The digital age has fundamentally changed traditional notions of who we are and how we wish to be perceived. The music producer Chris Walla puts it this way: “Confronted with our significantly more banal everyday life, we’re measuring our actual selves against our online selves with hopeful resignation.”
Doppelganger presents current trends in the depiction of human beings. In today’s images and sculptures, personal identities are being intensified, altered, or created through the use of techniques such as deformation and construction/deconstruction as well as the obliteration of classical proportions, visual traditions, and what is generally considered beautiful and fashionable.
The book shows permutations of the outer human shell created with costumes and masks as well as photo-technical and artistic manipulation. These take their visual cues from such diverse aesthetics as Dada, surrealism, high tech, cutting-edge fashion design, and the folklore of other cultures. Masquerades and artificial characters are used imaginatively to enhance and obscure true identities.
With examples ranging from the intimate to the radical, Doppelganger explores how many or how few effects the depiction of a person can take in order to function as such. In doing so, the book shows that the unique visual appearances being created today often reveal more about the identities of their subjects and creators than their “real” faces ever could.
A visual feast of outstanding paintings by British, European and American artists
Traces the development of pure-bred dogs and the social milieu in which they became fashionable
Filled with anecdotes about animal-loving patrons such as Queen Victoria
William Secord explores the presentation of the dog, from its origins in Greek, Roman and later European art, to the remarkable paintings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries up to modern times. In this splendid work, he traces the evolution of some fifty breeds, using carefully selected illustrations by outstanding nineteenth and twentieth-century artists, ranging from depictions of hounds and sporting dogs in the field to Victorian portraits of pampered pets and highly-bred favourites.
From the diminutive chihuahua to the massive St Bernard, this fascinating account of most of the popular breeds provides an original and penetrating artistic record of mankind's faithful companions. It is also an invaluable reference work about the many superb painters who specialised in dog painting, providing an essential index for art historians, dealers and galleries requiring a directory of names and examples of the exponents of this popular genre.