The beauty, mystery, and abuse of the American desert are topics explored by Richard Misrach in his breathtaking Desert Cantos series, one of the most ambitious and innovative photographic projects of our time. Evolving over the course of two decades, the series now comprises eighteen numbered and named subseries, or cantos, and a prologue. With subjects as diverse as a military base in Utah, a man-made flood in California, sublime skies in Arizona, and arts happenings in Nevada, Richard Misrach's images raise probing and compelling questions about contemporary society's relationship to the desert. Included in this beautifully illustrated book are more than sixty Desert Cantos photographs that have never before been published, as well as some of the artist's best-known and most-admired images.This monumental publication, the first comprehensive survey of Richard Misrach's epic work-in-progress, serves as an exhibition catalogue for a major midcareer retrospective organized by The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The show will tour in the United States (venues include Tucson, Tacoma, and Chicago).

Crimes and Splendors: The Desert Cantos of Richard Misrach

Anne Wilkes Tucker

Biographies & Memoirs

Bulfinch Pr

Louis Faurer

Lisa Hostetler

Kathleen V.

Merrell

The fully illustrated catalogue accompanying the Marlborough exhibition Brassaï, featuring an essay contribution from Anne Wilkes Tucker, author of Brassaï: The Eye of Paris (Museum of Fine Arts Houston, 1999). Brassaï (1899-1984) primarily favored living la vie de noctambule (the life of a nightwalker) during the years in which he was capturing scenes around Paris for his photographic climbing towers and balconies, surveying quiet parks through locked fences, and walking the Seine, the railroad tracks and the boulevards. In 1976, he explained, “I was eager to penetrate this other world, this fringe world, the secret, sinister world of mobsters, outcasts, toughs, pimps, whores, addicts, inverts. Rightly or wrongly, I felt at the time that this underground world represented Paris at its least cosmopolitan, at its most alive, its most authentic.” Brassaï never exposed more than two or three negatives of a subject. Such quick decisions demonstrate his prowess for capturing fleeting moments, a skill which certainly served him well in the crowded cafes and dancehalls as well as in dark alleys where lingering was unwise. The selection of images from Brassaï’s nighttime series form a sort of visual time capsule depicting the many facets of what the colorful Parisian nightlife of the 1930s had to offer. Reminiscing in later years, Brassaï recalled that he and the poet Jacques Prevért “reveled in the beauty of” what they believed to be, at the time, “sinister things.” Appearances by notorious figures of the queer scene of Montparnasse like Fat Claude and Madame Bijou serve as formidable foils to the portraits of lionized male artists— Braque, Maillol, Miró, and Picasso, which are also on view. The exhibition articulates the artist’s egalitarian eye, the same dignity afforded to the master artist shown in his prime is given to the so-called “doyen” of the Parisian vagabonds. This will be the first time in nearly forty years that Marlborough will showcase Brassaï’s

Brassaï

Marlborough Gallery, Inc.

Mark Cohen first came to the attention of the photography world in 1973 with a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. This iconic show proved to the art world that Cohen was the heir apparent to the explosive street photography of the 60s. Now, after more than thirty years, Cohen’s complex and influential body of work is presented for the first time in Grim Street, an astonishing collection of Americana as original and effective as the work of Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, or Weegee. Cohen’s photography confronts the viewer with a startling beauty, rapidly shifting from rough and confrontational to quiet, respectful, and serene. In Grim Street, filled with what Cohen calls “grab shots,” you can easily imagine the photographer guilefully patrolling the streets of Wilkes-Barre, the Pennsylvania mine-town he calls home. His camera, often prefocused and shot from the hip, scrolls around its subjects searching for tidbits of delectable detail. Then suddenly thrusting out towards its subjects, a strobe bursts, capturing a violently cropped spot of stockinged legs creeping around a corner, or a woman’s bared teeth and stretched lips. In these images emerges a cluttered world of visceral, sexualized encounters with the human body. The photographs are equally fascinating for the inconsistent reaction of their subjects. In one shot, a group of young girls hide their faces with their coats and cower against a brick wall, desperately searching for any protection from Cohen’s camera. Another shot brandishes a dapper young man, hair greased and comb quickly pulled out for the glamour shot. But just when you think that you can’t see the photographs for all the noise, Cohen’s camera stands back in meditation, displaying sensitive compositions of the gardens of Wilkes-Barre and the small town’s residents engaging in their daily comforts. One of the more complex bodies of street photography around, Cohen’s work will open your eyes as wide as they can go and keep you flipping the pages for years to come. “Cohen’s black-and-white photos…are deliberately disconcerting, almost vulgar….Heads are cropped out of the frame; truncated hands, legs, and arms loom monstrously into view; perspective warps. Cohen wasn’t alone in his harsh, comic view of down-home America, but his in-your-face take and fragmentary results were jarringly unique, and much imitated.” —Vince Aletti, The Village Voice

Grim Street

Arts & Photography

Mark Cohen

Joel-Peter Witkin

Thomas Southall

Individual Artists

powerHouse Books

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Books by Anne Wilkes Tucker