214 illustrations

Although known for his paintings and drawings, California artist Ed Ruscha has also attracted critical attention for his photography. A new exhibition and accompanying catalogue, Ed Ruscha, Photographer, depart from earlier books to explore how the artist’s different disciplines - painting, drawing, printmaking, and photography - are guided and shaped by a single vision.
Ruscha’s relationship to photography is complex and ambivalent, and the work is difficult to define. He has referred to his photography as a “hobby” but from the outset it has drawn considerable critical interest. The small books of photographs that Ruscha produced in the sixties and seventies earned him a reputation as an underground artist among his peers, and have influenced subsequent generations of artists in Europe and North America. The photographs were snapshot size, with an amateurish quality that intrigued his contemporaries. Neither purely documentary nor solely artistic, their subject matter was stereotypical and banal, with motifs drawn from sites in Southern California or the western United States. This, combined with their serial presentation, created a mythical road-movie or photo-novel effect with Beat Generation innuendos and inspired interest among artists at a time when serial logic was prominent in Pop art and Minimalism, and later in Conceptual art.

This volume, Ed Ruscha, Photographer, is produced in conjunction with a traveling exhibition to be shown in Europe in 2006, organized by The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. The exhibition photographs have been selected from the collections of the Whitney and the artist by independent curator Margit Rowell, who is also the author of the publication.

Uncensored and provocative shots of models and artists

A decade after his sizzling debut A Private View, Sante D'Orazio returns with a second volume of photo-diary-scrapbook, covering 1997 to 2008. Uncensored and provocative, D'Orazio's shots are mounted in collage-style entries framed with candid, handwritten observations. All-night parties and day-long photo sessions provide the light and shade of D'Orazio's jetset lifestyle - celebrities, models, musicians, actors and artists all feature, in various states of dress and undress. Included here are Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell, Claudia Schiffer, Diane Kruger, Tricia Helfer, Stephanie Seymour, Liz Hurley, Jay-Z, Mickey Rourke, Angelina Jolie, Christina Aguilera, Pam Anderson, Keith Richards, Axl Rose, Damien Hirst, Julian Schnabel and many more. Informal images contrast with posed shots, color with black and white, and outtakes are shown along published photos from the likes of Playboy and Interview. With a keen eye, this New York-based photographer creates a dynamic tableau of moods and styles. Access to this demi-monde is rare; capturing its essence in words and pictures, rarer still. Sante D'Orazio succeeds on both counts.

About the photographer:

Sante D'Orazio (b. 1956) is an internationally renowned photographer whose advertising campaign clients include Versace, Tommy Hilfiger, Victoria's Secret, Revlon, and L'Oreal, and whose editorial fashion shoots have featured in Vogue, Esquire, Town & Country, Max, Interview and Vanity Fair. His previous books include A Private View (1998), Sante D'Orazio: Photographs (2000), and Gianni and Donatella (2007).

About the author:

Ed Ruscha (b. 1937) is a painter, photographer and graphic artist, and one of the founders of Pop Art. Known for his landscapes with superimposed slogans and "word paintings," Ruscha has had many international retrospectives, and represented the USA at the 2005 Venice Biennale. He lives and works in Los Angeles.