A Sky filled with Shooting Stars

Caleb Cain Marcus’s very particular approach to photography is suggested in the title of his wonderful new book, A Portrait of Ice. Whereas we might expect a study of glaciers like this to be primarily about the appearances of landscape or current anxieties about climate change (and in truth neither of these issues is ignored [...]

Yes, that’s a question mark up there in the title. I generally reserve ASfwSS book reviews for publications that I can wholeheartedly recommend. It seems like a waste of energy to write about anything else; there are plenty of other people who will cover them. But a couple of weeks after this really disappointing read, [...]

A few weeks before the dawn of time the very first interview I ever did back at ARTINFO was with Mary Ellen Mark. The occasion was Steidl’s republication of her 1981 “Falkland Road” book of photographs of Bombay prostitutes. Now the Getty Museum has just published Ms Mark’s “Prom”, the result of a four-year project [...]

It’s been a long while since I featured a book review here, but every now and then something really special comes along. Some ASfwSS readers will be aware that shortly before the dawn of time, I first arrived in New York City as a graduate research student. The topic of my research was precisely the [...]

Second week of the new season and there are still great new shows opening pretty much every night of the week. This week it’s been a little bit harder to steer away from some of the obvious choices (my final pick today is more or less unavoidable – though none the less wonderful for that) [...]

When I predicted the top museum shows of 2009 for ARTINFO back in January, I remember being particularly excited about this one, Alias Man Ray: The Art of ReInvention that opens at the Jewish Museum on Sunday (and runs through next March). Now that I have had a chance to preview the show, I am [...]

Thomas Allen has been a favorite photographer of mine since I first saw his work at the Foley Gallery in 2004. He describes his work quite simply: “I work with vintage paperbacks, mainly 1950s pulp novels. I cut them with an Exacto knife and make pop-up books. Then I light them for very dramatic effect [...]

A weather front passes over low hills and a broken row of small houses; the sky darkens; and, just as the storm is about to break, a bizarre and terrifying sight unfolds before our eyes. A wild bear, one of the proudest and most feared creatures that comes into more or less regular contact with [...]

  For a lot of people, the new Rizzoli book about Kenny Scharf will seem a perfect match for his artistic personality: it’s big, it’s brash, it’s brightly colored, and it’s got a big-nosed, one-eyed cartoon character grinning out from the middle of it.  Rarely can an artist have been so inextricably linked with a [...]

  You remember the Andy Warhol “Giant” Size book that Phaidon published in 2006? An extraordinary and utterly covetable book, it sells for $125 full-price (though Amazon have sellers offering at less than $75), weighs in at more than seventeen pounds, and measures more than seventeen inches by thirteen. In other words, although it’s a [...]