Circa Press – förlag

Jan Kaplický (1937-2009) was a visionary architect with a passion for drawing. It was his way of discovering, describing and constructing; and through drawing he presented beguiling architectural imagery of the highest order. Many of his sketches, cutaway drawings and photomontages are brought together and celebrated in this book. These drawings date from the early years of his independent practice, Future Systems, in the 1970s, to his final ink drawings, executed in the mid-1990s. Featured projects range from design studies for the International Space Station, undertaken with NASA, to the Media Centre at Lord's Cricket Ground, in London, winner of the 1999 Stirling Prize.

The automobile is the ultimate analogue machine and mankind’s most ingenious, seductive and damaging invention. For over a century, cars have provided reference points for our notions of style, status and desire. In design terms, the Age of Combustion was as rich and varied as architecture’s Baroque – and far more popular. And now it is coming to an end, as the internal-combustion engine is superseded by the battery and cars become wheeled computers, running on AI not oil. Together with a wide-ranging introduction, this book reproduces 60 of Stephen Bayley’s popular monthly columns for Octane, the outstanding classic car magazine where, for more than 10 years, he has provided the most consistent and insightful commentary on car culture, often based on privileged access to industry insiders.

Callum Innes is one of the few artists working in abstraction to include watercolour as a major part of his practice. As with many painters, his explorations in this medium form a parallel body of work, an activity taken on as a kind of ‘break’ from his other painting, with different circumstances, conditions and intentions.Innes has been making watercolours for more than 25 years. He began to explore the medium when he was asked to do a show at the Kunsthaus, in Zurich. He says: "I blithely said yes to an exhibition without ever having made a watercolour before. It caused a lot of stress at the time, but I gradually developed a way of working with paper and pigment. I am still making watercolours, although they have changed over the years, and now I realise that they inform the oil paintings more and more. When you place two pigments together, either opposite or complementary, and then dissolve them in water you achieve a completely new colour which only reveals itself on the paper. I am often surprised and disappointed in the same hour."It has been a couple of years since I last spent time with watercolours. When lockdown occurred, in March 2020, I was setting up a new studio, overlooking a fjord in Oslo. It was unfamiliar, and I had no reference to earlier works as I do in Edinburgh. I started to work on a new watercolour series, focusing on them for a week at a time, always starting the day with a black and white one, just to get my hand in … the black and white ones are the most elusive. "This new body of 50 watercolours feels stronger and more luminous than previous ones. I have kept them sequential in the book, to show how each work informs the next and so on."

Steve Diet Goedde's photographs are concerned with fetishism, but they could reasonably be regarded as fashion photographs, for they are about clothes and the roles that dressing imposes on women, or allows them to play. Indeed, Goedde has consistently rejected the visual stereotypes of 'fetish' photography. Instead he sets out to seduce and amuse, experimenting with humour, irony and elements of the surreal. Extempore brings together images that are departures in another sense. They represent stolen moments, or glimpses behind the scenes, when the models are not necessarily aware of the camera. Most of Goedde's models are drawn from his close circle of friends and in these photographs particularly one senses a shared trust and understanding.

"I like depicting sexy, strong women - the spirit of a dominatrix. Through my work I explore the part of my personality that enjoys teasing and provocation. In doing this, I've seen the change and growth of myself as a person, a woman, a lover, a critical open-minded thinker and, most important, as an artist." - Alejandra Guerrero. In the second decade of the twenty-first century we are witnessing an unprecedented exploration of female sexual power, while on the other hand reactionary cultural forces contrive to keep women as defenceless as possible. In this context, the work of photographer Alejandra Guerrero can be understood as a clarion call. Hers is a rarefied visual art that marks a turning point for female sexuality in erotica, her eloquent tableaux revealing the intricate ways in which women exert their erotic power. Here we see a future in which women dictate raw, yet refined desires. Each moment comes from the erotic fever dreams of the participants and the desires of the woman behind the camera. Sometimes, when Guerrero turns the lens upon herself, those moments are one and the same. Contents: We delight in wickedness by Violet Blue; Plates; Biographies; Credits.

Tat* is a bit of a graphic designer's curse. Walk into any design studio and you will see tat pinned to the walls or placed with loving care on top of a computer screen. Even the purist will have a secret cache hidden away somewhere.AndyAltmann began collecting tat while he was on his Foundation course, getting ready for an interview at St Martins School of Art. He'd been asked to present a sketchbook, but worried that he couldn't draw very well, he decided to start a scrapbook: "I rummaged through the drawers at home and found some football cards from the late 1960s and early '70s(plenty of Georgie Best), an instruction leaflet from an old Hoover, Christmas cracker jokes, and so on. Then I started on the magazines, cutting out images of anything that interested me. And finally I took myself off to the college library, where I photocopied things from booksbefore reaching for the scissors and glue." It was the beginning of a significant collecting habit.So what it is that makes a piece of graphic tat interesting? Is it the 'retro' thing - a fascination with a bygone age, the primitive printing techniques, the naivety of the design, or the use of colour? All of the above, of course, but it's not quite that simple. "Occasionally people offer me something they've foundthat they think I might like", says Andy. "But usually they're wrong - it doesn't excite me at all. The magic is missing."To a graphic designer, most the content of this book can safely be regarded as 'bad' design. But there is some magic in each and every piece that has made Andy either pick it up off the street, trail through online links, or enter some dodgy looking shop on the other side of the world just to snap it up. Here you'll find everything from sweet wrappers to flash cards, from soap powder boxes to speedway flyers, from wrestling programmes to bus tickets. More tat than you can shake a stick at. Takentogether, it represents a lifetime of gleeful hunting and gathering.* tat (noun) - anything that looks cheap, is of low quality, or in bad condition; junk, rubbish, debris, detritus, crap, shite

"A little gem of a book chronicling that most gullible of all species, the human being" - Craig Brown, Books of the Year 2019, Mail on Sunday "Dafydd Jones has focused on one of the most dominant elements of the social life of our times - how the smartphone has taken us all over. It is a timely and rather sobering look at this phenomenon, done with his usual eloquence as a photographer." - Martin Parr. Almost everyone uses a smartphone, and most of us are addicted. In this book, photographer Dafydd Jones shows us just how pervasive our screen addiction has become. In almost every social situation, he shows how the smartphone has killed conversation and changed the way we look at the world. 'In the eighties and nineties', says Jones, 'when I photographed young people at parties or balls, I'd find them chatting each other up, or smooching in corners. Now I see them sneaking looks on their iPhones, checking on their Instagram feeds, or whatever it is they're hooked on. They hardly talk to each other, or make eye contact at all. And it's not just a generational thing - it afflicts the oldies too. Who knows what impact it's having in the bedroom. It's probably a race to see what will wipe out humanity first - global climate change or screen-induced sexual indifference.'

As a young man, living in Manhattan in the 1970s and ‘80s, Frank Rispoli was drawn to the New Wave and Punk club scenes. Recognising the inherent performance of sexuality and desire in both fashion and club culture, he documented the intertwining of the two. Always with a camera strapped around his neck, he frequented Danceteria, Tier 3, Max’s Kansas City, Studio 54 and many other clubs in Soho, Chelsea, the Lower East Side, and Midtown. Rispoli asked female clubgoers, bar patrons, singers, and band members if he could photograph their shoes, utilising the staged sets, props, and bathrooms of the clubs, and the taxis, sidewalks, and rooftops of the city, as his backdrops. A selection of these photographs forms the basis of his first book – High Heels.Rispoli attributes his interest in women’s shoes to his inability, as a teenager, to look women in the eye and, due to his shyness, focusing on their feet instead. He drew further inspiration from the work of Guy Bourdin, and his advertising photography of the period. Rispoli continues, in his photographs, to capture the fun, freedom, and performance found in other outsider communities and events, such as Wigstock, and the burgeoning art scene in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

Ifa Brand never felt satisfied as a model. The dissatisfaction stemmed from not being able to represent her true identity: 'I fell “between styles”: alternative but not alternative enough; fetish but not in a typical sense. I also disliked photographers telling me how I should look, pose, behave; telling me no to red lips, no to precious lingerie and all the things I loved.’In 2017, she decided to go her own way. She saw photography as an opportunity to be her own creative director, to follow her own storylines, and to explore her own vision of sensuality, eroticism and fetish.Hers is a quest for personal empowerment through the art of self-portraiture: ‘I find it very important to present a strong, independent woman. There needs to be an element of being untouchable. The message to the viewer is: yes you can look but solely on my terms.’

Designer Andy Altmann has been pursuing an obsession with typographic oddities for more than 30 years; and he’s not necessarily interested in the kind of thing you might expect. He delights in the weird and wonderful and finds inspiration in the ordinary. At last, he has organised his typographic hits and misses in a 400-page, whopper of a scrapbook. Conceived and edited by Andy, typo* is a cornucopia of curiosities. Between its covers you'll find everything from Swiss minimalism to Victorian street signs, from soap packets to magazine covers, from high art to the handmade. Essential is too small a word for this book: every graphic designer and typographer should have a copy. Keep it by the keyboard or refer to it secretly when stuck for an idea, you’ll wonder how you ever managed without it.*typo (noun): an error (as of spelling) in typed or typeset material; (abbr.) typography or typographer

In the third decade of the 21st century, we are witnessing an unprecedented exploration of female sexual power, while on the other hand reactionary cultural forces contrive to keep women as defenceless as possible. In this context, the work of photographer Alejandra Guerrero can be understood as a clarion call. Hers is a rarefied visual art that marks a turning point for female sexuality in erotica, her eloquent tableaux revealing the intricate ways in which women exert their erotic power. Here we see a future in which women dictate raw, yet refined desires. Each moment comes from the erotic fever dreams of the participants and the desires of the woman behind the camera. Guerrero grew up against a backdrop of sleek automobiles. As a child she would sit in the driver’s seat of her mother’s Mercedes and dream of one day being in control of such an elegant machine. Her father was a mechanical engineer whose hobby was fixing up cool cars, and she would watch him at work, taking in the details of fins and fenders. It sparked a fascination, which became an adult passion, which eventually inspired an entire body of work. Auto Erotica is Guerrero’s second monograph with Circa and follows Wicked Women down the same electrifying road.

"...captures the energy and camaraderie of the city’s burlesque club scene." — Burlesque MagAngus Stewart has spent 10 years backstage with London’s burlesque community, getting to know the performers and documenting their shared world to create what he calls ‘a family album’. From the beginning, his focus was on the personalities, rather than the performances. He deliberately eschews the ‘big reveal’. Instead, his photographs capture the friendships, the laughter and the camaraderie that characterise the burlesque scene. We are introduced to a thriving community that values dedication and loyalty, and where the exotic is always laced with humour; and we hear from performers Belle de Beauvoir, REIx, Lady Cheek, Lady May and Lynn Ruth Miller. Burlesque can be provocative, it can be political, and it can be serious. But it can also be a lot of fun.‘I discovered that while some performers earn a living from burlesque, most have other jobs – anything from seamstresses to doctors, to company directors. This huge melting pot of professional experience, coupled with a variety of reasons for wanting to perform, means that personal development is encouraged. It’s an incredibly supportive community, and I wanted to try to capture that spirit.’ – Angus Stewart

“Reading Tableaux was like revisiting old haunts, or places I would have liked to have haunted. It sparked visceral sense memories and made me nostalgic. And the ending …” – MidoriIt is 1984, the year of Ronald Reagan’s re-election and the Brighton bomb; one can sense revolution in the air. Oliver Woolf is a thirty-something journalist, well-connected socially, and an instinctual conservative, whose comfortable routine is upset by a chance encounter in the rain. The girl in the rain is Candy, who is not what she first seems. Over the summer, Oliver and Candy form an unlikely friendship, and when she stops calling on him, he sets out to find her. His search leads him through a labyrinthine underworld that extends from London to Manhattan. Along the way, he meets someone who will change his life forever. A late-twentieth century Rake’s Progress, Oliver’s journey confronts issues that are still largely taboo. Illustrated with photographs by Steve Diet Goedde, Tableaux combines art and storytelling in a new hybrid form.

The V&A may proudly hold the original artwork for the Rolling Stone’s ‘tongue and lips’ logo, but this is an anomaly. The cultural significance of the band logo has been overlooked. And yet, thousands of people wear them on T-shirts every day, mostly as badges of allegiance, but also simply because they look cool. Some have even become tropes – think The Ramones, Run DMC, AC/DC. (Q: How many people who wear Ramones T-shirts have seen them live or know their music?)Band logos first emerged during the 1960s. They became commonplace in the 1970s and 1980s, when record companies and designers latched on to the power of music branding. Bands and logos may seem like unlikely bedfellows … yet it’s often the most eccentric, anarchic types who end up with the most compelling or ingenious visual marques to signify their attitude and style of music.It is also interesting how many prominent graphic designers first became interested in logos and letterforms by doodling the names of their favourite bands on their school exercise books. Some of these efforts were reverential copies, others were improvements or embellished versions of the original. A wannabe designer’s version of attempting to emulate a Hendrix riff.Logo Rhythm includes stories and insight from well-known designers such as Beatles art director Kosh, Bowie designer Jonathan Barnbook, Malcom Garrett, Rob O’Connor of Stylorouge, Chris Bigg of 4AD and editorial guru Mark Porter. There are contributions from Horace Panter of The Specials, XTC’s Andy Partridge, Allan Gorrie of Average White Band, Jim McCarty of The Yardbirds and Alex Kapranos of Franz Ferdinand.The book hails the unsung heroes and tall stories behind iconic band logos of all genres. It unearths original artwork and proffers informed comment and critique. It celebrates the good, the eccentric and the notorious, digging for nuggets of interest and illumination in the compelling world of band logos.

It is 1994, the year of the OJ Simpson saga, Tony Blair’s rise to the leadership of the Labour Party, and South Africa’s first fully multi-racial elections. Nola Marks is a London nightclub hostess with an art history degree and itchy feet. Suddenly her world changes. She begins a new career with a fledgling publishing company, meets Lucian Freud, and finds herself adopted as his latest muse. Over the course of the following seven months, her professional and emotional worlds are turned upside down, as external forces impact in unexpected ways. Set ten years on from Tableaux, the author’s debut novel, the narrative cuts between divergent national cultures and different social tribes. With photographs by Jamie Noise, Nightingales combines art and storytelling in a compelling hybrid form.

In the third decade of the 21st century, we are witnessing an unprecedented exploration of female sexual power, while on the other hand reactionary cultural forces contrive to keep women as defenceless as possible. In this context, the work of photographer Alejandra Guerrero can be understood as a clarion call. Hers is a rarefied visual art that marks a turning point for female sexuality in erotica, her eloquent tableaux revealing the intricate ways in which women exert their erotic power. Here we see a future in which women dictate raw, yet refined desires. Each moment comes from the erotic fever dreams of the participants and the desires of the woman behind the camera. Guerrero grew up against a backdrop of sleek automobiles. As a child she would sit in the driver’s seat of her mother’s Mercedes and dream of one day being in control of such an elegant machine. Her father was a mechanical engineer whose hobby was fixing up cool cars, and she would watch him at work, taking in the details of fins and fenders. It sparked a fascination, which became an adult passion, which eventually inspired an entire body of work. Auto Erotica is Guerrero’s second monograph with Circa and follows Wicked Women down the same electrifying road.

In the 1960s and ‘70s, Archigram speculated on the nature of architecture in ways that influenced a generation. In an era defined by the space race, the group’s exploration of movable structures and modular systems stretched far beyond known technologies or contemporary realities. Archigram magazine became the platform for exploring and sharing many of these themes. Launched in 1961, the magazine ran for 9 ½ issues until 1974, when Archigram disbanded. Now, after a 50-year pause for thought, Archigram is back.Edited by Peter Cook, with contributions from Archigram founding members Dennis Crompton, David Greene and Michael Webb, and with inputs from numerous contemporary designers, technologists and critics, Archigram Ten takes a wry backward glance and imagines a bold leap forward. It looks at where architecture is going currently and asks: why? Contributors include: Hitoshi Abe, Odile Decq, Elizabeth Diller, Thom Mayne, and Eric Owen Moss.

Andrew Holmes is renowned for his hyper-real coloured pencil drawings. His subject matter is the fixed and mobile service infrastructure that sustains the city of Los Angeles. The gleaming trucks, automobiles, and motorcycles that traverse the highways, and the industrial armature of storage tanks, service stations and truck stops to be found beyond the city’s edge are, for Holmes, the greatest artefacts of a society based on oil. Over the past 50 years, he has captured scenes from this uniquely American landscape in painstaking detail. Together they evoke a lost civilisation. Gas Tank City presents 100 of Holmes’s Los Angeles drawings, along with commentaries by art historian, Thomas E Crow, architects Mark Fisher and Cedric Price, and Holmes himself.

Mark Fisher was the creator and designer of a new art form: the travelling rock show. His exuberant stage sets framed artists from The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, U2, Madonna, Lady Gaga and Jean-Michel Jarre to Elton John and Tina Turner. There were thousands of concerts and hundreds of bravura settings, from the 2000 London Millennium show to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, as well as permanent structures, such as the 2,000-seater theatre and stage machinery for KÀ by Cirque du Soleil, in Las Vegas, and the Dai Show Theatre, in China. Each of these projects first found expression in Fisher’s sketch-books and on his drawing board. This book spans his entire career, with details of every major project and more than 100 drawings – some of which are performances in their own right."In 1977, I went on the road with the Floyd, and that was really the moment I ran away and joined the circus." – Mark FisherWith contributions from those who knew Mark Fisher well: Cristina Garcia, his life partner, keeper of the archive and editor of this book; Piers Gough, his contemporary at the Architectural Association in London; Andrew Holmes, an artist, occasional collaborator and close friend; and finally Ray Winkler, a colleague of long standing and now CEO and Design Director of Stufish Entertainment Architects.

Archigram comprised Warren Chalk (1927-88), Peter Cook (1936-), Dennis Crompton (1935-), David Greene (1937-), Ron Herron (1930-94), and Michael Webb (1937-). Together they envisioned the future of architecture in ways that enthralled a generation. In an era defined by the space race, they developed a ‘high-tech’, lightweight, infra-structural approach that stretched far beyond known technologies or contemporary realities. They devised autonomous dwellings and focused on survival technology; they experimented with megastructures and modular construction systems; they explored mobility through the environment, and the use of portable living capsules: all through the medium of an incredible series of drawings and models. Archigram’s influence has been profound and enduring. They gave the high-tech movement its impetus; they inspired architects such as Renzo Piano and Norman Foster; and they laid the ground for the design of buildings such as the Pompidou Centre. Edited and designed by Archigram member Dennis Crompton, this book catalogues Archigram’s activities over fourteen years, together with commentaries by the architects and critics writing then and now.

"This is not a book for those who are only interested in cars. It is a compelling, sometimes uncomfortable journey through our fascination with speed, status and mortality..." — NL MagazineCars have a talismanic quality. No other manufactured object has the same disturbing allure. More emotions are involved in cars and car design than in any other product: vanity, cupidity, greed, social competitiveness and cultural modelling. But when all this perverse promise ends in catastrophe, these same talismanic qualities acquire an extra dimension.The car crash is a defining phenomenon of popular culture. Death Drive is both an appreciative essay about the historic place of the automobile in the modern imagination and a detailed exploration of the circumstances of 24 celebrity car crashes, from Isadora Duncan in an Amilcar, in 1927, to Helmut Newton in a Cadillac, in 2004. The author concludes by confronting the imminent demise of the car itself.

Over the course of a year, Brian Rose set out to photograph all the neighbourhoods at the ends of the subway lines in New York City. He had multiple reasons for engaging in such a project, but the strongest was the desire to portray New York as a highly diverse, multi-centred metropolis. Having spent a major part of his career photographing the city through often challenging times – the dichotomy of destruction and creativity of the 1980s, the mortal wounding of 9/11, and the suspended animation of the Covid-19 pandemic – Rose was perhaps uniquely equipped to document the city at this moment of political uncertainty under the increased strain of new arrivals, many of whom are refugees from around the world. For a new generation of New Yorkers, the trains roll on ceaselessly, and despite the title, Last Stop is not so much about endings as it is about reinvention.

Since 1961, when Archigram emerged as a visionary force, Peter Cook’s drawings have projected radical possibilities for architecture; and through drawing he has pursued a fascination with what he calls ‘the puzzlement of the strange thing’ to create compelling forms. Peter Cook Drawings presents some 200 of his coloured and line drawings, ranging from student projects at the Architectural Association, through the speculations of the Archigram years, to dazzling new work completed shortly before going to press. With an introduction by Andrew Holmes, commentaries by Peter Cook himself, and a timeline of all the built and drawn work, the book charts the course of a seven-decades long adventure in architecture.

With Road Work, Andrew Holmes continues his pilgrimage through the seductive litter of modern life. Cities are conventionally viewed as static objects, but a third of Los Angeles is on the move; it is a kaleidoscope trapped in a grid, where what you see is what you drive past. Road Work presents 500 of Andrew Holmes’ Los Angeles Polaroids, capturing the machines that deliver people and goods to different parts of the city each day. These vehicles are seen at the airport, at a truck stop, always in a parking bay, set classically against azure skies, frozen like statues in a Renaissance garden. Everything has equal status. Nothing transgresses the grid. The work is even, chrome and rust are its soul. Along with commentaries by David Greene and Holmes himself, Road Work includes lyrics by Chuck Berry and others, and extracts from a variety of road novelists and writers.

If Richmond VA represented the historic heart of the Confederacy, then Monument Avenue was meant to memorialise its soul. The avenue was conceived in the 1870s, when the city elected to build a memorial to General Robert E Lee. It was not until 1890, however, that the massive monument was unveiled. Over the succeeding decades, Lee was joined by statues commemorating other leading Confederate military and political figures – JEB Stuart, Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson and Matthew Fontaine Maury.Almost from the moment they were erected, the Confederate monuments, as symbols of white supremacy, were the focus of controversy and protest. The climax came in the summer of 2020 when Black Lives Matter protesters, outraged by the death of George Floyd, converged on the avenue to vent their fury. On July 10th, Jefferson Davis was dragged from his pedestal. Two days later, Brian Rose packed up his cameras in New York and drove back to his home state to document the last days of the grand boulevard of the Lost Cause. En route, he reflected on his own history and the roles played by his forebears in the Antebellum South.This new edition of a classic book captures a pivotal moment in modern American history.

Helena Calmfors is a New York-based artist and performer whose work is inspired by the archetype of the dominant woman. It is a role with which she identifies and yet gently subverts by introducing ‘soft’ elements such as flowers into the typically ‘hard’ aesthetic vocabulary of domination. Central to her work is the feminist belief in the right to own one’s body; she also explores the theme of reclaiming identity through hierarchical power play. The act of creating intimate scenes and experiences is present in all aspects of her art, ranging from performance to watercolour paintings, and digital and Polaroid photography. She uses instant photography as a way of representing the ephemerality of performance and the fleeting intimacy of the dominant/submissive relationship. With an introduction by the Indian-American artist, Ankita Mishra, Forget Me Not is Calmfors’ debut monograph.

"If you are a space fan, fascinated by the kind of venture the International Space Station represents, this book is an absolute must, full of juicy details and intriguing insights." - Popular Science, March 2016 In 1984 President Ronald Reagan gave NASA the go-ahead to build a Space Station. A generation later, the International Space Station is an established and highly successful research centre in Earth's orbit. The history of this extraordinary project is a complex weave of powerful threads - political, diplomatic, financial and technological among them - but none is more fascinating than the story of its design. This book provides the first comprehensive account of the International Space Station s conception, development and assembly in space. As a highly accessible chronicle of a complex piece of design and engineering, it will appeal to readers far beyond the space field. NASA Astronaut Nicole Stott, a veteran of International Space Station Expeditions 20 and 21 and Shuttle Missions STS-128, STS-129 and STS-133, introduces the book with a personal memoir: A Home in Space.