art + photo books ❤️

Andrew Cranston – Never a Joiner

Andrew Cranston · 2023

Face Time

Phillip Prodger · 2021

The Thames & Hudson Dictionary of Photography

Nathalie Herschdorfer

A World History of Women Photographers

Luce Lebart, Marie Robert · 2022

On Photography

Susan Sontag · 2010

How do we see the world around us? "The Penguin on Design" series includes the works of creative thinkers whose writings on art, design and the media have changed our vision forever. Susan Sontag's groundbreaking critique of photography asks forceful questions about the moral and aesthetic issues surrounding this art form. Photographs are everywhere. They have the power to shock, idealize or seduce, they create a sense of nostalgia and act as a memorial, and they can be used as evidence against us or to identify us. In six incisive essays, Sontag examines the ways in which we use these omnipresent images to manufacture a sense of reality and authority in our lives.

Saul Leiter: In My Room

· 2018

Playing To the Gallery

Grayson Perry · 2014

Cecily Brown (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

Francine Prose, Courtney J. Martin, Jason Rosenfeld · 2020

Sophie Calle: And so Forth

Sophie Calle · 2016

Sophie Calle: Did You See Me?

Christine Macel, Yve-Alain Bois, Olivier Rolin · 2004

This comprehensive retrospective of Sophie Calle not only celebrates the breadth of her iconoclastic work but also leads to a deeper understanding of her unique artistic vision. The work of conceptual artist Sophie Calle embraces numerous media: photography, storytelling, film, and memoir, to name a few. Often controversial, Calle's projects explore issues of voyeurism, intimacy, and identity as she secretly investigates, reconstructs and documents the lives of strangers - whether she is inviting them to sleep in her bed, trailing them through a hotel, or following them through the city. Taking on multiple roles - detective, documentarian, behavioral scientist and diarist - Calle turns the interplay between life and art on its head. The book presents Calle's best-known works, including "The Blind", "No Sex Last Night", "The Hotel", "The Address Book" and "A Woman Vanishes", as well as lesser known and earlier projects that have largely escaped the public eye. The book also includes diary excerpts and video stills, along with three critical essays, a revealing interview with the artist and a dialogue with fellow artist Damien Hirst.

Nan Goldin: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency

· 2012

First published in 1986, Nan Goldin's <i>The Ballad of Sexual Dependency</i> is a visual diary chronicling the struggles for intimacy and understanding among the friends and lovers whom Goldin describes as her tribe. These photographs described a lifestyle that was visceral, charged and seething with a raw appetite for living, and the book soon became the swan song for an era that reached its peak in the early 1980s. Twenty-five years later, Goldin's lush color photography and candid style still demand that the viewer encounter their profound intensity head-on. As she writes: Real memory, which these pictures trigger, is an invocation of the color, smell, sound and physical presence, the density and flavor of life. Through an accurate and detailed record of Goldin's life, <i>The Ballad of Sexual Dependency</i> records a personal odyssey as well as a more universal understanding of the different languages men and women speak. The book's influence on photography and other aesthetic realms has continued to grow, making it a classic of contemporary photography. This anniversary edition features all-new image separations produced using state-of-the-art technologies and specially prepared reproduction files, which offer a lush, immersive experience of this touchstone monograph.

The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

Olivia Laing · 2017

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism<br/><br/>#1 Book of the Year from Brain Pickings<br/><br/>Named a best book of the year by NPR, Newsweek, Slate, Pop Sugar, Marie Claire, Elle, Publishers Weekly, and Lit Hub<br/><br/>A dazzling work of biography, memoir, and cultural criticism on the subject of loneliness, told through the lives of iconic artists, by the acclaimed author of The Trip to Echo Spring.<br/><br/>When Olivia Laing moved to New York City in her mid-thirties, she found herself inhabiting loneliness on a daily basis. Increasingly fascinated by the most shameful of experiences, she began to explore the lonely city by way of art. Moving from Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks to Andy Warhol’s Time Capsules, from Henry Darger’s hoarding to David Wojnarowicz’s AIDS activism, Laing conducts an electric, dazzling investigation into what it means to be alone, illuminating not only the causes of loneliness but also how it might be resisted and redeemed.<br/><br/>Humane, provocative, and moving, The Lonely City is a celebration of a strange and lovely state, adrift from the larger continent of human experience, but intrinsic to the very act of being alive.

Art Monsters (paperback) /anglais

ELKIN LAUREN · 2024

<b>'Destined to become a new classic' Chris Kraus <p>A dazzlingly original reassessment of women's stories, bodies and art - and how we think about them.</b> <p>For decades, feminist artists have confronted the problem of how to tell the truth about their experiences as bodies. Queer bodies, sick bodies, racialised bodies, female bodies, what is their language, what are the materials we need to transcribe it? <p>Exploring the ways in which feminist artists have taken up this challenge, <i>Art Monsters </i>is a landmark intervention in how we think about art and the body, calling attention to a radical heritage of feminist work that not only reacts against patriarchy but redefines its own aesthetic aims. <p>Writing in the tradition of Susan Sontag, Hélène Cixous and Maggie Nelson, Lauren Elkin demonstrates her power as a cultural critic, weaving daring links between disparate artists and writers - from Julia Margaret Cameron's photography to Kara Walker's silhouettes, Vanessa Bell's portraits to Eva Hesse's rope sculptures, Carolee Schneemann's body art to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's trilingual masterpiece DICTEE - and shows that their work offers a potent celebration of beauty and excess, sentiment and touch, the personal and the political.

Conceptual Art

Tony Godfrey · 2003

What is art? Must it be a unique, saleable luxury item? Can it be a concept that never takes material form? Or an idea for a work that can be repeated endlessly?<br/>Conceptual art favours a vivid engagement with such questions. It can take many forms: photographs, videos, posters, billboards, charts, plans and, in particular, language itself. Tony Godfrey has written the first ever clear, extensive, concise and informative account of this fascinating phenomenon.

Alex Prager Silver Lake Drive (Paperback) /anglais

PRAGER ALEX · 2022

<p><b>The definitive monograph on Alex Prager, one of the truly original image makers of our time.</b><br> <br> Alex Prager is a photographer and filmmaker whose elaborate sets and complex staging draw on a rich cultural heritage of cinematic style, informed by street photography, to produce work that is unerringly memorable. At once temporal and timeless, bright but shadowed, Prager's images exist within a hyperreal world, deeply rooted in the eerie undertones of Los Angeles, where the line between reality and fiction is blurred.<br> <br> Prager's critically acclaimed work is introduced here, spanning a decade of photographic work and five films. This collection of carefully curated photographs is complemented by an in-depth interview by Nathalie Herschdorfer, director of the Musée des Beaux-Arts Le Locle, Switzerland, and discursive essays by Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Michael Mansfield, executive director of the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Maine, and Clare Grafik, senior curator at The Photographers' Gallery, London.</p>