New Work: ‘Crazy from the Heat’
Pentagram Austin Partner DJ Stout met photographer James H. Evans in 1988, about the time that Stout began working as the art director of Texas Monthly magazine. Evans, who had just moved to the Big Bend, became Stout’s go-to photographer in that remote West Texas region and shot many assignments for him over his 13 year career at the renowned regional publication. In 2003 Stout and Associate Partner Julie Savasky designed Evans’s first monograph, Big Bend Pictures, and now they have designed his newest book, Crazy from the Heat. The new volume, with its quirky title penned by Stout, is published by the University of Texas Press and began hitting bookstores this month.
“What was challenging from a design perspective about this book compared to the first one was the wide variety of imagery,” says Stout. “The pictures in Big Bend Pictures were all shot in the same format with the same toning. This book is definitely more frenetic. Kind of like the artist himself.”
New Work: ‘Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand’
Today photography is recognized as an established and influential art form, but 100 years ago the medium was struggling to be accepted as a traditional fine art. In the years between the turn of the 20th century and the beginning of World War I, photography’s “Big Three”—Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen and Paul Strand—helped legitimize the medium. Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand at the Metropolitan Museum of Art documents this pioneering period in an exhibition of 115 photographs drawn from the Met’s permanent collection. Pentagram’s Abbott Miller has designed the catalogue for the landmark exhibition, on view at the Met through April 10.
Alfred Stieglitz’s gift of 22 photographs in 1928 was the Met’s first acquisition of photography, and the photographer had a long relationship with the museum, later donating over 400 works made by various photographers of the period including Steichen and Strand. Today the Alfred Stieglitz Collection is a core of the Met’s photography holdings, and “Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand” includes many of the museum’s masterpieces.
‘Hallucinating Light’ - A Fantasy Portrait
Yves de Contades, photographer and creative lead at International Life magazine, has photographed fantasy portraits of 40 leading figures from the UK’s advertising and design industry. Harry Pearce is featured along with other subjects including Linda Burrows (Creative Director, Sunday Times), Theo Williams (CD, Habitat), Liz Sivell (CD, RGA Advertising), Suzanne Dean (CD, Random House Publishing), Jamie Bell (CD, CMW), Justin Cooke (owner, Fortune Cookie and Chair, British Interactive Media Association), Steve Vranakis (CD, VCCP), and former Pentagram Partner David Hillman. The results, a mix of the quirky, the clever and the downright bizarre are available to view online here.
A short video of the private view of the fantasy portraits can be seen here. The portraits will be on display at LBi for one month from Thursday, 24 June.
For his portrait, Harry was photographed holding a very special guitar. An explanation after the jump.
Continue reading "'Hallucinating Light' - A Fantasy Portrait"
Preview: ‘Dress Codes’ at ICP
Abbott Miller has designed the installation and graphics for Dress Codes: The Third ICP Triennial of Photography and Video, opening today at the Museum of the International Center of Photography in New York. The triennial is the only major US survey devoted to contemporary photography and video. Dress Codes closes out a year of fashion focused programming at the museum and explores ideas of identity, production and consumption through the lens of fashion, style and image, from uniforms to haute couture, to dress as a celebration of personal identity or as a religious or political statement. The exhibition features the work of 34 artists including Stan Douglas, Barbara Kruger, Martha Rosler, Cindy Sherman, Lorna Simpson, Zhou Tao and Thorsten Brinkmann. Miller worked on the show with ICP curators Kristen Lubben, Christopher Phillips, Carol Squiers and ICP adjunct curator Vince Aletti. Dress Codes is on view through January 17, 2010. More about the exhibition’s design coming soon.
Pentagram Papers 39: SIGNS
We have all seen the homeless on street corners holding hand-scrawled signs. Their messages are desperate, heartbreaking, and at times, even humorous. These naked forms of self-expression have unintentionally become some of the most basic, raw and compelling examples of graphic communication in our society today. The 39th edition of our privately published Pentagram Papers series was designed by DJ Stout. It features signs from the personal collection of the legendary musician and writer Joe Ely and photographed by Randal Ford. These images are combined with a series of large-format portraits of the homeless by Austin-based photographer Michael O’Brien, who worked with Alan Graham, president of Austin’s Mobile Loaves & Fishes, and Brother Duane Severance, a pastor to the street people. Ely wrote the book’s foreword.
We have adapted the contents of the paper online here:
Our Austin office recently launched the publication of SIGNS with a benefit that raised $5000 to help feed the homeless. We hope that you find Ely’s essay and the photographs of O’Brien and Ford as moving as we do and we encourage you to join us in supporting one of the charities listed here or a local one of your choice.
Everybody Dance Now: 20 Years of Dancing in Print
Opening today at the AIGA National Design Center, Everybody Dance Now: 20 Years of Dancing in Print is a retrospective of Dance Ink (1989-1996) and 2wice (1997-ongoing), the pioneering performing and visual arts magazines published by Patsy Tarr and designed and art directed by Abbott Miller.
Emerging from the New York dance community, Dance Ink was conceived as an alternative performance space, one that had the advantage of becoming a physical record of this most ephemeral art form. 2wice, its successor, continues in this tradition with a focus on editions that use the medium of print to evoke the tactile, visual and temporal qualities of performance.
Everybody Dance Now focuses on 2wice’s collaborations with a distinguished roster of performers and photographers, the result of a single, powerful idea of creating performances within the unique “stage” of the printed page. The exhibition, designed by Miller, includes the publications, books, photographs, posters and artifacts related to the production of these unique documents of contemporary dance.
The exhibition will be open to the public from April 3 through May 15 at the AIGA National Design Center, 164 Fifth Avenue in New York City. Gallery hours are Monday through Thursday, 11 am to 6 pm; Friday, 11 am to 5 pm.
A look back at Dance Ink and 2wice after the jump.
Continue reading "Everybody Dance Now: 20 Years of Dancing in Print"
New Work: 2wice Everybody Dance Now
Given the current state of the world, who couldn't use a little dancing? Everybody Dance Now, the latest edition of 2wice designed by Abbott Miller, is a portfolio of photographs by Martin Parr that capture the universal delight in getting down. Photographed over the past 35 years, the color-saturated pictures, including a few early black and white images, document the twisting, twirling, shimmying and shaking that take place in nightclubs, dance competitions, parades and celebrations from Blackpool to São Paolo.
"After so many collaborations with choreographers and dancers, it was fun to remember that dancing happens everywhere and is done by everyone," says Miller. "Working with Parr's photographs during this particularly gloomy time provided a bright spot, and we hope the publication provides the same lift to others."
Come dancing after the jump.
New Work: ‘In Search of Beauty’
Praised as “a true Old Master of the reflex camera” Fritz Henle (1909-1993) was one of the early champions of the Rolleiflex camera and its square format photography. Known later in life as “Mr. Rollei,” Henle’s diverse work in many genres (including documentary, travel, fashion, commercial, portrait, celebrity, avant-garde, nude, industrial, landscape and inspirational) popularized the new format in America which was later adopted by prominent photographers like Diane Arbus and Irving Penn. Henle, described as “the last classic freelance photographer,” was a frequent contributor to publications like LIFE, Harper’s Bazaar, Mademoiselle and Town and Country.
Austin Partner DJ Stout and Associate Julie Savasky have just completed the design of the definitive book on Henle, In Search of Beauty, published by The University of Texas Press. The large-format book, written and painstakingly researched by Roy Flukinger, will make its debut at a major retrospective exhibition of Henle’s work, Fritz Henle: In Search of Beauty, opening on 3 February at the Harry Ransom Center on the campus of The University of Texas in Austin.
A look inside the book after the jump.
New Work: ‘A Certain Alchemy’
DJ Stout has designed his eighth book for the internationally acclaimed photographer Keith Carter. The new title, A Certain Alchemy, published by the University of Texas Press, is being released this month. Lauded as “a transcendent realist” and “a poet of the ordinary,” Keith Carter is a Beaumont, Texas native whose work has been shown in over one hundred solo exhibitions in thirteen countries. Initially finding his subjects in the familiar, yet exotic, places of East Texas, Carter has since expanded his range not only geographically, but also into realms of dreams and imagination, where objects of the mundane world open glimpses into ineffable realities.
A look inside A Certain Alchemy after the jump.
Pentagram Papers 38: The Russian Garbo
In the early 1930s Samuel Goldwyn brought the Russian silent film actress Anna Sten to Hollywood. Hoping he had found his Garbo equivalent, Goldwyn failed to recognize that as the silent movie era was quickly fading, Sten was unable to speak English. Before this realization, and upon her arrival, Sten and her husband commissioned Richard Neutra to build them a house in the Hollywood Hills. Virtually unknown, this modernist masterpiece had had only two owners before Pentagram Architects’ James Biber and Neutra house specialists Marmol Radzinger began a restoration. Aimed at balancing Neutra’s original vision, Sten’s demands and the current clients’ desires, the ensuing process was “a live experiment in mediating between the past and the future,” says Biber.
Pentagram Paper 38: The Russian Garbo is a documentary of the Sten-Frenke House that tells the stories of its evolution, architect and owners through reproductions of Neutra’s original documentation and the post-renovation photography of Julius Shulman. The prodigious 95-year-old photographer had never shot the house before, adding yet another story to the history of the residence. “The process of restoring the Sten-Frenke House involved research of the most intimate kind,” recalls Biber. “The extensive documents tell one story, and quite a personal one, the house tells another and the photographs by Julius Shulman tell yet another.” Together they form a portrait of the creation and restoration of this remarkable house.
We have adapted the paper’s content online here:
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