Books 03.11
The latest books causing us to sit up and take notice.
Max Huber
Phaidon Books has recently released this monograph of Swiss graphic designer Max Huber (1919-92) in paperback. Combining painting and photography with other graphic media, this truly innovative work is a great example of a multi-disciplinary approach to design, and all without the modern technology of Photoshop. Brilliant.
New Topographics
Britt Salvesen, published by Steidl & Partners
This book is dedicated to the exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape, held in 1975 at the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House, Rochester, New York. The show brought together Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel (Jr.). Signaling the emergence of a new approach to landscape, the exhibition effectively gave a name to a movement, New Topographics.
The pictures were stripped of any artistic frills and reduced to an essentially topographic state, conveying substantial amounts of visual information but eschewing entirely the aspects of beauty, emotion and opinion. The photographers all depicted urban or suburban realities under changes in an allegedly detached approach. (Steidl)
See also a review (and slideshow) of this book by Shana Lopes, a graduate student in art history at the University of Arizona in Tucson on http://places.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=12878
Nollywood
The book of South African photographer Pieter Hugo’s Nollywood exhibition (which was recently on at Te Tuhi Gallery in Auckland) includes all the images from the show. Nollywood, Nigeria’s film industry, is reputed to be the third biggest film industry in the world. It has a prolific output catering mainly for local audiences. Hugo has recreated the stereotypical characters of its movies – zombies, satanic demons, mummies etc, the series is posed by actors in the backlots of Nigeria’s film-making centres Enugu and Asaba. http://http://www.pieterhugo.com/
