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Blabac Photo: The Art of Skateboarding Photography is a stunning chronicle of a youth movement as seen through the lens of Mike Blabac, a man who is as dedicated to his craft as he is to the skateboarding lifestyle that inspired it. For millions of people around the world, skateboarding is more than a mere hobby or a sport - it’s a way of life that has shaped everything from fashion and music, to video games and art.

Blabac Photo proves that point with 300 awe-inspiring images that communicate the stories and exploits of some of the most creative athletes to ever step on a skateboard including Eric Koston, Stevie Williams, Colin McKay, Rob Dyrdek, and Danny Way.

As skateboarding evolved over time, from a hobby for kids on the Venice boardwalk into a global culture, skate legends were born, records were broken, titans of industry materialized - and Mike Blabac was there to document the history of the movement as it developed before his eyes.

107 color photographs, 216 b/w photographs, 21 toned photographs

At first I thought strictly about a book of photographs on fashion. As I worked on it, I thought more and more about something my friend the late, great fashion designer Gianni Versace once said, in giving me advice before an assignment, "Call me des mode, but give me beauty."

And with these inspired words I wanted to make a record of how I journeyed out into the world and recorded what most people call fashion. These photographs were not just about the shape of clothes, but also how one sees fashion in nature, architecture, and in the human spirit.

When I began photographing, I was at Life Magazine borrowing some equipment. I ran into a bunch of other photographers in the camera department. One photographer asked, "what kind of photos are you doing for the magazine?" I replied, "I am going to do some pictures of girls in bathing suits." They all burst out laughing at me, and said, "that doesn't sound too serious." That's when I knew that as a photographer I didn't want people to stop laughing with me.

That laughter can be found in a picture of a girl wearing a dress by Yohji Yamamoto that's so big she can't even walk in it or a boy wearing twigs as a tunic at Karl Lagerfeld's chateau in Brittany or the Duchess of Devonshire feeding her pet chickens in a Jean Patou couture evening dress from the 1940s. In this crazy world of ours, most things don't make sense any more, but the wonderful thing about taking pictures of people wearing or not wearing clothes is that maybe you won't solve all the world's problems but you'll at least be giving back a seed of imagination to our garden of lost innocence. And it's fashion that can create a big fantasy life for all those who enter.

Bob Mizer spent 48 years making photos and films for his Athletic Model Guild, and 41 years publishing Physique Pictorial, America's first, and most explicitly gay physique magazine. His diaries, kept from the age of eight, make it clear that he was openly homosexual from his late teens, but until the age of 42 he lived and worked in his mother's L.A. rooming house, where his strict ethical code prevented him from fully expressing his fantasies. For 24 years he worked in black and white and never showed a completely naked man, but following his mother's death in 1964 Mizer built a kingdom dedicated to the pleasures of male flesh, and photographed fully nude men in explicit poses and psychedelically saturated colors.

In the 1970s and '80s Bob Mizer's compound, centered around the old rooming house, became home to dozens of his young models, who lived outdoors on couches and porch gliders among the chickens, geese, goats and monkeys, Roman statuary, cast off Christmas trees and other sundry props that featured in his increasingly quirky films and photography.

Sometimes called the Hugh Hefner of gay publishing for his pioneering magazine (republished in entirety by TASCHEN in 1997), Mizer influenced figures in art and society from David Hockney–who first came to America partly to meet Bob Mizer–to California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who modeled for Mizer in 1975.

Bob's World: The Life and Boys of AMG's Bob Mizer is the first book to celebrate the full-color, deliriously uninhibited carnival of late-period Mizer. Over 250 photos are accompanied by an oral history by contributing artists David Hockney, Jack Pierson and John Sonsini, photographers David Hurles and Hal Roth, models Ben Sorensen and Andrew Sears, and Wayne Stanley, inheritor of the Mizer estate. The book includes a one-hour DVD of Mizer films spanning 1958–1980, specially edited for this edition.

The Former Soviet Union’s Foremost Photographer

Since starting out as a photographer in the mid-1960s, Boris Mikhailov (b. Kharkov, Ukraine, 1938; lives and works in Kharkov and Berlin) has built a wide-ranging and strikingly multifaceted oeuvre. A virtuoso of his art, he has explored a great variety of ways of using the medium to paint a picture of his immediate surroundings that is as unsparing as it is ironic. His unflagging critical engagement of photographic techniques and the work with different cameras and stylistic devices as well as the alternation in his oeuvre between conceptual photography and documentary approaches render him the preeminent present-day photographer whose work reaches back to the Soviet era.

The book - which accompanies his largest exhibition in Germany to date - brings together a selection of works that includes the experimental pictures of his early years as well as his most recent photographs created in Berlin.
With essays by Thomas Köhler, Christina Landbrecht, Inka Schube and Jan Verwoert.

Rarely has anyone photographed reality in such an unprettified way as Boris Mikhailov. He captures the unadorned and the natural; in pictures devoid of aesthetic exhaltation, he concentrates on people and their living conditions.

On his journeys through Russia, Germany and his Ukrainian homeland, Mikhailov has equally observed the poor, the well-to-do, the outcasts and the homeless. Look at Me, I Look at Water was composed in 1999 at the suggestion of the Heiner Mller-Society when Boris Mikhailov's name was found in one of Heiner Mller's notebooks.

With this book Mikhailov is continuing, thematically and conceptionally, what he began with his artist's book Unfinished Dissertation in 1985.

The photographs are accompanied by handwritten Russian commentaries, which together give the impression of a private album which narrates stories from a chapter in the artist's life.

The special thing about Boris Mikhailov as a "book maker" is that he thinks of and develops photography in sequences, in spaces and cuts, in the forms of its montage.

Viewed as a whole, his books and book drafts which often only exist as one original copy create a retrospective of a very unique and intimate kind. The artist's books "Krymskaja Fotomanija" (Crimean Photomania) and "Mountains", each with 128 pages, are shown here in facsimile, accompanied by 80 pages of illustrated text.

Boris Mikhailov is seen as a chronicler of his Ukrainian homeland: the everyday life of the so-called little people on the street, on the beach, at dances anywhere that the politic becomes visible in the private. Drawing on this material, Mikhailov explores both the human condition and the history and decline of the Soviet Union and the consequences of its fall.

About the Author:

Boris Mikhailov was born in Kharkov, Ukraine in 1938. He uses documentary as well as staging and studio techniques to comment on the Soviet Regime and, latterly, the downfall of the Soviet Union. His work has appeared in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), the Kunsthalle (Zurich), and the Sprengel Museum (Hannover). Today, Mikhailov lives and works in both Kharkov and Berlin.

For the acclaimed photographer Boris Mikhailov (born 1938), a society's most significant paradigm shifts are often most clearly perceived in the smallest of everyday transactions. For example, in a café or restaurant in Soviet-era Ukraine, a waiter would have offered you "tea or coffee?" Today, two decades after the fall of the Soviet bloc and the ascent of western capitalism, it's "tea, coffee, cappuccino?" In his latest body of work, Mikhailov addresses this shift by focusing on his hometown of Charkow, in northeast Ukraine. Here, the consumerist invasion of western capitalism is everywhere apparent in huge, colourful advertising banners and billboards, but the promises of the so-called Orange Revolution seem to have been fulfilled for only a few.

Mikhailov writes that "only when one sees misery in a picture, does one begin to notice it in the street," and throughout the 200-plus photographs in this volume, he takes pains to neither dramatize nor ameliorate the conditions of life in Charkow; and so his tough-minded pictures present a bleak but rigorously honest portrait of Ukraine and its inhabitants.

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For Boris Mikhailov, societal changes are most clearly visible in small, everyday events. While the waiter in Ukraine would still be asking "tea or coffee?" during the Soviet era, the question today is "tea, coffee, cappuccino?"

In his newest works (2000 - 2010), Mikhailov tackles precisely these changes and captures-as he has already in "By the Ground / At Dusk" (Oktagon, 1996)-daily life in his hometown Charkow. In this collection of more than 200 colour photographs, the West is perceptible everywhere in the form of huge, colourful advertising banners, but the promises of the Orange Revolution, that everything would get better, have only been fulfilled for few.

Through palliating nothing, transfiguring nothing, Mikhailov attempts to sensitise the view of the observer. The individual pictures and scenes create a large tableau of society that tells us more about Ukraine and its inhabitants than any specialised book.

Brassai (1899-1984), born in Hungary as Gyula Halasz, began his artistic apprenticeship in Berlin before moving to Paris in 1923 and launching a career that would establish him as a key figure in the evolution of twentieth-century photography. Brassai's importance as a photographer was recognized early in his career, affording him a privileged position from which to witness the varied aspects and milieus of Parisian life during the 1920s and 1930s. During and just after the war, Brassai collaborated with other artists and writers, and displayed his own artistic proficiency in multiple domains including theatre, cinema, sculpture, drawing, and writing. The late 1940s marked the beginning of a new period in Brassai's life, during which he married and became a naturalized French citizen. In the 1950s and early 1960s, he travelled extensively and executed his original graffiti compositions that would acquire international fame. Toward the end of his life, the artist returned to reading and writing. Brassai, who remained at the cutting edge of avant-garde, refused to espouse a single style; his rich body of work exceeds definition.

This illustrated biography is based largely on unpublished documents and photographs from the artist's personal archives. The author shares stories told to her by Brassai's wife Gilberte and by several of the artist's friends, including Henry Miller, Miro, Henri Michaux, and Raymond Queneau. Filtering a rich variety of sources, "Brassai" offers a very intimate and multi-faceted view of the artist's life and of the bonds that link him and his legendary images to Paris.

Brassaï (1899–1984) war der erste und ist bis heute der berühmteste Chronist des nächtlichen Paris. Als der vielseitig begabte gebürtige Ungar 1924 nach Frankreich kam, stürzte er sich nicht nur mit Begeisterung in das Pariser Nachtleben, sondern begann auch bald, auf seinen nächtlichen Streifzügen durch die Stadt zu photographieren.

Kaum zehn Jahre später, 1932, erschien sein Buch Paris de Nuit, das ihn schlagartig berühmt machte – ein Klassiker der Photoliteratur und phototechnisch gesehen eine damals unerhörte Meisterleistung. Das Licht, die Existenzbedingung jeder Photographie, reduziert sich in Brassaïs Bildern auf ein paar Bühnenscheinwerfer oder Lampen in den einschlägigen Etablissements, auf spärlich erleuchtete Fenster, eine Straßenlaterne im Nebel, Reflexe auf regennassem Asphalt …

Die großzügige Schenkung von Brassaïs Witwe 2002 an den französischen Staat und die Versteigerung seiner Werkstatt 2006 förderten weiteres Bildmaterial zu Tage und riefen Spezialisten und Photohistoriker auf den Plan. Ergebnis ihrer Arbeit ist dieses große Brassaï-Buch, das sich auf seine Nachtbilder der 30er Jahre konzentriert. Angesiedelt zwischen Reportage, Sozialdokumentation und poetischer Vision, ist Brassaïs nächtliches Paris der Zwischenkriegszeit vor allem auch ein Meilenstein in der Geschichte der Photographie des 20. Jahrhunderts.

The first study exclusively dedicated to Brassaï’s night photographs from the 1930s, his most productive period, reconstituting their genesis and their chronology through Brassaï’s various influences and complexity.

It was the Belle Époque, a time before air travel or radio, at the brink of a revolution in photography and filmmaking, when Burton Holmes (1870–1958) began a lifelong journey to bring the world home. From the grand boulevards of Paris to China’s Great Wall, from the construction of the Panama canal to the 1906 eruption of Mount Vesuvius, Holmes delighted in finding “the beautiful way around the world” and made a career of sharing his stories, colorful photographs, and films with audiences across America. As a young man, Holmes was mentored by John L. Stoddard, a pioneer of the U.S. travelecture circuit, who passed on his well-established mantle when he retired. Holmes roamed the globe throughout the summer and traversed the United States all winter, transforming the staid lecture tradition into an entertaining show. He coined the term “travelogue” in 1904 to advertise his unique performance and thrilled audiences with two-hour sets of stories timed to projections of multihued hand-painted glass-lantern slides and some of the first “moving pictures.” Paris, Peking, Dehli, Dubrovnik, Moscow, Manila, Jakarta, Jerusalem: Burton Holmes was there. He visited every continent and nearly every country on the planet, shooting over 30,000 photographs and nearly 500,000 feet of film. This book represents the best of the Holmes archive, brimming with brilliant color photographs not published in decades. A rare window on the world of 100 years ago, Burton Holmes Travelogues will transport you to a time that has all but evaporated, and inspire you to strike out on a journey of your own.

Highlights from the legendary photo journal

"This has to be the 'must buy' book of the decade - no photographic library will be complete without it. " - mono, UKPhotographer, writer, publisher, and curator Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) was a visionary, far ahead of his time. Around the turn of the 20th century he founded the Photo-Secession, a progressive movement concerned with advancing the creative possibilities of photography, and by 1903 began publishing Camera Work, an avant-garde magazine devoted to voicing the ideas, both in images and words, of the Photo-Secession. Camera Work was the first photo journal whose focus was visual, rather than technical, and its illustrations were of the highest quality hand-pulled photogravure printed on Japanese tissue. This book brings together a broad selection from the journal’s 50 issues.

Texts by:

Pam Roberts was Curator at the British Royal Photographic Society from 1982-2001. She lives in Bath.

This is the most complete volume available on one of the outstanding representatives of new German photography.

Ever since embarking on her first photographic projects in the early 1970s, Candida Höfer has been primarily interested in what could best be termed public space – interiors, such as libraries, foyers, museums, club houses or, more rarely, urban scenarios such as public squares, streets or zoos.

Candida Höfer’s relationship to architecture is fully in keeping with the New Objectivity tradition. Her photographs of public spaces are almost sober and ascetic in feel – especially as she forgoes any spectacular staging of the locations. The emptiness is imbued with substance with a subtle attention to colour, and the prevailing silence instilled with a metaphysical quality.

Even when Höfer’s photographs present significant works of renowned architects or designers, her incorruptible and consistently laconic approach means that the architectural mind in question takes a back seat to the photographer.

Candida Höfer was born in 1944. She was a student at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art and studied film under Ole John before going on to study photography under Bernd Becher. She has taken part in many group exhibitions and has held countless solo shows, most recently at Documenta XI, where her Zwölf–Twelve cycle was displayed. She is one of the greats of the international photographic and art community.

Michael Krüger, who contributes the penetrating introductory text, is Director of the Munich-based publishing company Carl Hanser Verlag, and the author of several critically acclaimed novels.