Robert Stivers has explored the nexus of desire and memory in photographs that are hauntingly erotic. The images published here also possess a mysterious, melancholy feeling, and often turn on eroticism and death. For Stivers, the image is most often about the human figure in space, modeled by light, often reduced to the simplest forms. Embracing the abstract potential of the photograph, the artist mines the subconscious in a performative act of seeing and recording. This, the artist's first book, offers a contemplative visual journey. The photographs are accompanied by an illuminating essay by A.D. Coleman.

Robert Stivers: Photographs

Arts & Photography

Robert Stivers

Individual Artists

Arena Editions

Adam Fuss has emerged as one of the bold and truly creative artists utilizing photography today. Fuss' photograms clearly break from those of his predecessors, Man Ray, Moholy-Nagy, and Talbot, and while striking a chord of homage, the images redefine how and what we see in pictures, viscerally and intellectually. Like an eighteenth-century experimenter, Fuss utilizes organic and raw materials in an unusual approach, revealing spiritual and emotional process. Laid atop the paper for hours, and even days, colorization is recorded with a stroboscopic flash. Live snakes, the entrails of rabbits, eggs, cow liver, sperm, flowers, and stained glass circumscribe the vital, often mysterious energies emitted from these pictures. This book, the first major monograph of the artist's work, is certain to be an important contribution to current discussions of photography's past and the question of its future.

Adam Fuss

Eugenia Parry

Casting themselves as latter-day dandies of an era gone by, the artist team of McDermott &amp; McGough have mined the history of aesthetics as a means to illuminate the present condition of art and culture. With biting irony, and an unmistakably camp sensibility, McDermott &amp; McGough have long employed a visual language that draws heavily from earlier movements; Romanticism, the Pre-Raphaelites, Symbolism and Decadence, and Pictorialism, to name just a few. But their work is closely tied to the present day. This, the first retrospective monograph of their photographic work, underscores the tenacity of their mission to seek a future in the past. Included are the duo's portraits, nudes, still lifes, and architectural pictures utilizing such archaic processes as gum-bichromate, cyanotype, platinum palladium, and salt printing.

McDermott & McGough: A History of Photography

Durant, Mark Alice

McGough, Peter

McDermott, David

Photography & Video

Time has always been an implicit subject of photography, and in J. John Priolas movingly beautiful still-lifes it becomes explicit, visible, as never before. Each image gives the object at its centera pair of bronzed baby shoes, a mended dishtowel, a puff of smokethe clear, intense scrutiny usually reserved for portraiture. These still-lifes, however, are portraits of absent lives and passing time. Once Removed brings together three stylistically distinct, thematically related series of these impeccably crafted images. The first gathers together evocative objects that speak of hope, desire, and the fleeting moments of paradise in every life. The second depicts objects whose scars, stains, and cracks testify to now vanished bodies, passions, householdsredeeming this flotsam and jetsam in photographs which brilliantly demonstrate that objects can bear witness to invisible ideas and emotional truths. The last series continues to pursue time itself and, like the other two, triumphs at photographys most difficult task: depicting what cannot be seen. In this case ephemerality itself is depicted in images of things whose lifespan was often little longer than the time it took to make the photograph.

Once Removed: Portraits

Priola, J. John

The travel albums of photographer George Platt Lynes, publisher Monroe Wheeler, and writer Glenway Wescott are illuminating documents of the American expatriate years. Together, this extraordinary minage-`-trois spent the heady interwar period frequenting Paris, Villefranche-sur-Mer, and other European cities, meeting up with such lively personalities as Thornton Wilder, Jean Cocteau, Katherine Anne Porter, Man Ray, Reni Crevel, and Christian Birard. Inspired by the encouragement of Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and Jane Heap, all three men went on to pursue vibrant careers in the arts. Platt Lynes became a celebrated photographer in 1931; Wheeler, with Wescotts sister-in-law, Barbara Harrison, started the extraordinary little press, Harrison of Paris in 1930; and Wescott became a bestselling fiction writer in 1927. The photographs represented here date from the threesomes first meeting, and underscore the intimate bond they shared. It is a story of youthfu! l passion and enthusiasm that spea ks to the enduring ties that held these three talented men together throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.

When We Were Three: Travel Albums of George Platt Lynes, Monroe Wheeler and Glenway Wescot 1925-1935

Wescott, Glenway

Lynes, George Platt

CRUMP, James

Pohorilenko, Anatole

Wheeler, Monroe

For more than two decades artist Bruce Cratsley has produced a personal and highly poetic body of work with the dominant theme being the mysteries of light and shadow, Cratsley's images of inanimate objects, urban street scenes, and portraits of friends and lovers, possess a metaphysical peculiarity.

Bruce Cratsley: White Lights, Silent Shadows

Biographies & Memoirs

Cratsley, Bruce

Reference & Collections

Gerard Malanga has been acclaimed as a poet, photographer, and filmmaker. Resistance to Memory is a compilation of his photographic portraits taken during the 1970s, many never before published. Included are remarkable photographs of the legendary cultural, artistic, literary, and musical personalities of our time, including: Robert Mapplethorpe, Jasper Johns, George Plimpton, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Abbie Hoffman, Candy Darling, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Durrell, Roman Polanski, William Burroughs, and many more. The book features texts by Thurston Moore, a founding member of the band Sonic Youth, and the late Ben Maddow, one of the visual critics of twentieth-century film and photography.

Resistance to Memory

Maddow, Ben

Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) regularly created series of drawings, sometimes continuing them intermittently over a decade. Despite de Koonings renown as a painter and draftsman, there have been no publications to look at selected groups of his drawings in depth. This book, and the traveling exhibition organized by The Drawing Center, New York, presents four of his drawing series, affording a closer view of de Koonings working process and his constant reinvention of mark-making. 
The earliest series to be included, Folded Shirt on Laundry Paper, 1958, is figured by a calligraphic spareness and openness that lays bare a panoply of mark-making possibilities with brush and ink. The second series are twenty-four drawings from 1966 which the artist created with eyes closed. These works make clear just how totally interdependent de Koonings memory and drawing hand were. But for their documentation, they are indistinguishable from his drawings made with eyes open. Several of the drawings are of the Crucifixion, and this subject, unique for de Kooning, comprises the third group of drawings executed in the mid- and late-1960s. These drawings take fullest advantage of charcoals lush flexibility. The fourth group, almost never seen, is comprised of tracings made on large sheets of vellum of painting configurations that might be employed in subsequent works. Done from the late-1960s through the 1970s, these double-sided drawings are made startlingly complete by de Koonings subsequent improvisations added to them. 
Each series will be discussed in relation to the artists contemporaneous painting and will explicate his constantly changing but interrelated means. No other artist of his generation produced drawings so regularly and so superbly. Drawing is the crucible of de Koonings art.

Willem De Kooning: Drawing Seeing/Seeing Drawing

DE KOONING, WILLEM

Drawing Center (New York, N. Y.)

Kertess,klaus

History & Criticism

Ross Bleckner, well-known for his large-scale canvases, has for years used watercolor as both a means and an end to painting. While Bleckners works in oil deal primarily with remembrance and lossoperating as memento mori to those lost in crisisthe watercolors are far more iconic, symbolic of transformation and transcendence. The watercolors, instructive in understanding the larger oil on canvas pictures, also possess a photographic qualitytheir brightness and shimmering surfaces attest to this artists mastery and technique. These precious gems hold up on their own as a major part of Bleckners oeuvre, yet they are relatively unknown. Beautifully reproduced, the sixty images selected here reveal the depth of Bleckners talent and the degree to which this work relates to the artists other paintings.

Ross Bleckner: Watercolor

Bleckner, Ross

Adam Fuss has emerged as one of the bold and truly creative artists utilizing photography today. Fuss's photograms clearly break from those of his predecessors Man Ray, Moholy-Nagy and Talbot, and while striking a chord of homage, the images redefine how and what we see in pictures, both viscerally and intellectually. Like an eighteenth-century experimenter, Fuss utilizes organic and raw materials in an unusual approach, revealing spiritual and emotional process. Laid atop the paper for hours, and even days, colorization is recorded with a stroboscopic flash. Live snakes, the entrails of rabbits, eggs, cow liver, sperm, flowers, and stained glass circumscribe the vital, often mysterious energies emitted from these pictures. This book, the first major monograph of the artist's work, makes an important contribution to current discussions of photography's past and the question of its future.

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Arena Editions publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Arena Editions

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Arena Editions publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Robert Stivers: Photographs

Adam Fuss

McDermott & McGough: A History of Photography

Once Removed: Portraits

When We Were Three: Travel Albums of George Platt Lynes, Monroe Wheeler and Glenway Wescot 1925-1935

Bruce Cratsley: White Lights, Silent Shadows

Resistance to Memory

Willem De Kooning: Drawing Seeing/Seeing Drawing

Ross Bleckner: Watercolor

Adam Fuss