Arthur Pollock has worked as a photojournalist for over fifty years, both freelance and on staff for several major news outlets. His professional career began in Hammond, IN and Lowell, MA in the nineteen sixties as he documented day-to-day street level stories of the time, and cut his teeth in those towns in the midst of an economic downturn and a cultural revolution. Hired on staff at the Boston Herald in the early nineteen eighties, he worked in the field for over ten years on many important features and was the recipient of numerous awards before becoming Assistant Photo Editor at the end of the decade.

This monograph is the first attempt at chronicling his enormous body of work and contains a cross-section of material from his early days on the streets, all the way up until the early nineteen nineties.

While he may echo the understatement of a news scribe, Pollock’s work clearly pays special homage to the artistry of those iconic shutter artists, Diane Arbus and the legendary New York street lensman of the 30s and 40s, Weegee. Indeed, every picture does tell a story. And in this unique collection, there are hundreds of stories… wonderfully told.

— Peter Gelzinis

This volume presents an overview of the Canadian collective oeuvre — an oeuvre still haunted by Miss General Idea, a fictive character who was at once muse and object, image and concept. Founded in Toronto in 1969 by Felix Partz, Jorge Zontal — both disappeared in 1994 — and AA Bronson, the trio adopted a generic identity that “freed it from the tyranny of individual genius.” Their complex intermingling of reality and fiction took the form of a transgressive and often parodic take on art and society. Treating the image as a virus infiltrating every aspect of the real world, General Idea set out to colonize it, modify its content and so come up with an alternative version of reality.

Paintings, installations, sculptures, photographs, videos, magazines, and TV programs: General Idea’s is an authentically multimedia oeuvre, that has lost nothing of its freshness and can now be seen as anticipating certain aspects of a current art scene undergoing radical transformation. The book covers the collective’s main areas of concern and themes, such as the artist and the creative process, glamour as a creative tool, art’s links with the media and mass culture, architecture and archaeology, sexuality and AIDS, etc. Including newly commissioned essays and republished texts, it is richly illustrated with documents and reproductions of the most important projects realized by General Idea from 1969 to 1994.

A pioneer of Conceptual art in Los Angeles during the late 1960s and 1970s, the painter, installation artist and theater director William Leavitt (born 1941) is above all an artist of narrative devices. Since 1969, his works in all the above media have employed abrupt fragments of popular and vernacular culture and depictions of modernist architecture to construct elusive narratives of cityscapes and environments. The culture and atmosphere of Los Angeles has played a significant role in Leavitt’s handling of these themes; classic southern Californian motifs of ever-present artifice and almost washed-out brightness recur throughout his work. Surveying the artist’s 40-year career, this volume includes sculptural tableaux, paintings, works on paper, photographs and performances from the late 1960s to the present. Leavitt has created a remarkable oeuvre that has influenced generations of artists, and this volume is both long overdue and highly anticipated.

Hose Variations is the first book by Bjarne Bare. This monograph, as the title suggests, consists of studies of hose variations. It is a study of time in between human interaction, where the dead moment, rather than the decisive, is in focus. The surroundings and placement of each hose reveal their owners character and is a light anthropological study of man, as well as a take on the traditional documentary genre of photography. It consists of Bares recent work from Berlin, Buenos Aires, Lodz, Los Angeles, and Oslo.

Ari Marcopoulos’s unique style of raw immediacy has made him one of the most important contemporary photographers. For thirty years, photographer Ari Marcopoulos has been pioneering contemporary photography by documenting subcultures such as skateboarders and graffiti artists, as well as landscapes and his own family and friends. Since his days printing photographs for Andy Warhol, he has amassed a huge body of work marked by its arresting and unsentimental intimacy that has been influential to the worlds of art, fashion, and photography. Bound to mimic a phone book, Ari Marcopoulos, Directory presents a collection of approximately 1,200 photographs, with curator and critic Neville Wakefield providing insightful commentary on some of Marcopoulos’s singular images. Copublished with Rizzoli, each book in this limited-edition series includes a print signed by the artist.

West Coast artist Eric Wesley was born in 1973 in Los Angeles. His work, which can take the form of sculpture, painting, drawing, architectural model or public artwork proposal, often uses decrepit materials and conveys a humorous take on the world and his own identity within it. For the Whitney Biennial, he created scale sets for a faux reality show; his kinetic sculpture Kicking Ass was a mechanized donkey that kicked holes in the gallery wall behind it. This small monograph is the first publication dedicated solely to the artist’s work, and is published on the occasion of his exhibition as part of the MOCA Focus series.

Couleurs du Spectre, contains a selection of photographs by Camille Vivier taken over the last ten years. They blend together classical pictorial subjects such as still life, nudes, and animals but with a distinct personal eye revealing a shadowy universe. Each photograph is theatrically staged employing props and the artifice of light to play with the formal beauty of the subject, while revealing a certain strangeness among the stillness. Vivier uses literature, cinema, and art history to reinterpret common cultural references and create a personal collection of curios and imagery of fantastic animals and characters. The film sequences are an extension of the photographic process and allow for further exploration of themes and imagery.

Richard Misrach’s Destroy This Memory is an affecting reminder of the physical and psychological impact of Hurricane Katrina. Rather than simply surveying the damage, Misrach — who has photographed the region regularly since the 1970s, most notably for his ongoing Cancer Alley project — found himself drawn to the hurricane-inspired graffiti: messages scrawled in spray paint, crayons, chalk, or whatever materials happened to be on hand. At turns threatening, desperate, clinical, and even darkly humorous, the phrases he captured — the only text that appears in the book — offer unique and revealing human perspectives on the devastation and shock left in the wake of this disaster.

Destroy This Memory presents previously unpublished and starkly compelling material, all of which Misrach shot with his 4 MP pocket camera. Created between October and December 2005, this haunting series of images serves as a potent, unalloyed document of the raw experiences of those left to fend for themselves in the aftermath of Katrina.

In 2001, Walead Beshty began documenting the Diplomatic Mission of the Republic of Iraq to the former German Democratic Republic in Berlin. Still protected as sovereign territory under the Vienna Conventions, the embassy has stood abandoned since the early 1990s as, in Beshty’s words, “a relic of two bygone regimes, unclaimable by any nation; a physical location marooned (by) symbolic shifts in global politics, a ruin set apart neitherby fences nor by millennia, but by the invisible and abstract mechanisms of international law”. The site inspired his ongoing engagement with the invisible and marginal territories of globalization which provide an important line through his photographic and sculptural work of the past decade. Selected Correspondences focuses on three bodies of photographic work — two that deal with the Embassy directly and a third, Transparencies, which continues the question of place and movement. The work has been exhibited at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, Tate Britain, London, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, among others, and is brought together here for the first time, accompanied by two new essays on the projects.

Preface by Karola Grässlin.

Essays
The Great Persuader by Astrid Wege; How Far We’ve Come From The River, a conversation between Bennett Simpson and Stephen Prina.

Describing Conceptual artist and musician Stephen Prina’s work in 2004, the Harvard Gazette wrote, “Prina’s artwork is full of unsuspected surprises, secret compartments that pop open to release compressed bundles of meaning or coiling strands of narrative.” His work at the 2008 Whitney Biennial, for example, was conceived as “a traveling spectacle — a mini-Broadway-musical-on-the-road or circus,” according to the artist. This concise retrospective volume presents work from 1979 to 2008, as well as installation views of Prina’s recent one-person exhibition at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden in Germany.