Cyclops (Inscribed) [1994]

Cyclops (Inscribed) by Albert Watson [1994]

Near Fine in Fine Dusjacket, with tiny bump on bottom edge.
Boldly Signed 'To Evan, Albert Watson 1994'.
Hardcover in Dustjacket; 192 pages
Bulfinch Press; 1st Edition
3 pounds; 11.5 x 1 x 14.5 inches
9780821221419

Presents a collection of iconic portraits and photographs taken from the twenty-five-year long career of the photographer. Style is substance in Watson's photography--the style of fashion, faux crime, hypersex, and celebrity. There is a slightly jagged edge to his take on the world, but it is an edge safely dulled by a carefully cultivated aestheticism that makes the pictures go down easy. That said, Watson is undeniably a powerful magazine photographer whose darkly beautiful images (reproduced herein by Agfa's new CristalRaser technology) glisten with seductively described surfaces.

His subjects range from travel photos of Marrakesh to celebrity portraits to fashion fiction (in a lengthy "Malcolm X Fashion Story"). Interspersed--and perhaps constituting the book's central thread--are strange object-portraits of Moroccan fetishes and other, more contemporary fetish objects. The crazy quilt of typefaces used for the captions and mercifully short text might be seen as avant-garde, or more cynically as the computer work of a designer with multiple personality disorder--as style as substance, in any case.