The Coffee Table

Comments (0) Wednesday, Dec 8 1999

GO-SEES: Girls Knocking on My Door | By JUERGEN TELLER | Scalo | 480 pages | $50 hardcover

Madeleine, Natalia, Shona, Miele, Collette, Emma, Helen, Celine, Anna, Corrie, Alissa, Teresa, Goya, Phoebe. These are some of the young women who came from all over to see the London-based German photographer Juergen Teller. Some were already models, most simply wanted to be, and when they knocked on the door of his studio, he photographed them right then and there — in the doorway, or on the sidewalk. There’s a year’s worth of girls here, and besides the obvious interest — the pretty and not-so-pretty and occasionally very pretty faces — the 470 color plates form a sort of über-image of our times: youth obsession, self-obsession, obsession obsession. What surprises is just how fascinatingly uninteresting it all is. "Get a life, girl!" one wants to shout. "Go to school!" Still, there are some light moments: Is it any wonder that someone named Denise Boomkens is so beautifully endowed? Or that Erica Stormquist looks like so much trouble? And why is Lori Fredrickson bending over like that? For all its seeming repetition, this is a book that, like that other German picture show, Run Lola Run, takes you places.

—Tom Christie

WOMEN| Photographs by ANNIE LEIBOVITZ, essay by SUSAN SONTAG | Random House | 247 pages | $75 hardcover

A collection of celebrity portraits by Annie Leibovitz was the first book of photography I owned, back in the early ’80s. The same grand-performance quality I loved then made me approach her new book with caution. What I found, however, was a thoughtful, lovingly constructed book with 117 compelling images of women, some young and sleek, some weathered, some accomplished, some not. Backed by a Susan Sontag essay, the book explores the representation of women, how they are looked at, how they are encouraged to look. Since Leibovitz began her relationship with Vanity Fair, she has created an expansive body of work, shifting effortlessly from one shooting style to another. The exciting thing here is that Women comes without a gimmick; the work feels more personal, more dignified, and immensely respectful of her subjects.

—Kathleen Clark

Two books on the work of two prominent Los Angeles architecture firms that couldn’t be more different — the firms as well as the books. Morphosis, which grew up alongside Sci-Arc, where two of its principals were instructors, is the vastly hipper of the two. The book makes a nice objet, but after flipping through its 800 digital illustrations, one wishes for old-fashioned photographs of the actual buildings. (Like a singer who performs his standards only as an encore, the designers do include a few photos at the back.) Morphosis principal Thom Mayne begins his essay, "When architects write about their work — and they probably shouldn’t . . ." He should have held that thought, but instead continues unabated (and unedited) and with extensive footnotes. Also included is a time line of Morphosis projects and world events, such as the demolition of the Berlin Wall and the release of each Peter Greenaway film. Enough said?

Far more interesting, surprisingly, is You Are Here, Frances Anderton’s look at Jon Jerde, the man who gave us the themed mall: CityWalk in Universal City, the Bellagio in Vegas, Horton Plaza in San Diego, the Mall of America in Minnesota, and several international projects, most notably, Canal City Hakata in Fukuoka, Japan. If these projects lack the cutting-edge visual intrigue Morphosis offers in spades, it’s no surprise: Says Jerde, "Our stuff isn’t supposed to be visual. It’s supposed to be visceral." If nothing else, it is that, and Anderton (a producer of KCRW’s Which Way, L.A.? and an occasional writer for the Weekly) and the other essayists bring it — and its cultural contexts — alive in a readable, thoughtful and thought-provoking manner. Given our status as "a consumerist republic," as Klein has it, You Are Here may be one of the most important books published this year, like it or not.

—Tom Christie

EDWARD STEICHEN: The Early Years | By JOEL SMITH | Princeton University Press in association with the Metropolitan Museum of Art 168 pages | $60 hardcover

Fifty-seven beautifully printed, large plates reproducing prints from the photographer’s precocious 20s and the century’s first decade — before he went on to perfect celebrity portraiture for Condé-Nast — convey marvelously the subtle tonalities and layered depths of the "fluid-saturated, chalk-scraped, intensively handled" originals (as Joel Smith describes them in his jargonless introduction). Rooted in Whistler and Monet but modern in energy and effect, these pictures — of racetrack crowds, woodland scenes, naked women or famous men — have the loamy richness of charcoal drawings: Forms emerge out of a dark ground in smears of light, or (as in his crepuscular studies of the Flatiron Building) barely emerge at all. Though soft-edged and scant of detail, they possess an immediacy, mystery and force not often found in the crystalline images of our prosaically hi-res, full-color present day.

—Robert Lloyd