Showing posts with label Jack Woody. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jack Woody. Show all posts

8.21.2014

GOMORRAH GIRL: Twin Palms Edition

Gomorrah Girl by Valerio Spada
Twin Palms Publishers, Fall 2014

Gomorrah Girl, by Valerio Spada, tells two stories in one: the problems of growing up in a crime-ridden area and the murder of Annalisa Durante, a young woman caught in the crossfire of a Mafia shootout. The stories are brought together through innovative, book-within-a-book design. 

Bound together are Spada’s photographs documenting adolescence in the land of Camorrah (the name for the Mafia in Naples) and pages detailing the police investigation. Twin Palms Publishers will release a new edition early this Fall. Very cool.


Gomorrah Girl by Valerio Spada
Unique hand assembled book with fold-out hard cover case

“In this book there are portraits of girls whose destinies can still change if not the destiny of the area in which they are growing up. Annalisa was one of them. She kept a diary, in which she wrote that Naples was becoming too dangerous to live in and how she was dreaming to escape.” - Valerio Spada

Gomorrah Girl was first released as a self-published edition, with a limited print run and garnered considerable attention. It was selected as the Grand Prize winner for Photography Book Now, 2011. Valerio Spada went on to receive a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in Creative Arts, Photography in 2013.

Gomorrah Girl by Valerio Spada
Twin Palms Publishers: Fall, 2014
9 x 13", casebound. 54-color plates, 78 pages
First Edition, $85
ISBN 978-1-936611-07-2



6.13.2014

SEAN PERRY: Sheila Metzner. Color

Sheila Metzner, Color

Beautiful printing, fine photographs and exquisite publishing. There is a trifecta of mastery at play that make this a unique and desirable title. I am moved by each and believe you will find them worthy of your time.

The Fresson print is a lush, secretive and exclusive process akin to the carbon print, first shared with the French Photographic Society in 1899 by Théodore-Henri Fresson. In the 1950s two of his sons opened a shop in Paris and evolved the process to render color. They continue today with the inventors' grandson and great-grandson now producing these distinctive prints. Rich and tactile with a soft elegant palette, they feature grain and texture that echoes the atmosphere of a pointillist painting.

I am so not kidding when I say rare! It is a proprietary process and only produced for artists in small quantities by this French family. Extraordinarily stable and perhaps the most archival of all color printing processes, they are highly prized by collectors. I have a deep love of these exquisite objects, introduced to me by photography icon Sheila Metzner.

 by Doug Beach

Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1939, Ms. Metzner is an immensely collected artist known for her work featuring Fresson prints. She attended Pratt Institute and began a career in advertising, rising to the first ever female art-director at Doyle Dane Bernbach. She left after the birth of her first child (of five) and continued to make pictures relatively unknown for years. Critical mass arrived as the preeminent curator John Szarkowski (Museum of Modern Art), included one of her images in the notable exhibition "Mirrors and Windows: American Photography since 1960." It would be the catalyst to launch editorial, fashion and commercial clients as well as her work being acquired for significant permanent collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The International Center of Photography and the Museum of Modern Art.

Her retrospective monograph Color, was masterfully produced by Jack Woody in 1991. It covers the first 20 years of her career – a broad range of fashion, still life, portraits and landscape work. It's truly a beautiful title produced by one of my favorite publishers, Twin Palms. The book is 9 by 12 inches with 76 four-color plates over 172 pages. Lush green cloth boards with titles stamped in black on spine and cover. This copy is in near-fine condition, with only the lightest shelf wear to the dust jacket. Binding is tight with crisp and bright pages, no remainder marks and no clippings. Publisher postcard is still tucked inside end-paper and front cover. Likely never read, my guess overstock to a bookstore somewhere. First Edition, First Printing.

Twin Palms Publisher, Jack Woody
Photograph by Duane Michals

The book is on hold at the HPB Parmer location in Austin, Texas until Sunday at close under the name, Mr. Fresson. Originally available at $60.00, I suggest you partake, it is offered exclusively for $5.00 to the first to ask for it at the checkout counter – a sumptuous feast for your senses for a few pennies and pluck.

Internet friends may find copies online. I found a decent list at AbeBooks to survey here. And a signed limited edition is available directly from Twin Palms Publishers.

Until next time – Sean Perry

12.15.2012

2012 HOLIDAY BOOKS: A Few New Favorites I

 Saul Leiter
With Vince Aletti and Margit Erb, and others
Kehrer Verlag; First Edition (2012)
 
"Painter and Photographer Saul Leiter (b. 1923) exhibited alongside abstract expressionists like Willem de Kooning before beginning in the late 1940s to take photographs. Like Robert Frank or Helen Levitt, he found his motifs on the streets of New York, but at the same time was visibly interested in abstraction. Edward Steichen was one of the first to discover Leiter's photography, showing it in the 1950s in two important exhibitions at New York's Museum of Modern Art. This book, published to mark the first major retrospective of Leiter's work anywhere in the world, features his early black and white and color images, his fashion photography, the over painted nudes, as well as his paintings and sketchbooks."


Delpire; First Edition (2012)

"In addition to the 89 photographs published, there are 68 details, 24 pages of sketch and preparatory drawings and a text, Crazy About Christ by Eugenia Parry, who aims to give clues, if not guidelines to his work." Read the books review by Bernard Perrine here + Interview with Joel Peter-Witkin here


 Howard Greenberg: An American Gallery,  
Twenty-Five Years of Photography

"...my 25th Anniversary show and book, “An American Gallery, Twenty-Five Years of Photography” (although published by Lumiere Press in 2007, this Collection is timeless). I labored for a couple of years about the 25th anniversary, I want to do a publication, I want to  do a show, I didn’t know what to do. Part of the problem was I’ve worked with so many photographers and estates and I have so many friends out there that I didn’t feel I could be politically correct. So I just took twenty-five pictures from my own collection and spoke about them and about my involvement in photography." –Read the Interview with Howard Greenberg here
 

 "It’s a document of documents spanning 30 years of time – actually fairly important times with important people in important places – all touched by Vanity Fair." –Jonathan Becker

As one of the great visual storytellers of our time, Becker has worked in an exclusive world of aristocrats, artists, and heads of state most would never observe except through the lens of his Rollei. He’s documented for Vanity Fair HRH The Prince of Wales and Camilla Parker-Bowles at their first public appearance together in Buckingham Palace, "Dr. Death" Jack Kevorkian, China’s outspoken human rights activist Ai Weiwei, the mother of modern dance Martha Graham, as well as countless other fascinating characters from the rarefied worlds of art, literature, politics, pop culture, and society.
Read more in my Interview with Jonathan Becker...



forthcoming from Twin Palms

"John Schabel’s series of photographs depicting anonymous airline passengers effectively captures the curious blend of impersonal efficiency and poignant humanity that pervades the experience of contemporary commercial air travel. Like products on an assembly line, the planes carrying Schabel’s subjects churn down the runway; and with the same regularity the individual passengers emerge, identically framed, from his camera and onto the gallery wall. Interestingly, it is precisely this mechanized process that lays bare the active, but often overlooked, emotional and intellectual relationship between human beings and flight.” — Laura M. Andre
 

Gary Briechle Twin Palms, 2012


The rocky coast of Maine is where Briechle found himself driven to make pictures, using the wet-plate collodion process, of the individuals who constitute his stand-in family. “I've been in Maine close to eight years now and there are some people I've photographed for the entire time. A few have died and I've shot their likenesses tattooed on the chests of those they've left behind.”

 Sailboats and Swans

Michal Chelbin, text by novelist A.M. Homes Twin Palms, 2012


There is nothing easy about it. It is a constructed moment, a scene within a scene, the real within the unreal. They are moments, lunga fermata, suspensions of time in the midst of what might otherwise be unbearable.

The images are about a kind of discomfort—theirs, hers, mine and ours. It is like an old fashioned staring contest—one guy looks at the other and the first one who blinks is the loser, except Michal Chelbin never blinks. Instead she captures with the click of a shutter. Chelbin is always looking, drawing what is hidden to the surface. She captures—we shudder. — A.M. Homes

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12.24.2011

2011 BEST PHOTOGRAPHY BOOKS | Part I

A few of my choices for
The Best Photography Books of 2011
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The Unseen Eye: Photographs from the Unconscious
Aperture, 2011

The Unseen Eye: Photographs from the W.M. Hunt Collection
George Eastman House, Rochester, New York to Feb. 19, 2012

"When I turned 50, I decided my life’s mission would be to promote the pleasure of photography." William Hunt, collector, curator, consultant, writer, teacher... Read La Lettre's Interview with WM. Hunt

"The Unseen Eye: Photographs from the Unconscious presents a wonderfully idiosyncratic and compelling collection of photographs assembled around a particular theme: in each image, the gaze of the subject is averted, the face obscured or the eyes firmly closed. The pictures present a catalog of anti-portraiture, characterized at first glance by what its subjects conceal, not by what the camera reveals. Amassed over the course of thirty years by New York collector W. M. Hunt, the collection includes works by masters such as Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus, Imogen Cunningham, William Klein, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Robert Frank as well as lesser-known artists and vernacular images." –Aperture

Eyewitness. Hungarian Photography in the Twentieth Century
Brassaï, Capa, Kertész, Moholy-Nagy, Munkácsi
Royal Academy Publications, 2011

"At a crucial moment between two world wars, five men changed the face of photojournalism and art photography, and inspired the world. With their groundbreaking shots, Brassaï, Capa, Kertész, Moholy-Nagy, and Munkásci radically redefined photographic practice and theory, ushering in the modern era." Publisher's Description


"The elusive Vivian Maier has left us many clues and a diary of over 100,000 negatives that reflect her time and her place. The quiet observer,the plain spoken no non-sense woman, the obsessive photo taker, the nanny and mysterious legend in the making. There are a lot of good images revealed in these books all leading us to learn a little more from this sphinx like creature" – John A. Bennette, Curator of Maier's first New York exhibition, "Vivian Maier, Photographer," at the Hearst Gallery, New York

In 2011, Aperture released Diane Arbus: A Chronology and newly reissued Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph and Untitled: Diane Arbus on the fortieth anniversary of the original publication.


You and I. Photographs by Ryan McGinley
Twin Palms, 2011

"Following in the footsteps of Allen Ginsberg and his "Snapshot Poetics," McGinley turned his lens on the bodies and pastimes of his Lower East Side milieu, adding another generation to the History of Photography. This work, from the first years of this century, has given way to Ryan’s subjects running through and falling out of otherworldly utopian landscapes, caverns, forests and deserts; worlds away from the Chinatown tenements he still calls home."–Jack Woody, Twin Palms Publisher

Bordeaux Series. Photographs by Mona Kuhn
Steidl, 2011

Working with preeminent photography publisher, Gerhard Steidl, on her newly released Bordeaux Series, Kuhn said, “The thing is, I only have really wonderful things to say about Gerhard. He is indeed a genius of publishing.”–Mona Kuhn

Read Mona Kuhn's Interview



Moby: Destroyed
Damiani, 2011

“When I play music, I’m just exclusively focused on the music. When I’m taking photographs, I’m exclusively focusing on that. There’s not a lot of interdisciplinary stuff going on in my head.”– Moby

Read Moby's Interview

Core Curriculum: Writings on Photography is a collection of essays, reviews and lectures by Tod Papageorge, Photographer and Walker Evans Professor of Photography at the Yale University School of Art. Papageorge discusses with deep critical insight are Eugène Atget, Brassaï, Robert Frank (with Walker Evans), Robert Adams and his close friend Garry Winogrand.

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Sylvia Plachy's Out of the Corner of My Eye: de reojo, Goings On About Town

Although Sylvia Plachy didn't publish a book in 2011, her work remains timeless. Plachy, a Hungarian/American photographer, was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1943. Her family moved to New York City due to the Hungarian Revolution where she met photographer Andre Kertesz. Plachy's photo essays and portraits have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Village Voice, The New Yorker, Granta, Artforum, Fortune, and everywhere else. They have been exhibited in galleries and museums in Berlin, Budapest, Chicago, Minneapolis, New York, Paris and Tokyo. Her book, Self Portrait with Cows Going Home (2005), is a personal history of Central Europe with photographs and text, received a Golden Light Award for Best Book in 2004. In 2009, she received the Dr. Erich Salomon Preis in Berlin for Lifetime Achievement in Photojournalism. This January 2012, Plachy and Jeff Liao will be exhibiting Panoramic Photographs of New York City when The South Street Seaport Museum reopens.

12.17.2011

RYAN McGINLEY: Twin Palms Retrospective

Dash Bombing, 2000. Photograph © Ryan McGinley

Jonas (Glow Falls), 2008. Photograph © Ryan McGinley


"Following in the footsteps of Allen Ginsberg and his Snapshot Poetics, McGinley turned his lens on the bodies and pastimes of his Lower East Side milieu, adding another generation to the History of Photography. This work, from the first years of this century, has given way to Ryan’s subjects running through and falling out of otherworldly utopian landscapes, caverns, forests and deserts; worlds away from the Chinatown tenements he still calls home." – Jack Woody, Twin Palms Publisher


You and I
Published by Twin Palms, 2011

"You and I carefully pieces together a ten-year overview of McGinley's work, resulting in a portrait of a generation. Taking us along on his youthful road trip across America, he incorporates the American landscape with nude figures of friends and acquaintances, perpetually falling from buildings, down waterfalls, out of trees, and over cliffs. McGinley said, "In the beginning, all the stuff was documentary, but after a while, I got bored with waiting for things to happen—for someone to light a Christmas tree on fire or take their clothes off and make love." read more on La Lettre de la Photographie

3.23.2011

MARK MORRISROE (1959-1989): Exhibition

Mark Morrisroe, "Jonathan (Jack Pierson)," 1982, Chromogenic print, 20 x 16 inches (sheet), 15 x 15 inches (image), Courtesy of ClampArt, New York City © Estate of Mark Morrisroe (Ringier Collection), Fotomuseum Winterthur

Mark Morrisroe, "Untitled (Self Portrait)," 1988, Photogram (Unique), 14 x 11 inches, Courtesy of ClampArt, New York City © Estate of Mark Morrisroe (Ringier Collection), Fotomuseum Winterthur

Mark Morrisroe, "Untitled (Jonathan Pierson)," 1978, Polaroid print (Unique), 3.75 x 3.75 inches, Courtesy of ClampArt, New York City © Estate of Mark Morrisroe (Ringier Collection), Fotomuseum Winterthur

Monograph: Mark Morrisroe (Twin Palms Publishers)
Photographs +Text by Mark Morrisroe, 200 plates

"It kills me to look at my old photographs of myself and my friends. We were such beautiful, sexy kids but we always felt bad because we thought we were ugly at the time. It was because we were such outcasts in high school and so unpopular. We believed what other people said. If any one of us could have seen how attractive we really were we might have made something better of our lives. I'm the only guy that I know who wanted to runaway to be a prostitute."– Mark Morrisroe
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Mark Morrisroe studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where he became life long friends with Nan Goldin, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Davis Armstrong and Jack Pierson, now collectively called "The Boston School." He died in 1999.
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Nan Goldin wrote: "Mark was an outlaw on every front-sexually, socially and artistically. He was marked by his dramatic and violent adolescence as a teenage prostitute with a deep distrust and a fierce sense of his uniqueness. I met him in Art School in 1977; he left shit in my mailbox as a gesture of friendship. Limping wildly down the halls in his torn t-shirts, calling himself Mark Dirt, he was Boston's first punk. He developed into a photographer with a completely distinctive artistic vision and signature. Both his pictures of his lovers, close friends, and objects of desire, and his touching still lifes stand as timeless fragments of his life, resonating with sexual longing, loneliness, and loss."

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