Published on the occasion of the first Italian anthological exhibition dedicated to her, the volume retraces the successful work of Lisette Model, an artist of Austrian origin who had great importance in the development of photography in the Fifties and Sixties. Parallel to her teaching activity - she had among her students authors who later became famous such as Diane Arbus and Larry Fink - Lisette Model was an ironic and irreverent photographer, able to capture in her shots the most grotesque aspects of post-war American society. Alongside the most famous series - such as Promenade des Anglais, created in Nice, or the photographs dedicated to New Yorkers or the very suggestive ones made in jazz clubs - the book also includes lesser-known projects, which account for her personal and sardonic photographic language. The close-up shots, the recurring use of the flash, the exasperated contrasts are the expedients that the author resorts to in order to accentuate the imperfections of the bodies and the coarse gestures of her subjects, transformed into the characters of a sneering human comedy: an approach to reality that made Lisette Model the forerunner of a way of using photography that would find full realisation only in the following decades. Text in English and Italian.

The first extensive monograph dedicated to the work of Paolo Ventura (Milan, 1968). Ventura has established himself in the field of artistic photography, offering a singular and absolutely original interpretation of staged photography, an art form in which photography is the final product of a creative process which, in his case, involves the preparation of scenarios and mannequins: the latter, together with real characters among which the artist himself often appears, are the protagonists of his stories. In these three-dimensional settings Ventura recreates, and then fixes through photography, a mental space that refers to the atmosphere of “magical realism� and to the fairytale flavour of childhood, generating a deliberately surreal contrast with the depth of some topics involved (such as war, abandonment, memory, identity). The volume offers an overall look at the artist’s 15 years of activity, showcasing 21 series from 2005 to the present time, highlighting the evolution of his language which, in addition to photography, is also expressed through drawings. The monograph includes critical texts by Walter Guadagnini and Francine Prose, an interview with Ventura by Monica Poggi and biographical notes. Text in English and Italian.