Poised between poetry, surrealism and a smile, Chema Madoz reveals a world in which the absurd observes us at every moment. His photos contain the world in a small envelope or a tiny wooden box. They have as their subject objects stripped of their primary function. Behind their usual appearance, their strangeness is revealed and makes us question what is normal. Chema Madoz was born January 20, 1958, in Madrid. His work, known throughout the world, was finally recognized in 1991 with the Kodak Prize for European Photography.
Duane Michals (born 1932) was seventy when, soon after the death of his mother, he returned to his native Pittsburgh to revisit the house in which he was born and brought up. Its deteriorated state proved a poignant focus for his memories, prompting reveries on mortality and the succession of generations that found form as a sequence of photographs and poetic texts. In The House I Once Called Home, the interaction of words and images provides a sensitive and moving account of one man's journey through life. Michals creates a highly affecting layering of time by superimposing new photographs onto much older images taken in the same location during his earlier life there. Michals is one of America's most consistently individual and original voices in photography. He rejected the documentary emphasis of much of the work that preceded him, instead using the camera to explore the workings of the mind. Michals sought to overcome what he deemed to be the limitations of the single photographic image, both by writing directly onto his prints and by creating narrative sequences of images; these innovative techniques proved immensely influential. Powerfully intimate in its focus, The House I Once Called Home demonstrates conclusively the possibility of exposing universal truths through the most personal events. It is a work to which every reader will be able to relate through the filter of his or her own experience, and which will undoubtedly accrue new meanings as we ourselves return to it at different stages in our lives.
This "Book of Images" comes as a true storm, full of ideas on how to think differently about photography and context. How can they blend in with each other, enhance each other or clash with each other? This is a unique dictionary of visual experiences featuring more than 250 artists such as John Baldessari, JR, Christian Marclay, Daido Moriyama, Martin Parr and Cindy Sherman.00Exhibition: Festival Images Vevey, Switzerland (2018).
Welcome to a world where little people have big personalities. A world that’s upside down and yet weirdly, wonderfully real. A world where Lilliputian thieves poach strawberry seeds. Where it takes a guy with a jackhammer to pop open pistachios. Where skaters fall into a crack in the crème brûlée, and teddy bear cookies congregate with evil intent. Marrying inspired photographs of real food and tiny people with equally inspired captions, photographer Christopher Boffoli creates a smart, funny, quirky vision of what it means to play with your food. The scenes are hilarious and outlandish— a farmer shovels a pasture full of cow pies, aka chocolate chips; hikers pause at a rest stop to take in a magical mushroom forest. And the captions surprise with their cleverness and emotional truth. Of the proudly gesticulating little chef amid the macarons: “Right on cue, Philippe stepped up to take all of the credit.” Of the tiny bather up to her chin in waves of blue Jell-O: “In her continuing search for a husband, Gladys decided it was best to put herself in situations where she needed to be rescued.” Of the broad-shouldered technician spreading condiments on a hot dog: “Gary always uses too much mustard. But no one can say so. It’s a union thing.” Happiness, hope, adventure, pride, love, greed, menace, solitude—it’s our world, seen through a singularly unique and funny lens, in more than 100 scenes from breakfast through dessert.
They have been in existence for over 100 million years, but it has taken us less than 30 years to kill almost all of them off. Honey bees are responsible for pollinating 60% of the world?s food supply. Without them, the human race would face starvation. A worldwide epidemic, it has been called the bee apocalypse by Russia?s president, but it is worse in the United States than any other country. Since 1972, feral honey bees in the United States have declined 80% to near extinction, and domestic bees in the United States are down to 60%. Since 2006, the epidemic has been referred to as colony collapse disorder, describing the disappearance of entire colonies of bees. Among the causes cited for this disaster of epidemic proportions are parasites, the decrease in abundance and diversity of wildflowers, insecticides and genetically engineered foods (GMO?s) that create their own synthetic pesticides which kill bees as well as other insects. But one thing is for certain-- mankind is responsible for the drastic decline in bee population and the United States government is doing nothing about it. On the contrary, the government has taken measures to make the problem worse.
In The Program Era, Mark McGurl offers a fundamental reinterpretation of postwar American fiction, asserting that it can be properly understood only in relation to the rise of mass higher education and the creative writing program. McGurl asks both how the patronage of the university has reorganized American literature and—even more important—how the increasing intimacy of writing and schooling can be brought to bear on a reading of this literature. McGurl argues that far from occasioning a decline in the quality or interest of American writing, the rise of the creative writing program has instead generated a complex and evolving constellation of aesthetic problems that have been explored with energy and at times brilliance by authors ranging from Flannery O’Connor to Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth, Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates, and Toni Morrison. Through transformative readings of these and many other writers, The Program Era becomes a meditation on systematic creativity—an idea that until recently would have seemed a contradiction in terms, but which in our time has become central to cultural production both within and beyond the university. An engaging and stylishly written examination of an era we thought we knew, The Program Era will be at the center of debates about postwar literature and culture for years to come.
In 1980 Bruce Davidson began photographing the New York subway system, venturing regularly into this intoxicating, sometimes dangerous subterranean world. At first Davidson photographed in black and white, but he soon realized color was necessary to depict the intensity of this graffiti-covered landscape. Originally published in 1986, this updated Steidl edition of Subway is printed from new scans of Davidsons Kodachrome slides and features additional images.
