november-books

Tuesday, 26 March 2013

heartbreak for breakfast, yum

Sunday, 24 March 2013

Andy Warhol's Interview / First Issue November 1969

Great. Super rare first issue of 'The Crystal Ball of Pop'. Constructed of interviews with up and coming Super Stars, and essays on film. Interviews with Michael Sarne; George Cukor; Donald Lyons on "Justine or Camille"; Amy Sullivan with Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin; 'What It's Like to be a Star and Live in a Hollywood Palace" by Taylor Mead; "Feast of Friends" by Jerry Hopkins; "Interview with Agnes Varda concerning her new film, Lions Love"; "Spirts of the Dead" by Wheeler Dixon; "Towards an Even Newer Cinema" by Heldon Renan; "The Starlet" by Dion McGregor; "Peter Fonda as Scorpio Risen" by Richard Lorber; ""Seeing Double" by Robert Weiner; and "The Permance of Sharon Tate" by Gerard Malanga and lots of brilliant images. An amazing piece of pop history.

The book of the film Streetwise by Martin Bell, Mary Ellen Mark and Cheryl McCall- which portray's the lives of 9 teenagers growing up on the streets in Seattle. From the introduction: 'The children of Pike Street are runaways; when I first saw Mary Ellen Mark's photographs of them--in the spring of 1983--I knew they were perfect characters for an important story, because they were both perfect and important victims. The characters in any important story are always victims; even the survivors of an important story are victims. At the time, Seattle's Green River Killer had already murdered 28 young girls, yet the teenagers of Pike Street were holding their own --pimps, prostitutes, and petty thieves, they were eating out of dumpsters, falling in love, getting tattooed, being treated for the variety of venereal diseases passed on to them by their customers. / All teenagers plan for unlikely futures--"three yachts or more"--and lifetime lovers, but the children of Pike Street must conduct their dreaming in the presence of expediencies far darker than most Americans can imagine. Tiny is a fourteen-year-old girl, malnourished, an accomplished prostitute with a lengthy record of occupational diseases; her alcoholic mother says that Tiny's prostitution is "just a phase." Dewayne is a sixteen-year-old boy; he visits his father, a failed arsonist, in prison. Dewayne's father fails as a father, too; Dewayne is one of the victims of Pike Street who won't survive this story--' . A frank photo documentary of street children in mid-eighties America.

Beautiful document of the British at leisure. Ray-Jones spent some time in America during the early to mid 1960s, training as a graphic designer at Yale and later with Alexey Brodovitch. On returning to England in 1966 he sought to photograph the ‘English Way of life’, in particular how people spent their leisure time. ‘I want my pictures to bite like the images in Buñuel’s films which disturb you while making you think. I want them to have poignancy and sharpness but with humour on top My aim is to communicate something of the spirit and the mentality of the English, their habits and their way of life, the ironies that exist in the way they do things, partly through tradition and partly through the nature of their environment and mentality.’ Roth in The Open Book pp.302-3. A real classic.

A sharp copy of this classic book shot in the late forties in Yorkville, Lower East Side and Spanish Harlem. According to Parr and Badger: "Levitt's photographs are beautiful--major underrated works. Like Henri Cartier-Bresson, she achieves a rare balancing act: her pictures have sentiment without being sentimental, always maintaining an objective distance...The casual observer of these pictures, dazzled by their poetry, could easily miss the harsher realities masked by the surface warmth and joie de vivre.” The New York Times stated, "Helen Levitt was the first American photographer to fully comprehend the essence of Henri Cartier-Bresson's photographic message and put it into practice. Like Cartier-Bresson, she understood how to combine intuition and intellect to forge sophisticated, lyrical compositions from commonplace events.” Quite beautiful.

Brilliant portrait of American women by Macadams including Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson, Margie Beals, Marisol Escobar, Laurel Wise, Michelle Phillips, Jane Fonda, Barbara Hammer and loads of other cool as hell cats. Brilliant.

Scarce in such a good condition. Compiled by Szarkowski. 85 photographic plates depicting women with Winogrand's characteristic spontaneity and "inspired amateurism." "Winogrand was an innovator and one of the most dazzlingly reckless members of what John Szarkowski called photography's 'new generation of primitives...' his style appeared to be no style--effortless, loose, and as uncalculated as a snapshot" (Roth, The Book of 101 books: Seminal Photographs Of The 20th Century). Beautiful book that's part street style and part photodocumentary, shot between the early sixties and 1975. Highly recommended.