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Acclaimed photographer Kosti Ruohomaa is widely known for his photographs of hard scrabble Yankees in mid-century Maine. No one was more acutely aware than Ruohomaa that his work was capturing a way of life that was rapidly fading. Before his work in Maine, however, Ruohomaa started out with Disney, then went on to become a freelance photographer for the Black Star Agency, where he was a regular contributor to Life, National Geographic, Look, and Ladies Home Journal. His true passion, however, was documenting the lives of the people of Maine. In this biography by curator Deanna Bonner-Ganter, of the Maine State Museum, Kosti's life and work is made relevant and important to an audience that may be unfamiliar with his work.

Marking the centenary of the birth of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946), this book offers a new approach to the Bauhaus artist and theorist’s multifaceted life and work—an approach that redefines the very idea of biographical writing. In Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Louis Kaplan applies the Derridean deconstructivist model of the "signature effect" to an intellectual biography of a Constructivist artist. Inhabiting the borderline between life and work, the book demonstrates how the signature inscribed by "Moholy" operates in a double space, interweaving signified object and signifying matter, autobiography and auto-graphy. Through interpretative readings of over twenty key artistic and photographic works, Kaplan graphically illustrates Moholy’s signature effect in action. He shows how this effect plays itself out in the complex of relations between artistic originality and plagiarism, between authorial identity and anonymity, as well as in the problematic status of the work of art in the age of technical reproduction. In this way, the book reveals how Moholy’s artistic practice anticipates many of the issues of postmodernist debate and thus has particular relevance today. Consequently, Kaplan clarifies the relationship between avant-garde Constructivism and contemporary deconstruction. This new and innovative configuration of biography catalyzed by the life writing of Moholy-Nagy will be of critical interest to artists and writers, literary theorists, and art historians.

Arthur Fellig's ability to arrive at a crime scene just as the cops did was so uncanny that he became known as "Weegee," claiming that he functioned as a human Ouija board. Weegee documented better than any other photographer the crime, grit, and complex humanity of midcentury New York City. In Flash, we get a portrait not only of the man (both flawed and deeply talented, with generous appetites for publicity, women, and hot pastrami) but also of the fascinating time and place that he occupied.From self-taught immigrant kid to newshound to art-world darling to latter-day caricature--moving from the dangerous streets of New York City to the celebrity culture of Los Angeles and then to Europe for a quixotic late phase of experimental photography and filmmaking--Weegee lived a life just as vivid as the scenes he captured. Flash is an unprecedented and ultimately moving view of the man now regarded as an innovator and a pioneer, one whose photographs are among the most powerful images of urban existence ever made.

American Grotesque is a lavish retrospective of grotesque, occult, and erotic images by the forgotten Hollywood photographer William Mortensen (1897–1965), an innovative pictorialist visionary whom Ansel Adams called the "Antichrist" and to whom Anton LaVey dedicated The Satanic Bible. Mortensen's countless technical innovations and inspired use of special effects prefigures the development of digital manipulation and Photoshop. Includes a gallery of more than one hundred striking photographs in duotone and color, many of them previously unseen, and accompanying essays by Mortensen and others on his life, work, techniques, and influence.