Published by D.A.P.. By Vince Aletti. Interview with Fran Lebowitz.
In 1973, Vince Aletti became the first person to write about the emerging disco scene. His engagement with disco nightlife continued throughout the decade as he wrote his weekly column for Record World magazine, which incorporated top ten playlists from DJs across the US (such as Larry Levan, Larry Sanders, Walter Gibbons, Tee Scott and Nicky Siano) alongside Aletti's own writings and interviews.
As disco grew from an underground secret to a billion-dollar industry, Aletti was there to document it, and The Disco Files is his personal memoir of those days, containing everything he wrote on the subject (most of it between 1974 and1978) augmented with photography by Peter Hujar and Toby Old. This book is the definitive and essential chronicle of disco, true from-the-trenches reporting that details, week by week, the evolution of the clubs, the DJs, and above all, the music, through magazine articles, beautiful photographs, hundreds of club charts and thousands of record reviews.
Photocopies of Aletti's Record World columns circulated for years among DJs and music lovers, until they were finally collected in 2009 into the first edition of The Disco Files, an instant classic that quickly sold out. This new edition of The Disco Files brings Aletti's compulsively readable disco writing back into print, adding an interview with Fran Lebowitz originally published in the Village Voice in 1990.
Throughout his career, curator, writer and critic Vince Aletti (born 1945) has been at the forefront of music, culture and the arts. He wrote for Record World and Rolling Stone and covered the club scene in the late 1970s and 1980s for the Village Voice, where he would serve as art editor until 2005. In addition to curating numerous photography exhibitions, Aletti writes about photography for the New Yorker.
Published by Steidl/Pace/MacGill Gallery. Text by Vince Aletti.
The Lower East Side between 1972 and 1985—filled with artists, wannabe artists and hangers-on—was a community of the misbegotten gathered from every town in America and relocated in the mean streets between Broadway and the Bowery, and Peter Hujar was right in the midst of it. Nothing but talent, flamboyance, rank gender-bending mockery and arch irony supported these artists: some made their names, many came to grief and a few made art. In those days, the gutted streets of the Lower East Side resembled a war-zone. Though some established artists had passed through—Rauschenberg and Johns, John Cage and Merce Cunningham—almost everyone lived and worked on the extreme outer margins of money and art, penniless and unknown. As a community, downtown New York was a counterstatement to the rich New York of the banks, museums, media, corporations and the art world itself. That downtown New York is gone: time, gentrification, disease and death have taken their toll and turned this vibrant epoch into a chapter in art history. But before it vanished, its extravagant cast sat for Peter Hujar’s camera, and with this volume, that community is vividly brought to life. Featured are Charles Ludlam, David Wojnarowicz, Edwin Denby, Susan Sontag, Paul Thek, Divine, Robert Wilson, John Waters, William S. Burroughs, Ray Johnson, Fran Lebowitz, Remy Charlip, Joe Brainard and many others. Peter Hujar (1934–87) was born in Trenton, New Jersey, and moved to Manhattan to work in the magazine, advertising and fashion industries. He documented the vibrant cultural scene of downtown New York throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In 1976 he published Portraits in Life and Death, with an introduction by Susan Sontag. Hujar died of AIDS in 1987.
Published by r/e projects. Text by Vince Aletti, Pilar Ribal, Gerard A. Goodrow, Risa Needleman, Benjamin Tischer, Stephen Irwin, Melvin Brown.
Artist Stephen Irwin (1959-2010) worked in sculpture, drawing and installation, but he is best known for his work altering vintage pornography: using steel wool to rub off a magazine page's shiny coating and taking most of the picture with it, Irwin lovingly isolated fragments of the image. Censoring much of what might have been shocking about the original photographs, Irwin's images suggest instead a more expansive erotic landscape of tenderness and perversion, chastity and lasciviousness. Before his death, Irwin asked that his ashes be compacted and turned into graphite for pencils. Although this ultimate performance never materialized, the gesture and thought is a testament to his creative and conceptual mind, one that fully grasped the delicacy and absurdity of life.
PUBLISHER r/e projects
BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 6.75 x 9.5 in. / 144 pgs / 110 color.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 5/26/2015 Active
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: FALL 2015 p. 126
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9783000479977TRADE List Price: $45.00 CAD $60.00 GBP £40.00
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Published by Le Bal/Editions Xavier Barral. Text by Vince Aletti.
Mark Cohen (born 1943) is a protagonist of the street photography idiom that dominated American photography in the early 1970s. Dark Knees is a catalogue of Cohen’s photos taken in his hometown over the past 40 years. The images captured by Cohen, who rejects the use of his viewfinder in favor of holding the camera away from his body, constitute a poetical documentation of the small mining town in which he was raised, in blurry night scenes with fragments of torsos and the backs of legs. Cohen says of his style: "I became a surrealist because I kept walking around the same blocks, and I started taking a picture of a guy’s shoe. I didn’t know what I was doing exactly. I was just being led by whatever I would see." Dark Knees includes an essay by the acclaimed photography critic Vince Aletti.
Published by Fraenkel Gallery. Introduction by Jeffrey Fraenkel. Text by Vince Aletti, Stephen Koch. Interview with Fran Lebowitz.
Celebrated and revered by artists, the work of Peter Hujar remains something of a public secret, but his photographs dealing with sex and eroticism, made between the years 1969 and 1986, have come to define a certain era in New York. Today they are widely considered to be his finest and most radical work. Hujar’s view of the human body is uninhibited and uncompromising, but his poignant explorations of sexuality and desire also project a universal humanity; as Nan Goldin said of Hujar’s nudes, "Looking at his photographs of nude men, even of a naked baby boy, is the closest I ever came to experience what it is to inhabit male flesh." This monograph, published in conjunction with an exhibition at Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, is the first to deal specifically with Hujar’s photographs of love and lust. Captured in deeply textured black and white, these photographs present a view of human relationships that encompasses both the tender and taboo. This volume also contains an interview with author Fran Lebowitz from 1989, and newly commissioned essays by Vince Aletti and Stephen Koch. Peter Hujar (1934–1987) was born in Trenton, New Jersey and moved to Manhattan to work in the magazine, advertising and fashion industries. He documented the vibrant cultural scene of downtown New York throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In 1976, he published Portraits in Life and Death, with an introduction by Susan Sontag. Hujar died of AIDS in 1987.
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.
This limited edition of Portraits comes with a signed archival print photograph by Michael Thompson (10 x 17 inches) and is housed in a linen box.
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.
Published by PPP Editions. Text by Collier Schorr.
From the collection of the renowned photography critic and curator Vince Aletti, Male collects photographs, paintings and artifacts on the theme of the male body, amassed over the last 30 years. Aletti's collection was first presented at New York's White Columns gallery in February 2008, and is a wild blend of anonymous and iconic art and photography from the nineteenth century to the present, a visual cacophony that distinguishes Aletti's taste and appetite as a collector. Among the known photographers in the collection are Alexandr Rodchenko, Nan Goldin, Marco Breuer, Aaron Siskind, Gary Schneider, Peter Hujar, Bill Jacobson, McDermott and McGough, Weegee, George Platt Lynes, Larry Clark, Danny Lyon and Malick Sidibe. Alongside reproductions, a gatefold page displays the works as they are installed in Aletti's New York home, and Collier Schorr contributes an essay recording the impact the collection has had on her own work and view of photography. Schorr writes: “Art history, written mainly by men, has shied away from the male figure... Aletti's collection… creates a Cosmos: at once a microcosm of gay male life, a personal fantasy, and the infinite, enveloping World.”
PUBLISHER PPP Editions
BOOK FORMAT Paperback, 10 x 12.5 in. / 272 pgs / 72 color / 132 bw.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 2/28/2010 Out of print
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: SPRING 2010 p. 87
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9780971548060TRADE List Price: $120.00 CAD $145.00
New York's Underground Week by Week By Vince Aletti
Published by DJhistory.com.
In 1973 Vince Aletti became the first person to write about the emerging Disco scene, and went on to write a famous weekly column in Record World magazine, which incorporated top ten playlists from DJs across the US (such as Larry Levan, Larry Sanders, Walter Gibbons, Tee Scott and Nicky Siano) alongside his own writings and interviews. As Disco grew from an underground secret to a billion-dollar industry, Vince was there to document it, and this is his personal memoir, containing everything he wrote on the subject (most of it between 1974-1978). The Disco Files is the definitive and essential chronicle of Disco, true from-the-trenches reporting that details, week by week, the evolution of the clubs, the DJs and above all, the music, through magazine articles, beautiful photography, hundreds of club charts and thousands of record reviews.
PUBLISHER DJhistory.com
BOOK FORMAT Paperback, 6.75 x 9.5 in. / 474 pgs / 400 bw.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 7/31/2009 Out of print
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: FALL 2009 p. 172
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9780956189608TRADE List Price: $35.00 CAD $40.00
Published by JRP|Ringier. Text by Vince Aletti, Jon Savage.
This beautifully designed three volume boxed set presents new photographic work by Hedi Slimane, the iconic fashion designer who, during tenures at Yves Saint Laurent and Christian Dior, has infused men's fashion with an androgynous, rock n' roll swerve. The first volume is an album of Slimane's photographs of the Lollapalooza-esque three-day Festival Internacional de Benicássim on the East coast of Spain, the second is devoted to images of the new British and American rock scenes and the third contains essays on Slimane's work by art critic Vince Aletti and music critic Jon Savage. In a 2003 conversation with Interview's Ingrid Sischy, Slimane discussed his beginnings as a photographer: "I started taking pictures before I even began in fashion. I didn't start with clothes until I was 16, but I had my first camera when I was 11. I've always taken pictures, almost like some people take notes or write down their thoughts." As this collection reveals, Slimane's photographs of the international music scene are as fresh and intrinsic as his paradigm-shifting work in fashion.
Published by Hatje Cantz/Yossi Milo. Edited by Yossi Milo. Interview by Nobuyoshi Araki. Text by Vince Aletti.
Kohei Yoshiyuki's nighttime photographs, taken with infrared film and flash in Japan's Shinjuku, Yoyogi and Aoyama Parks during the 1970s, capture the illicit sexual encounters, both heterosexual and homosexual, that frequently occurred there under the cloak of darkness. The Park's images not only reveal hidden sexual exploits but also uncover many spectators ardently lurking in the darkness, waiting to join in--and quickly raise issues of voyeurism and surveillance. In The Photobook: A History, Volume II, Martin Parr speaks to the societal relevance of this series, calling it, "A brilliant piece of social documentation, catching perfectly the loneliness, sadness and desperation that so often accompany sexual or human relationships in a big, hard metropolis like Tokyo." As exhibition organizer and editor Yossi Milo writes in his introduction, "With each viewing, I noticed something that had eluded me before: the photos' rigorous compositions…They are provocative photographs, and unsettling as well: one is both chilled and thrilled by Yoshiyuki's boldness, by how close he crept to his unaware subjects, by the hours he spent late at night crouched in bushes and against trees, waiting for his perfect shot." Originally published as Document Kouen in Japan in 1980 and long out of print, the austere and acclaimed first edition of this book now commands prices near $1,000 per copy. This new, updated edition, featuring an interview with the artist by colleague Nobuyoshi Araki and an essay by the noted photo critic Vince Aletti, contains all 60 works from the infamous Park series, reproduced from new scans in deluxe duotones. This work has not been seen by the public since the 1970s and has been known only to cult collectors until now. Exhibited at Yossi Milo Gallery in New York in September of 2007, it was one of the most talked-about offerings of the season.
Published by Les Presses du Reel. Edited by Vince Aletti.
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.
PUBLISHER Les Presses du Reel
BOOK FORMAT Paperback, 6.5 x 9 in. / 194 pgs / illustrated throughout.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 4/1/2006 No longer our product
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: SPRING 2006 p. 141
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9781564661500TRADE List Price: $15.00 CAD $17.50
Published by Hatje Cantz. Essay by Erdmann Ziegler. Introduction by Vince Aletti.
Without exception, Ingar Krauss's photographs, moving formal portraits in faded gray and sepia tones, are all of children and teenagers. The subjects look serious, proud, unapproachable, remote and sometimes defiant--both essentially childlike and more mature than they ought to be. The photographer finds his models at home and on his travels to typical childhood institutions of former Eastern Bloc countries: summer camps, Socialist clubhouses for Young Pioneers, and orphanages. Conditions there explain some of the work's timelessly melancholy tone, which the artist fortifies by printing on old photographic paper produced in Eastern Europe. Krauss, born in 1965 in Berlin, had his solo debut in Germany in 2002 and has since shown in New York each of the last three years. This beautifully printed book is his first.
Published by Hatje Cantz. Edited by Christian Skrein. Essays by Carl Aigner, Christian Skrein and Vince Aletti. Preface by Peter Noever.
“You press the button, we do the rest.” Kodak used this slogan in ads for the first box cameras, introduced by George Eastman in 1888. From then on, virtually anyone could take pictures--the snapshot was born! Without exception, the amateur photos presented in Snapshots: The Eye of the Century capture what are essentially ordinary moments--yet every trace of banality disappears once they are removed from the context of personal biography. Sometimes the moment is right, and art just “happens,” in the form of double or multiple exposures, slipped horizons, or curious details that enter the picture frame because the camera moved just as the shutter was released. Christian R. Skrein-Bumballa, an artist and a former professional photographer, has tracked down and collected thousands of these treasures, which can be viewed as part of our visual heritage. His impressive selection of photographs is here arranged thematically, and at its heart we find the essentials of the human condition: joy and pain, visualized in the decisive moment in which history stands still for a fraction of a second. Snapshots features the most aesthetically notable and otherwise curious photographs from the S.A.S. Snapshots Archiv Skrein, a collection of nearly one million snapshots from all over the world.
Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century, Deluxe Edition
Published by Roth Horowitz, LLC. Photographs by Daido Moriyama. Edited by Vince Aletti, Jeffrey Fraenkel, Andrew Roth. Text by May Castleberry, Shelley Rice, Richard Benson, Neville Wakefield, David Levi Strauss.
The history of the photographic book goes back more than a century; early on, the medium of photography and the book format were understood to relate to each other on both technical and aesthetic levels. The examples of truly great combinations of photographic image and text, great design and typography bound together as books are numerous, and make up an impressive artistic, social and documentary statement of the twentieth century. Writer and rare book expert Andrew Roth has selected for this volume a group of 101 of the best photography books ever published: books that bring all of the elements of great bookmaking together to create, ultimately, a thing of beauty, a work of art. Mostly made up of publications in which the photographs were meant to be seen in book form, as opposed to approaching the book as merely a repository of images, this list includes many artists and titles that will be familiar to the collector, but also not a few surprises. Chronologically, the first book is Volume One of Edward Curtis's seminal 1907 The North American Indian, and the last is David LaChapelle's LaChapelle Land from 1996. In between are books by Walker Evans and Berenice Abbott, Atget and Brassai, Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand, and many other seminal photographers from all over the world. Each book in the catalogue receives a double page spread which includes publication information, several image spreads and a short text. But The Book of 101 Books is much more than simply an annotated and illustrated catalogue. Six important new essays on a variety of related topics from respected scholars, critics and artists are included as well: here you will find Richard Benson on the history of printing techniques, Shelley Rice on the societal significance of photography books, May Castleberry on reprints, exhibitions and keeping books alive for the public; Daido Moriyama on his personal memories of making his classic Bye Bye Photography, Dear, Neville Wakefield on the particular attributes of one of the most recent books in this group, Richard Prince's 1995 Adult Comedy Action Drama and Jeffrey Fraenkel on the myriad perils of publishing photography books. The catalogue entries themselves are written by the well known critics Vince Aletti and David Levi Strauss. Taken together, the depth and beauty of these essays and images will make The Book of 101 Books both an essential reference and an aesthetically compelling object.
PUBLISHER Roth Horowitz, LLC
BOOK FORMAT Slipcased, 9.5 x 11.5 in. / 320 pgs / 500 color.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 9/2/2001 No longer our product
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: FALL 2001
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9780967077468SDNR30 List Price: $750.00 CAD $900.00
Peter Hujar: Lost Downtown
Stephen Irwin
Mark Cohen: Dark Knees
Peter Hujar: Love & Lust
Michael Thompson: Portraits
Michael Thompson: Portraits
Male
The Disco Files 1973-78
Hedi Slimane: Rock Diary
Kohei Yoshiyuki: The Park
Permanent Food No. 14
Ingar Krauss: Portraits
Snapshots: The Eye Of the Century
The Book Of 101 Books