Skira Editore – serie

A monograph surveying the past twenty years works of the “celebrity photographer” Uli Weber, one of the most accomplished photographers of his generation. Some photographers build a global reputation specialising in fashion. Others excel in portraiture, travel or the commercial world of advertising. Most photographers seek to master just one genre but, over the past 20 years, a rare few have excelled in all those disciplines, one of them is Uli Weber. From teenagers’ bedroom walls to the halls of The Victoria and Albert Museum, Uli Weber is one of the most accomplished and accessible photographers of his generation. When he started twenty years ago, it was his aim to “create beautiful pictures that are always relevant.” The beauty of them is obvious to even the most untutored eye. This book features a fine collection of works that has an unusually wide span.

The first monograph on Kata Legrady’s works presenting a collection of drawings, photographs, sculptures and video-installations. Kata Legrady (Hungary 1974) belongs to that long line of artists for whom an object offers the stimulus for artistic thought. Her approach takes the form of a symbolic encounter between weapons of war and confectionery. The Smarties are used to decorate weapons so that in her hands machine guns, grenades and knives become strange and colourful, almost beautiful and appealing. The series Bombs and Candies began in 2008 and forms a corpus of great formal and conceptual coherence. At first sight there is no precise message, no hidden aspect. We are not dealing with complex and stratified arrangements of images or objects but with restrained, frontal and simplified compositions. They are carriers that, as Jeff Koons put it so well, are there “to stimulate and activate the viewer’s mental and physical state”.

The first complete monograph devoted to Luciano Rigolini's photography Alongside his work in cinema and documentary, Luciano Rigolini has also carried out intense and rigorous research in the field of photography. Between 1990 and 2002 he photographed the urban landscapes and architectural details of European and American cities. These black and white images are uniform in size (140 x 140 cm), and immediately reveal their aesthetic and conceptual roots in the historical avant-garde, especially constructivism and German objectivity. At the same time he began to collect vintage stereoscopic plates, nineteenth century photographic prints and anonymous amateur images dating from the eighties of last century. A synthesis of these elements gave rise to an exhibition entitled La forma dello sguardo held in Spring 2001 at the Museo Cantonale d’Arte in Lugano; a substantial catalogue was also published. This was followed in 2008 by the exhibition Fotostiftung Schweiz di Winterthur “What you see”, which was centred around anonymous works by 107 amateur photographers. This new work focuses in particular on the relationship between photography, painting and the role played by digital technology. Among other things, it presents a wealth of hitherto unpublished large format works, a reinterpretation of anonymous photographs and documents uncovered in forgotten archives, at flea markets or purchased from antique dealers or on the Internet. These images, originally created with no artistic pretensions, restored or re-elaborated using specific digital processes and printed in large format, reveal surprising sculptural, pictorial and formal qualities.

An acclaimed fashion photographer provides a personal, luminous, and moving account of post-tsunami Japan. This volume is an extraordinary photographic report by the famous Japanese fashion photographer Yasushi Handa, taken a few weeks after the terrible earthquake and tsunami that battered the eastern coastline of Japan in March 2011. It includes the detailed history of the provinces affected by the disaster, an accessible scientific explanation of the reasons why such an event can occur, and a look to the future that talks clearly about how damage can be limited and how nuclear disasters can be prevented. The book also reveals the composure of the Japanese people and their incredible capacity to resurrect themselves. The photographs were exhibited in Tokyo, Kobe, and Okinawa between January and March 2012 and were admired by a great number of visitors.

The ciliary muscle reproduces the effect of a lens and allows the eye to focus or blur vision. The ciliary muscle became the emblem of the critical vision that Diller + Scofidio (+ Renfro) had of their heterogeneous fields of research and experimentation. Their interdisciplinary projects range from objects, installations and performances to media and architecture. In recent years they have expanded - with a third partner joining their studio - to embrace projects on an urban scale. Diller + Scofidio (+ Renfro): The Ciliary Function covers their development documenting about twenty works, from the earliest to the most recent and includes essays investigating the studio's context, influences and strategies, some interviews with the architects, and a scheme showing the evolution and growth of the studio from 1979 to today.

The art of the up-and-coming South African artist Candice Breitz draws on contemporary mass culture, devising new systems for understanding reality. Published in association with the Castello di Rivoli, this book documents Breitz's new work "Mother + Father". Exploding the terrain of representation, Candice Breitz employs a variety of darkly humorous and often disturbing tactics to strike out at stereotypes and visual conventions as presented and accepted in the media and popular culture. Breitz appropriates photographs and visual fragments and recontextualises these in bold, sometimes tasteless-seeming images, which radically challenge conventional wisdom and question currently accepted assumptions. Considering herself a "symptom" of her own time, Breitz has articulated her artistic practice by acting directly inside pop culture, opening up, unhinging, and fragmenting its apparent solidity, and devising a sort of creative intervention that transforms her from mute spectator into an active, critical voice. Conceived specifically for Castello di Rivoli, "Mother + Father", 2005, represents one of the artist's most complex projects to date.The work is developed in two distinct installations. The protagonists in the first installation, entitled "Mother", are Hollywood actresses Faye Dunaway, Susan Sarandon, Meryl Streep, Diane Keaton, Julia Roberts, and Shirley MacLaine. In "Father" the six father figures have the well-known faces of actors who include Tony Danza, Dustin Hoffman, Harvey Keitel, Steve Martin, Donald Sutherland, and Jon Voight. Suspended in a void made up only of words, facial expressions, and body language, the new interactions of these actors and actresses give rise to the theatrical space of Breitz's work. Digital simulacra, the mothers and fathers devised by the artist are hostages, trapped within a specific emotional repertoire that questions the canons according to which the media - television and Hollywood - have taken over the role of parenting, training the public to experience, through the screen, circumstances that, instead, pertain to real life. Candice Breitz has participated in numerous exhibitions including Re-animations, Modern Art Museum, Oxford, Remix: Contemporary Art and Pop, Tate Liverpool.She has been invited to participate in the exhibition Experience of Art at this year's Venice Biennale.