Vince Aletti

Michael Thompson

Acclaimed by American Photo as "one of the most important photographers working today," the fashion and celebrity photographer Michael Thompson began his career in the late 1980s as a studio assistant to Irving Penn, and now is famed for his glamorous portraiture. In our celebrity-besotted culture, the magazine photographer holds tremendous power to sculpt the public's conception of a star; and Thompson has done so for such A-listers as Cate Blanchett, Sting, Mariah Carey, Matt Damon, Jodie Foster, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Julia Roberts, Sting and Meryl Streep. Michael Thompson: Portraits presents work spanning Thompson's illustrious 20-year career. Taken from the pages of fashion and lifestyle magazines including Vogue, W, GQ, Allure and Vanity Fair, the nearly 150 images in this book intensify the mythic pungency of their subjects while simultaneously inviting an intimate glimpse into their inner lives. The images have been selected by the widely admired photography critic and connoisseur Vince Aletti, who conducts a far-reaching appraisal of celebrity, using Thompson's images as a touchstone to examine the emergence of celebrity as cult, as well as the power of the photographer's astringent gaze to strip artifice from his subject. As one of the foremost celebrity photographers of the last two decades, Thompson emerges here as a leading image-broker for our times.

Michael Thompson. Portraits. Ediz. italiana, inglese e francese

Nobuyoshi Araki

Kohei Yoshiyuki

"Captured in three Tokyo parks in the early seventies, Kohei Yoshiyuki's The Park series features some intriguing photographic works of art. Shot at night using flash and infrared film, the photographs show hetero- and homosexuals gathering for furtive sexual encounters in the Shinjuku, Yoyogi, and Aoyama parks. These amorous scenes, however, are unpleasantly crowded; even before Yoshiyuki approached them with his camera, the couples had become objects of desire for voyeurs. The sixty-two photographs are presented here in duotone quality with an interview with the artist."--BOOK JACKET.

The Park

Susan Bright

Any fashion photographer can make a flattering portrait, but the contemporary masters featured in Face of Fashion don't even try. This striking volume presents the intensely unconventional, often unnervingly intimate portraiture being made by some of today's most creative and original fashion photographers. Each photographer is represented by a range of portraits, including several commissioned especially for this book. Some of these portraits were produced as ads, others were commissioned for editorial features. Many of the subjects are celebritiesKate Moss by Corinne Day, Madonna by Steven Klein and by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott, Sting by Paolo Roversi; others are as anonymous as Mario Sorrenti's Woman I. Essays by Susan Bright and Vince Aletti illuminate the collaborative nature of this radically new approach to portraiture, as well as how it diverges from earlier work by Cecil Beaton, Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, and others. In addition, interviews and candid descriptions of the process by the photographers and subjects themselves provide rare insight into the potent mix of fame, fashion, and photography seen here.

Face of Fashion

This text explores the symbiotic relationship between contemporary portrait photography and fashion. It presents the intensely unconventional, often unnervingly intimate portraiture being made by five of the most creative and original fashion photographers in the world today.

New York's Underground Week by Week By Vince Aletti

The Disco Files 1973-78

Bruce (of Los Angeles.)

An icon of gay art and one of the most famous names in physique photography, Bruce Bellas is remembered as the pioneer of beefcake. Beginning in the 1940s and continuing until his death in 1974, he photographed some of the most important icons in the world of physical culture and body- building. Collected in this book are Bellas' rare photographs and films - the two volumes Inside and Outside comprise more than 100 colour images, masterfully restored as a limited edition, celebrating Bruce of Los Angeles and his refined, masterful aesthetic of erotica.

Inside/Outside

Bruce of Los Angeles

Presses Du Reel

The word "appropriate" can have two very different meanings depending on whether it is used as an adjective or a verb. In the case of "Permanent Food," artist Maurizio Cattelan and Paola Manfrin's periodical of pilfering, it is the active usage of the word, and only the active usage, that is appropriate. Bound together in each issue is a thoroughly bewildering, amusing, grotesque and blasa selection of images culled from anywhere, everywhere and nowhere: a German electrical company's ad featuring Tom and Jerry; a trash-strewn airplane interior; a naked fashion model with wide tan lines; a detail of a Victorian dummy; "super-tech" eyelashes by MAC; a naked woman with her toes in a skeleton's eye and nose sockets; a Mapplethorpe photograph of two leather men; a sweet ceramic puppy; a snow field; a crashed VW beetle; and much, much more. You can't even imagine how much more.

Permanent Food

The first book to showcase and critically explore the groundbreaking photography of fashion magazines over the last century For nearly a century, fashion magazines have provided sophisticated platforms for cutting-edge photography – work that challenges conventions and often reaches far beyond fashion itself. In this book, acclaimed photography critic Vince Aletti has selected 100 significant magazine issues from his expansive personal archive, revealing images by photographers rarely seen outside their original context. With his characteristic élan and featuring stunning images, Aletti has created a fresh, idiosyncratic, and previously unexplored angle on the history of photography.

Vince Aletti

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