i saw the Dashwood Books announcement today about Ari Marcopoulos's new book The Chance is Higher (regular readers will not be surprised to hear that i love this title). a cool thing about The Chance is Higher is that all of the black & white images in it (as above) were printed through a Xerox machine...pushing at the boundaries of what photographic reproduction means today. the cover image is obviously a show-stopper.
having just re-watched Basquiat, i was interested to learn that Amsterdam-born Marcopoulos joined the East Village art scene in the early 80's. he became Andy Warhol's assistant and befriended (and photographed) Jean-Michel Basquiat (anyone have a link to such photos?). since then he's done an eclectic mix of editorial, commercial work, and videography.
looking through some of his past personal work, the photo below jumped off the screen at me. it's called "Sho Ka Wa, Sonoma, CA (2004)." i love how it is so simple, but so beautiful. the ribcage and the pose illustrate his son's beanpole youth and freedom, but also add in an element that is a little shocking, a little macabre. in fact, the above cover image—of the healthy body imprinted with a specter of skeletal death—echoes the very same juxtaposition for me.
i like looking at them both together.
1 comment:
That's great. I've been working on starting up a photocopy based photo magazine and it's nice to see that the bar has been set pretty high. Didn't Hamburger Eyes start out that way?
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