One Second to Live: Photography, Film and the Corporeal in An Age of Extremes is a book, in 16 chapters, that covers the aspect of photography and film that deals with the "substantial" and the "non-spiritual" - the two dictionary definitions of the corporeal. Corporeal images - moving or still - explore our common terrestrial existence in a particular place (as opposed to space) and a specific time ( as opposed to non-temporal imaginary realms peculiar to science fiction of fantasy).\nWhatever the vast difference in corporeal photographs and films they all deal in some way with our innate, and complex relationship to all living things and to our own sensibility. Such a view accepts as a starting point that stories are lived in bodies and made in them. As a result corporeal works are usually grounded in an intensive appreciation of sense experience. Lastly, in corporeal works there is usually a sense of doubt about any arrangement that might organize this experience into a system or a philosophy - doubt is often ever-present, not as angst but as play - or just to complicate matters as some fusion of the two.\nWhatever the subject or themes, corporeal poetics are invariably also celebrations of the density of being. The corporeal artwork's most salient philosophical quality is usually some form of melancholy skepticism and stoicism balanced out by a variety of Epicurean gratifications. While these are expressed more often in ironic asides, jokes, reveries, satires or aphorisms, than in formal writings or artworks, the latter are the subject of this book where we will address the corporeal aspects of still and moving images.The 16 essays that make up the book primarily cover the 20th century starting with the auspicious meeting between Edward Weston and Tina Modotti in 1919, and on to Gerhard Richters "painting as photography" in the early 21st century. It is my hope that this book entertains, clarifies, and puts the work of these master photographers and filmmakers into some historical and cultural perspective.

One Second to Live: Photography, Film and the Corporeal in an Age of Extremes

Arts & Photography

Porcari, George

Photography & Video

Delancey Street Press

Nothing Happened is a memoir by Isaac Cronin that primarily deals with the 1960's and 1970's, the "street fighting years," covering terrain from Berkeley to Paris. The book is a first hand account of the counterculture of the time as well as an exploration of the inner workings of the Situationist International in France and the USA. While treating the subject with some humor the book also seeks to redress some accepted truisms and cliches about the time that have calcified into "fact." Nothing Happened is also a critical examination of various writings and pronouncements that were influential at the time, putting that period in perspective.

Nothing Happened An American Situationist Memoir

Biographies & Memoirs

Cronin, Isaac

Memoirs

The Antonioni Adventure is written by George Porcari, designed by Ucef Hanjani and published by Delancey Street Press. It is a work that covers the work of Michelangelo Antonioni from L’Avventura to The Passenger. Antonioni, like other radical filmmakers of the immediate post-war period, most conspicuously Jean-Luc Godard and Pier Paolo Pasolini, observed society from what we might call an outraged critical perspective that sought to explore the resulting tragic contradictions of communities from inside the society that created them, and thereby establish a new aesthetic paradigm through a critical analysis that was fundamentally poetic. What was understood by these artists – as common ground - was that the post-war utopian promises of universal access - via the computer, electronic communication and media, along with greater high speed mobility - all presumably facilitated a new utopia, but one that by the late sixties was in deep crisis.The Antonioni Adventure traces the Italian director’s trajectory through the 1960’s as he responded to that crisis in social mores, political/cultural wars, and a new emotional terrain. At the time all of this seemed very much like dangerous, uncertain, and uncharted waters. Longer essays on Blow-Up, Zabriskie Point and The Passenger detail the importance of those films as they explore the new contemporary social and emotional matrix. Antonioni’s work fearlessly charted sensitive characters coping under the new postwar realities; conditions that are very much still with us today. What are those circumstances, and how did the characters in those works react to them – how and why did they succeed or fail? These are some of the questions that the author addresses.While many filmmakers would explore  the complex dynamics of relationships in the thorny post-war era – such as Ingmar Bergman - only in Antonioni’s work do we see characters attempt to create emotional bonds in a peculiarly hyper-realistic modern context that is fundamentally antithetical to those emotions. The result is a sense of pathos and humor that is profoundly sympathetic to his characters without being sentimental or patronizing. His profound sense of irony and disgust was reserved for those in power, as we see in Zabriskie Point, not those who were searching for how to cope in a difficult new world made in large part by technocrats and their machines. The futility of human endeavors and the permeability and fragility of the flesh were constant themes that found new ways of expression as his work progressed from its neorealist beginnings toward unexplored areas that were new to him and to his audience. The book traces the trajectory of that "adventure" - or that search - for a new means of expression within the context of the feature film. 

The Antonioni Adventure

The first edition of Greetings From LA: 24 Frames and 50 Years was printed in 2016 and coincided with an exhibit at haphazard gallery in Los Angeles. It featured the essay “Photographic Adventures with Edgard Degas” and an essay not found in the second edition titled “Gone to Hollywood: Annie Leibovitz and Helmut Newton Shoot the Stars.” The second edition contains “The Delight of the Particular: The Photography of Ronald Traeger” by George Porcari and “El Laberinto Dos” by Mark Von Schlegell not found in the rst edition.
The catalog documents the body of photo-collage work by including all 24 artworks in the book, along with other pictures by Porcari that coincide with the essays by various writers.
The contributing authors are:
Jorge Pardo, who is a Cuban born American artist, who lived for many years in Chicago and Los Angeles and currently resides in Mexico. He shows regularly in galleries and museums world wide.
Veronica Gonzalez-Peña is a Mexican born writer and filmmaker who has lived for much of her life in Los Angeles and currently resides in New York. She has published many works over the years, working primarily with Semiotexte(e).
Mark Von Schlegell is an American born writer currently residing in Cologne, Germany. He has published many works of science fiction for Semiotext(e) as well as essays and catalogs.
Colin Blodorn is an American born writer and art historian currently residing in Athens, Georgia. 
Sylvère Lotringer is a French born philosopher and writer, who has taught for many years at Columbia University in New York and at various other institutions in Europe and the USA. He was co-founder of Semiotext(e) and has published a far ranging body of interview books with French philosophers includeing Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio.

Greetings From LA: 24 Frames and 50 Years

Gonzalez-Peña, Veronica

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

"If it goes by, I've always known it was fickle," Marilyn Monroe once said of fame, an overriding theme in this collection of essays, profiles, and memoir by showbiz survivor Duke Haney. Fame proved faithful, of course, to Monroe, the book's most iconic subject, while others, like Steve Cochran, a villain in movies and a "hard-drinking, bed-hopping cop magnet" in reality, were widely forgotten before their untimely, often mysterious deaths. Taking an experimental tack in some instances, Haney employs a psychic medium to conduct a séance at Jim Morrison's former residence and an astrologer to interpret the birth chart of an astrology-crazed film star-turned-bank robber. He attends the funeral of the "next James Dean" who became a raggedy street person, performs a cringeworthy nude scene in a movie produced by "King of the Bs" Roger Corman, and searches for the camper van where funk trailblazer Sly Stone has been reduced to living. Painstakingly researched and compulsively readable, Death Valley Superstars offers a kind of midnight tour of Los Angeles past and present, highlighting hidden corridors and seldom-heard anecdotes about a few of the many who, fooled by Hollywood's mirages, found themselves caught in its quicksand.

Death Valley Superstars: Occasionally Fatal Adventures in Filmland

Haney, Duke