Happy birthday, Edward Weston

Seminal photographer Edward Weston was born 125 years ago today. Later this year, to celebrate the anniversary, AMMO Books will release a new set of his photographs. They shared a preview of its packaging, above, with Jacket Copy.

Weston was born in Chicago in 1886 -- on March 24 -- and received a camera for his 16th birthday. He followed his elder sister to California in 1906 and settled in Tropico, now part of Glendale. He married Flora Chandler, a cousin of the L.A. Times Chandlers, in 1909; she had some money, and they had four children. Weston opened a portrait studio and built his reputation as a photographer, gaining attention in national magazines. He would have a series of photographic assistants/muses/mistresses, eventually divorcing Flora in 1937.

In the early 1920s, Weston opened a studio in Mexico City where he worked with his assistant and lover Tina Modotti, photographing many significant portraits and nudes. In Mexico, he was hailed by artists Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros, and Jose Orozco as a major figure.

Weston moved back to California in 1926, when he began his photographs of natural forms -- shells, peppers, cabbages -- in grand closeups. In 1937 he was the first photographer ever to be awarded a Geggenheim Fellowship for the arts.

About a decade later, Parkinson's disease stopped Weston from taking photographs, but he continued to supervise the printing and circulation of his work, which was done by his sons. He died in 1958 at the age of 71. More about his work can be found at this website, begun by Weston's son Cole, also a photographer, and now maintained by his grandchildren.

Full disclosure: the designers working with AMMO, Third Thing Design, are friends of mine. I've been hearing about this book for a while, but this is the first I've seen of it.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo credit: AMMO Books.

16 Elizabeth Taylor books, scandals included

Elizabeth Taylor, who died early Wednesday at age 79 in Los Angeles, had never really bothered to write a full-life autobiography. Maybe that's because the public life of the Oscar-winning actress was, for a few decades, so large that there was no need to retell it. The seven marriages, two to Richard Burton. The very public lifting of singer Eddie Fisher from his wife, Debbie Reynolds -- a telling photo of the three of them together is after the jump.

If memoir is lacking, photos are everywhere. She was so famous and so beautiful that it's not hard to find picture books dedicated to her. And it seems like every photo book that includes the words "glamour" or "Hollywood" includes at least one photo of Liz. Similarly, the name-droppy Hollywood books also always mention her, and more than one notes that she hated being called Liz.

Taylor was the author of record of three books (one source says four, although I can't find the fourth). Two may well have had ghostwriters; the last one was acknowledged to be ghostwritten by Jane Scovell. All three make our list of 16 books about Elizabeth Taylor, the big picture.

1. "Nibbles and Me" by Elizabeth Taylor (1946). The young actress on her adventures with her pet chipmunk.

2. "Elizabeth Taylor" by Elizabeth Taylor (1964). An informal, authorized memoir. Don't expect dish.

3. "Elizabeth Taylor: The Last Star" by Kitty Kelley (1981). The notorious biographer took on Taylor for her second big book and wound up with a lifelong enemy. Afterward, Taylor repeated called Kelley a liar -- so while this book dishes the dirt, it may be more shiny rumor than documented fact.

4.  "Richard Burton: A Life" by Melvyn Bragg (1989). The biography of Burton includes passages from his diaries about  Taylor. "My God, she's a beauty. Sometimes even now, after eight years of marriage, I look at her when she's asleep at the first light of a gray dawn and wonder at her," he wrote. And later, "Our quarrels sounded like the quarrels one hears from the next room in a cheap hotel by two middle-aged people 20 years married and bored witless by each other."

5. "Elizabeth" by Alexander Walker (1991). The British film critic makes connections between Taylor's films and her life, and is particularly good in his examination of her early career.

6. "A Passion for Life: The Biography of Elizabeth Taylor" by Donald Spoto (1995). Reviewed as "at once scathing and sympathetic," Spoto's biography, grounded in her film career and Hollywood research, blames a showbiz mom for Taylor's self-destructive tendencies.

7. "Liz: An Intimate Biography of Elizabeth Taylor" by C. David Heymann (1995). Based on thousands of interviews, this unauthorized bio makes a less respectable, more candid companion to Spoto's.

William T. Vollmann and Susan Meiselas talk photography

Robert Capa Gold Medal-winning and MacArthur "genius" fellow photographer Susan Meiselas and National Book Award-winning author William T. Vollmann sat down at the Hammer Museum on Tuesday night for an open, onstage conversation. It was the first time the two had met in person. The only communication they'd had before -- Vollmann doesn't use e-mail -- was a six-minute phone conversation in advance of the event, during which they'd talked about what they wouldn't talk about.

Not surprisingly, at times it was awkward.

But that awkwardness was entirely fitting, revealing an actual thinking-in-the-moment. It was a geniune and fascinating conversation, with occasional halts for considerations, rather than a prepared talk.

To get things started, they each showed 10 of their photographs. Vollmann went first because the other way around would be "anti-climactic" he said. "She's a great photographer, and I'm a writer who likes to take pictures."

Vollmann explained his motivation for taking photos of fighters and others he encountered in Afghanistan: "Everybody deserves to be made immortal in some way."

Meiselas wasn't so sure. "This question of how it serves them plagues me," she said. Meiselas was a photojournalist who went to Nicaragua in 1978, taking pictures of its revolutionaries, who often felt compelled to conceal their faces from her for safety. She showed images of people crossing the border from Mexico into the United states on foot -- people who also would not want to be identified.

"I'm so fascinated by what it means for a writer to make pictures," Meiselas said. She later went back to this idea. "My photographs are hoping you'll be in that scene -- I'm trying to link you into that narrative space." As a kind of response, Vollman spoke about his presence as a witness. Fittingly, in his photos, his own shadow often fell partially on his subject, literally inserting him into the frame.

How being witness can affect events is something the two discussed without reaching resolution."I'm always hoping I can do some kind of good," Vollmann said. But "good" is a complicated path.

Meiselas showed photographs she'd taken of mass graves in Kurdistan, photographs she called "evidential" (as opposed to "narrative"). Those photographs, which helped bring the story of the Kurds' suffering to light, were taken in advance of the latest Iraq war, which both Meiselas and Vollmann said they opposed. "The complicated thing for me," Meiselas said, "all my Kurdish friends were pro-war. They wanted exactly what they got."

In the audience: a revolutionary and an Oscar-winner.

Tonight: Architect Tadao Ando at the Hammer Museum

Architect Tadao Ando is the only person to have won the four most prestigious prizes in his field -- the Pritzker, the Carlsberg, the  Praemium Imperiale and the Kyoto. His U.S. works include the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; foodies may have noticed his design of Morimoto Restaurant in the Chelsea area of Manhattan.

Taschen is publishing a whalloping  new compedium of his work, "Ando's Complete Works to Date 1975-2010," which Ando will sign from 6:30 to 7 tonight at the Hammer Museum in Westwood, before his lecture at 7 p.m. The famed Japanese architect will also appear at the Taschen store in Beverly Hills for a book signing on Wednesday from 7 to 8 p.m.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Tadao Ando in 2006. Credit: Ricardo DeAratanha /Los Angeles Times

Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis

Meet Benedikt Taschen

 
The Wall Street Journal visits with visionary publisher Benedikt Taschen in his John Lautner-designed house in the hills of Hollywood. Most books, Taschen tells the paper, "are disposable from the beginning." Not his.

Mr. Taschen started out selling comic books when he was in his teens, with his first store called Taschen Comics. Then there was a chance encounter in 1984 with 40,000 remainder copies of a book on Magritte; he bought them for a pittance, sold them for double and began his career publishing his own books with the money made. Today, the company publishes about 100 titles per year.

Mr. Taschen admits he puts too much love and attention into his creations to ever go into the orbit of mass publishing, adding that he wants to make collectibles, not disposables.

One of Taschen's five retail stores, packed wall-to-wall with his signature art and photography books, is in Beverly Hills. In 2010, the recent Taschen publication "Los Angeles: Portrait of a City" won the Southern California Independent Booksellers Award for art and architecture book. Read the complete article about Benedikt Taschen here.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Publisher Benedikt Taschen, right, with Hugh Hefner at Hefner's 2009 book signing. Credit: Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times

 

Photographer Autumn de Wilde signs Death Cab for Cutie book

Photographer Autumn de Wilde will be signing copies of her Death Cab for Cutie photo book, called, appropriately, "Death Cab for Cutie," on Thursday night at Silverlake's Intelligentsia coffeshop.

The book includes more than 200 photos of the band, reminiscences and ephemera. '"It's really important to document these artists long-term," De Wilde told Spin in November, when the book was released. "Certain parts of these artists go away forever if you don't capture them in photos."

De Wilde will be signing "Death Cab for Cutie" (the book, not the band) from 8 to 10 p.m. at Intelligentsia, and Skylight Books will be on site with copies for sale.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Death Cab for Cutie in 2005. Credit: Autumn de Wilde

Taschen and Muhammad Ali: Round 2

 

 
Fifty years ago, Muhammad Ali (a.k.a. "The Louisville Lip") began his transformation into the Greatest of All Time, winning the light-heavyweight boxing gold medal at the Summer Olympics in Rome. On Oct. 29, 1960, Ali (then known as Cassius Clay) won his first professional bout, against Tunney Hunsaker, beating  the West Virginia police chief in a six-round decision. It's hard to find a date that's not significant in Ali's history; Wednesday, for example, marks 33 years since his win over Earnie Shavers in New York City, the last bout in which he retained the heavyweight title. 

To celebrate 50 years of the life and career of the boxing great, Taschen has published an updated and scaled-down version of its 2003 behemoth tribute to the Champ with an affordable trade edition selling for $150. See a photo gallery of images from Taschen's "Greatest of All Time."

The original "Greatest" was four years in the making when it debuted seven years ago, weighing in at a hefty 75 pounds and measuring 20 inches by 20 inches. The nearly 800 pages featured 3,000 photographs by 150 photographers and artists including Steve Schapiro, Andy Warhol and David LaChapelle.

 "The Champs" edition was limited to 1,000 copies and came with four gallery-quality silver-gelatin prints signed by photographer Howard L. Bingham and Muhammad Ali. It also included two inflatable sculptures by Jeff Koons.  The price tag: $15,000. A collector's edition is also available without all the swag for $4,500. Both editions came in a silk-covered box illustrated with Neil Leifer's legendary 1966 photo, "Ali vs. Williams," an overhead shot in the Houston Astrodome of the Champ and his flattened opponent, Cleveland "Big Cat" Williams -- a picture that later earned for Leifer the title "Greatest Sporting Image of All Time."

Leifer's other well-known photo, of the 1965 Ali-Liston fight, graces the cover of the trade edition. The shot of Ali towering over a floored Sonny Liston was the center of a recent episode of the 1960s AMC drama "Mad Men."

"This shot is on the cover of every newspaper in the country," said Don Draper as he borrowed the image for a Samsonite ad campaign and reminded a new generation of the effect of that photo and moment in history.

The trade edition of "Greatest of All Time" is part of Taschen's Golden Books collection, marking its 30th anniversary in publishing.  Although this edition may have dropped a few weight classes to a lightweight 16 pounds, it contains the same images, essays and interviews that still define and honor Ali's life.

-- Liesl Bradner

See a photo gallery of images from Taschen's "Greatest of All Time."

Images, from top: "Greatest of All Time" cover, Golden Book edition, 2010. Ali versus Liston II, 1965. Copyright: Neil Leifer, "Greatest of All Time"/Taschen. And a rare poster from the Clay-Liston fight that was postponed for six months due to Ali's hospitalization after suffering from an acute hernia. Copyright: Taschen Archive, "Greatest of All Time"/Taschen