Books
You've Been Shot by a Smooth Photographer: The World of Michael Jackson Impersonators
Lorena Turner’s book The Michael Jacksons is the end product of a journey to track down, photograph, and interview Michael Jackson impersonators.
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A Personal Journey Through the Legacy of Apartheid
Catherine Taylor’s book centers on her search — what feels like an obsessive search — through veins of history buried in the time of apartheid in South Africa, where she and her family are from.
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Photographs Document the Global Traditions of Living with the Dead
Memento Mori: The Dead Among Us, a photography book by Paul Koudounaris out this month from Thames & Hudson, is a visual narrative of how a more visceral relationship to the dead thrives across the globe.
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A Poetic Record of Creations Lost, Missing, or Destroyed
Rarely has a book been so dizzyingly impenetrable while being, at the same time, so eminently readable. Les Unités perdus (The lost unities), by the French poet Henri Lefebvre, manages to both live up to this paradox and flourish within its idiosyncratic ramparts.
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A Comic Draws on the Dark Side of Hollywood's Golden Age
When the double-sized first issue of The Fade Out surfaced last summer — an ongoing comic noir set in 1940s Los Angeles — a share of the print run featured a limited-edition cover (commonly called a "variant" cover).
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A Graphic Novel Portrait of Slavery in Brazil
The history of black slavery in Brazil has largely been told from the perspective of the colonizers, not the enslaved.
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Inside Andy Warhol's Book Factory
It’s strange to picture Andy Warhol curled up with a novel, but the eccentric pop artist “lived and breathed" books, according to Warhol by the Book, the first US museum exhibition to explore the literary side of his practice.
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The Mystery of the Painter of Light™
Thomas Kinkade was a painter of cabins, lighthouses, and improvable sunsets. He was an avowed evangelical Christian who fortified his saccharine landscapes with passages from the scriptures.
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The Sibling Rivalry that Shaped Diane Arbus's Vision
In Silent Dialogues, art historian Alexander Nemerov, son of former US Poet Laureate Howard Nemerov and nephew of Diane Arbus, traces his father’s evolving attitudes toward photography and his sister's work in particular.
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The Bleak Banality of Shopping in Communist Europe
"In a cityscape largely without commercial seduction, the banality of the shop windows underscored a real cultural difference between East and West," photographer David Hlynsky writes in his introduction to Window-Shopping Through the Iron Curtain.
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Contemporary Photography's Capitalist Realism
In Caspar David Friedrich's “Frau vor untergehender Sonne” (“Woman before the Rising Sun”), a young woman is depicted facing the rising sun, which turns her almost completely, but not entirely, into a silhouette.
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A Heartbreaking Archive of Missing Pet Posters
Taped around telephone poles and pinned to message boards, the homemade missing pet poster is an enduring form of public communication in an era when just about every other type of transmission is going digital.