In Print: PhotoNOLA Book Signing

Sunday, December 7, 2014
5:30pm

A multi-artist book signing event featuring:

Christopher Boffoli – Big Appetites
E2 (Kleinveld & Julien) – In Empathy We Trust
Tina Freeman – Artist Spaces
Loli Kantor – Beyond the Forest
Louviere & Vanessa – Black Forest
Rick Olivier – Zydeco
Linda Troeller – Orgasm
Eugenia Uhl – The Essential Louisiana Cookbook

This event is presented in partnership with Octavia Books and the Louisiana State Museum.

Big Appetites: Tiny People in a World of Big Food
– Christopher Boffoli
Paperback: 256 pages
Workman Publishing Company (September 2013)
7.9 x 5.5 inches
$12.95

Marrying inspired photographs of real food and tiny people with equally inspired captions, photographer Christopher Boffoli creates a smart, funny, quirky vision of what it means to play with your food. The scenes are hilarious and outlandish— a farmer shovels a pasture full of cow pies, aka chocolate chips; hikers pause at a rest stop to take in a magical mushroom forest. And the captions surprise with their cleverness and emotional truth. Of the proudly gesticulating little chef amid the macarons: “Right on cue, Philippe stepped up to take all of the credit.” Of the tiny bather up to her chin in waves of blue Jell-O: “In her continuing search for a husband, Gladys decided it was best to put herself in situations where she needed to be rescued.” Of the broad-shouldered technician spreading condiments on a hot dog: “Gary always uses too much mustard. But no one can say so. It’s a union thing.”

Happiness, hope, adventure, pride, love, greed, menace, solitude—it’s our world, seen through a singularly unique and funny lens, in more than 100 scenes from breakfast through dessert.

In Empathy We Trust – E2
11 x 14 inch linen covered box
28 unbound pages, 20 images
Princess Books & Diálogos (December 2014)
$49.95

Unbound Boxed book with twenty images from E2’s In Empathy We Trust series, includes some of the world’s most iconic images remade with a twist, such as Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, Rembrandt’s Jewish Bride and Whistler’s Mother. Each of the twenty images has a description and image of the original work.

Artists Spaces – Tina Freeman
Hardcover: 144 pages
Univ of Louisiana at Lafayette (November 2014)
11.4 x 9.3 inches
$49.95

Few artists have the luxury of separate work and living spaces, thus work and life often end up compressed into a singular personal environment. Artist Spaces, New Orleans provides a comprehensive portrait of the city’s artists and their relationship to space.

In more than one hundred extraordinary photos taken by Tina Freeman and more than a dozen artist interviews by Morgan Molthrop, Artist Spaces, New Orleans highlights the spaces of New Orleans art luminaries George Dureau, Ron Bechet, Ma-Po, Dawn Dedeaux, Elizabeth Shannon, Willie Birch, Ersy, David Halliday, Robert Tannen, Elenora “Rukiya” Brown, Nicole Charbonnet, Kevin Kline, Amy Weiskopf, Keith Duncan, Josephine Sacabo, Lin Emery, and graffiti artist “Fat Boy.”

The interviews and photos provide a perfect complement. While Freeman poetically captures an intensely personal vision of the artists and their spaces, Molthrop unearths what the most accomplished artists in the city have to say about their relationship to that space. What results is an indication that each artist’s style is often reflected in the quality, character, and aesthetic of their living/working environments¬–a striking illustration of how deeply personal, all-encompassing, and interconnected are life and art.

Beyond the Forest: Jewish presence in eastern Europe, 2004-2012 – Loli Kantor
Hardcover: 200 pages with 99 photographs
The University of Texas Press (November 2014)
Texts by Anda Rottenberg and Joseph Skibell
10.5 x 10 inches
$60

Like a forest recovering from a cataclysmic fire, the Jews of Eastern Europe are drawing on deep roots to regrow their communities in the long aftermath of the Holocaust and decades of Soviet domination. They are creating a contemporary Jewish culture that would be both familiar and strange to the generation that perished in the conflagration of the Holocaust.

Over the past eight years, Loli Kantor traveled extensively in Ukraine as well as Poland, Romania, and the Czech Republic, witnessing a gradual rebirth of Jewish culture in Eastern Europe. Her black-and-white and color images of presence and absence, and her portraits of faces and belongings, eloquently reveal how Eastern European Jews are honoring the past and building the future through revived observances of the holidays, and historically significant Jewish social events. Polish art historian and critic Anda Rottenberg offers an appreciation of Kantor’s photography and its significance for reclaiming Eastern European Jewish identity. Novelist Joseph Skibell celebrates Kantor’s “brave vision, unblinking and unafraid”

Here I Am – Photographs by Lisa Leone
Hardcover: 104 pages with 65 photographs
Minor Matters
10 x 9 inches
$50

The Bronx—Paris—Los Angeles—early 1990s—Hip hop. This culture of music, dance, art and fashion is forever in its nascent and most authentic in Here I Am, the first monograph of Lisa Leone’s photographs. From Nas in the first studio recordings for what would become Illmatic to Snoop on the set of his first video, from ingénue Debi Mazar hanging on the stoops of the West Village to Grandmaster Flash at a RockSteady reunion, Leone’s photographs open portals to the sounds, places and, most important, the people who forged and continue to influence the energy that is hip hop.

Bronx-born Lisa Leone infuses her frames with sound and motion, pointing to what would become her multi-faceted way of seeing through both photography and cinema.

* Lisa will not be present but signed copies of her book will be available.

Black Forest – multiple artists
(Louviere + Vanessa signing)
Hardcover: 128 pages, 72 color and b&w plates
Candela Books (November 2014)
Edited by Russell Joslin
7 x 9.5 inches
$45

Black Forest is an arcane collection featuring the works of over 50 contemporary photographers, including Roger Ballen, Arthur Tress, Debbie Fleming Caffery, Elijah Gowin, Louviere and Vanessa, Arno Rafael Minkkinen, Irina Ionesco, Julie Blackmon, Joel-Peter Witkin, Gilles Berquet and many other internationally renowned photographers.

In this volume, editor Russell Joslin, long-time publisher of SHOTS magazine, follows in the steps of André Breton (from whom he borrows his title), exploring what he calls “subterranean beauty.” Darkly atmospheric sequences of surrealistic photographs become a metaphor for the unconscious and the mysterious corners of the psyche. Suggesting loose, intuitive relationships between the works of contemporary artists, Joslin creates four visual narratives associated in tone, emotion and formal structure, but allows room for his readers and viewers to render for themselves the hidden, connective layers of meaning.

This compelling collection of unconventional narratives is complimented by the strange and beautiful design of Jeff Louviere, who, along with his wife and collaborator Vanessa Brown, is one of the contributing artists to this dark and engaging photography book.

Zydeco! – Rick Olivier
Paperback: 176 pages
University Press of Mississippi (1999)
8 x 10.2 inches
$30

In eighty stunning portraits of the genre’s leading people and places and through extensive interviews and historical commentary, photographer Rick Olivier and journalist/musician Ben Sandmel have created a book as spirited as the rollicking music it so vividly illuminates.

The Zydeco project began with an album cover shoot for Rounder Records in 1988 at Richard’s Club in Lawtell, LA. The photographs were made over a ten-year period across Southwest Louisiana. ‘Zydeco!’ was published by the University of Mississippi Press and features these photographs with the essays and interviews of author Ben Sandmel. Zydeco! is the first published collection of fine photographs, lively text, and oral history devoted exclusively to black Creole dance music. Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities named ‘Zydeco!’ Book of the Year in 2000.

Orgasm: Photographs & Interviews:
Linda Troeller & Marion Schneider
Paperback: 188 pages
Daylight Books (October 2014)
7 x 9 inches
$35

In this volume, New York-based photographer Linda Troeller (born 1949) collaborates with scholar and artist Marion Schneider to discuss and portray women’s feelings upon orgasm through personal narratives and photographs. The project involves 25 women of different ages, nationalities, and cultural and social backgrounds. Schneider posed the following questions to them: “What does the word orgasm mean to you?” “Can you remember your first orgasm and show the feelings to the camera?” “Can you remember your strongest orgasm and show the feelings to the camera?” Troeller’s portraits are juxtaposed with interviews with the participants. Boldly and tenderly countering the taboo associated with the topic, this frank and intimate examination of the female orgasm as told through the mouths of these diverse participants serves as a touchstone for women and men everywhere. This book continues the investigation into female sexuality begun by Troeller and Schneider’s 1998 volume The Erotic Lives of Women, acclaimed in The New York Times Review of Books as “one of the gutsiest books of the decade.”

The Essential Louisiana Cookbook – Eugenia Uhl + Stanley Dry
Renaissance Publishing (November 2014)
Paperback:128-page
$16.95

Stanley Dry, a former senior editor of Food & Wine Magazine, writes that Louisiana “has the most distinctive regional cuisine in the country” and he sets out to prove it with both traditional and more contemporary recipes. The author emphasizes using quality local ingredients for preparing the book’s 50 scrumptious recipes, which are illustrated with beautiful full-color photographs by New Orleans native Eugenia Uhl.