Jesse Pearson

Nudity Today explores the nude photography of ten young artists roughly between the ages of 20 and 30, including Tim Barber, Jerry Hsu, Sandy Kim, Maggie Lee, Nicole Lesser and Jordan Bennett. It examines the new moods and outlooks in photography engendered by the heady era that witnessed the explosion of the snapshot aesthetic, the birth of digital photography and the proliferation of online networks and outlets for sharing and exhibiting images. As these technological changes shaped the means of photography, the continuing relaxation of social mores transformed its ends. The young art photographers of today are more open in their sexuality and freer in their bodies than the generations that came before them, and the intimacy and spontaneity of their lives comes across unfiltered in their work. Nudity Today opens with an introduction that examines the major influences on these young artists--the photographers Ryan McGinley, Terry Richardson and Richard Kern. Kinship with and the influence of these three artists can be seen in ever-varying combinations in the generation of photographers that made themselves known in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The sensuality and earthiness of McGinley, the humor and raunch of Richardson and Kern’s concision and voyeurism have molded the younger photographers who are making nude photography today. With its wall-to-wall, scrapbook mode of design, Nudity Today illuminates just how big this movement is--how many young artists are making intimate, beautiful, funny, and even sometimes shocking nudes.

This book harkens back to the halcyon days of photographer and filmmaker Richard Kern’s youth. Edited by Jesse Pearson, editor of Nudity Today and Apology Magazine, Contact High couldn’t have a simpler premise--it’s all about naked girls smoking weed. This cheeky and playful collection of portraits recalls a time in Kern’s life when, he says, “I spent a lot of time with my friends smoking pot, listening to music, running around in the woods and sometimes swimming naked. Back then, when I was around a naked girl, weed was either about to be smoked or had been smoked.” In 1999, Kern met a model in Los Angeles who reminded him of the girls he used to smoke with back in North Carolina. So, seizing the moment, he “went down to Charleston to shoot her at her house and in the swamps around there. Her ambition at 18 years old was to open a head shop. She had a small gro-lite farm in her bedroom.” This carefree and sexy series of images from 1999 to the present is charged with an atmosphere of freewheeling, optimistic hedonism. Readers will undoubtedly get a real buzz from the beauty and sensuality of the images--perhaps tinged with a bittersweet hint of nostalgia for the sexy abandon of their own carefree youth.

A former professional boxer, actor, horse trainer and radio announcer, Charles Willeford (1919-1988) is best known for his Miami-based crime novels featuring hard-boiled detective Hoke Moseley, including Miami Blues and Sideswipe. His career as a writer began in the late 1940s, but it was his 1972 novel Cockfighter that announced his name to a wider audience. Of that book, Harry Crews said, "Charles Willeford renders the sport with such knowledge and attention to detail that... I had the almost inexpressible impression of being on my knees again beside the great fighting pits of the southern circuit." Considered to be Willeford's masterpiece, Cockfighter is a brutal and beautiful fiction of the American South, loosely modeled, according to the author, on Homer's Odyssey. Frank Mansfield is the titular cockfighter: a silent and fiercely contrary man whose obsession with winning will cost him almost everything. Mansfield haunts the cockpits, bars and roads of the rural South in the early 1960s, adrift but always capable of nearly anything. First published in complete form in 1972, and adapted by Willeford for a Monte Hellman film in 1974 (which became infamous for its use of real animals in the fight scenes), the novel Cockfighter has been out of print for nearly 20 years. Cockfighter is issued here with an introduction by Jesse Pearson and is the second volume in PictureBox's ongoing Charles Willeford reissue series.

Make us something about cats. This dictum, given to the artists and writers who participated in the 2003 Catholic exhibition at Guild & Greyshkul Gallery in New York, produced--beautiful, startling, thought-provoking, sweet, disturbing--results. According to editors/curators Jesse Pearson and Glynnis McDaris, “If they said 'cats are pretty,' that was fine. If they said 'cats are stupid,' that was fine too. This is Catholic in the spirit of its neglected definition: Having varied tastes. This isn't about eating fish on Fridays... The visual art in Catholic includes photographs by Roe Etheridge, Ryan McGinley, Colin DeLand, Richard Kern, Terence Koh and Terry Richardson; drawings by artists Jim Drain, Sabrina Mansouri, Pieter Schoolwerth and Spencer Sweeney; and projects from Le Tigre's JD Samson, Built-by-Wendy's Wendy Mullen and United Bamboo. Cats also includes Steve Lafreniere's writing on his mother's cat photography, Amber Gayle on brushes with 300-pound mountain lions, Amy Kellner's diatribe on the “Hang in There, Baby” tradition and a poem from Eileen Myles's pet, Avi.