of the people he photographed, both in the Netherlands and on his travels abroad, look straight into the lens.

Ed van der Elsken did not regard photography as an autonomous phenomenon but as something that only acquires meaning in relation to other images. He published a large number of photo-books and experimented with slide projections.

The books are characterised by his direct, personal treatment of image, text and layout. All these aspects bear his hallmark: as well as being responsible for the photography he also had a say in the text and graphic design. Moreover, his photo-books demonstrate the style of prints that he developed, with pronounced contrasts, dark skies and a strong emphasis on relevant areas.


Van der Elsken's approach to photography is echoed in the way he tackled his films. Here, too, virtually everything was in his hands - production, direction, camera, editing and commentary.

He started filming in 1955, and it is from that time that an interaction between the two activities can be observed. Because of the way the images are combined, and because of the story and structure, the photo-books have a markedly filmic character.

Conversely, the unconventional editing of his films often gives them the character of a photo-book, with scenes consisting of double pages which when turned unexpectedly reveal surprising new images. This interaction is furthermore demonstrated by the fact that in his films he often picks up the thread of a story which he had previously photographed, and vice versa.


Ed van der Elsken's life and work fall into three periods. His Paris years (1950-1954) are linked with his first wife, Ata Kando, and with his first photo-book, Love on the Left Bank, which was published in 1956 and attracted international attention.

The second period (1955-1970) concentrates on Amsterdam and the many journeys he made alone or with his second wife, Gerda van der Veen. His most important books of this period include Bagara (1958), Jazz (1959) and Sweet Life (1966).

The third period (1971-1990) is closely associated with Edam, his last domicile, and with the rural life he shared with Anneke van der Elsken-Hilhorst. During these years he made a large number of travel reportages for Avenue magazine (1967-1979).

He also took frequent trips to Japan. Among his most important publications of this period are his first photo-book in colour, Eye Love You (1977), Amsterdam! Old photos 1947-1970 (1979), Adventure in the Country (1980), The Discovery of Japan (1988) and the posthumously published Once Upon A Time (1991)."


Read more about Ed Van Der Elsken and see more of his work at Nederlands fotomuseum website.

Ron Arad: No Discipline.

Ron Arad: No Discipline. Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Aug 2 - Oct 19, 2009. Video with Ron Arad (above) from coolhunting. Found via designrelated's twitter.

"Among the most influential designers of our time, Ron Arad (Israeli, b. 1951) stands out for his daredevil curiosity about technology and materials and for the versatile nature of his work.

Trained at the Jerusalem Academy of Art and at London's Architectural Association, Arad has produced an outstanding array of innovative objects over the past twenty-five years, from almost unlimited series of objects to carbon fiber armchairs and polyurethane bottle racks. He has also designed memorable spaces, some plastic and tactile, others ethereal and digital.

This exhibition will be the first major retrospective of Arad's design work in the United States.

Arad relies on the computer and its rapid manufacturing capabilities as much as he relies on the soldering apparatus in his metal workshop. His beautiful furniture can even receive and display SMS and Bluetooth messages from mobile phones and Palm Pilots.

Idiosyncratic and surprising, and also very beautiful, Arad's designs communicate the joy of invention, pleasure and humor, and pride in the display of their technical and constructive skills."


About the video:

"Checking in with Ron Arad during the installation of his MoMA exhibit spanning nearly three decades of work, this video follows the Israeli designer as he leads us on a tour through the show.

Arad explains how his unconventional design practice relates to his radically amorphous forms and to the show's title, 'No Discipline.' "

Echo Test - Mel Kadel.

Echo Test - Mel Kadel. Exhibition at the Fecal Face Dot Gallery, San Francisco. Sept 10 - Oct 10, 2009. (Opening: Thurs Sept 10, 2009 (7-10pm) ). Found via Julia Rothman's twitter.

"Echo Test, a solo exhibition of new pen-and-ink drawings by Los Angeles based artist Mel Kadel.

Kadel is widely recognized for her lively patterned, often humorous scenes depicting tiny people, pushing, pulling, and climbing across the page. Using earth-toned inks on coffee-stained paper, Kadel's figures twist, tug and float in a fictional world governed by its own gravitational rules. Limbs, hair and faces merge to create rich patterns in shades of washed-out blue, gold, brown and red.


Echo Test marks Kadel's first solo show in San Francisco and will include both large and small scale drawings in combination with wall painting, extending the world she depicts on paper onto the gallery walls.

Arranged in non-traditional clusters, her drawings will display as a quilt of images, playing off each other to transform the gallery into quasi- psychedelic mélange of color and pattern.

Works as small as 6"x9" and up to 44"x44" will be available, as well a specially recorded four song EP entitled, 'Stop That Dreaming', by Los Angeles band ((Sounder)) with original cover-art by Mel Kadel. The limited edition of 100 physical copies (signed and numbered Kadel) will be available at the reception and an electronic version will be available for download on Fecalface.com.

Kadel, along with artists Travis Millard and Michael Sieben can be heard singing on the track 'Oh Darkness Looming.' ((sounder)) is the music project of artist/video director Mike Aho.


About Mel Kadel:

Mel Kadel, raised in Pennsylvania, received her B.F.A. from Moore College of Art & Design. After living in New York for several years, she moved to Los Angeles where she now lives and works.

Kadel's work has been exhibited across the country and can be found in the collections of notables such as: Shepard Fairey, Harrison Ford, Sheryl Crow, Mick Fleetwood and Jason Lee."