my last supper: 50 great chefs and their final meals
by melanie dunea

If Mario Batali was going to die tomorrow, what would he concoct for his last meal on earth? Thanks to Melanie Dunea, we now know that his elaborate ten-course meal at a small trattoria on the Amalfi coast would include the Neopolitan version of a grilled cheese sandwich, REM would play live with U2, Anthony Bourdain would be among the guests, and they would cap the meal with “a sea of icy limoncello.” It’s an insider’s game chefs have always played in darkened kitchens over pints of beer, and now, luckily for us foodies, photographer

found ~ the best lost, tossed, and forgotten items from around the world
edited by davy rothbart

Okay. So it's not really an art book. But it's a coffee-table-kinda-book -- guaranteed to set your voyeuristic heart aflame. Diary readers and sneek-peekers will drool over these kaleidoscopic, microscopic slices of life. From the creator of Found magazine comes a treasure trove of found love-letters, hate-letters, photographs, to-do lists, math tests, misdirected emails, poetry, doodles, ripped-out diary pages... all those lonely cast-offs too personal, too revealing, too fascinating to disappear into the gutter. Heartbreaking, hilarious, obsessive and tragic, these tattered glimpses are cross-sections of human life, psychology, society, and peculiarity. You'll never brush aside that crumpled piece of paper next to your car again.

in almost every picture ~ by eric kessels, 2002

This is a series of photographs taken by a husband of his wife during their travels between 1956-1968, found by Eric Kessels at a flea market in Spain. Intimate, private, strange, surreal, fascinating, and deeply touching, Kessels has presents a fascinating and many-sided exploration of the observed, the loved, the object, the gaze, the pose, the forgotten, marriage, fashion, and the art and psychology of the snapshot. Shot after shot of the same woman in varying poses, against various landscapes, in different clothes and the same bathing suit - and the viewer begins to imagine stories to fill the space between the lens and the subject. You feel like you know her, but only because you fit your own stories onto her face, shape her life into an echo of something you know, you give her children that have left and disowned her, or she has no children, or her only child died tragically. She loves her husband, she can't stand her husband, he's not really her husband.

cindy sherman ~ the complete untitled film stills

Cindy Sherman's art lies in her sense for the details, the nuance that creates the composition's turning point. Her sense is not for the theatrical, as it might appear at first, but a step away - a sense for the attempt at representation of the human in the theatrical. What is reality in the fact of a film still is made fiction again, a shot stolen from the fiction of the set returned to its fictitious beginnings. These fictitious film stills, all Sherman's self-portraits, are not of the glossy, glammy Hollywood variety, but more reminiscent of grainy, contrasty Antonioni films. Antonioni chose his actors based on the expressive nature of their faces, their ability to depict an emotional situation through physical means, which helped create the psychological (not dramatic or emotional) intensity of his films. Cindy Sherman's photographs work in a similar way. Emotional drama is absent, but the terse, elusive psychological details are worked into the countless characters she assumes in this series.

The private orchestration of self-portraiture is heightened to astounding, yet seamless degrees in this series. The solitary staging, the self that disappears to the point of unrecognizability, the subject as utterly selfless, malleable, completely elusive - all of these results don't obscure the pure pleasure of the image, the image that surpasses the concept and exists on its own completely as an aesthetic work of humor, wit, and craft.

One the most influential works of art in recent years, the sixty-nine images in the Untitled Film Stills series are collected and published here for the first time, including a seventieth image from a lost roll in the series, and an introduction by Cindy Sherman.

{Lucía Silva}   return to top