Gifts for Movie Buffs

In 1941, Jacob Lawrence, then just 23 years old, made a series of 60 small tempera paintings on the Great Migration, the decades-long mass movement of black Americans from the rural South to the urban North that began in 1915–16. The child of migrant parents, Lawrence worked partly from his own experience and partly from long research in his neighborhood library. The result was an epic narrative of the collective history of his people. Moving from scenes of terror and violence to images of great intimacy, and drawing on film, photography, political cartoons and other sources in popular culture, Lawrence created an innovative format of sequential panels, each image accompanied by a descriptive caption. Within months of its completion, the series entered the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Phillips Memorial Gallery (today The Phillips Collection), Washington, DC, each institution acquiring 30 panels.

The Migration Series is now a landmark in the history of modern art. Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series, now in paperback, grounds Lawrence’s work in the cultural and political debates that shaped his art and demonstrates its relevance for artists and writers today. The series is reproduced in full; short texts accompanying each panel relate them to the history of the Migration and explore Lawrence’s technique and approach. Alongside scholarly essays, the book also includes 11 newly commissioned poems, by Rita Dove, Nikky Finney, Terrance Hayes, Tyehimba Jess, Yusef Komunyakaa, Patricia Spears Jones, Natasha Trethewey, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Crystal Williams and Kevin Young, that respond directly to the series. The distinguished poet Elizabeth Alexander edited and introduces the section.

Leah Dickerman is Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Elsa Smithgall is Curator at The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

Jodi Roberts is Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Elizabeth Alexander is Thomas E. Donnelley Professor of African American Studies and American Studies at Yale University. Her most recent book of poetry is Crave Radiance: New and Selected Poems 1990–2010 (Graywolf Press, 2010).

Rita Dove is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia. She is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1987) and a former United States Poet Laureate (1993–95). Her most recent book of poetry is Sonata Mulattica (W. W. Norton, 2009).

Nikky Finney is John H. Bennett, Jr. Endowed Professor of Creative Writing and Southern Letters, the University of South Carolina. She is a winner of the National Book Award for Poetry for her book Head Off & Split (Triquarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 2011).Terrance Hayes is Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University. He is a MacArthur Fellow (2014) and a winner of the National Book Award for Poetry for his book Lighthead (Penguin, 2010).Tyehimba Jess is Assistant Professor of English at the College of Staten Island in City University of New York. He is a winner of the National Poetry Series for his book leadbelly (Wave Books, 2005).

Yusef Komunyakaa is Global Distinguished Professor of English at New York University. He is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1994). His most recent book of poetry is The Chameleon Couch (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012).

Patricia Spears Jones is a poet based in New York. Her most recent book of poetry is Living in the Love Economy(Overpass Books, 2014).

Natasha Trethewey is Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing, Emory University. She is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (2007) and a former United States Poet Laureate (2012–14). Her most recent book of poetry is Thrall (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012).

Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Cornell University. Her most recent book of poetry is Open Interval (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009).

Crystal Williams is Associate Vice President, Chief Diversity Officer and Professor of English at Bates College. Her most recent book of poetry is Detroit as Barn(Lost Horse Press, 2014).

Kevin Young is Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Previously, he was the Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing and Curator of Literary Collections and Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University. His most recent book of poetry is Book of Hours (Knopf, 2014).

Over the course of its 240 pages, Auto Erotica covers the gamut of motoring in Britain during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s through rare ephemeral booklets full of unusual graphic ideas and concepts. Their fabulous photography, dazzling color charts, daring typography, strange foldouts and inspiring styles symbolize the automobile aspirations of generations of Britons.
Assembled by nostalgia enthusiast Jonny Trunk—author of The Music Library and Own Label—the book is also packed full of era-defining classic cars, from those we love to those we can’t remember. Expect fast Fords, the XJS, the TR8, MGs, Minis, Maxis, Renaults, Beemers, VWs, Vivas, Citroëns, DeLoreans and a whole lot more: amazing motorcars from the past, and even some from the future, as you've never seen them before.
Jonny Trunk is a London-based artist, collector, broadcaster, writer and archivist whose work is centered around nostalgia. In 1995, Trunk founded Trunk Records, specializing in film scores, old advertising jingles, art, sexploitation and kitsch releases. Trunk’s previous publications include Wrapper’s Delight, The Music Library, Own Labeland Wobbly Sounds.

In Joan Didion: What She Means, the writer and curator Hilton Als creates a mosaic that explores Didion's life and work and the feeling each generates in her admirers, detractors and critics.
Arranged chronologically, the book highlights Didion's fascination with the two coasts that made her. As a Westerner transplanted to New York, Didion was able to look at her native land, its mores and fixed rules of behavior, with the loving and critical eyes of a daughter who got out and went back. (Didion and her late husband moved from New York to Los Angeles in 1964, where they worked as highly successful screenwriters, producing scripts for 1971's The Panic in Needle Park and 1976's A Star Is Born, among other works, before returning to New York 20 years later.) And from her New York perch, Didion was able to observe the political scene more closely, writing trenchant pieces about Clinton, El Salvador and most searingly the Central Park Five.

The book includes more than 50 artists ranging from Brice Marden and Ed Ruscha to Betye Saar, Vija Clemins and many others, with works in all mediums including painting, ephemera, photography, sculpture, video and film. Also included are three previously uncollected texts by Didion: “In Praise of Unhung Wreaths and Love” (1969); a much-excerpted 1975 commencement address at UC Riverside; and “The Year of Hoping for Stage Magic” (2007).

American visual artist Marilyn Minter (born 1948) has long cultivated a space between the classical and the commercial for her photorealistic paintings and visceral photographs. Minter’s art is characterized by an emphasis on natural textures in all of their extremes—whether that of the turquoise eyeshadow on a young woman’s face or the glittery grit on the underside of a high-heeled shoe. This monograph dedicated to her recent works presents her 2009 film Green Pink Caviar and a dozen monumental paintings as well as the processes behind such works.
In her most recent painting series, Minter is inspired by classical representations of the female bather as an artistic subject from ancient Greece to early Impressionism. She offers a contemporary version of this figure: her female subjects relax and wash themselves in modern showers, their faces and bodies partially obscured by a film of condensation on the glass separating them from the viewer. In some images the women appear as a mere blur behind the glass; in others, the rivulets of water that course down the glass plane reveal enough to identify a face or body part. The effect is a sensuousness that defies the male voyeuristic gaze seen throughout art history.

Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills, a series of 69 black-and-white photographs created between 1977 and 1980, is widely seen as one of the most original and influential achievements in recent art. Witty, provocative and searching, this lively catalogue of female roles inspired by the movies crystallizes widespread concerns in our culture, examining the ways we shape our personal identities and the role of the mass media in our lives. Sherman began making these pictures in 1977 when she was 23 years old. The first six were an experiment: fan-magazine glimpses into the life (or roles) of an imaginary blond actress, played by Sherman herself. The photographs look like movie stills--or perhaps publicity pix--purporting to catch the blond bombshell in unguarded moments at home. The protagonist is shown preening in the kitchen and lounging in the bedroom. Onto something big, Sherman tried other characters in other roles: the chic starlet at her seaside hideaway, the luscious librarian, the domesticated sex kitten, the hot-blooded woman of the people, the ice-cold sophisticate and a can-can line of other stereotypes. She eventually completed the series in 1980. She stopped, she has explained, when she ran out of clichés.

Other artists had drawn upon popular culture but Sherman's strategy was new. For her the pop-culture image was not a subject (as it had been for Walker Evans) or raw material (as it had been for Andy Warhol) but a whole artistic vocabulary, ready-made. Her film stills look and function just like the real ones--those 8 x 10 glossies designed to lure us into a drama we find all the more compelling because we know it isn't real. In the Untitled Film Stillsthere are no Cleopatras, no ladies on trains, no women of a certain age. There are, of course, no men. The 69 solitary heroines map a particular constellation of fictional femininity that took hold in postwar America--the period of Sherman's youth and the starting point for our contemporary mythology. In finding a form for her own sensibility, Sherman touched a sensitive nerve in the culture at large. Although most of the characters are invented, we sense right away that we already know them. That twinge of instant recognition is what makes the series tick and it arises from Cindy Sherman's uncanny poise. There is no wink at the viewer, no open irony, no camp.

In 1995, The Museum of Modern Art purchased the series from the artist, preserving the work in its entirety. This book marks the first time that the complete series will be published as a unified work, with Sherman herself arranging the pictures in sequence.

Cindy Sherman is a ground-breaking American photographer, born in 1954. She began her "Film Stills" series at the age of 23, gaining early recognition, and has followed it with remarkable experiments in color photography. Her art has won her wide recognition and praise, and been collected and exhibited by major museums throughout the world since 1980. A major retrospective exhibition of her work was shown at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Dallas Museum of Art. Sherman is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. She is represented by Metro Pictures gallery in New York.

For nearly four decades, Spike Lee has made movies that demand our attention. His extensive filmography reflects an unflinching critique of race relations in the United States, from the Student Academy Award®–winning short Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads and the ever-relevant Do the Right Thing to the more recent Oscar®-winning BlacKkKlansman and Da 5 Bloods. A lifelong cinephile and film scholar, Lee draws inspiration from other artists working across a range of eras, genres and global cinemas. He has also devoted much of his career to teaching the next generation of filmmakers.
Spike Lee: Director’s Inspiration presents Lee’s personal collection of original film posters and objects, photographs, artworks and more—many of these inscribed to Lee personally by filmmakers, stars, athletes, activists, musicians and others who have inspired his work in specific ways.
Straight from the walls of Lee’s 40 Acres and a Mule production studio in Brooklyn, his faculty office at NYU and his Martha’s Vineyard home, these objects offer a glimpse into what shapes Lee’s signature filmmaking approach. Spike Lee: Director’s Inspiration also includes a conversation between Lee and Shaka King (Judas and the Black Messiah) and brief texts by some of the many artists Lee himself has inspired.

Covering 30 years of sculptures, paintings, works on paper, large-scale wall drawings, installations and site-specific works, this book presents the art of Gary Simmons, one of the most respected artists of his generation. Since the late 1980s, Simmons has played a key role in situating questions of race, class and gender identity within art discourse. He is notable for combining pop-cultural imagery with conceptual artistic strategies to expose and analyze histories of racism inscribed in US visual culture. Over the course of his career, Simmons has revealed traces of these histories in the fields of sports, cinema, literature, music, and architecture and urbanism while drawing on popular genres such as hip-hop, horror and science fiction. His approach is cool and unflinching in its interrogation of historical and cultural narratives, yet the results consistently deliver a strong emotional charge. This publication offers readers the opportunity to gain a holistic understanding of the complex, profoundly moving work of this influential artist.

Gary Simmons was born in 1964 in New York City, where he was raised. Today he lives and works in Los Angeles. He received a BFA in 1988 from the School of Visual Arts, New York, and an MFA in 1990 from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia; he also studied at Hunter College, New York. He has received numerous awards, including the Studio Museum in Harlem Joyce Alexander Wein Prize (2013), the George Gund Foundation USA Gund Fellowship (2007) and the National Endowment for the Arts Interarts Grant (1990).

Corita Kent, formerly Sister Mary Corita, is known for her exuberant, colorful serigraphs and her teaching, as evidenced in her lively art classes. As a Catholic nun from 1936 until 1968, Corita lived and worked in the Immaculate Heart of Mary community in Los Angeles. She taught lettering and layout, image finding, and art structure for 20 years in Immaculate Heart College’s art department. There, she screened multiple films simultaneously, hosted guest thinkers including Saul Bass, Buckminster Fuller and John Cage, and guided the making of large-scale collaborative projects with students. Corita regularly took her students out for looking sessions at a used car lot or an art exhibition. While constantly looking and discovering visually,

Corita shot thousands of 35 mm slides documenting references, the IHC milieu and the art department processes. For Corita, the vernacular environs of advertising, supermarkets and the city’s media landscape were a source of inspiration and raw material. Her slide collection encompasses a wide range of subjects: cookies, coke bottles, toys, presents, experiments, projects, Mary’s Day celebrations stemming from Corita’s classroom, flowers, magazines, seeds, puppets, visits with Charles and Ray Eames, street signs, trade fairs, folk art, boxes, billboards and kites. Drawing from the Corita Art Center’s vast slide collection, Ordinary Things Will Be Signs for Us embodies Corita’s philosophy of looking.

The first retrospective volume on the photography of the internationally acclaimed Nigerian filmmaker, photographer and music video director Andrew Dosunmu, Monograph looks back at 20 years of previously unpublished and sumptuously colorful portraiture and more, including stills from music videos and the 2022 Netflix film Beauty.

Dosunmu has published his photography with iconic music and fashion magazines such as The Face, Vibe, Fader, Vogue Hommes, Paper and Interview, and has been commissioned by international brands such as Nike and Adidas. Throughout his career, Dosunmu has developed a prolific personal body of work that until now has never been published, though it has been sought after by private collectors and museums. The images compiled in Monograph portray uniquely stylish individuals in Dakar, Mumbai and Cartaghena. United by Dosunmu’s acute instinct for color into a compelling aesthetic vision, these portraits celebrate global culture with tremendous sensuality. The book includes a conversation between Dosunmu and Arthur Jafa.

Andrew Dosunmu is a Nigerian photographer and filmmaker who came to prominence in the US with music videos for various acclaimed artists. He is the director of Hot Irons, Restless City, Mother of George, Where Is Kyra? and Beauty, all of which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Dosunmu lives between New York City and Lagos, Nigeria.

In the 1990s, queer youth, outcasts and artists flocked to San Francisco to experiment with art, self-expression, style and gender and to find community. Rent was affordable, paving the way for queer bars, clubs, tattoo shops, galleries, cafés, bookstores and women-owned businesses to emerge. A new wave of feminism embraced gender fluidity, and butch/femme culture flourished. The Mission district was the center of this queer cultural renaissance, and the feeling of community there was palpable.
Chloe Sherman was both a member of this community and an ardent visual chronicler.

Her documentary photographic work on 35mm film stems from a commitment to capturing the vibrancy, tenderness, individuality, resilience and joy within this subculture that was derided by mainstream society. Distilling the spirit of the time, her debut monograph is a candid portrait of a vibrant era that connects current and future generations to the pulse of San Francisco at a pivotal chapter in queer history.

Chloe Sherman (born 1969) arrived in San Francisco in 1991 and earned her BFA in Photography at the San Francisco Art Institute. Her work has been exhibited internationally and featured in magazines such as Rolling Stone and Interview.

Known for pushing the boundaries of good taste, John Waters (born 1946) has created a canon of high-shock-value, high-entertainment movies that have cemented his position as one of the most revered and subversive auteurs in American independent cinema. Featuring misfit muses, tributes to his hometown of Baltimore and themes of fetish, obsession and celebrity culture, his renegade films—including Pink Flamingos (1972), Female Trouble (1974), Desperate Living (1977), Hairspray (1988), Serial Mom (1994) and A Dirty Shame (2004)—are irreverent, laugh-out-loud comedies that lovingly draw inspiration from William Castle, Herschell Gordon Lewis, Russ Meyer, Andy Warhol and Pier Paolo Pasolini alike. 

John Waters: Pope of Trash accompanies a landmark exhibition at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, the first dedicated solely to Waters’ films. The book presents costumes, props, handwritten scripts, concept drawings, correspondence, promotional gimmicks, production photography and other original materials from all of the filmmaker’s features and shorts. Spotlighting many of his longtime collaborators, it also features a new interview with Waters and texts by curators Jenny He and Dara Jaffe, film historian Jeanine Basinger, film critic and cultural theorist B. Ruby Rich, and author-writer-producer David Simon that explore how Waters’ movies have redefined the possibilities of independent cinema.

Known around the world for his powerful art and activism, Ai Weiwei (born 1957) does not differentiate between disciplines: his practice glides across art, architecture, design, film, collecting and curating. Richly illustrated with over 200 images, Ai Weiwei: Making Sense is the first major publication to present Ai’s work as a commentary on design and what it reveals about our changing values. It presents a selection of Ai’s collected objects, from ancient stone axe heads to porcelain teapot spouts, from Neolithic tools to modern mass-produced products, as well as new works created specifically for the Design Museum.

These collections draw from the artist’s fascination with historical Chinese artifacts, placing their craftsmanship in dialogue with China’s more recent history of demolition and urban development. Also featured are essays by leading experts covering dominant themes in Ai’s work, such as craft, collecting and the urbanization and industrialization of China. It concludes with an interview between renowned British Israeli architect Eyal Weizman and Ai himself.

From 2011 to 2015, Brooklyn-based photographer Ash Kolodner (born 1987) traveled across the United States photographing hundreds of LGBTQ+ individuals of all ages. They made two consecutive portraits of each of their subjects, photographing them twice during the same sitting: once with eyes closed and then with eyes open. These diptychs symbolize the vulnerability many have felt at the outset of discovering their personal identities, and then the realization and self-actualization manifest in the intimate and profound process of coming out.

Through more than 180 color portraits, along with subject interviews and contributing texts by filmmaker Kimberly Peirce and Tony award-winning producer Jordan Roth, and icon and performer, RuPaul, Gayface reflects the beauty, intimacy and sometimes the pain of a community kept in the shadows for decades. Ultimately these pictures and this handsome volume represent a revelatory statement on the profound humanity we all share.

Niki de Saint Phalle’s sensual Nanas—colorful, buxom female figures—laid the foundation for her international success beyond the art world. But the self-taught artist’s creative spectrum is much broader, and her unconventional oeuvre—ranging from painting and drawing to assemblages, performances, theater, film and architecture—is more subversive and critical of society than is widely assumed. Based in part on her efforts to process her own experiences, Saint Phalle addressed social and political issues, critically questioning institutions and role models in ways that are as relevant today as they have ever been. This publication sheds new light on the artist’s exceptional personality and uncovers an oeuvre that is always surprising and eccentric, emotional, dark and brutal, humorous and cheerful.

The first comprehensive book on the surreal, queer and humorous photographic art of Jimmy DeSana, a central figure in New York's art and music scenes of the 1970s and '80s

 This is the first overview of the work of Jimmy DeSana, a pioneering yet underrecognized figure in New York's downtown art, music and film scenes during the 1970s and 1980s. The book situates DeSana's work and life within the countercultural and queer contexts in the American South as well as New York, through his involvement in mail art, punk and No Wave music and film, and artist collectives and publications.

 DeSana's first major project was 101 Nudes, made in Atlanta during the city's gay liberation movement. After moving to New York in 1973, DeSana became immersed in queer networks, collaborating with General Idea and Ray Johnson on zines and mail art, and documenting the genderqueer street performances of Stephen Varble.
By the mid-1970s, DeSana was a fixture in New York's No Wave music and film scenes, serving as portraitist for much of the period's central figures and producing album covers for Talking Heads, James Chance and others. His book Submission, made with William S. Burroughs, humorously staged scenes out of a S&M manual that explored the body as object and the performance of desire. DeSana was also an early adopter of color photography, creating his best-known series, Suburban, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This body of work explores relationships between gender, sexuality and consumer capitalism in often humorous, surreal ways. After DeSana became sick as a result of contracting HIV, he turned to abstraction, using experimental photographic techniques to continue to push against photographic norms.

Life Meets Art presents an unparalleled, global, behind-the-scenes tour through 250 beautiful interiors from the homes of the most creative people in art, architecture, design, fashion, literature, music, film and theatre.

These inspiring, unique spaces show us the spaces where the greatest creatives in history lived their lives, honed their crafts and, in many cases, produced some of the world's most celebrated masterpieces - providing an intimate and insightful perspective on the masters that define artistic history. Organized alphabetically by artist, each interior features a color photograph and a short descriptive text, including details on whether the house is open to the public or private.

This book will inspire everyone fascinated by stylish living, creative interior design, and the myriad possibilities for home décor, as well as those fascinated by the personal and professional lives of their cultural heroes.

Life Meets Art includes homes from creative masters of past centuries such as artists da Vinci, Raphael and Rubens, composers Handel, Lizst, and Verdi and writers Dickens, Byron, and Coleridge. The book also showcases the extraordinary interiors of many twentieth century stars and epoch-defining talents such as architects Frank Lloyd Wright, Eileen Gray, Le Corbusier, and Walter Gropius, artists Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, and Henry Moore, writers Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Agatha Christie and musicians Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, and Elvis Presley.

Homes from some of the most celebrated talents of today are also featured, including artists Francisco Clemente, Cornelia Parker, and Gilbert and George, fashion designers Alexander McQueen, Marc Jacobs, and Diane von Furstenberg, designers Marc Newson and Es Devlin and musicians Moby, Jimmy Page, and David Bowie.

Specifications:

• Format: Hardback
• Size: 290 × 250 mm (11 3/8 × 9 7/8 in)
• Pages: 304 pp
• Illustrations: 275 illustrations

Dior as designer, collector and art dealer: a panoramic exploration of the legendary designer’s world

This volume features around 120 haute couture designs by Christian Dior from the collections of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs and the House of Dior—including archival runway prototype and custom garments—showcased alongside fashion photography, film stills, vintage perfume, cosmetics and original sketches, Dior’s furniture and other decorative pieces that demonstrate the designer’s passion for collecting and his time as an art dealer.
The items reproduced here thus offer an overview of Dior’s life and character, as well as his haute couture creations since 1947, always the epitome of modern elegance, with the selection taking as its unifying thread the fabric of dreams and the passing on of an aesthetic vision.
Christian Dior was born in Granville, a seaside town on the coast of Normandy, France, in 1904. While his family had hoped that he would become a diplomat, Dior preferred art. His preternatural talent resulted in him being hired by Robert Piquet in 1937, and he subsequently worked alongside Pierre Balmain and Lucien Lelong. Dior was an instant sensation after the Second World War. His designs, which asserted femininity, were a strong rebuke to the utilitarian, unisex clothing of wartime Europe, and came to symbolize the “New Look.” Since his untimely death in 1957, an exceptional series of creative directors have imprinted their own style upon the iconic brand

A Wall Street Journal 2021 holiday gift guide pick

American photographer Ruth Orkin earned acclaim for her work as she combined her love for travel and her experience growing up in Hollywood into a practice that captured the cinematic elements of everyday life and revealed the humanity of the upper crust.
The atmospheric photographs taken by Orkin in cities such as Florence, New York and London still shape the image of these metropolises today: her street scenes consistently offer penetrating insights into the personality of her human subjects as well as their environments. This unique quality also manifests in her celebrity portraits of figures such as Albert Einstein, Marlon Brando, Tennessee Williams and Lauren Bacall: though clearly posed, these photographs offer a certain level of candor that allows the viewer to connect with the sitters on a human level. She also pursued filmmaking with two successful features, Little Fugitive (1953) and Lovers and Lollipops (1955)—and she did all of this as one of the few female practitioners in the field.
Published on the occasion of what would have been the photographer’s 100th birthday, this illustrated volume celebrates Orkin’s life and career with an equally extensive and fascinating overview of this exceptional artist's oeuvre.
Ruth Orkin (1921–85) studied at Los Angeles City College. Working as a freelance photographer, she published in magazines such as Life, Look and Ladies' Home Journal. She was awarded an Oscar for the film Little Fugitive, which she made with her husband in 1953. A World Through My Window(1978) is her best-known book of photographs.

By 1944, Gordon Parks had established himself as a photographer who freely navigated the fields of press and commercial photography, with an unparalleled humanist perspective. That year, Roy Stryker—the former Farm Security Administration official who was now heading the public relations department for the Standard Oil Company (New Jersey)—commissioned Parks to travel to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to document the Penola, Inc. Grease Plant.
Employing his signature style, Parks spent two years chronicling the plant’s industry—critical to Pittsburgh’s history and character—by photographing its workers. The resulting photographs, dramatically staged and lit and striking in their composition, showed the range of activities engaged in by Black and white workers, divided as they were by roles, race and class. The images were used as marketing materials and made available to local and national newspapers, as well as corporate magazines and newsletters. However, they served as much more than documentation of industry, enduring as an exploration of labor and its social and economic ramifications in World War II America by one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.
Featuring more than 100 photographs, many previously unpublished, this is the first book to focus exclusively on Parks’ photographs for the Standard Oil Company, illuminating an important chapter in his career prior to his landmark career as a staff photographer for Life.
Gordon Parks was born into poverty and segregation in Fort Scott, Kansas, in 1912. He worked as a brothel pianist and railcar porter, among other jobs, before buying a camera at a pawnshop, training himself and becoming a photographer. In addition to his tenures photographing for the FSA (1941–45) and Life magazine (1948–72), Parks evolved into a modern-day Renaissance man, finding success as a film director, writer and composer. He died in 2006.

The French New Wave of the 1950s and 1960s is one of the most important movements in the history of film. Its fresh energy and vision changed the cinematic landscape, and its style has had a seminal impact on pop culture. The poster artists tasked with selling these Nouvelle Vague films to the masses—in France and internationally—helped to create this style, and in so doing found themselves at the forefront of a revolution in art, graphic design and photography.

French New Wave: A Revolution in Design celebrates explosive and groundbreaking poster art that accompanied French New Wave films like The 400 Blows (1959), Jules and Jim (1962) and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964). Featuring posters from over 20 countries, the imagery is accompanied by biographies of more than 100 artists, photographers and designers involved—the first time many of those responsible for promoting and portraying this movement have been properly recognized.

This publication spotlights the poster designers who defined the look of the French New Wave. Artists presented in this volume include Jean-Michel Folon, Boris Grinsson, Waldemar Swierzy, Christian Broutin, Tomasz Ruminski, Hans Hillman, Georges Allard, René Ferracci, Bruno Rehak, Zdenek Ziegler, Miroslav Vystrcil, Peter Strausfeld, Maciej Hibner, Andrzej Krajewski, Maciej Zbikowski, Josef Vylet’al, Sandro Simeoni, Averardo Ciriello, Marcello Colizzi and many more.

The iconic black-and-white photographs of Hamburg-born photographer Frank Habicht (born 1938) reflect the spirit of the Swinging Sixties in London. In the 1960s, the conservative postwar years in England gave way to a period of upheaval, with a younger generation dreaming of an unconstrained life, one full of free love, peace and harmony. On the streets of the British capital, Habicht began photographing the profound social and political changes that were underway.

Habicht, who has lived in New Zealand since 1981, has produced photographs for many international magazines and newspapers, such as the Guardian, Die Welt, Camera Magazine and Twen. His photographs were recently exhibited at the Barbican in London, and he has made portraits of music and film greats such as Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones, Jane Birkin, Christopher Lee and Vanessa Redgrave.

Frank Habicht: As It Was collects Habicht’s photos from the 1960s in an opulent book. A unique collection of images of the swinging, groovy, hippie and psychedelic ‘60s in London, it offers an eye-opening contribution to the history of a country that is currently undergoing yet more social transformation.

Andy Warhol’s 1966 movie The Chelsea Girls is the iconic document of the Factory scene and 1960s New York. Filmed in part at the Chelsea Hotel with Factory Superstars like Nico, Ondine, Brigid Berlin, Gerard Malanga and Mary Woronov, The Chelsea Girls was Warhol’s first commercially successful film. “In one film alone,” an early reviewer noted, “[Warhol] has sadism, masochism, whipping, transvestites, homos, prostitutes, a homosexual ‘Pope,’ boredom, stunningly beautiful girls, depravity, humor, ‘psychedelics,’ truth, honesty, liars, poseurs....” In honor of the 24th anniversary of The Andy Warhol Museum, the publication of Andy Warhol’s The Chelsea Girls coincides with a major project undertaken by the museum to digitize hundreds of his well-known and never-before-seen films.

The book is an in-depth, deluxe treatment of the film, featuring stills from the newly digitized film, previously unpublished transcripts and archival materials, and expanded information about each of the individual films that comprise The Chelsea Girls. The film’s alternation of sound between the left and right screens is recalled in the publication’s design in which the transcripts are printed directly beneath the corresponding imagery to evoke an authentic experience of the film. Also included are previously unpublished transcriptions of unheard reels. Andy Warhol’s The Chelsea Girls is a beautifully produced document of a legendary movie and a mythic moment.

A visual tribute to Agnès Varda’s three lives as a photographer, filmmaker and artist, with previously unseen archival materials, texts and personal reflections from Jane Birkin, Martin Scorsese, JR and more

The Art of Film Projection: A Beginner's Guide is a beautifully produced, comprehensive outline of the materials, equipment and knowledge needed to present the magic of cinema to an enthralled audience.

Part manual and part manifesto, The Art of Film Projection compiles more than 50 years of expertise from the staff of the world-renowned George Eastman Museum and the students of the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation into the most complete and accessible guide to film projection ever produced. The product of more than ten years of painstaking work by renowned film preservation specialists, and featuring a foreword by Tacita Dean and Christopher Nolan, this volume addresses a changing film landscape.