Books for Film Fanatics

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.

Photographer Joel Meyerowitz (born 1938) began photographing redheads in 1978 against the contrasting blue backdrop of Cape Cod. The portraits from this period are collected in this new edition of Meyerowitz's 1991 photobook Redheads, featuring 16 additional images. After running an ad in the Provincetown Advocate, Meyerowitz began collecting the experiences of people who grew up with red hair, in addition to photographing them. Making up only two or three percent of the world’s population, their stories of schoolyard bullying and self-acceptance illustrate a broader narrative of growth and beauty.
Despite cultural and racial distinctions between redheads, the phenotypic association between the subjects brings a sense of familiality to the collection of portraits.
Meyerowitz describes how red hair and its reaction to light evokes a sense of the color film process. He is known for his transition to color film during a period of resistance to color photography. “My way of making portraits is not by getting down on my hands and knees, nor climbing high on a ladder, nor getting into bed with a celebrity,” Meyerowitz writes, “but simply standing eye to eye with anyone who has found their way to me, young or old. I need only one or two sheets of film and the patience to see it through.” This hardcover edition includes previously unseen portraits.

There has always been a raw immediacy to film posters: provoking and enticing, shocking and seducing audiences across the threshold of the movie theater. The artists tasked with communicating that have been at the forefront of design: groundbreaking visionaries such as Saul Bass and Paul Rand; Eastern European artists using poetic, surreal and often disturbing imagery in highly original and subversive concepts. Other poster artists have woven contemporaneous movements in art and popular culture into their designs, creating a time capsule of the obsessions and concerns of a different era.

Iconic posters for films such as Metropolis, The Man with the Golden Arm, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Goldfinger sit alongside more unexpected and lesser-known artwork for films such as 2001, Star Wars, Taxi Driver and The Birds. Nearly all cinematic movements are included, from early silent masterpieces through German Expressionism, film noir of the 1940s, 1950s science fiction, the psychedelic imagery of the 1960s, the gritty violence and retribution of the 1970s and 1980s, and then onward into the 21st century, where the stripped-back graphics nod back to the Bass minimalism of the 1950s.

An extraordinary visual compendium, 1001 Movie Posters is the final word on movie posters and a must for film lovers and anyone interested in the power of advertising and design.

The artistic polymath behind R.E.M. explores the potency of portraiture

Before his wildly successful foray into music—as frontman of the 1990s international sensation R.E.M.—Michael Stipe was a visual arts student at the University of Georgia in Athens. After the band dissolved in 2011, Stipe returned to his first love: generating illustrations, photography and sculptures. His diaristic photographs are perhaps his best known works, and he has previously published three photobooks with Damiani that largely consisted of portraits.
In this fourth publication, portraiture once again takes focus. This time, however, Stipe articulates the form through a plethora of mediums: including plaster, concrete, rotocast plastics, bookmaking, ceramics, video and darkroom photographic printing. The book privileges process over product, displaying a series of works in progress that continue an exploration of contemporary portraiture, instinct and abstraction. Classical and conceptual forms create a cohesive whole from seemingly disparate elements, culminating in an inclusive and complete vision, in which the familiar and unfamiliar are granted equal grounding. The volume is published in conjunction with Stipe’s solo exhibition of his artwork at the ICA Milano, which opened in December 2023 and will be up through March 2024.
The New York City–based artist Michael Stipe (born 1960) studied photography and painting before leaving school upon the formation of R.E.M. The sensibility that he began to develop during his time as an art student transferred to the spectrum of his work for R.E.M., from art directing all graphic, video and stage designs, to writing, composing and performance, and his iconoclastic personal style.

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).

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.

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.

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 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.