Magic Hour Press – serie

On December 18, 1974, Linda Rosenkrantz asked her friend Peter Hujar to write down everything he did one day. Hujar met Rosenkrantz at her apartment on 94th street the following day where she asked him about it in detail. She tape-recorded their conversation and this book is a full transcript of that exchange, published here for the first time since it was recorded 47 years ago. The book features an introduction by Stephen Koch, director of the Peter Hujar Estate.“Peter Hujar’s monologue, prompted by Linda Rosenkranz, is a Warholian gem, and a prize discovery for Magic Hour Press.”— Moyra Davey“This slim volume is Peter’s sexiest self-portrait. Read it and weep if you didn’t know him. Or read it and weep if you did that we lost him.”— Nan Goldin“It’s wonderful to hear Peter’s voice again. The voice I channel when I make his prints [since 2008]. He was my friend, mentor - an inspired printer - my teacher. Thank you, Linda, for your brilliant idea, and thanks for this book, it’s a great gift.”— Gary Schneider

The first English translation of an important and evocative interview-turned-book project in Marguerite Duras' illustrious oeuvre"I could talk for hours about this house, this garden. I know it all, I know where every old door is, everything, the walls of the pond, all the plants, the location of every plant, even the wild plants I know the place of, everything." So begins Marguerite Duras’ rhapsody on the spaces she has inhabited throughout her life. The Places of Marguerite Duras was filmed and aired as a two-part television documentary in 1976. Her reminiscences are structured around her memories of specific locations: her house in Neauphle-le-Château; her childhood home in French Indochina, which inspired her acclaimed novel The Sea Wall; the Hôtel des Roches Noires in Trouville, where she wrote The Ravishing of Lol Stein; and the vast seascapes of Indochina, Bengal and Normandy, whose powerful tides compelled her art and life.The transcript of the documentary was published in French two years after the documentary aired, and is now published in English for the first time, just shy of 50 years since the film’s creation. True to the original French edition, Duras’ reflections are accompanied by photographs and film stills. The complete English translation by Alison Strayer includes a new essay by writer and director Durga Chew-Bose.Marguerite Duras (1914–96) was a filmmaker and author, and a leading figure in French postwar cinema. Her novel L’Amant won the Prix Goncourt in 1984. She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for the film Hiroshima mon amour (1959).

Corporeal, carnal and visceral, Fragoso’s drawings are emphatically devoted to matters of the fleshThe first book on Mexican artist María Fragoso Jara (born 1995) presents 30 drawings executed in a visceral crimson hue, evoking death, birth, sex and love. Her work dwells in a worldly place where, as she puts it, “tenderness and violence, desire and vulnerability, fragmentation and wholeness exist in charged balance.”

A new edition of the beloved out-of-print artist’s book that makes material, through unbound pages, Cage’s concept of indeterminacyLike a mushroom hunting trip full of unexpected pleasures, Iris Garden combines 22 of John Cage’s stories from his 1959 spoken word album Indeterminacy—for which he read aloud texts of varying length within one-minute increments—with 44 of William Gedney’s photographs shot from the 1950s to 1989, several of which are portraits of the famed composer. Together, Cage’s anecdotal prose about everyday life and Gedney’s austere photographs articulate an aesthetic sensibility of openness—one which allows the reader to fill in the narrative blanks. The book’s design ingeniously mirrors Cage’s devotion to chance by leaving its pages loose and unbound so that they may be shuffled and reordered by the reader. Originally published in a small print run by photographer Alec Soth’s independent press, Little Brown Mushroom, in 2013, this new edition brings a rare out-of-print book back into the world. Soth founded his press as a space to experiment with image and text—a spirit saliently reflected in Iris Garden’s quietly radical collaboration.John Cage (1912–92) was one of the most influential and transformative figures in 20th-century music and art. A pioneer of chance operations, experimental composition and the use of silence—most famously in his work “4'33"”—Cage reshaped the boundaries of artistic practice, extending his ideas into writing, visual art and philosophy.Working largely outside the commercial mainstream and recognized more fully after his death, William Gedney (1932–89) was an American photographer who developed a lyrical documentary style shooting across the United States, from rural Kentucky to San Francisco.

Guibert’s photo novel exploring the reclusive lives of his great-aunts, published in English for the first timeThe protagonists of Suzanne and Louise, the second book by French writer and photographer Hervé Guibert, are his elderly great-aunts, who lived alone in a large townhouse in Paris’ 15th arrondissement. The older sister controlled the finances while the younger, a former nun, did the housekeeping. During a series of weekly visits from their grandnephew, these reclusive women offered up their home and their bodies to his camera. The resulting images would grow into Guibert’s first and only photo novel, a provocative exploration of fantasy, mortality and desire.Originally published in France in 1980, and highly sought after by fans of Guibert, Suzanne and Louise is reissued here for the first time in a full English translation by Christine Pichini, a new introduction by artist and writer Moyra Davey and an account of the book’s origins by Thomas Simmonet—director of the Parisian publishing house Les Éditions de Minuit—complete with testimonials, documentation, unpublished photographs and contact sheets.Hervé Guibert (1955–91) was the author of 25 books and published extensive texts and criticism on photography, primarily with the French newspaper Le Monde. His bestselling novel To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life (1990) was inspired by his close friend Michel Foucault and the two men’s experiences living with AIDS, which tragically ended Guibert’s life at the age of 36.

Lankton's iconic and startling doll sculptures as we have never seen them before: through her own eyesThis is the first monograph on the trans visionary artist Greer Lankton (1958–96), whose lifelike doll sculptures shocked 1980s New York. Lankton's dolls, which she began making as a child and produced obsessively until her death at age 38, were a means to explore her fraught relationship with the human body. In the book's 100 photographs, all shot by Lankton herself, these figures take on a life of their own, kvetching at a party, strolling along a beach, or lounging on a stoop in the East Village. Among this extraordinary cast of oddballs—usually femme, often freakish, always radiating a glamorous confidence—we find characters of Lankton's own invention alongside well-known icons such as Divine, Coco Chanel, Andy Warhol and even Lankton herself.Born in 1958 to a Presbyterian minister in Michigan, Greer Lankton moved to New York in 1978 and became a rising star of the downtown scene. There, her deviant elegance was immortalized in photographs by Peter Hujar, David Armstrong and Lankton's close friend Nan Goldin, who described her as "one of the luminaries of the East Village renaissance: beautiful, glamorous, wild and hysterically funny." Lankton's work was a neighborhood fixture, in exhibitions at the gallery Civilian Warfare and in regular window displays at Einstein's Boutique, and was also celebrated farther afield, in era-defining group shows at PS1 and the Venice Biennale. Her final work, an immersive installation created for the Mattress Factory in 1996, remains on permanent view.

Salvaged from a devastating fire, Day's photographs and stories provide glimpses into her close friendship with author Hervé GuibertIn the fall of 2013, the house of American photographer Anne Day burnt to the ground. A few of her prints and negatives survived in a file cabinet but had become completely charred: only remnants of images and traces of a younger self remained. A close friend of hers in the early 1980s was the French photographer and author Hervé Guibert (1955–91). They worked together on magazine assignments for Le Monde, profiling Orson Welles, Jane Fonda and the antique dealer Madeleine Castaing, to name a few. When not working, they took day trips to the seaside; Guibert introduced Day to his Parisian circle of friends. He took her to see performances by Pina Bausch and Mark Morris and they dined with Cartier-Bresson and Duane Michals. While Day made her living as a photographer, it was the photos she took of her grandmother that Guibert loved the most. Taking its title from an article Guibert wrote about Day, this volume mixes Day's burnt prints with her anecdotes about the people she knew and the places she frequented.

A fresh edition of the novel that expands upon the autofictional world introduced in Guibert's cult classic, Suzanne and Louise (1980)Hervé Guibert's novel The Gangsters opens at the front door of a Paris townhouse inhabited by the narrator's elderly great-aunts, Suzanne and Louise. The narrator, distracted by a health crisis and his pursuit of an ambivalent lover, arrives to find suspicious renovation work taking place. But even after the great-aunts confess to being intimidated and extorted, neither he nor the incompetent police can stop the ongoing larceny. Readers of Guibert's writing may already recognize the narrator (also named Hervé) and his great-aunts from the groundbreaking photo-novel Suzanne and Louise (1980). Like his other books, The Gangsters is a work of autofiction. Here, he uses the crime-novel format to explore universal motifs, such as cruelty, desire and mortality. "When I disappear," Guibert continued, "I will have said it all. I will have striven to reduce this distance between the truths of experience and writing." Originally published in 1988, The Gangsters was his first book to be translated into English. This new edition from Magic Hour features Iain White's original translation and a new afterword by the writer Janique Vigier.Astoundingly prolific, the French writer and photographer Hervé Guibert (1955–91) authored 25 books and published numerous texts on photography. Memorialized as a leading exponent of French autofiction, Guibert rose to acclaim for his bestselling AIDS novel, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life (1990).