For the first time, iconic fetish photographer G. Elliott Simpson is showing his works in a monograph. This book features cutting-edge fetish photography showcasing rubber and latex, aesthetically appealing and skillfully made. The Toronto-based photographer manages to approach the topic in a tasteful way, allowing viewers from the outside to explore an unknown world of lust and desire.

TEXTURES synthesises research in history, fashion, art, and visual culture to reassess the "hair story" of peoples of African descent. A fraught topic for African-Americans and others in the Diaspora, artists, barbers, and activists address the topic of Black hair,both the historical perceptions and its ramifications for self and society today. TEXTURES explores the breadth of Black artists' perspectives on hair vis-a-vis beauty, pride, and politics. Barbers and activists address Black hair, from historical perceptions to its challenges today. Combs, products, and implements from the collection of hair pioneer Willie Morrow are paired with masterworks from artists like David Hammons, Sonya Clark, Lorna Simpson, Mickalene Thomas, and Alison Saar. The exhibition & catalogue are inspired by Drs. Ellington and Underwood who research preferential treatment of straight hair, the social hierarchies of skin, and the power and politics of display.

How can we pack so much big booty into such a tiny and inexpensive package? Sorry, but it's a trade secret we can't divulge, except to say that shoehorns and spandex were involved. The original Big Butt Book featured a great cross section of delectable rears from the 1950s to the present day. Here, since life is such an ironic deal, we decided to pare the original content down to just the biggest and the best, in-your-face phatties to which the great Sir Mix-a-Lot alluded when penning, "My anaconda don't want none, unless you've got buns, hun." Then we added in about 30 new photos, just to be generous. Now in these 150 plus photos you'll see the big and the bountiful, then the bigger and more bountiful, in black and white and in color. The models may be largely anonymous, but their curves are legendary, and now that they're collected in a discrete little package affordable by all in these financially trying times, why hold back? Your badonkadonk is calling.

Prometheus was punished by the supreme god Zeus for giving to mankind the Olympic fire with which they learned to think and feel. He was chained to a cliff in the Caucasus, where, to make matters worse, he was visited daily by an eagle who ate part of his liver. At night, however, his liver grew back. We now know that the liver can regenerate, but were the ancient Greeks aware of this quality? The myth of Prometheus has been a source of inspiration for many visual artists over the centuries. In this book, the medical history of the liver is traced through the ages through an examination of historical texts on the organ's functions and properties, parallel to the art movements in which the fascinating iconography of Prometheus is reviewed. The book offers a surprising interplay of art and medicine, placing emphasis on the unique morphology of the liver.

This book analyzes the evolving interaction between court and media from an understudied perspective. Eight case studies focus on different European Empress consorts and Queen regnants from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, using a comparative, cross-media, and cross-period approach. The volume addresses a multitude of questions, ranging from how dynastic women achieved public prominence through their portraits; how their faces and bodies were moulded and rearticulated to fit varying expectations in the courtly public sphere; and the degree to which they, as female actors, engaged with or had agency within the processes of production and reception. In particular, two types of female rulership and their relationship to diverse media are contrasted, and lesser-known and under-researched dynastic women are spotlighted. Contributors: Christine Engelke, Anna Fabiankowitsch, Inga Lena Angstroem Grandien, Titia Hensel, Andrea Mayr, Alison McQueen, Marion Romberg, and Alison Rowley.

When we think Tom of Finland we first picture muscular, macho young men in military gear. Tom's vision of masculine perfection was formed during his service as an officer during World War II. Though he served in the Finnish air force, it was the German troops, stationed in Finland to help the country repel invading Russian forces, which served as inspiration. After all, only the Germans had uniforms created by Hugo Boss, tightly tailored, replete with designer touches, and complimented by high, shiny black leather boots. Tom, at 19, was smitten, an obsession that deepened following his first sexual experiences with German officers in the blackout streets of Helsinki. Tom began putting his military fantasies on paper in 1945 to memorialize his thrilling nighttime encounters when the war ended. At first the Hugo Boss uniforms dominated, but as the years and then decades passed he included American naval uniforms as well, and then his own hybridized designs of black leather, jodhpurs, boots, and peaked caps, with military insignia replaced by Tom's Men patches. As Tom attracted an army of loyal fans, he created, with pencil, pen and gouache, an army of free, proud, masculine fantasy men committed to pleasure and male camaraderie. The Little Book of Tom: Military Men explores Tom's fascination with militaria through a mixture of multi-panel comics and single-panel drawings and paintings, all in a compact and affordable 192 pages. Historic film stills and posters, personal photos of Tom, sketches, and Tom's own reference images explore the cultural context and private inspirations behind the ultimate Tom of Finland hero.

This book analyzes the philosophical origins of dualism in portraiture in Western culture during the Classical period, through to contemporary modes of portraiture. Dualism - the separation of mind from body - plays a central part in portraiture, given that it supplies the fundamental framework for portraiture's determining problem and justification: the visual construction of the subjectivity of the sitter, which is invariably accounted for as ineffable entity or spirit, that the artist magically captures. Every artist that has engaged with portraiture has had to deal with these issues and, therefore, with the question of being and identity.

Taking inspiration from artists of the Renaissance to Rococo periods, contemporary artist Arabella Proffer has re-imagined the mannerist portrait with a pop surrealist twist. After researching fashion history, heraldry, and peerage protocol, she went on to create her own world parallel to that of old world Europe. Concocting a family legacy -- ancestors that could belong to anyone it has become an impulse and a passion the artist continues to explore, adding characters and stories to her ever-growing private empire of punks, goths, and nobility behaving badly. Included are over 40 portraits created between 2000 and 2011, their stories, family trees, map and more, as well as a foreword by Josh Geiser of Creep Machine and Paper Devil.

The SuicideGirls are a collection of more than 2,500 pin-up girls devoted to changing your idea about what makes a woman beautiful ... and they are naked. Started in Portland, Oregon, by Missy Suicide and her friends in 2001, the SuicideGirls broke conventional notions of beauty and the pin-up girl ideal as defined by men's and women's magazines and the culture at large. This time around "SuicideGirls isn't redefining what it means to be beautiful or what it means to be a geek. They're celebrating the fact they've] always been here, they've] always been geeks, and they've] always been beautiful." "SuicideGirls: Geekology" casts the spotlight on the self-proclaimed geeks of the SuicideGirls population the video-game players, the comic-book readers, the Trekkies, and many other shining examples of the culture they're celebrating. There's something really wonderful about this book. There's something beautiful around the idea of showcasing girl geeks in all their glory: to go beyond the photos and find out that, to us, each piece of the picture means something. To find out how many hours we put into designing our cosplay and how attentive we are to the homages we create. We're not just playing dress up in a world we know nothing about. We were right there with it, helping to build popularity from the ground up: first in line, issue number one. Once a subculture of a subculture, women are now a full force in the geek community."

At last, the third and final phase of this sumptuous feast of female passions is ready for its up close and very personal premiere The stunning artwork of Stefano Mazzotti has made this series the stand-out in sapphic desire and stunning detail With a running commentary by Silvio Andrei, this third book sets girl on girl on GIRL Whoa That's a 33% increase in girlage

Creating Professional Characters: Develop Spectacular Designs from Basic Concepts is an inspiring and informative exploration of how popular professional character designers take the basic concept of a character in a production brief and develop these ideas into an original, high-quality design. Suitable for student and professional character designers alike, this book focuses on how to approach your character designs in ways that ensure the target audience and production needs are met while still creating fun, imaginative characters. This visually appealing book includes twenty thorough tutorials guiding you through the design and decision making processes used to create awesome characters. Replicating the processes used in professional practice today, this book demonstrates the types of brief a professional designer might receive, the iterative design process used to explore the brief, the influence of production feedback on the final design, and how final designs are presented to clients. This detailed, enlightening book is an excellent guide to creating incredible imaginative characters suitable for your future professional projects.

Fleshing out surfaces is the first English-language book on skin and flesh tones in art. It considers flesh and skin in art theory, image making and medical discourse in seventeenth to nineteenth-century France. Describing a gradual shift between the early modern and the modern period, it argues that what artists made when imitating human nakedness was not always the same. Initially understood in terms of the body's substance, of flesh tones and body colour, it became increasingly a matter of skin, skin colour and surfaces. Each chapter is dedicated to a different notion of skin and its colour, from flesh tones via a membrane imbued with nervous energy to hermetic borderline. Looking in particular at works by Fragonard, David, Girodet, Benoist and Ingres, the focus is on portraits, as facial skin is a special arena for testing painterly skills and a site where the body and the image become equally expressive. -- .

What did it mean for painter Lee Krasner to be an artist and a woman if, in the culture of 1950s New York, to be an artist was to be Jackson Pollock and to be a woman was to be Marilyn Monroe? With this question, Griselda Pollock begins a transdisciplinary journey across the gendered aesthetics and the politics of difference in New York abstract, gestural painting. Revisiting recent exhibitions of Abstract Expressionism that either marginalised the artist-women in the movement or focused solely on the excluded women, as well as exhibitions of women in abstraction, Pollock reveals how theories of embodiment, the gesture, hysteria and subjectivity can deepen our understanding of this moment in the history of painting co-created by women and men. Providing close readings of key paintings by Lee Krasner and re-thinking her own historic examination of images of Jackson Pollock and Helen Frankenthaler at work, Pollock builds a cultural bridge between the New York artist-women and their other, Marilyn Monroe, a creative actor whose physically anguished but sexually appropriated star body is presented as pathos formula of life energy. Monroe emerges as a haunting presence within this moment of New York modernism, eroding the policed boundaries between high and popular culture and explaining what we gain by re-thinking art with the richness of feminist thought. -- .

Artist, writer, musician, film-maker, "Star Wars" mega-fan - Matt Busch goes by many titles. "The Detroit Real Press" called him, 'The Rock Star of Illustration', and given his legion of genuine rockers who dig his work, that's a pretty good description of this multi-talented artist. Much beloved for his "Star Wars" paintings and comic work, this particular collection of full colour illustrations focus on another great love of Matt's life - portraits of pretty girls in various states of undress! Get to see the hotter side of Busch's amazing work, including the artist's personal favourites (paintings and the models who pose for him!). Also a nice little step-by-step feature shows Matt's process for all you would-be artists-in-training!

This title was first published in 2000: In their stunning simplicity, George Romney's portraits of eighteenth-century gentry and their children are among the most widely recognised creations of his age. A rival to Reynolds and Gainsborough, Romney was born in 1734 on the edge of the Lake District, the landscape of which never ceased to influence his eye for composition and colour. He moved in 1762 to London where there was an insatiable market for portraits of the landed gentry to fill the elegant picture galleries of their country houses. Romney's sitters included William Beckford and Emma Hart, later Lady Hamilton. An influential figure, one of the founding fathers of neo-classicism and a harbinger of romanticism, Romney yearned to develop his talents as a history painter. Countless drawings bear witness to ambitious projects on elemental themes which were rarely executed on canvas. Richly illustrated, this is the first biography of Romney to explore the full diversity of his oeuvre. David A. Cross portays a complex personality, prone to melancholy, who held himself aloof from London's Establishment and from the Royal Academy, of which Sir Joshua Reynolds was President, and chose instead to find his friends among that city's radical intelligentsia.

Powerful, supple, and sensual - these are words best used to describe the art of TC Cor - an illustrator with an expert eye for the way flesh glistens and muscle ripples on the female form. His newest "bodies" of work have been assembled in this meticulous collection, and is a magnificent gallery of pencil and airbrush illustrations.

Both an exploration of the ways in which we fashion our public identity and a manual of modern sociability, this lively and readable book explores the techniques we use to present ourselves to the world: body language, tone of voice, manners, demeanor, "personality" and personal style. Drawing on historical commentators from Castiglione to Machiavelli, and from Marcel Mauss to Roland Barthes, Joanne Finkelstein also looks to popular visual culture, including Hollywood film and makeover TV, to show how it provides blueprints for the successful construction of "persona." Finkelstein's interest here is not in the veracity of the self - recently dissected by critical theory - but rather in the ways in which we style this "self," in the enduring appeal of the "new you" and in our fascination with deception, fraudulent personalities and impostors. She also discusses the role of fashion and of status symbols and how advertising sells these to us in our never ending quest for social mobility.

A vibrant survey of visual culture in Golden Age Denmark (1801-1864) Following the disastrous outcome of the Napoleonic Wars and national bankruptcy, Denmark affected a remarkable cultural renaissance, spawning such major talents as Hans Christian Andersen, Soren Kierkegaard and Hans Christian Orsted. The Golden Age, roughly spanning the first half of the nineteenth century, produced defining images of a peaceful and ordered society as the emerging Copenhagen bourgeoisie asserted a taste for portraits, urban scenes and landscapes that embraced their lifestyles. Artists such as Christen Kobke and C. W. Eckersberg turned their attentions to the people, traditions and customs of their land, encapsulating the quintessence of this celebrated period of cultural richness. Danish Golden Age Painting examines the vital role played by the visual arts within the wider context of the era's social, political, intellectual, scientific, artistic and cultural achievements. Drawing on the best of established and contemporary Danish scholarship, it presents an innovative survey of Danish Golden Age art.