Monday, December 21, 2015

Japanese Photography: The Birth of a Market


http://www.blouinartinfo.com/photo-galleries/the-assessment-japanese-photography


Japanese Photography: The Birth of a Market

Eikoh Hosoe and Yukio Mishima's "Killed by Roses," 1963.
(Courtesy Bauman Rare Books)
“When we first had the Daido Moriyama exhibition in 2004, nobody was interested,” recalls Cologne gallerist Priska Pasquer of the photographer whose most prized bodies of work from the 1960s and ’70s document the seedy streets of the Shinjuku district in Tokyo. “This changed completely in the past decade.”
Moriyama is but one of several postwar Japanese photographers to be rediscovered by Western markets over the last 10 years. Among the others whom Pasquer herself promoted at Paris Photo in the 2000s are Eikoh Hosoe, whose first book, Killed by Roses, 1963, featured Yukio Mishima as model and muse in psychologically fraught erotic imagery; and Shomei Tomatsu, who collaborated with Ken Domon on the photo book Hiroshima–Nagasaki Document 1961, which explored the lingering effects of the atomic bombs. These three, together with Masahisa Fukase, Yutaka Takanashi, Takuma Nakahira, and Kikuji Kawada, rank among the top tier of photographers gaining recognition in Europe and America under the banner of the Provoke movement, named for a short-lived avant-garde magazine many were affiliated with. (Another key Provoke artist, Nobuyoshi Araki, was already familiar in the West, though principally for his later, sexually explicit works.) In the aftermath of World War II, these artists cast aside the dispassionate observations of the documentary tradition and embraced deeply subjective styles, producing images that are jittery and stark, and often expose erotic machinations.

Western collectors’ newfound curiosity about the Provoke artists follows a concerted campaign by a handful of players that demonstrates both how changing tastes alter markets, and how markets can change tastes.
That campaign’s success so far rests on a confluence of trends. By the turn of the century, dealers and auction houses had successfully established a canon of Western photographers, flushed out most troves of their vintage work, and driven prices for it beyond the reach of new collectors. Dealers set out to find new sources of affordable material, and several Europeans looked to Asia. At the same time, the once marginalized field of photography was becoming more entwined with contemporary art, and young collectors who came to the medium through the work of later American artists like Larry Clark and Nan Goldin were primed for the earlier Japanese photographers’ gritty aesthetic, which soon earned the label are, bure, boke (“rough, blurred, out-of-focus”). Dealers were not alone in rediscovering this work. A number of museum curators, eager to explore new material and attracted to these pieces’ affordability, mounted exhibitions that in turn amplified dealers’ efforts to attract and educate collectors.
While both vintage and new prints now claim prices undreamed of by the photographers 15 years ago, they remain relatively affordable. “We are seeing a unique window in which you can buy masterworks for under $10,000 to $20,000,” says London photo dealer Michael Hoppen, whose gallery deals with many of the photographers or their estates, including Fukase, Kawada, and Miyako Ishiuchi. “If you were to look at masterworks by American or European photographers—even late prints by OK photographers—they are going for much more than that.”
Art markets regularly stage rediscoveries of both individual artists and supposedly undervalued movements—witness the recent rise of Gutai. The Provoke story appears to be a success: Endangered works have been brought to light and preserved, institutional validation of their art historical worth has been established, and prices have increased at a measured pace. But before the full impact of the market-driven resurgence is understood, questions remain, ranging from issues of recontextualization to the balance of supply and demand.
The market growth in the West has not been matched in Japan. This may be chalked up to the relatively small size of the country’s photo collector base. Likely, however, the lack of a surge in Japan stems also from collectors there being more attuned to the photographers’ original intentions, which revolved almost exclusively around the creation of photo books.
“Contemporary Japanese photographers have values that seem distinct from those of the photographers of the West,” wrote Shoji Yamagishi, the highly influential editor of Camera Mainichi, in 1974. “They are, for example, not particularly interested in the quality of the finished print.” That attitude reflected the fact that these artists’ primary vehicle, from the late 1950s through the late ’70s, was photo books, sometimes excerpted in magazines like Camera Mainichi and Provoke. The book format encouraged work produced in series, and not infrequently hinting at sequential narratives, while diminishing concern for the individual print. “At the time Moriyama started to work, the edition system didn’t exist,” says Christophe Guye, who began working with the artist seven years ago and also shows younger photographers, such as Kosuke and Kazuna Taguchi, who have been influenced by the Provoke artists. “Moriyama’s photographs were used as printing proofs.”
Yuka Yamaji, senior photo specialist at Phillips London, notes how foreign the single, framed photo was in Japan, and not just among Provoke artists. “The notion of an ‘original print’ was virtually unknown,” she says. “For this reason, original prints from the 1960s and ’70s are very rare and highly sought after. It was only in the 1990s, with the advent of institutional photography collections and regular programs of photography exhibitions, that the Japanese public began to understand photography as prints.”
That institutional support came slowly. Zeit-Foto Salon, the first gallery to specialize in photography in Japan, opened in Tokyo in 1978. But it wasn’t until 1988 that the Kawasaki City Museum in Kanagawa Prefecture became Japan’s first public art museum with a department of photography. It is only since the 1990s that gallerists like Taka Ishii, Sayaka Takahashi, and Tomoka Aya began tracking down the Provoke artists and reorienting them to the contemporary markets, laying the groundwork for the Western dealers who would come in the 2000s seeking material.
Japan’s postwar innovators piqued the interest of American and European curators decades before the dealers took notice. In 1974, Domon and Kawada were among those recognized in the first survey outside the country, “New Japanese Photography,” curated by Yamagishi and John Szarkowski for the Museum of Modern Art in New York. More surveys followed in this first wave, at the Graz Municipal Art Museum in Austria in 1976 and ’77, at Bologna’s Museum of Modern Art in 1978, and at the International Center of Photography in New York in 1979.
By the late ’70s, a younger generation of Japanese photographers who were more attuned to international practices, such as Hiroshi Sugimoto, were emerging. Western curatorial interest waned, though a few prescient institutions like the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) continued to collect work by the earlier artists.
Two decades later, when the recent wave of European dealers first made the trek to Japan, they found what they had been looking for. Hoppen reports encountering a 20th-century trove that appeared “unstripped,” with a demonstrated craftsmanship superior to what he had seen in any other country. “If you could equate it to Europe, it was a bit like going to Paris and being shown 20 Man Rays when you were hoping you might get to see 1,” Hoppen recalls of his first trip, in 2000.
In 2001, New York rare-book dealer Andrew Roth published The Book of 101 Books, an international compilation of important postwar examples of the form that included Moriyama’s third book, Bye, Bye Photography, Dear, 1972. Since then, the Western audience has been receptive to Provoke artworks in their original form, with many important titles experiencing a renaissance as reprints. Scholarship by Martin Parr and Anne Tucker has provided further impetus to consider the work in its original, unframed context.
But a modern art market cannot be built around goods selling for less than $100—the typical price for later reprints of Bye, Bye Photography, Dear. So dealers in the 2000s went looking for more valuable material: publishing proofs, rare vintage prints, and first editions (Bye, Bye Photography, Dear originals have sold for more than $5,000). Through the middle of the decade, they promoted this work to a small but growing audience, garnering assistance with name recognition from the reprint publishers.
Commercial viability was confirmed, and prices for nearly all artists got a solid bump in 2008 and 2009 when photography specialist Yamaji engineered annual Japanese photography sales for Christie’s, her employer at the time. “Distinctly Japanese,” held in London on May 15, 2008, set records for Moriyama’s Smash-up, 1969 (£31,700; $62,000); Yasuhiro Ishimoto’s Machi, 1960/1968 (£6,000; $12,000); Kawada’s Woman of Sankt Pauli, 1969 (£18,500; $36,000) and his seminal photo book Map, 1965 (£16,100; $31,000); and Yutaka Takanashi’s Untitled from the series “Toshi e,” 1968 (£6,875; $13,000).
The following year, in July, the Christie’s London sale “Distinctly Japanese II” registered more high-water marks with Ikko Narahara’s Engraved Arrow, 1972 (£6,250; $10,000) and Young Men, Niida, Akita City, 1952 (£18,750; $31,000) by Ihee Kimura, a postwar photographer not affiliated with Provoke.
In the fall of 2009, market-makers got their next big break in the form of SFMOMA’s exhibition “The Provoke Era: Postwar Japanese Photography,” built entirely from the museum’s collection and featuring Fukase, Hosoe, Moriyama, and Tomatsu, among many others. It was the first of several museum shows that have further galvanized the market over the past six years.
The market, in turn, has played a role in driving the museum exposure through the Provoke material’s relative affordability. Tate Modern, for example, never collected photography before curator Simon Baker joined the institution in 2009, immediately facing the challenge of building the collection from scratch while staying within budget. The attractive price point of the Provoke-era photography as well as access to living photographers who were able to make available complete bodies of work—the museum’s preferred method of collecting—helped make the effort feasible. “We don’t collect things because they are cheaper,” says Baker. “But with the Tate starting its collection very late, there are some things we see that are not viable for a museum—that arguably should have been bought when they were at a reasonable value, or that we should wait for as donations. We really have to think about how we use the resources we have.” Having collected work from a range of Provoke photographers in short order, the museum has in recent years mounted two shows with heavy emphasis on the field: “William Klein+Daido Moriyama” in 2012 and “Conflict, Time, Photography” in 2014. A third, “Performing for the Camera,” opens in February 2016, with work by Hosoe and Fukase, among others.
One Japanese gallerist with ties to many of the movement’s photographers has witnessed the uptick in museum purchases firsthand. “A few years ago,” says Taka Ishii, “American and European curators came to Japan to do research for the international art festivals and exhibition shows, but nowadays the museums are the ones visiting, bringing their patrons in order to collect for their institutions.” Ishii adds that they mainly focus on collecting vintage photographs.
And institutions around the world have expressed interest. M+, the museum of visual culture currently under construction in the West Kowloon Cultural District of Hong Kong, for example, is vacuuming up art from the region, including Japanese photographic prints. “Is Japanese photography more recognized than, say, Japanese painting or Japanese sculpture?” asks Doryun Chong, chief curator at M+. “I think mostly you can say yes. Photography has been incredibly strong in Japan and is a natural area for us to focus on and to include in significant ways in the collection.” So far, the museum has acquired documentary photos from the 1960s (by Kiyoji Otsuji, Noritoshi Hirakawa, Narahara, and Shigeo Anzai), as well as work done by bona fide art photographers like Araki, Moriyama, and Hosoe. Chong also expresses interest in acquiring work by the female Surrealist Toshiko Okanoue.
This season, more curators are staging Provoke-era shows, starting with the J. Paul Getty Museum’s October opening of “Ishiuchi Miyako: Postwar Shadows,” which runs through February 21. “She is worshiped by all the big, bad boys in Tokyo. When you mention her to Araki and Moriyama—these red-blooded Japanese photographers—they go, ‘Oh, yeah, she’s the real deal, we are nothing,’” says Hoppen, who works with Ishiuchi. The dominance of men in the movement was, in part, the impetus for Getty curator Amanda Maddox to organize the show.
October also saw the unveiling at New York’s Japan Society of “For a New World to Come: Experiments in Japanese Art and Photography, 1968–1979,” running through January 10 and featuring the work of Ishiuchi, Moriyama, Tomatsu, and Jiro Takamatsu. And in January 2016, the Albertina in Vienna will debut a show of Provoke photographs curated by Matthew Witkovsky; it moves to the organizing museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, in July.
Ultimately, this raft of shows may play a part in pricing museums out. “The scholarship that is coming forward and turning into curatorial practice has a real impact on the market,” observes Alison Bradley, an independent curator and dealer who helped organize a special sale titled “Provenance: Japan” as a part of Phillips contemporary sales series in New York last month. During the November 10 day sale, Provoke photographers including Fukase, Ishiuchi, Moriyama, and Tomatsu were represented by a total of 13 photos in eight lots.
The next day, a pair of special sales at Christie’s London focused on Japanese art, and work by Araki, Ishiuchi, Moriyama, Rinko Kawauchi, and Asako Narahashi was among the offerings. This past summer Sotheby’s tried opening the market in China with a two-week-long selling exhibition at its S2 gallery space in Hong Kong titled “Shashin! Japanese Photography Then/Now,” which paired young photographers like Mika Ninagawa and Kawauchi with Moriyama, Araki, and Hosoe.
The move by auction houses to capitalize on the current moment has not gone unnoticed by the dealers who toiled for years to build the market. “This is virgin market with no actual control yet, which is why I think all the big auction houses are jumping in,” says Hoppen. The dealer cautions that the rush to bring new material to light may attract those interested in the market potential more than the aesthetics. “I don’t think one should be under the illusion that this is going to be driven purely by taste.”
Despite Hoppen’s concerns, the early dealers themselves have played a role in pushing ever more material to market. Most Provoke photographers are now septuagenarians and octogenarians, but many still living continue to work. Once the vintage output inventory became more difficult to find, some dealers in Japan and the West also started working with the photographers to create modern prints of old work on demand. “There is a great demand for the vintage prints,” says Zurich dealer Guye. “However, collectors can also benefit from the availability of modern prints, as Moriyama’s most iconic images are still available, and modern prints hand-proofed by the artist become vintage prints over time.” Gallerist Pasquer insists that the cultural divide still persists, making modern prints issued in open editions an inevitability. “You cannot work with Japanese photographers with this Western idea of editions,” she says.
There may still be more vintage material if one looks carefully enough. For the past four years, Michele Vitucci of Micheko Galerie in Munich has traveled to Tokyo and Hokkaido in August to spend time with the photography communities there. “There is a huge treasure of photography that risks disappearing,” he reports. “I have seen guys with shoe boxes full of subjective photography; each print would sell for $5,000 to $10,000 at Kicken Gallery in Berlin. They have no concept of saving this stuff, though—some of it is half-eaten by mice. It’s really a shame.”
The lingering uncertainty about the actual amount of vintage material that may ultimately become available, combined with the relatively recent introduction of modern prints, some issued in open editions, may pose the greatest risk to long-term prospects for a Western market for Provoke art. Until the scope of supply is more fully understood, buyers are often left to calculate monetary value in comparison with other photographic material of similar aesthetic value. Where that kind of calculus will lead the market in the long run is hard to know.
But for now, the dealers’ long-term commitment seems to be paying off. Or as Hoppen says, “It’s getting louder and louder—that’s the way I think you could describe it.”   



            

                                                                           

                                                                      



                           




                    Blouin Artinfo

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          Blouin Artinfo

          9 Biggest Art World Scandals of 2015

          9 Biggest Art World Scandals of 2015

          Problematic pavilions at Venice Biennale, Cooper Union's tuition, and more.
          (Illustration by BlouinArtinfo)
          From Kiev to California, conflicts, controversies, and lawsuits — some settled, some ongoing — plagued the sphere of art this year. Here’s a look at 2015’s notable conflagrations.
          1. Cooper Union and the Fate of Free Tuition

          2. USC MFA Class Drops Out
          Yet another art school intrigue dominated headlines this year, when an entire MFA class at the University of Southern California’s Roski School of Art and Design dropped out over an allegedly egregious administrative “bait-and-switch” on tuition funding, as well as curricular concerns. (A faculty exodus in 2014 precipitated the latter issue.) BFA students at Roski have since staged solidarity protests, while the administration scrambled to hire faculty and admit new students to the gutted program.
          3. Tania Bruguera and the Havana Biennial
          The arrest and detention faced by the artist Tania Bruguera for her politically-charged work marred the Havana Biennial and raised serious questions about the Cuban government’s commitments to artistic freedom. At the same time, the Havana Biennial, and an accompanying Cuban art market frenzy, offered a glimpse of what a post-US sanctions Cuban art scene would look like, and underscored positive and negative aspects of the state of artistic production in the country. (See our article on the Havana Biennial, which includes an interview with Bruguera.)
          4. Danh Vo and Bert Kreuk
          Among the more theatrical legal controversies in the (recent) history of contemporary art, the breach-of-contract suit brought by Dutch collector Bert Kreuk against artist Danh Vo in 2013 exploded this year, and gave many art publications the excuse to publish the phrase “SHOVE IT UP YOUR ASS, YOU FAGGOT.” The line is from “The Exorcist,” and was to be prominently featured in the work Vo offered to Kreuk as part of a court ruling mandating that he deliver a “large and impressive” piece for the collector. An acrimonious back-and-forth played out in public between both parties before they reached a settlement earlier this month.
          5. Private Museums and Tax Evasion
          A New York Times article on the tax advantages collectors accrue from warehousing their hoards in “museums” on or proximate to their homes invited scrutiny of some such institutions from the Senate’s finance committee. Whether or not this closer look at private museums and the tax code will amount to anything remains to be seen, but — along with a New York state crackdown on sales-and-use taxes owed on art sales — may yet instill a fear of the taxman in some of the country’s most profligate collectors. (See our interview with Fritz Dietl on his Delaware “freeport.”)
          6. Yves Bouvier and Dmitry Rybolovlev
          A bitter lawsuit sprung from a freeport’s biometric gates reverberated in the art market, with such blue-chip eminences as Larry Gagosian weighing in on a perceived “conflict of interest” that arose from alleged double-dealing by freeport impresario Yves Bouvier. The multi-jurisdiction onslaught brought against Bouvier by the oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev was widely covered this year, and offered a window into the ordinarily secretive world of private art dealing. One improbable beneficiary: Picasso’s stepdaughter, Catherine Hutin-Blay, to whom Rybolovlev gifted a $30 million painting.
          7. Management Shakeups at Italy’s Top Museums
          As part of sweeping culture ministry reforms, 20 major Italian museums, including world-renowned institutions like the Uffizi in Florence and the Borghese in Rome, announced a search for new directors early this year. The move ushered in “a kind of a revolution in the way these museums are going to be administered,” a museum studies scholar told ARTINFO at the time. In August, when the new appointments were announced, it was revealed that foreigners would be leading some of Italy’s most storied institutions for the first time in history.
          8. Problematic Pavilions at the Venice Biennale: Iraq, Iceland, Kenya
          What does it mean when eminent scholars and artists denounce their country’s Venice pavilion for its “neocolonial” vision? Or when Venetian authorities shutter a pavilion over security threats? Or a national pavilion is revealed to be a pay-to-play scheme disavowed at the highest levels of the government it purports to represent? The Iraqi, Icelandic, and Kenyan pavilions, respectively, offered some answers to these questions.
          9. Conflict Prompts Kiev Biennale Cancellation
          Despite the violence that plagued Ukraine this year and last, the Second Kiev Biennale still took place, albeit in an unofficial guise. But first it had to be delayed and then canceled by its government-affiliated sponsors. Citing a force majeure clause — a legal term freeing parties from agreed-upon duties in the event of extenuating external circumstances — the biennial was officially cancelled due to political instability in the country. The revised and unofficial biennial, with funding secured from private donors and foundations by curators Georg Schölhammer and Hedwig Saxenhuber, was announced several months later.



          Top 20 Fashion Exhibitions in 2016

          Blouin Artinfo




          Top 20 Fashion Exhibitions in 2016

          David Hockney, Peter Schlesinger and Maudie James by Cecil Beaton, 1968, Part of the upcoming Vogue 100: A Century of Style at the National Portrait Gallery, London
          (The Condé Nast Publications Ltd.)
          While 2015 will be remembered for the stunning China Through the Looking Glass exhibition at the Met in New York and the queue-around-the-block Savage Beauty exhibition of Alexander McQueen’s creations at the V&A in London, 2016 is already promising to be another year of fabulous fashion exhibitions.
          Futuristic fashion and new technologies will be ‘a l’honneur,’ with a major retrospective of Issey Miyake in Tokyo, and exhibitions of Manus x machina at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and #techstyle at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
          Meanwhile, a major exhibition on 300 years of fashion at les Art Décoratifs in Paris promises to be a must-see, as will retrospectives on Oscar de la Renta and Isaac Mizrahi.
          Click on our slideshow to learn more about these and the rest of our top 20 fashion exhibitions.

                                 
                                



          Vogue 100: A Century of Style, National Portrait Gallery, London
          February 11 through May 22, 2016,
          A major exhibition tracing the breadth and depth of work commissioned by the magazine, providing a unique perspective on cultural changes as they were reflected in its pages. Visitors will be able to view Peter Lindbergh’s famed 1990s cover shots of supermodels, as well as prints from the 1993 Corinne Day editorial featuring an adolescent Kate Moss in her knickers that helped usher in the “grunge” era.



          #techstyle, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
          March 6 through July 10, 2016
          The exhibition draws on the MFA’s collection of contemporary fashion featuring key pieces from innovators such as Alexander McQueen and Iris van Herpen.

          The Work of Issey Miyake, the National Art Center, Tokyo
          March 16 through June 13, 2016
          A major retrospective of the work of the innovative designer who has pushed innovative use of fabrics and techniques. Highlights will include a large section devoted to his Pleats Please creations.
          National Art Center, Tokyo

          Undressed: A brief history of underwear, V&A, London
          April 16 through March 12, 2017
          From the corsets and camisoles, girdles and garters to the latest barely-there nightie, this exhibition will offer more than 200 examples of women’s and men’s underwear investigating how their designs have combined the practical and personal with the sensory and fashionable.
          Manus x machina, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
          May 5 through August 14, 2016
          This exhibition will span more than 200 years of sartorial history and explores the impact of new technology on fashion examining how designers reconciled handmade and machine made in the creation of haute couture and avant-garde ready-to-wear. Also featured will be the latest in new technologies used including 3D printing, laser cutting, thermo shaping, computer modeling, ultrasonic welding, and laminating.
          Antonio Lopez: Future, Funk, Fashion On View, el Museo del Barrio, New York
          May 25 through  September 17, 2016
          The famed fashion illustrator dominated editorials in the 1970s and '80s and this exhibition will feature his drawings, instamatic photographs, and portraits of various fashion world luminaries created in his exploration of race, gender, and the body through fashion.
          Counterculture Now, Somerset House, London
          July 4 through August 29, 2016
          This exhibition will explore how counter culture manifests itself today, charting counter cultural movements through art, clothes, and photography since the start of the new millennium.
          Proust's Duchess, the Museum at FIT, New York
          September 2016 – January 3, 2017
          This exhibition, recently seen in Paris, focuses on the wardrobe of Élisabeth, Comtesse de Greffulhe, the inspiration for Marcel Proust’s character the Duchesse de Guermantes in his novel, In Search of Lost Time.

          The Vulgar, the Barbican
          October 13, 2016 through February, 5 2017
          The exhibition explores notions of vulgarity in the fashions from its early origins to the present day. Renaissance objects will sit alongside pieces of 21st-century couture.



          ... Copenhagen towers get the go ahead


        • PHAIDON


          Steven Holl’s Copenhagen towers get the go ahead

          Work will start on an ambitious harbour project - seven years after Holl got the gig

          Copenhagen Gate by Steven Holl. Image courtesy of Stevenholl.com

          Copenhagen Gate by Steven Holl. Image courtesy of Stevenholl.com

          As the US architect Steven Holl told us last month, it usually takes him eight years to get from an initial design to a completed building. Danish citizens have had to add a few years on to this turnaround time, thanks to the global financial crisis. In 2008, Holl’s Copenhagen Gate won an architectural competition organised by the city's harbour development body. However, the ensuing global downturn scuppered any chance of its construction. Now, building work is planned to start in 2016/17 the architects say.

          Copenhagen Gate by Steven Holl. Image courtesy of Stevenholl.com

          Copenhagen Gate by Steven Holl. Image courtesy of Stevenholl.com

          The plan is for two office towers either side of Copenhagen’s harbour mouth, connected by a walkway. One office tower will stand on the Langelinie site, a berth for ocean ships for decades, “with geometry taken from the site’s shape, and a prow-like public deck thrusting out to the sea horizon”, the team adds. Across the water, the Marmormolen tower has “a main terrace that thrusts out towards the city horizon shaped by a public auditorium below."

          Copenhagen Gate by Steven Holl. Image courtesy of Stevenholl.com

          Copenhagen Gate by Steven Holl. Image courtesy of Stevenholl.com

          Visitors can make their way up the Langenlinie to its deck to gain access to the lifts, which will transport them to the 65m-high enclosed pedestrian bridge. The crossing is formed of two parts that meet in the middle at an angle “joining like a handshake over the harbour”, say the architects. “The new design is intended to form an iconic landmark for Copenhagen’s waterfront. At night the uplights washing the coloured aluminium reflect like paintings in the water,” the architects add.

          Copenhagen Gate by Steven Holl. Image courtesy of Stevenholl.com

          Copenhagen Gate by Steven Holl. Image courtesy of Stevenholl.com

          A high-rise stroll from one pier to the other will surely be an energising experience and it looks like the Danish capital should be getting a new piece of destination architecture sometime soon. For greater insight into the work of this important contemporary architect, get a copy of our new Steven Holl monograph.



          An Inventively Designed Photo Book (That You Can Read)

          Art

          An Inventively Designed Photo Book (That You Can Read)


          The images in the Gus Powell book released this fall, “The Lonely Ones,” can stand alone: Powell captures orphaned landscapes and quotidian moments that hit on both the poignancy and the absurdity of everyday life. But it’s the subtle, funny one-liners Powell adds to his photos that elevate the collection of images to something that’s part poetry, part comic strip. Taking its name and inspiration from the 1942 classic by the cartoonist William Steig, “The Lonely Ones” pays homage to the “king of cartoons” with a book (and upcoming show) that delights in the interplay between language and image. “I tried to make a book that did traffic in feelings,” Powell says of the body of work, which spans a decade.
          Powell was first introduced to the cartoonist’s artwork while working in the photo department of The New Yorker, when he discovered a Steig original: a simple drawing of a crumpled and torn letter at the foot of a mailbox, with the caption, “Change of heart.” That caption makes a cameo appearance in Powell’s innovatively designed book, which is organized into gatefolds that present the captions first and the photographs hiding behind them, waiting to be discovered after the pages of the diminutive, diary-size book are unfolded. “I wanted to make a book you would read,” Powell says. “And no one ever says that about a photo book.”