Surveillance cinema

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présentation de Laure Beaumont-Maillet

"From 1897 until his death in 1927 Atget was photographer of Paris par excellence. This book brings together 840 of his images arranged district by district, neighborhood by neighborhood-it is the most prolific collection of his work ever published. To turn the pages is to take an unforgettable stroll through the eerie, empty streets of Paris 70 years ago. It is a strange, largely unpeopled world where objects project an uncanny density: shoes dangling in a shop window, or the milk cart laden with cans and equipped with whip and reins but no driver. This is Atget's Paris and in typical Atget style those humans that do appear are the humble tradespeople, the ragpickers, the prostitutes. Although hailed by the surrealists for the poetic quality of his images, Atget refused to accept that he was an artist, claiming that the pictures he took were simply documents. He has become known as the first modern photographer and had the unique ability to inject a tragic quality into ordinary things. As a special tribute this book has been formatted in the shape of a Parisian cobblestone."--Amazon.

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Frederic Tuten

"In this novel, Frederic Tuten explores the ageless tension between a life of passion and a desire for ease. Set in Paris and New York, The Green Hour tells the story of Dominique, an art historian who cannot choose between two men who embody the critical schism in her life - unquenchable idealism and material, attainable happiness.". "The novel etches the career of this extraordinary woman from her rebellious college years to the present. What unfolds is a passionate love story in which Dominique is torn by her destructive devotion to her first love, the seductive Rex, who periodically appears and disappears from her life, and Eric, a wealthy businessman deeply bound to her.". "Woven into this turbulent love story is the narrative of Dominique's intellectual life, revealing her complex relationship with art, tradition, and the cultural turmoils of our time. In portraying a character for whom love and idealism are lost, the novel hauntingly reveals the need for pursuing both."--BOOK JACKET.

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Ralph Crane and Lisa Fletcher

"To enter a cave is to venture beyond the realm of the everyday and discover what lies beneath the earth's surface. From huge vaulted caverns to impassable water-filled passages, tiny remote pilgrimage sites to massive tourism enterprises, caves are sites of mystery. Dark spaces that remain largely unexplored, caves are astonishing wonders of nature and habitats for exotic flora and fauna. Cave investigates the natural and cultural history of caves and considers their impact on the human imagination and experience of the natural world. This book explores the long history of human interest with caves, across countries and continents, examining their dual role as spaces of wonder and fear. We encounter the adventurers and 'cave hunters' who pioneered cave science, and the explorers and cave divers still searching for new routes deep into the earth. This book examines the allure of the subterranean world, from caving to cave tourism, and its place in mythology, literature and art. This unique, lavishly illustrated book provides fascinating insight into cave systems and cave lore, the ecology and use of caves, and the extraordinary artistic responses earth's dark recesses have evoked over the centuries."--Page 2 of cover.

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Patrick McGrath

"From the days of their privileged, eccentric English childhood, Jack Rathbone has always enjoyed the adoration of his sister Gin. When both attend St. Martin's School of Art in London, it is a painful wrench for Gin to watch him fall under the spell of Vera Savage, a flamboyant, not entirely clean nor sober artist from Glasgow. Jack and Vera run off to New York and, from a bruised and bereft distance, sister Gin follows the couple's progress to Port Mungo, a seedy river town in the mangrove swamps of the Gulf of Honduras. There, Jack single-mindedly devotes himself to his art, while Vera succumbs to infidelity and a chronic restlessness, which even the birth of two daughters cannot subdue." "Patrick McGrath tracks these individuals across decades and continents: the latter-day Gauguin figure Jack, his buccaneering mate Vera and their two girls, Peg and Anna, cast adrift in their parents' chaos - as observed by Gin, their far from detached chronicler. It is ultimately a world of dark tropical impulses and Manhattan art-market forces, where a mysterious death is swathed in tight complicit secrecy, and the imperatives of narcissism and art hold human beings in outlandish thrall."--BOOK JACKET.