Photography : Photography

Ann Shelton: Dark Matter traces the 20-year career of a leading New Zealand photographer. Ann Shelton's evolution as a camera artist with a unique, penetrating vision into the culture and history of New Zealand is beautifully illustrated in this book, which includes multiple examples from all her important bodies of work. Dark Matter begins with Shelton's early 1990s work which is known for its unflinchingly raw, autobiographical content. Through a series of essays which address the main themes in Shelton's art and illuminate her particular approach readers are shown the way the artist's exacting eye and fastidious research practice developed. The book presents Shelton's well-known images of infamous historical sites in New Zealand alongside her more internationally-focused work and her latest, striking suite of photographs depicting ikebana. Ann Shelton: Dark Matter is both a photography lover's book and a book lover's object of desire.

Title: Dark Matter
Author: SHELTON ANN
Format: Hardback
Publishing status: Active
Publication date: 21/11/2016
Price: $90.00
RRP: $90.00
Imprint: Auckland Art gallery
Publisher: Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tam
ISBN: 9780864633095
Available stock: 1

Damiani takes great pleasure in re-publishing this classic photo book from 1959 in a beautifully printed facsimile edition. With nearly 200 photographs of Halsman's famous subjects in midair, these uniquely witty and energetic images of airborne movie stars, politicians, royalty, artists, and authors have become an important part of Halsman's photographic legacy. For six years in the mid-1950s, he ended his portrait sessions by asking his sitters to jump. Grace Kelly hikes her skirt with surprising moxie. Marilyn Monroe, Edward Steichen, Audrey Hepburn, Robert Oppenheimer, John Steinbeck, Weegee, Aldous Huxley, Marc Chagall, Salvador Dali, Brigitte Bardot, and Groucho Marx all take the leap of faith - ensuring that we see something about them that we hadn't quite seen before. It is a tribute to Halsman's powers of persuasion that Richard Nixon, the Duke & Duchess of Windsor, Judge Learned Hand (in his mid-80s at the time) and other figures not known for their spontaneity could be talked into rising to the challenge. He called the resulting pictures his hobby.
And in Philippe Halsman's Jump Book, he tells us, with mock-academic wit, that the photos are studies in the new science of Jumpology. The jumps took place wherever the rest of the shoot had been located: in the studio, outside or inside, at the subject's home or workplace. "When you ask a person to jump," Halsman wrote, "his attention is mostly directed toward the act of jumping, and the mask falls, so that the real person appears." As Roberta Smith, chief art critic of the New York Times, wrote in her review of the 2010 Halsman/ Jump exhibit in New York: "There is a sublime silliness to Halsman's images that can make you laugh regardless of how often you see them. They offer incontrovertible proof of Schiller's claim that 'all art is dedicated to joy.' Evidently the simple act of getting off the ground requires giving in to something like joy. You have to let go." It is not coincidental that Halsman devised Jumpology in the era of Action Painting, which sowed the seeds that would soon grow into performance art.
Roberta Smith continues: "Halsman pushed his own form, the studio portrait, to extremes, exaggerating its basic components in ways that make us more aware of them: the trust that must exist between photographer and subject; the split-second 'performance' that any still camera captures; the uncontrollable revelations of character; the way we all try to rise, as it were, to the occasion of a photograph."

Title: Jump
Author: HALSMAN PHILIPPE
Format: Hardback
Publishing status: Active
Publication date: 01/09/2015
Price: $70.00
RRP: $70.00
Imprint: Miscellaneous
Publisher: Damiani
ISBN: 9788862084208
Available stock: 1

As John Loengard writes in the preface to this monograph: 'The truth is: a good photograph cannot be repeated. This may be why a photograph of a brief moment, an instant in time, can hold our interest forever.' And this volume, Moment by Moment , is an intriguing selection of a many moments in his over half-century long career. His subjects include movie stars, writers, politicians, artists and other photographers, as well as normal people engaged in a host of extraordinary activities - or, rather, typical activities rendered unforgettable, of enduring interest, by the photographer's vision. From a shimmering Marilyn Monroe to a brooding T. S. Eliot, from a now almost sinister silhouette of Bill Cosby to an iconic shot of the Beatles, from an Etonian to a boy in the streets of Manchester, as well as ranchers, sweepers, picknickers, and other photographers, Loengard's vision moves and delights us with his humanity and artistry. Loengard enlarges our understanding and deepens our appreciation of his photographs with insightful commentaries on each of the pictures reproduced in the book.

Title: Moment by Moment
Author: LOENGARD JOHN
Format: Hardback
Publishing status: Active
Publication date: 10/11/2016
Price: $85.00
RRP: $85.00
Imprint: Thames & Hudson
Publisher: Thames & Hudson Ltd
ISBN: 9780500970775
Available stock: 1