Charlotte Cotton

An evocative photographic homage shot by renowned image-makers that celebrates the iconic archival fashion designs of Francisco Costa for Calvin Klein. From 2003 to 2016, Francisco Costa was the creative director and women s collections designer for the American fashion house Calvin Klein. It was a time of creative abundance, one that simultaneously supported both fashion design experimentation and its traditional crafts. In 2020, Costa revisited his fashion collections archive and invited twenty-one photographers to receive a box containing hand-selected prototype and runway clothing from Costa s Calvin Klein women s collections that could be used either as inspiration or directly as props and costumes within photographs. 555 is a collaborative project that celebrates the iconic collection s reanimation and visual transformation by an extraordinary congregation of participating artists and image-makers. Moody, contemplative, and provocative images featured range from observational and documentary photography to self-portraiture, evocative nude editorials, fashion photography, and visual records of artistic performances. Housed in a beautifully crafted, limited edition clamshell box, twenty-one unbound booklets, printed on various tactile paper stocks, feature photographic stories by Diego Villarreal, Marcelo Gomes, Nick Waplington, Jamie Hawkesworth, Hugh Lippe, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Joel Meyerowitz, Lea Colombo, and Collier Schorr.

Mert Alas, born in Turkey, and Marcus Piggott, born in Wales, met in 1994, at a party on a pier in Hastings, England. Piggott asked Alas for a light, the pair got talking, and rapidly discovered they had plenty in common, not least a love of fashion. Three years later, the duo now known as Mert and Marcus had moved into a derelict loft in East London, converted it into a studio, and had their first collaborative photographic work published in Dazed & Confused.These days, Mert and Marcus shape the global image of such renowned brands as Giorgio Armani, Roberto Cavalli, Fendi, Miu Miu, Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent, Givenchy, and Lancôme, and public figures including Lady Gaga, Madonna, Jennifer Lopez, Linda Evangelista, Gisele Bündchen, Björk, Angelina Jolie, and Rihanna. Their photographs encompass a wide range of styles and influences but are renowned particularly for their use of digitized augmentation of images, and a fascination for strong, sexually charged, confident female subjects: “powerful women, women with a meaning, a you-don’t-have-to-talk-or-move-too-much-to-tell-who-you-are kind of woman.”Bringing our best-selling Collector’s Edition to an affordable, compact format, this collection explores the unique vision of a creative partnership that has defined and redefined standards for glamour, fashion, and luxury. Approximately 300 images from the megawatt Mert and Marcus portfolio are accompanied by an introduction by Charlotte Cotton.First published as a TASCHEN Collector’s Edition, now available as an affordable, compact edition

In the 21st century photography has come of age as a contemporary art form. Almost two centuries after photographic technology was first invented, the art world has fully embraced it as a legitimate medium, equal in status to painting and sculpture. This book provides an introduction to the extraordinary range of contemporary art photography, from portraits of intimate life to highly staged, ‘directorial’ spectacle. The vast span of photographers whose work is reproduced includes established artists such as Isa Genzken, Jeff Wall, Sophie Calle, Thomas Demand, Nan Goldin and Sherry Levine, as well as emerging talents such as Sara VanDerBeek, Rashid Johnson, Viviane Sassen and Amalia Ulman. This new edition revitalizes previous discussion of works from the 2000s through dialogue with more recent practice. Adding to the wide selection featured of work, Cotton celebrates a new generation of artists, who are shaping photography as a culturally significant medium for our current socio-political climate.

Brigitte Niedermair’s solo exhibition at the Museo di Palazzo Mocenigo is a dynamic interplay of the artist’s photographs - drawn from her archive of over twenty years of photographic practice - with the architecture and décor of the interconnected rooms of Palazzo Mocenigo. Working with international photography curator Charlotte Cotton, Niedermair has responded to the distinct atmosphere of each room, and inserted her hallmark tableaux fashion and still life photographs into these historic environments that range from intimate to imposing scale. The synergy between the public and once-private interiors of this historic Mocenigo family palazzo - Venice’s museum of fabrics and costume since 1985 - and Niedermair’s photographs is multilayered, with a tenor that shifts from room to room. Niedermair selected paintings from the Palazzo Mocenigo collection for de-installation, replacing them with her photographs to consciously amplify and counterargue with the embedded subtexts of gender and identity that permeate these predominantly 17th century interiors. With images that are surreal yet lyrical, artist Brigitte Niedermair explores the antagonism between photography and painting. Her work touches boundaries that are yet to be defined, exposing the ambiguity between seeing and imagining, fiction and truth. The book includes some of the most acclaimed phortographs by Niedermair like the T-shirts emblazoned with the feminist slogan ‘We should all be feminists’ and the provocative The Last Supper, one of the best examples of how art can invert meanings and invent languages. Brigitte Niedermair has revisited The Last Supper from a female perspective, conveys the central role of women in everyday life.

Lotta Antonsson's work recalls her fascination with the late 1960s and 70s, in a style where documentary and fiction blur in a merging of social and sexual revolutions. From a process that utilizes techniques of collage and montage there emerges a personal way of looking at the ephemeral nature of things, whether printed matter such as magazines and books, or natural objects such as shells, minerals and driftwood. Antonsson's analogue cuts and repetitions seize upon the allegorical potential of image fragments, liberating fashion and erotic photography to become explorations of the gendered aspect of their histories. Antonsson belongs to the generation of Swedish artists who emerged in the early 1990s, whose work was inspired by postmodernist art and theory (including a questioning of the male gaze as well as the construction of the woman as an object) and often use humour, irony and self-distance as part of their method.

Photography is Magic surveys more than eighty artists whose practices shape the possibilities of our contemporary photographic landscape.

Contemporary Swedish Photography provides an overview of Sweden s photography scene, from the legendary Christer Strömholm to the wide range of photographers practicing today. The book covers the work of over 50 photographers, presented in alphabetical order, and with an introductory text for each as well as sumptuous images of their work. The focus of the book is art photography but cross-disciplinary photographers working in fields such as documentary photography, advertising, and fashion are also included, making this an essential reference book for all those who are interested in contemporary Swedish photography. Photographers featured in the book: Andreas Ackerup, Lotta Antonsson, Bisse Bengtsson, Erik Berglin, Miriam Bäckström, Aida Chehrehgosha, Dawid, Cecilia Edefalk, Anders Edström, JH Engström, Johan Fowelin, Maria Friberg, Hans Gedda, Carl Johan De Geer, Peter Gehrke, Catharina Gotby, Denise Grünstein, Paul Hansen, Annika von Hausswolff, Maria Hedlund, Jean Hermanson, Julia Hetta, Walter Hirsch, Linda Hofvander, Martina Hoogland Ivanow, Pieter ten Hoopen, Mikael Jansson, Jens S Jensen, Gerry Johansson, Annica Karlsson Rixon, Eva Klasson, Clay Ketter, Hyun-Jin Kwak, Jenny Källman, Åke E:son Lindman, Fredrik Lieberath, Tuija Lindström, Maria Miesenberger, Tova Mozard, Robert Nettarp, Anneè Olofsson, Mikael Olsson, Petrus Olsson, Julia Peirone, Anders Petersen, Ann-Sofi Sidén, Gunnar Smoliansky, Karl-Johan Stigmark, Christer Strömholm, Lars Tunbjörk, Pernilla Zetterman, Camilla Åkrans. (English and Swedish.)