By manipulating the means and products of mass media, Richard Prince gives his viewers a glimpse of American culture as directed toward middle-class consumers. His appropriations of living rooms, watches, and sophisticated couples and individuals turn the informative nature of the original advertisement into cultural indicators of borrowed and fictional representation. This book assembles together the photographs that initiated Prince's exploration of "authorship" and "the original," ideas that were prevalent in the critical discourse of the late 70s, and are perhaps even more so today.

Richard Prince: Early Photographs 1977-1979

Arts & Photography

PRINCE, Richard

Individual Artists

Skarstedt Fine Art

By stripping the painting down to its basic rules, by using himself as a decisive subject matter, Oehlen created a body of work that diminished the limitations of previous cultural, aesthetic, and artistic obligations made on a painter and painting. This first volume to feature all of Oehlen's early self portraits reveals his balancing of figuration with abstraction, and his simultaneous questioning of the practice and history of art.

Albert Oehlen: Self Portraits

Described by one critic as "embarrassingly intimate," Cindy Sherman's Centerfolds, a series of twelve 2 x 4 foot images shot in 1981 for an Artforum commission, take the horizontal centerfold as their physical and conceptual framework. Though the images were never run in the magazine--the editor was concerned that they would be misunderstood--they remain some of the most affecting of Sherman's constructed pictures. In them, Sherman's vaguely adolescent female characters fill up the frame with an ambiguous, uncomfortably close presence, their plaid kilts, wet t-shirts, matted hair, disheveled nightgowns, and pretty gingham dresses keeping them in your face but unavailable, emotionally suggestive but ambivalently distanced. This handsome, compact volume, the first to include all twelve of the Centerfold images, is run through with an informative, involved text by Lisa Phillips, Head Curator of the New Museum and a long-time supporter of Sherman's work.

Cindy Sherman: Centerfolds

Phillips, LIsa

Grundberg, Andy

Schjeldahl, Peter

Smith, Roberta

In a 1992 interview, Laurie Simmons stated that, in her first body of color works, she was “trying to recreate a feeling, a mood from the time I was growing up: a sense of the 50s that I knew was both beautiful and lethal at the same time.” Reproduced here, her early series Interiors and Big Figures depict a post-World War II, 50s suburbia through plastic housewife and cowboy dolls placed in constructed interiors and manipulated exteriors. While the dolls provide a sense of play, the reality of the images they model is unavoidable. The female is pictured in the home, but she is alone, isolated, and vulnerable. The cowboy exudes the confidence and independence of a life of adventure, but he cannot escape the implied violence, racism and paternalism that also characterize his ideal.

Laurie Simmons: Photographs 1978/79

In the summer of 1996, Gregory Crewdson spent two solitary months at his family's cabin in Becket, Massachusetts. Using both small- and medium-format cameras, he obsessively photographed the fireflies that came alive at dusk each evening. Crewdson was drawn to the flickering lights, in part, by the underlying impossibility of capturing their elusive beauty in pictures. This luxurious volume, featuring 61 full-page tritone reproductions, calls to mind many of the hallmarks of Crewdson's oeuvre, from the sense of wonder in the nocturnal landscape, to the focus on light as a narrative event, to the fascination with nature as a psychological mystery. Although consistent in terms of their subject matter, these photographs demonstrate a wide scope of visual expression ranging from almost pure abstraction to more idyllic representations of the natural landscape.

Gregory Crewdson: Fireflies

Crewdson, Gregory

Color Coordinated Interiors catalogues a little known but characteristic and illuminating early project of Laurie Simmons's from 1983, just a few years after her first solo show in New York. Simmons is best known for her chilling and sophisticated photographs of dolls and dollhouses--seminal works that can be found in the greatest collections of contemporary art throughout the world, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Here, Simmons created miniature spaces using projection and illusion rather than glue-and-board craft, casting photographs behind dolls and lighting her tiny models starkly with flashlights--they're "Teenettes," three-inch-high Japanese figures whose clothes and hairstyles are all molded from the same single piece of brightly-colored plastic. The Teenettes' features are fuzzy by nature, but the scenes behind them here are photographed so that piping on every pillow pops out. This guided tour, with an interview by California artist James Welling, puts this newly collected work in context.

Laurie Simmons: Color Coordinated Interiors 1983

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