The Earth is pockmarked with the evidence of ancient collisions:huge craters blasted into its surface by thousands of pounds of meteorite fragments traveling at approximately 50,000 miles per hour.
Ranging in age from those formed in this century to billion-year-old specimens, the Earth's meteorite craters are eroding at a rapid pace. The best-preserved impact sites are often difficult to access—buried under ice, obscured by foliage, or baking in desert climes. These desolate landscapes are connected to another place outside of our world, and for photographer Stan Gaz they are sites of pilgrimage—steps in a journey begun as a curious young boy accompanying his father on geological expeditions, and culminating in a six-year journey traveling the globe in search of these sites, much of that time spent leaning his twenty-pound, handheld Hasselblad medium format camera out of an open-sided helicopter.
The Handy Book of Artistic Printing celebrates a previously berated and today largely forgotten episode of design history—one of increasing interest in light of the recent embrace of ornament by some leading contemporary designers. This book will be of value to graphic designers, but also to fine artists, visual merchandisers, and collectors of ephemera everywhere.
During the late nineteenth century, letterpress printers, engravers, and lithographers boldly challenged the rational sobriety of traditional design by introducing intricate borders, corner embellishments, quirky typefaces, and exotic imagery. The style was known as "artistic" and was quickly taken up by letterpress printers as the design idiom of choice for advertisements, packaging, and all of the other ephemera occasioned by the rapid expansion of America's economy. For a while, this commercial style represented the best in popular taste.
Bamboo Fences provides a detailed look at the complex art of bamboo fence design in Japan, presenting these unique structures in over 250 photographs and line drawings.
Bamboo has always played an important role in Japanese daily life, and the versatile plant has been used for numerous purposes ranging from food, garden design, and furniture to cooking utensils. Among its applications in the garden and home is its use as a raw material for fences and partitions. Indeed, in Japan bamboo fence building has become an art form, and endless varieties of bamboo fences exist, from simple picket designs to elaborate fences woven with Bamboo branches. This wide range of fence designs has its origin partly in the full development of the tea ceremony during the sixteenth century, when elegant bamboo fences became important elements of tea ceremony gardens. Read more...
These ghostly reminders of destruction and oppression prompt Virilio to consider the nature of war and existence, in relation to both the Second World War and contemporary times.
This is the first English-language translation of the French edition published in 1975 to accompany the exhibition of Paul Virilio's photographs at the Pompidou Center. The author's haunting photographs are accompanied by his analysis of the architecture of war in both philosophical and concrete terms. Virilio discusses fortresses and military space in general and the bunkers themselves, including facsimiles of original military maps and extracts from Hitler's "Directives of War." He also examines the role of Albert Speer, Hitler's architect, in the rise of the Third Reich.
