Luc Sante Books In Order

Camera Obscura

Abelardo Morell, author of last year’s award winning A Book of Books, makes magical Camera Obscura images in darkened interiors. The deceptively simple process he blacks out all of the windows leaving just a pinhole opening in one of them produces photographs of astonishing, complex beauty. Due to the nature of refracted light, the world outside his darkened room is projected, upside down, onto the interior space within which he works, converting the room, in effect, into the interior of a camera. Morell then photographs the results with a large format view camera, often requiring exposures of eight hours or more. Locations around the world were chosen for the interesting details and juxtapositions they would elicit the Empire State Building lies across a bedspread in a midtown Manhattan interior; the Tower of London is imprinted on the walls of a room in the Tower Hotel; the countryside in rural Cuba, Morell’s birthplace, plays across the walls of a crumbling interior that is rich with the patina of its own history. Every image is full of surprises and revelations.

Low Life

Luc Sante’s Low Life is a portrait of America’s greatest city, the riotous and anarchic breeding ground of modernity. This is not the familiar saga of mansions, avenues, and robber barons, but the messy, turbulent, often murderous story of the city’s slums; the teeming streets scene of innumerable cons and crimes whose cramped and overcrowded housing is still a prominent feature of the cityscape. Low Life voyages through Manhattan from four different directions. Part One examines the actual topography of Manhattan from 1840 to 1919; Part Two, the era’s opportunities for vice and entertainment theaters and saloons, opium and cocaine dens, gambling and prostitution; Part Three investigates the forces of law and order which did and didn’t work to contain the illegalities; Part Four counterposes the city’s tides of revolt and idealism against the city as it actually was. Low Life provides an arresting and entertaining view of what New York was actually like in its salad days. But it’s more than simpy a book about New York. It’s one of the most provocative books about urban life ever written an evocation of the mythology of the quintessential modern metropplois, which has much to say not only about New York’s past but about the present and future of all cities.

Evidence

In Evidence, Luc Sante, the author of Low Life, offers an eerie, insider’s visit to the scene of the crime. This collection of rarely seen Evidence photographs, taken by the New York City Police Department between 1914 and 1918, presents startling images, some brutal, some poetic and all possessed of a strange and spectral beauty. In his introduction, Sante explains his attraction to this murderous gallery: ‘Here was a true record of the texture and grain of a lost New York, laid bare by the circumstances of murder. Lives stopped by razor or bullet were frozen by a flash of powder…
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On Planet Earth

On Planet Earth: Travels in an Unfamiliar Land collects Jan Staller’s strangely seductive photographs from locations across the United States and around the world. from abandoned factories to military test sites, from high tech water purification plants to heavy machinery that looks like it fell from outer space. Staller’s square format and panoramic photographs reveal bizarre and forgotten constructions of industrial society, set against a symphony of color and light.A sense of mystery pervades Staller’s images: ordinary building devices and machine parts take on the aura of Surrealist sculptures, while common construction sites echo the sacred grounds of ancient civilizations. Using long exposures and a combination of light sources often photographing at dawn or dusk Staller produces photographs that are breathtakingly rich in color and intensity. Complementing the images in On Planet Earth is a narrative by Luc Sante, who shares Staller’s fascination with urban and industrial wastelands, the history they contain, and the mysteries they conceal. Together, Staller’s photographs and Sante’s text offer a stimulating, Technicolor tour of the unknown at the edge of the contemporary landscape.

Making It Real

Artwork by Vik Muniz. Contributions by William Mitchell. Text by Luc Sante.

The Factory of Facts

The acclaimed author of Low Life reinvents the memoir in a cunning, lyrical book that is at once a personal history and a meditation on the construction of identity. Born in Belgium but raised in New Jersey, Luc Sante transformed himself from a pious, timid Belgian boy into a loutish American adolescent, who eschewed French while fantasizing about the pop star Fran oise Hardy. To show how this transformation came about and why it remained incomplete The Factory of Facts combines family anecdote and ancestral legend; detailed forays into Belgian history, language, and religion; and deft synopses of the American character.

Richard Prince

Emerging in the 1980s, Richard Prince combines the media of painting, artist’s books and photography to offer peculiar views into the margins of American culture. Prince’s highly idiosyncratic subject matter such as one line jokes in the style of 1960s cartoons, Marlboro cowboys and motorcycle gangs is central to his work. In the late 1970s Prince was working for the cutting services of Time Life publications in New York, and began to re photograph advertiseme*nts and compose his own pictures from this highly familiar ‘pop’ imagery. Recently his work has taken an unexpected turn, and the artist has emerged as a consummate painter, producing some of the most unusual and admired works in the current painting scene.

Cabinet 14

On the theme of ‘the Doppelganger,’ Cabinet collaborates with Kabinet, a Russian journal of art and cultural theory based in Saint Petersburg. The collaborative themed section includes a comparison by American astronauts of Soviet cosmonauts; an investigation of the color ‘Red’; and an interview with Viktor Sukhodrev, who was, for 30 years, the top diplomatic translator in the Soviet Union, present in conversations between Khruschev and JFK, Carter and Brezhnev, etc. Also in this issue, Shelley Jackson’s ‘fold in’ essay on conjoined twins, Joanna Burton on the town of Reno and the culture of divorce, artist’s projects by Josiah McElheny and Komar & Melamid, and more.
Cabinet is a quarterly magazine of art and culture that confounds expectations of what is typically meant by the words ‘art,’ ‘culture,’ and even sometimes ‘magazine.’ Like the 17th century cabinet of curiosities to which its name alludes, Cabinet is as interested in the margins of culture as the center. Featuring wide ranging, multi disciplinary content in each issue through the varied formats of regular columns, essays, interviews, and special artist projects, Cabinet‘s hybrid sensibility merges the popular appeal of an arts periodical with the visually engaging style of a design magazine and the in depth exploration of a scholarly journal. Playful and serious, exuberant and committed, Cabinet‘s omnivorous appetite for understanding the world makes each of its issues a valuable sourcebook of ideas for a wide range of readers, from artists and designers to scientists and historians. Cabinet was founded on the proposition that an art magazine that genuinely tried to reflect the contemporary artist’s relationship to the world might end up being utterly unrecognizable as an art magazine. Cabinet is, paradoxically, an art magazine that almost never writes about art. Instead, the magazine invites its readers to participate in an ongoing investigation of the connections between superficially unrelated aspects of cultural expression. In an age of increasing specialization, Cabinet looks to previous models of the well rounded thinker to forge a new type of magazine for the intellectually curious reader of the future.

Edited by Sina Najafi. Essays by Johanna Burton, Shelley Jackson, Viktor Sukhodrev, et al.

Paperback, 7. 75 x 9. 75 in./128 pgs /

Five Masters of Photography

This is a unique selection of five of the greatest masters of photography of all time. It includes work by Julia Margaret Cameron, Walker Evans, Gustave Le Gray, W. Eugene Smith, and Josef Sudek. The box set also represents a fabulous value: five books for the price of three, presented in a specially designed case.

Folk Photography

The postcard craze that swept the United States in the early 20th century coincided with the spread of pocket cameras and led to the phenomenon of real photo postcards, so called because they were mostly made by small town amateur and professional photographers and printed in their darkrooms, usually in quantities of less than a hundred unlike the contemporary mass produced photolithographs. Real photo postcards were typically produced in small, often isolated towns whose citizens felt an urgent need to communicate with distant friends. The cards document everything about their time and place, from intimate matters to events that qualified as news. They depict people from every station of life engaged in the panorama of human activities eating, sleeping, labor, worship, animal husbandry, amateur theatrics, barn raising, spirit rapping, dissolution, riot, disaster, death. The phenomenon began in 1905 and peaked in the 1910s, when many millions of real photo postcards were mailed each year. Previous books have been content to display these cards for their socio historical or nostalgia value; this book goes much further. The 122 postcards it reproduces cover the entire field of the cards’ subject matter, but Luc Sante illuminates them with the penetrating, stimulating analysis expected from a writer hailed as ‘a singular historian and philosopher of American experience.’ Sante wants us to see the images not simply as depictions of a vanished way of life, but as a crucial stage in the evolution of photography, possessing a blunt, head on style that inherits something of the Civil War photographers’ plain aesthetic yet also anticipates the work of Walker Evans and other great documentary artists of the 1930s. Combining all his gifts as a chronicler of early 20th century America, a historian of photography, and a brilliant critic, Sante shows how real photo postcards offer a revealing ‘self portrait of the American nation.’