Photographer Steve McCurry, best known for his iconic National Geographic portrait ‘Afghan Girl’, recently posted twosets of beautiful photographs on his blog of people reading books. Publishing Perspectives spoke to McCurry about the ongoing project:
As a photographer, McCurry is always on the hunt for the “unguarded moment,” that slice of time that reveals something personal and honest. “I have another gallery of people sleeping and of couples interacting. There’s an intimacy people have with a book and its author that is similar,” he says, adding. “We’re all different and we’re all the same. It amuses me that whether you’re fabulously rich and sophisticated or you happen to be someone on the street in the third world or a classroom in some remote area, reading is all the same act. It’s a common link in our shared humanity, a thing we all do that is regardless of where we are economically or socially.”
The first selection of McCurry’s photographs of readers, titled ‘Fusion: The Synergy of Images and Words’, can be seen here. The second set is here.
Hornby Cover Versions — Some rather beautiful student work by Barcelona-based graphic designer Lucía Castro (although my inner-bookseller gets very twitchy at the thought of those soft off-white covers!). (via Cosa Visuales)
Full of Refusals — Tom McCarthy interviewed for More Intelligent Life:
[C]ontemporary literature has to deal with the challenges laid down by modernism. The most exhilarating and unsettling upheavals took place in the early 20th century, and to ignore them and go back to writing some kitsch version of the 19th-century novel is ostrich-like… I’m suspicious of the term ‘avant-garde’. I think it should be restricted to its strict historical designation: Futurists, Dadaists, Surrealists etc. “Tristram Shandy” and “Motherless Brooklyn” aren’t avant-garde novels; they’re novels.
C by Tom McCarthy will finally available in the US and Canada on September 7th.
[P]ublishers are competing against both established players and new entrants at the same time. The newer players often have much lower costs than we’re used to, making them potentially tough competitors… I’ve been thinking lately that publishers need to work more aggressively on creating agile content that can be discovered and easily reused or recombined. Creating content that is sold in one format just won’t be cost-effective in the future.
David McCandless, author of Information is Beautiful / The Visual Miscellaneum (same book different title), explains how simple diagrams can reveal unexpected patterns and connections in complex data sets at TED: http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2010/08/10-reading-revolutions-before-e-books/62004/ Tweet
Jardin de la Connaissance – Berlin-based landscape architect Thilo Folkerts and artist Rodney Latourelle used 40,000 reclaimed books to create a ‘Garden of Knowledge’ for the 11th International Garden Festival in Grand-Métis, Quebec (via Kitsune Noir). A History of Print Culture — Assistant Professor of Media Culture, C.W. Anderson, provides his annotated syllabus for a [...]
Created by Rintala Eggertsson Architects, Ark is a free-standing wooden tower accessed by a spiral case that connects two floors of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The façades of the tower consist of hundreds of shelves, holding thousands of books, which visitors can browse. The books can be read in private chambers within [...]
Photographer Steve McCurry, best known for his iconic National Geographic portrait ‘Afghan Girl’, recently posted two sets of beautiful photographs on his blog of people reading books. Publishing Perspectives spoke to McCurry about the ongoing project:
