Cindy Sherman

The Men in the Cities series made Robert Longo famousin the 1980s: larger-than-life drawings of sharplydressed business people writhing in contortion, a sortof death dance of the modern man. Created between1977 and 1983, it is an early attempt in mergingsculpture, drawing, photography, and film.This book presents the photographic source materialto the series taken by the artist himself. Using friendssuch as Cindy Sherman, Brooke Alexander, GlennBranca, and Larry Gagosian as models, he'd bringthem up on the roof of his New York City loft, rig upropes to them and throw objects at them to makethem jerk, fling, and fall--and take their picture.With a foreword by internationally renowned artistCindy Sherman, a close friend of Longo's, and aninterview with Robert Longo, conducted in 1987 bythe author and screenwriter Richard Price.

Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills, a series of 69 black-and-white photographs created between 1977 and 1980, is widely seen as one of the most original and influential achievements in recent art. Witty, provocative and searching, this lively catalogue of female roles inspired by the movies crystallizes widespread concerns in our culture, examining the ways we shape our personal identities and the role of the mass media in our lives. Sherman began making these pictures in 1977 when she was 23 years old. The first six were an experiment: fan-magazine glimpses into the life (or roles) of an imaginary blond actress, played by Sherman herself. The photographs look like movie stills--or perhaps publicity pix--purporting to catch the blond bombshell in unguarded moments at home. The protagonist is shown preening in the kitchen and lounging in the bedroom. Onto something big, Sherman tried other characters in other roles: the chic starlet at her seaside hideaway, the luscious librarian, the domesticated sex kitten, the hot-blooded woman of the people, the ice-cold sophisticate and a can-can line of other stereotypes. She eventually completed the series in 1980. She stopped, she has explained, when she ran out of clich s.Other artists had drawn upon popular culture but Sherman's strategy was new. For her the pop-culture image was not a subject (as it had been for Walker Evans) or raw material (as it had been for Andy Warhol) but a whole artistic vocabulary, ready-made. Her film stills look and function just like the real ones--those 8 x 10 glossies designed to lure us into a drama we find all the more compelling because we know it isn't real. In the Untitled Film Stills there are no Cleopatras, no ladies on trains, no women of a certain age. There are, of course, no men. The 69 solitary heroines map a particular constellation of fictional femininity that took hold in postwar America--the period of Sherman's youth and the starting point for our contemporary mythology. In finding a form for her own sensibility, Sherman touched a sensitive nerve in the culture at large. Although most of the characters are invented, we sense right away that we already know them. That twinge of instant recognition is what makes the series tick and it arises from Cindy Sherman's uncanny poise. There is no wink at the viewer, no open irony, no camp.In 1995, The Museum of Modern Art purchased the series from the artist, preserving the work in its entirety. This book marks the first time that the complete series will be published as a unified work, with Sherman herself arranging the pictures in sequence.

Rocha graduated from the prestigious Central Saint Martins M.A. program and, upon the presentation of her first collection in 2010, quickly garnered an instant following among fashion insiders and taste-makers; Adrian Joffe of Dover Street Market was an early fan. Born from the deep and lush nature of her native home in Ireland as well as the dynamism of her upbringing in Hong Kong, her designs are highly feminine, captivating, and infinitely provocative. Her vision is one that seems to have no bounds her highly singular designs have since reached a new set of followers that have grown to include stylishly rebellious A-listers like FKA twigs, Billie Eilish, and Chloe Sevigny along with a devoted set of fashion darlings who don Rocha s platform brogues, voluminous, almost gothic dresses, and egg-shaped pearl handbags handbags in cities across the globe. This book is a long, pensive gaze into Rocha s subversive world, one heavily inspired by art, nature, and her dual heritage. A natural bookmaker (Rocha has published an impressive number of collectible zines), this tome is insightfully edited, designed, and crafted, gathering catwalk images, shadowy editorials, and backstage documentation in a manner that stays true to the nature of the world she s created. An absolute essential for any fashion-lover s bookshelf, this monograph is highly anticipated and set to follow in the footsteps of successful authors Rizzoli has published in the past including Ann Demeulemeester, Rick Owens, Jun Takahashi, and Maison Martin Margiela.

For almost 50 years, the theme of fashion has been a constant in the work of US artist Cindy Sherman. The exhibition Cindy Sherman - Anti-Fashion is the first to focus on this close engagement with fashion and approaches her photographic oeuvre from a new perspective. In so doing, it sheds light on the interplay between art and fashion. For Sherman uses her numerous commissions from magazines and her collaborations with renowned designers as a constant source of artistic inspiration. The exhibition reveals the subject of fashion as the starting point for the artist's critical investigation of gender, stereotypes, and our attitude to aging. The wide range of Sherman's assumed characters highlights the artificiality and changeability of identity, which - now more than ever - is shown to be selectable, (self-)constructed, and fluid.

Femxphotographers.org’s second publication Mind Over Matter focuses inward. Women’s bodies are frequently sexualized while their minds are vilified and their voices silenced. This is true throughout history and in different cultures worldwide. A book about female vision, the power of the mind, as well as dreams and fantasies, logic and intuition, Mind Over Matter is an exploration of inner strength, courage, determination, willpower, and support in complex and individual series. Edited by Roula Seikalyi and with contributions by photographers from the team as well as many guest artists and writers, the publication has the character of an illustrated reader.

Type 42 presents 120 works from an extraordinary archive of work by an anonymous artist. The archive is composed of black-and-white polaroids showing headshots and close-ups of actresses taken from the television screen beginning in the late 1960s. They are mainly distorted, slightly blurry and occasionally pixelated, but a strong emphasis on the science fiction or B-movie genres pervades. In some of the photographs the television screen can be seen as a framing device, but for the most part the television’s borders are absent from the picture – one of the many remarkable aesthetics of this collection.‘Type 42’ refers to the type of Polaroid film used. The entire body of work was found intact in New York in 2012 by artist Jason Brinkerhoff; his attempts to trace the origins of the polaroids have remained unsuccessful.All but a handful are inscribed. In most cases the name of the actress is written across the bottom of the photograph; in some cases the title of the film or TV series she appears in is written across the top of the photograph; and in a few cases both sets of information are written on top and bottom accordingly. There are also 31 photographs where the artist has written the women’s measurements across the top along with her name across the bottom.