THEA 12000: Theatrical Design: Sweat by Lynn Nottage

Edward Burtynsky has achieved global recognition for his spectacular, large-scale photographs which depict the impact of human activity upon urban and natural environments around the world. They cover such subjects as mines and quarries, the oil industry, ship-building and ship-breaking, water as a resource under threat worldwide, and an emergent China. Curated by William A. Ewing, this volume, the first comprehensive survey of Burtynsky's multi-faceted work in over a decade, includes both iconic images and previously unpublished photographs. Relinquishing the project-based lens through which the photographer's work has previously been presented - the major monographs Oil and Water being the most recent examples - it presents Burtynsky's photographs in free-flowing sections which combine and contrast work from throughout his career. This original approach provides a sense of both his visual language and his exploration of the dilemmas at the heart of our globalized world. Each section is interspersed with selected texts which work in concert with the images to provide a context and greater understanding of Burtynsky's view of the world. With an introduction by Ewing and an afterword by academic Joshua Schuster, Essential Elements provides an entirely new way of seeing Burtynsky's work for those who are already familiar with it, as well as an accessible introduction for those encountering his photographs for the first time.

The Bechers' industrial vision has become an essential part of the way we see today; their head-on, deadpan photographs of pithead gear and water towers and blast furnaces have for more than 30 years expressed a serenely cool, rigorous approach that reduces the individual structures they photograph to variations on an ideal form. In this, their latest work, the Bechers' present four principally different forms of gas holders or gas tanks in 140 photographs taken during the years 1963-1992 in Great Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, and the United States. The subjects are photographed under overcast skies that eliminate expressive variations in lighting; the Bechers make no attempt to analyze or explain them. Captions contain only the barest of information: time and place. On the subject of gas holders, the Bechers limit their remarks to a minimal functional description, leaving the esthetic dimension of their subject to the photographs themselves: much of the fascination of these photographs lies in the fact that these unadorned metallic structures, presumably built with little concern for their visual impact, are almost invariably striking in appearance. Bernd and Hilla Becher teach at the DÜsseldorf Art Academy. They began their collaborative photographic enterprise in 1957, when they did a study of workers' houses in their native Germany. The Bechers follow in a distinguished line of German photographers that includes August Sander, Albert Renger-Patzsch, and Werner Manz, all of whom contributed in different ways to the definition of "objective" photography.

Since 1959 Bernd and Hilla Becher have been photographing imperiled industrial structures such as pit-head frames, water towers, blast furnaces, cooling towers, gas tanks, and silos. As documenters of the industrial era in Europe and the United States - an era now drawing to a close - they are not only photographers, but industrial archaeologists, salvaging testimonies of past developments in the form of readable documents for posterity. At the same time, the Bechers could also be called conceptual artists, as their photographs reveal the meaning and transformative character of structure.

In December 1968, the American artist Robert Smithson embarked on a field trip to the huge industrial complex in the Ruhr district of Germany. His local guides were the Dusseldorf-based artist duo of Bernd and Hilla Becher, and Konrad Fischer, in whose Dusseldorf gallery Smithson was scheduled to exhibit. The Bechers had begun their own project of photographing the vernacular industrial architecture of Northern Europe in the early 1960s, and had already spent several months photographing at Oberhausen as well as at adjacent industrial sites. The different series of photographs made by Smithson and the Bechers of the same site foreground their respective preoccupations with the industrial landscape and the process of production and entropy, with systems and their inevitable dissolution. Their contrasting bodies of work embody alternate perspectives on time: the Bechers' sense of historical time and Smithson's of the geological. Though formally divergent, each artist's work comprises a radical rethinking of classical notions of beauty and landscape. Neither the Bechers' typologies nor Smithson's projects were possible without prospecting in neglected parts of the landscape, whose distressed state refuted any automatic relationship between history and progress.

The photographic industry employs thousands of women, but champions mostly men. To begin to redress the balance, here is a timely presentation of the work of over thirty young female photographers working today. This book is predominantly a celebration of some of the most inquisitive, intelligent and daring photography being created now. The stories the photographers tell are the most pressing social, political and personal issues seen through the female lens.Firecracker, established in 2011 by Fiona Rogers, is an online platform dedicated to supporting female photographers worldwide by showcasing their work. Building upon Firecracker's foundations, this book brings together photography that encompasses an eclectic variety of styles, techniques and locations, from German Alma Haser's futuristic series of portraits that use origami to create 3D sculptures within the frame, to Egyptian Laura El-Tantawy's filmic and intensely personal series on political protest in Cairo. There is a recurring theme throughout the book that serves to unite these extraordinary women and their work: the exploration of marginalized individuals and under-discussed subjects, seen by fresh eyes. Fiona Rogers and Max Houghton offer insightful and expert authorship and curation.

Cool is the definitive and dynamic visual history of youth style culture movements; with an accessible format, smartly elegant and sophisticated content, with celebrity contributors that will attract a broad audience: from the fashion-forward youth putting together their first looks; to the urban fashionistas who push the style envelope; to the rarefied and sartorially fit readers of Visionaire magazine. Cool unearths and memorializes more than 100 global youth subcultures spanning more than a century. Beautifully illustrated, the book is a type of manual of street styles--from Flappers, to Swing Kids, to Goths, to today's Normcore--that have influenced and helped shaped the zeitgeist, music, fashion, media, and modern cultural history all over the world.

With little formal training as a photographer or artist, Zoe Strauss (b. 1970) founded the Philadelphia Public Art Project in 1995 with the aim of exhibiting art in nontraditional venues. Five years later, she began using photography as the most direct means of representing her chosen subjects. Zoe Strauss: 10 Years offers a midcareer assessment of Strauss's achievement to date, and the first full account of her celebrated ten-year project, beginning in 2001, to exhibit her photographs under an elevated section of Interstate 95 in Philadelphia. Strauss's troubling and sometimes touching images focus primarily on American working-class experience, to convey what she calls "an epic narrative that reflects the beauty and struggle of everyday life." Generously illustrated, this book includes nearly 200 photographs—135 of them published here for the first time—along with images that document her I-95 exhibitions. With essays by Peter Barberie and Sally Stein, plus a text by the artist herself, a bibliography, and a chronology, this is the most definitive publication to date about this important young artist.