An icon of gay art and one of the most famous names in physique photography, Bruce Bellas is remembered as the pioneer of beefcake. Beginning in the 1940s and continuing until his death in 1974, he photographed some of the most important icons in the world of physical culture and body- building. Collected in this book are Bellas' rare photographs and films - the two volumes Inside and Outside comprise more than 100 colour images, masterfully restored as a limited edition, celebrating Bruce of Los Angeles and his refined, masterful aesthetic of erotica.
These books focus on the groundbreaking homoerotic art of pioneers of male nude photography. From Lon of New York's stylized, classically posed portraits to Dave Martin's wholesome, athletic young men, to Bruce of Los Angeles' cavorting models, these books rescue an era of American photography that has virtually been forgotten. Other volumes are devoted to the formal, carfully posed portraits of Douglas of Detroit and the fun, kicky work of Pat Milo.
Founded in 1781 by pioneers from what is today northern Mexico, El Pueblo de Los Angeles mirrors the history and heritage of the city to which it gave birth. When the pueblo was the capital of Mexico’s Alta California, the region’s rancheros came here to celebrate mass or to attend fiestas in the historic Plaza. Following California’s statehood in 1850, the pueblo for a time ranked among the most lawless towns of the American West. American speculators, wealthy rancheros, and Italian wine merchants crowded its dusty streets. The town’s first barrio and the vibrant precincts of Old Chinatown soon grew up nearby. As Los Angeles burgeoned into a modern metropolis, its historic heart fell into ruin, to be revitalized by the creation in 1930 of the romantic Mexican marketplace at Olvera Street. Here, two years later, David Alfaro Siqueiros painted the landmark mural América Tropical, whose story is a fascinating tale of art, politics, and censorship. In the decades since, the pueblo has remained one of Southern California’s most enduring and most complex cultural symbols. El Pueblo vividly recounts the story of the birthplace of Los Angeles. An engaging historical narrative is complemented by abundant illustrations and a tour of the pueblo’s historic buildings. The book also describes initiatives to preserve the pueblo’s rich heritage and considers the significance of its multicultural legacy for Los Angeles today
President Emerita of the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) Karen Brooks Hopkins pens BAM…and Then It Hit Me, an inspiring memoir of her 36 years at the iconic cultural institution, America's oldest performing arts center. The book has a sharp focus on concepts such as leadership, innovation, urban revitalization (including the transformation of Brooklyn from Manhattan Outpost to the coolest neighborhood on the planet), as highly successful cultural fundraising played critical roles in the colorful evolution of this world-class cultural juggernaut in the performing arts.
2020 Miriam Matthews Ethnic History Award from the Los Angeles City Historical Society As Southern California was reimagining leisure and positioning it at the center of the American Dream, African American Californians were working to make that leisure an open, inclusive reality. By occupying recreational sites and public spaces, African Americans challenged racial hierarchies and marked a space of Black identity on the regional landscape and social space. In Living the California Dream Alison Rose Jefferson examines how African Americans pioneered America's "frontier of leisure" by creating communities and business projects in conjunction with their growing population in Southern California during the nation's Jim Crow era. By presenting stories of Southern California African American oceanfront and inland leisure destinations that flourished from 1910 to the 1960s, Jefferson illustrates how these places helped create leisure production, purposes, and societal encounters. Black communal practices and economic development around leisure helped define the practice and meaning of leisure for the region and the nation, confronted the emergent power politics of recreational space, and set the stage for the sites as places for remembrance of invention and public contest. Living the California Dream presents the overlooked local stories that are foundational to the national narrative of mass movement to open recreational accommodations to all Americans and to the long freedom rights struggle.
Presents a photographic chronicle of the life of reggae musician Bob Marley, accompanied by text tracing his life from his youth in Jamaica to his death at age thirty-six.
I Met Someone is the story of Academy Award–winning actress Dusty Wilding, her wife Allegra, a long-lost daughter, and the unspeakable secret hidden beneath the glamour of their lavish, carefully calibrated celebrity life. After Allegra suffers a miscarriage, Dusty embarks on a search for the daughter she lost at age sixteen, and uncovers the answer to a question that has haunted her for decades. With masterful suspense, Bruce Wagner moves among the perspectives of his characters, revealing their individual trauma and the uncanny connections to one another’s past lives. I Met Someone plummets the reader down a rabbit hole of the human psyche, with Wagner’s remarkable insights into our collective obsession with great wealth and fame, and surprises with unimaginable plot turns and unexpected fate. Alternately tender, shocking, and poetic, this is Wagner’s most captivating and affecting novel yet.
Davidson reveals a lush and exotic Los Angeles beyond the urban sprawl In 2008, Bruce Davidson, who had already photographed New York and Paris, began exploring Los Angeles with a focus on its exotic plant life. The arid climate, normally hostile to life, allows for an exceptional botanical diversity in L.A. County that reaches from the surrounding foothills and mountain wilderness to the Pacific Ocean, and Davidson quickly became a Los Angeles convert. Traffic, wealth, poverty, violence and other urban phenomena give way to valiant plant life where ivy thrives on the underside of the 405 and Glendale Freeway interchanges, and a tree in the foothills regenerates itself after a wildfire has parched its bark, he writes. Without its plant life and human respect for it, L.A. would be a vast desert void. Nature of Los Angeles 2008-2013 depicts the city in black and white, presenting its beauty and banality as emblematic of urban existence in general. Bruce Davidson (born 1933) began photographing at the age of ten in Oak Park, Illinois. He studied at the Rochester Institute of Technology and Yale University before being drafted into the army. After leaving military service in 1957, he freelanced for Life and in 1958 became a member of Magnum Photos. Davidson's work is held in many major museum collections and his awards include a Guggenheim fellowship (1962), the first National Endowment for the Arts Grant in Photography (1967) and an honorary doctorate in Fine Arts from the Corcoran College of Art and Design (2011).
England/Scotland 1960 offers a visionary insight into the very heart of English and Scottish cultures. Reflecting a postwar era in which the revolutions of the 1960s had hardly yet filtered into the mainstream, Davidson's photographs reveal countries driven by difference--the extremes of city and country life, of the landed gentry and the common people--and lucidly portrays the mood of these times in personal and provocative imagery that is as fresh today as it was in that time.
