"Famed worldwide for his epically proportioned photographs, Andreas Gursky is one of very few contemporary artists able to represent cultures of excessive information--which he does through images of supermarket wares, crowds, trash, architecture and nature. The extreme detail of Gursky's final image--achieved by digital restructuring--produces a vertiginous effect on the viewer, as it oscillates between total representation and total abstraction. It could be said that Gursky updates the eighteenth-century sublime for our times. This publication surveys the artist's most recent creations, on display at the renowned Kunstmuseum Basel throughout the winter of 2007/2008. Two new groups of works in particular, one on Formula 1 races and the other on the famous Arirang Festival (a closely choreographed mass spectacle in North Korea's capital of Pyongyang), are gathered here."--Publisher description.

The Dusseldorf School is renowned around the world, and is today synonymous with high artistic standards and a highly diverse and new approach to the medium of photography. There has been no other art movement since the Bauhaus to possess such a worldwide appeal. This volume traces its ascendancy from the mid-1970s.

The first substantial monograph of Andreas Gursky's work since 1984 this series of large-format color photographs depicts vast panoramic scenes: entire cityscapes, endless horizons, multi-floored office buildings, huge factory corridors and crowded public spaces. Taken from a distance, often with a bird's eye view, they represent more than a set of photographs of various locations -- rather Gursky's work reflects both the art forms and the everyday aesthetics of 20th-century society. Many photographs are allegories, offering a cultural critique of man's role in nature, technology, art and society. Other resemble abstract paintings, in which Gursky applies a number of formal elements, such as light, composition and form, to convey a mood or subtle message. In their size and scope, in their reflective mood and social commentary, and in their many layers of meaning and interpretation, these exquisitely reproduced portraits of interior and exterior spaces display the qualities that have made Andreas Gursky one of the most respected landscape photographers of his generation.

This title chronicles the life of Albert Hastings, an octogenarian living alone in a small flat in Wales. Bert's writing is paired with Deveney's photographs and together they tell a story of fulfilment, lonliness, hope and beauty.

Bringing to life the fabulous, colorful panorama of New Orleans in the first flush of the jazz era, this book tells the story of Buddy Bolden, the first of the great trumpet players--some say the originator of jazz--who was, in any case, the genius, the guiding spirit, and the king of that time and place. In this fictionalized meditation, Bolden, an unrecorded father of Jazz, remains throughout a tantalizingly ungraspable phantom, the central mysteries of his life, his art, and his madness remaining felt but never quite pinned down. Ondaatje's prose is at times startlingly lyrical, and as he chases Bolden through documents and scenes, the novel partakes of the very best sort of modern detective novel--one where the enigma is never resolved, but allowed to manifest in its fullness. Though more 'experimental' in form than either The English Patient or In the Skin of a Lion, it is a fitting addition to the renowned Ondaatje oeuvre.