Brad Gooch – författare

Demarchelier was known for his ability to capture a subject s beauty and charm in a natural way, often without ornate settings. His exquisite and timeless fashion portraits graced the pages of Vogue, Elle, Harper s Bazaar, and Glamour, with ad campaigns for Dior, Louis Vuitton, YSL, Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, and have featured such high-profile subjects as Cindy Crawford, Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista, Naomi Campbell, Karen Elson, and Nicole Kidman. Demarchelier is perhaps best known for his intimate portraits of Princess Diana that helped establish her popularity and accessible public image. Designed by the legendary art director Fabien Baron, the book simultaneously celebrates Demarchelier s remarkable legacy as one of the most influential fashion photographers of the past forty-five years (he passed away in 2022) and offers a fresh perspective with never-before-seen photos. While his published images often feature polished, high-fashion aesthetics, capturing the glamour and elegance of the fashion world, the unpublished ones reveal a more intimate, raw, and unfiltered side of his artistry. These unseen photos offer a glimpse into Demarchelier s creative process, showcasing moments of spontaneity and experimentation. Additionally, these unpublished images often reflect a broader range of subjects, moods, and settings, highlighting his versatility and depth as a photographer beyond his signature fashion shoots.

The ecstatic love poems of Rumi, a Persian poet and Sufi mystic born more than eight centuries ago, are beloved by millions of readers in America as well as around the world. Rumi has been compared to Shakespeare for his outpouring of creativity and St. Francis of Assisi for his spiritual wisdom. Yet his life has long remained the stuff of legend rather than intimate knowledge. In this breakthrough biography, Brad Gooch brilliantly brings to life the man and puts a face to the name, Rumi, while at the same time vividly coloring in his time and place--a world as rife with conflict as our own. The map of Rumi's life stretched over 2,500 miles. Gooch retraces this epic journey from central Asia, where Rumi was born in 1207, traveling with his family--who were displace by Mongol terror--as they settle in Konya, Turkey. Pivotal was the disruptive appearance of Shams of Tabriz in the 1240s, who taught Rumi to whirl and transformed him from a respectable Muslim preacher into a poet and mystic. Their vital connection as teacher and pupil, friend and beloved, is one of the world's greatest spiritual love stories. When Shams disappeared, Rumi coped with the pain of separation by composing joyous poems of reunion, both human and divine. Ambitious, bold, and beautifully written, Rumi's Secret reveals the unfolding of Rumi's devotion to a "religion of love," remarkable in his own time, and made even more relevant for the twenty-first century by this compelling account.

The author of the acclaimed City Poet returns with a searing memoir of life in 1980s New York City-a colorful and atmospheric tale of wild bohemians, glamorous celebrity, and complicated passions-with cameo appearances by Madonna, Robert Mapplethorpe, William Burroughs, and a host of others legendary artists. Brad Gooch arrived in New York in the late 1970s, yearning for artistic and personal freedom. Smash Cut is his bold and intimate memoir of this exhilarating time and place. At its center is his love affair with film director Howard Brookner, pieced together from fragments of memory and fueled by a panoply of emotions, from blazing ecstasy to bleakest despair. As both men try to reconcile love and fidelity with the irresistible desire to enjoy the freedom of the age, they live together and apart. Gooch works briefly as a model in Milan, then returns to the city and discovers his vocation as an artist. Brookner falls ill with a mysterious virus that soon has a terrifying name: AIDS. And the story, and life in the city, is suddenly overshadowed by this new demon plague that will ravage a generation and transform the creative world.Gooch charts the progress of Brookner through his illness, and writes unforgettably about endings: of a great talent, a passionate love affair, and an incandescent era. Beautifully written, full of rich detail and poignant reflection, recalling a time and a place and group of friends with affection and clarity, Smash Cut is an extraordinary memoir and an exquisite account of an epoch. Illustrated with 30 black-and-white photographs.

SOON TO BE A TV SERIES WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY ANDREW HAIGHNew York Times Book Critics Favorite Book of the Year · Washington Post Notable Book of the Year“It’s all here: the grade school Walt Disney and Dr. Seuss; the adolescent acid trips; the fondness for Post-it notes and flying saucers; the long tails of Dubuffet and Burroughs; the encounters with Madonna, Warhol, and one game-changer of a subway Johnny Walker Red poster. Brad Gooch takes us deep into Keith Haring’s imagination while somehow managing to fix the aura and energy of the 1980s New York art scene to the page. A keen-eyed, beautifully written biography, atmospheric, exuberant, and as radiant as they come.”—Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Revolutionary: Sam AdamsA stunning life of the iconic American artist, Keith Haring, by the acclaimed biographer Brad Gooch.In the 1980s, the subways of New York City were covered with art. In the stations, black matte sheets were pasted over outdated ads, and unsigned chalk drawings often popped up on these blank spaces. These temporary chalk drawings numbered in the thousands and became synonymous with a city as diverse as it was at war with itself, beset with poverty and crime but alive with art and creative energy. And every single one of these drawings was done by Keith Haring.Keith Haring was one of the most emblematic artists of the 1980s, a figure described by his contemporaries as “a prophet in his life, his person, and his work.” Part of an iconic cultural crowd that included Andy Warhol, Madonna, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Haring broke down the barriers between high art and pop culture, creating work that was accessible for all and using it as a means to provoke and inspire radical social change. Haring died of AIDS in 1990. To this day, his influence on our culture remains incontrovertible, and his glamorous, tragically short life has a unique aura of mystery and power.In this definitive Keith Haring biography, Brad Gooch, noted biographer of Flannery O’Connor and Frank O’Hara, was granted access to Haring’s extensive archive. He has written a biography that will become the authoritative work on the artist. Based on interviews with those who knew Haring best and drawing from the rich archival history, Brad Gooch sets out to capture the magic of Keith Haring: a visionary and timeless icon.This authoritative art biography reveals the man behind the icons, capturing the relentless creativity and historical importance of a once-in-a-generation artist: Subway Drawings: Discover the full story behind the thousands of ephemeral chalk drawings that transformed New York City’s subway system into a public gallery for everyone.Art for Everybody: Explore Haring’s democratic belief in breaking down the barriers between high art and popular culture, from his Pop Shop to his public murals.An American Artist: Witness Haring’s journey from a childhood in Kutztown, Pennsylvania—learning to draw cartoons from his father—to his meteoric rise as a global art phenomenon.The AIDS Crisis: Understand how Haring confronted the devastating epidemic that shaped his later work and tragically cut short his life and career at the age of 31.

SOON TO BE A TV SERIES WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY ANDREW HAIGHNew York Times Book Critics Favorite Book of the Year · Washington Post Notable Book of the Year“It’s all here: the grade school Walt Disney and Dr. Seuss; the adolescent acid trips; the fondness for Post-it notes and flying saucers; the long tails of Dubuffet and Burroughs; the encounters with Madonna, Warhol, and one game-changer of a subway Johnny Walker Red poster. Brad Gooch takes us deep into Keith Haring’s imagination while somehow managing to fix the aura and energy of the 1980s New York art scene to the page. A keen-eyed, beautifully written biography, atmospheric, exuberant, and as radiant as they come.”—Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Revolutionary: Sam AdamsA stunning life of the iconic American artist, Keith Haring, by the acclaimed biographer Brad Gooch.In the 1980s, the subways of New York City were covered with art. In the stations, black matte sheets were pasted over outdated ads, and unsigned chalk drawings often popped up on these blank spaces. These temporary chalk drawings numbered in the thousands and became synonymous with a city as diverse as it was at war with itself, beset with poverty and crime but alive with art and creative energy. And every single one of these drawings was done by Keith Haring.Keith Haring was one of the most emblematic artists of the 1980s, a figure described by his contemporaries as “a prophet in his life, his person, and his work.” Part of an iconic cultural crowd that included Andy Warhol, Madonna, and Basquiat, Haring broke down the barriers between high art and popular culture, creating work that was accessible for all and using it as a means to provoke and inspire radical social change. Haring died of AIDS in 1990. To this day, his influence on our culture remains incontrovertible, and his glamorous, tragically short life has a unique aura of mystery and power.Brad Gooch, noted biographer of Flannery O’Connor and Frank O’Hara, was granted access to Haring’s extensive archive. He has written a biography that will become the authoritative work on the artist. Based on interviews with those who knew Haring best and drawing from the rich archival history, Brad Gooch sets out to capture the magic of Keith Haring: a visionary and timeless icon.

The landscape of American literature was fundamentally changed when Flannery O'Connor stepped onto the scene with her first published book, Wise Blood, in 1952. Her fierce, sometimes comic novels and stories reflected the darkly funny, vibrant, and theologically sophisticated woman who wrote them. Brad Gooch brings to life O'Connor's significant friendships - with Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, Walker Percy and James Dickey among others - and her deeply felt convictions, as expressed in her communications with Thomas Merton, Elizabeth Bishop, and Betty Hester. Hester was famously known as 'A' in O'Connor's collected letters, The Habit of Being, and a large cache of correspondence to her from O'Connor was made available to scholars, including Brad Gooch, in 2006.

Ray Johnson (1927–95) was a seminal Pop artist, a proto-conceptualist and a pioneer of mail art.Always one to throw sand in the gears of art-world institutions, he tended to circulate his work either in truly alternative spaces (like sticking up out of the uneven floorboards of a warehouse downtown) or through the US Postal Service. Throughout his life, Johnson sent collages, drawings and less easily categorized forms of printed matter to friends, colleagues and strangers. Already in 1965, Grace Glueck described Johnson as “New York’s most famous unknown artist.” Though his work resists efforts to pin it down, Johnson can be said to have found a particularly useful medium in collage. Collage allowed Johnson to reflect—but also to participate in—the modern collision of visual and verbal information that only became more frenzied as the 20th century wore on.This volume collects 42 collages made by Johnson between 1966 and 1994, most never exhibited or published before, with a new essay by writer Brad Gooch, who first came into contact with Johnson when he began receiving unsolicited mail art shortly before the artist’s death. The collection of works in this volume shows the artist at his most expansive, combining art history with celebrity, word with image and the personal with the universal.

The story of 'Zombie', a strange and remarkable young man from Truckstown Pensylvania. His earliest chidlhood memory of visiting the 'Sacred Voodoo Chamber' in the nearby Scranton Art Museum leaves him in thrall and begins in him a lifelong process of zombification. Fear and worship become his guiding forces as he stumbles through life on a voyage that will take him to New York, then Haiti and back again, and into a ies of relationships in search of his true 'master.'

From the lost generation of Andy Warhol's New York to the cocaine-fuelled runways of the top fashion houses of Paris and Milan, Scary Kisses captures the tenderness and cruelty of the beautiful people circa 1980. As a menage a trois drifts listlessly into a spiral of cynicism and nihilistic gratification, Gooch's raw, voyeuristic eye for detail and precise, snapshot prose recreates a time unlike any other, and characters that flash with stark, bright realism. On a par with The Bonfire of the Vanities, this is a classic portrait of Manhattan nightlife and decadence.