Leanne Shapton – författare

A love story told in the form of an auction catalog. Auction catalogs can tell you a lot about a person -- their passions and vanities, peccadilloes and aesthetics; their flush years and lean. Think of the collections of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Truman Capote, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. In Leanne Shapton's marvelously inventive and invented auction catalog, the 325 lots up for auction are what remain from the relationship between Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris (who aren't real people, but might as well be). Through photographs of the couple's personal effects -- the usual auction items (jewelry, fine art, and rare furniture) and the seemingly worthless (pajamas, Post-it notes, worn paperbacks) -- the story of a failed love affair vividly (and cleverly) emerges. From first meeting to final separation, the progress and rituals of intimacy are revealed through the couple's accumulated relics and memorabilia. And a love story, in all its tenderness and struggle, emerges from the evidence that has been left behind, laid out for us to appraise and appreciate. In an earlier work, Was She Pretty?, Shapton, a talented artist and illustrator, subtly explored the seemingly simple yet powerfully complicated nature of sexual jealousy. In Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris—a very different yet equally original book—she invites us to contemplate what is truly valuable, and to consider the art we make of our private lives.

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography Named a Best Book of the Year by The ObserverBack in print, a “fusion of cool, clear-eyed prose and watercolors, photographs and painted portraits” (Time Out New York) by celebrated author and artist Leanne Shapton, on a sport that has shaped her life. Intimate with chlorinated space; weightless yet limited; closed off to taste, sound, and most sight; acutely aware of the clock: this is a swimmer’s state. When ten-year-old Leanne Shapton joins an Ontario township swim team with her brother, she finds an affinity for its rhythms—and spends years training, making it to the Olympic trials twice. Swimming Studies reflects on her time immersed in a world of rigor and determination, routine and competition, pairing together contemplative essays and paintings. Vivid details of an aquatic life appear: adolescence in suburban Canada, dawn risings for morning practice, bus rides with teammates, a growing collection of swimsuits, dips in lakes and oceans. When she trades athletic pursuits for artistic ones, the metrics of moving through water endure. In these elegant and potent meditations, Shapton renders swimming as a mode of experiencing time, movement, and perspective, capable of shaping our lives in every environment.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERWomen in Clothes is a book unlike any other. It is essentially a conversation among hundreds of women of all nationalities—famous, anonymous, religious, secular, married, single, young, old—on the subject of clothing, and how the garments we put on every day define and shape our lives.It began with a survey. The editors composed a list of more than fifty questions designed to prompt women to think more deeply about their personal style. Writers, activists, and artists including Cindy Sherman, Kim Gordon, Kalpona Akter, Sarah Nicole Prickett, Tavi Gevinson, Miranda July, Roxane Gay, Lena Dunham, and Molly Ringwald answered these questions with photographs, interviews, personal testimonies, and illustrations.Even our most basic clothing choices can give us confidence, show the connection between our appearance and our habits of mind, express our values and our politics, bond us with our friends, or function as armor or disguise. They are the tools we use to reinvent ourselves and to transform how others see us. Women in Clothes embraces the complexity of women’s style decisions, revealing the sometimes funny, sometimes strange, always thoughtful impulses that influence our daily ritual of getting dressed.

A new reissue of Leanne Shapton’s Guestbook, which “elevates the traditional ghost story into an art form” (Interview), collaging the verbal and non-verbal into brief, eerie narratives.A house stands empty. Family photographs, wrapping paper, and watercolor portraits act as windows into other lives. Little sculptures relay the story of an estranged couple. Photographs of a tennis prodigy document his exhaustive fits.Guestbook: Ghost Stories arranges artifacts and illustrations alongside meditative dispatches from a familiar, yet new reality. Her stories invite both visual and literal readings of forgotten objects, dark interiors, memento, laid carefully before us. Shapton’s beautiful and haunting pieces last long after the page has turned and the book has closed—making one wonder, ultimately, who has visited whom.

A new reissue of Leanne Shapton’s Guestbook, which “elevates the traditional ghost story into an art form” (Interview), collaging the verbal and non-verbal into brief, eerie narratives.A house stands empty. Family photographs, wrapping paper, and watercolor portraits act as windows into other lives. Little sculptures relay the story of an estranged couple. Photographs of a tennis prodigy document his exhaustive fits.Guestbook: Ghost Stories arranges artifacts and illustrations alongside meditative dispatches from a familiar, yet new reality. Her stories invite both visual and literal readings of forgotten objects, dark interiors, memento, laid carefully before us. Shapton’s beautiful and haunting pieces last long after the page has turned and the book has closed—making one wonder, ultimately, who has visited whom.

A love story told in the form of an auction catalog. Auction catalogs can tell you a lot about a person -- their passions and vanities, peccadilloes and aesthetics; their flush years and lean. Think of the collections of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Truman Capote, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. In Leanne Shapton''s marvelously inventive and invented auction catalog, the 325 lots up for auction are what remain from the relationship between Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris (who aren''t real people, but might as well be). Through photographs of the couple''s personal effects -- the usual auction items (jewelry, fine art, and rare furniture) and the seemingly worthless (pajamas, Post-it notes, worn paperbacks) -- the story of a failed love affair vividly (and cleverly) emerges. From first meeting to final separation, the progress and rituals of intimacy are revealed through the couple''s accumulated relics and memorabilia. And a love story, in all its tenderness and struggle, emerges from the evidence that has been left behind, laid out for us to appraise and appreciate. In an earlier work, Was She Pretty?, Shapton, a talented artist and illustrator, subtly explored the seemingly simple yet powerfully complicated nature of sexual jealousy. In Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris—a very different yet equally original book—she invites us to contemplate what is truly valuable, and to consider the art we make of our private lives.

Ethereal illustrations expand on a New York Times series by an acclaimed author and artistSunday Night Movies features Leanne Shapton's watercolors of resonant moments in black-and-white cinema. Selecting a brief fragment of each chosen film, she creates an indelible image that is both a hand-painted movie still and a personal response to a fleeting celluloid moment.Together, the seventy-eight paintings create a valentine to the world of cinema. Shapton's journey through film history becomes a wistful celebration of the subtle moments in stories, which can often slip by unnoticed. What could be a simple title, still life, or portrait of an actor becomes both illusive and allusive through the medium of these personal paintings.Shapton's bestselling Petit Livre book The Native Trees of Canada took a decades-old government catalogue and reimagined it, employing bold colors and stark shapes to represent familiar trees in their majestic glory. The book was a sleeper hit and went through multiple printings. With Sunday Night Movies she brings her love of film to light, and the effect is restrained and fanciful, familiar and all new.

Leanne Shapton gives voice to the toys on our shelves in this wry yet tender children’s bookAlways there to comfort and listen, stuffed animals provide a reassuring presence in many a childhood. With Toys Talking, acclaimed illustrator and author Leanne Shapton explores their inner lives, to reveal that their thoughts and feelings are just as complicated as our own. The concerns of these bunnies, bears, and ducks range from the mundane to the existential, and with each new pairing of character and text, we see a deeper portrait of their pensive, quiet world. Shapton holds a mirror to our own lives, to our insecurities and concerns, by revealing that the objects who comfort us have worries of their own. This book brings Shapton’s gorgeously minimal brushstrokes to a younger audience, and will leave children and parents alike brimming with the beauty and melancholy of self-reflection.