EASTER SALE 25

This is the softcover reissue of Alvin Booth's 2007 book with the same content. The original edition won a red dot award and was nominated for the German Photo Book Award as well as the German Design Award.
This softcover edition features an interesting cover: it has been printed with thermochromatic ink on toned Römerturm cardboard. Touching the cover causes it to decolorize. But don't worry, the design/print will come back.

 

Alvin Booth was born in Hull, an industrial city in the Northeast of England. He left school at the age of seventeen and trained to become a hairdresser. After working in Hull he later moved to Oxford where his interest in photography grew. In 1989 he gave up hairdressing and moved to New York City.

His work is highly valued on the international photography market, and has been exhibited in international museums and is represented by some of the most prestigious galleries in major cities in the United States and Europe. He divides his time between New York and the southwest of France.

Alvin Booths first book of nudes, CORPUS (forward by Charlotte Cotton of the Victoria and Albert Museum) was awarded the Kodak Photo Book press award for 2002.

„Alvin Booth's photographs – and the ways that he works to transforme the naked body into particular forms of photographic imagery – are quite explicitly about the beauty of he sexualised female form," writes photographer Peter Hamilton, one of Booth's closest friends, in a foreword to his new book Osmosis.

Magically ethereal, mysterious nudes are at the gravitational centre of Alvin Booth's image-making. A widely recognized artist represented by a host of European and American galleries, and a master of innovative techniques of shooting and printing, he is completely self-taught."

„(...) Etherealness is really that I wanted to capture in 'Osmosis'; to abstract the figures as much as possible so that the bodies are barely there. I wanted to still keep them looking like figures, but to make them look a bit impossible too, almost not quite human at all, not people. (...)"

(Alvin Booth)
(Barbara Oudiz, EYEMAZING, 01-2007)

„Gliedmaßen, in Stoff gedrückt wie Fossilien in Stein. Latex, der sich wie Haut um nackte Körperteile spannt. Schatten und Silhouetten, flüchtig und dünn wie Giacomettistatuen. Körperbilder, wie mit schwarzer Tusche hingekleckst.

Alvin Booth, 1959 in England geboren und seit 1989 in New York lebend, feiert in seinen Fotografien den menschlichen Körper, aber nicht selten hat man den Eindruck, dass es sich um ein Fest der Gespenster handelt. Oft treten an den stoffüberzogenen Gliedern die Knochen und Knöchel weiß hervor. Bisweilen ist man an Skelette erinnert, die der Sand halb bedeckt.

Als hätte man es mit Daguerreotypien zu tun, erscheinen die Fotografien ganz in weichen Brauntönen. Die Bildoberflächen selbst wirken körnig, die Konturen der darunter eingeschlossenen Körper hingegen sanft und verschwommen. Dieses Pendeln zwischen Nähe und Distanz, Leben und Tod erzeugt die Erotik dieser Fotografie; nicht umsonst sind Themen wie Fetischismus und Bondage ihre Inspiration. Booths Fotoband "Osmosis" zeigt den Körper als unbegreifliches Ding, das in keinem Bild ganz aufgeht und dem schon eine winzige Verschiebung genügt, um ihn fremd erscheinen zu lassen.

(Sebastian Kirsch, Tagesspiegel, 21.01.07)

„Leiber, Licht, Leinwand . Alvin Booth favorisiert sinnliche Andeutungen. In seinem ersten, preisdekorierten Buch „Corpus" widmet er sich dem Spiel mit dem Fetischismus. In „Osmosis" zeigt er den Mensch nun gefangen und geschützt im Kokon eigener Gefühle. Die Phantasie ist ja oft weitaus stärker und trostreicher als das, was es an realem Sex zu genießen gibt. Alvon Booth macht das zu einer zeitlosen These, indem er den Bildern die Anmutung fotohistorischer Techniken gibt. Seine Stilisierungen überhöhen bewusst, denn nichts anderes passiert beim Kino im Kopf auch.

(...) Alvin Booths Arbeiten hängen in diversen Fotosammlungen, darunter der von Elton John. Jetzt hat er in der kleinen, exzentrischen „edition GALERIE VEVAIS" sein zweites Buch für den internationalen Markt herausgegeben."

(DAS MAGAZIN, Dezember 06)

"(...) Alvin Booths gift is alarming in its intimacy because he lets us see what he sees. There is tenderness and a hint of sadness in his photographs of women, seen as though slumbering in a latex cocoon. It is a private vision shared of women's suspended, as though caught after falling from a great height, an impossible, privileged view. Here is the female form in all its bright life, a brightness accentuated by the contrast introduced by splashes of sleep and shadow. (...)"

(John Krakauer)

"(...) Alvin Booth impresses his own secret theatre of the imagination upon what his prints are showing us, the last stage of the process seems to be that he creates in so much of his work the vision of an idealised female form. (...)"

(Peter Hamilton)

 

Presseartikel / Press Reports: Tagesspiegel, Das Magazin, Eyemazing
Seite aus dem red dot communication design yearbook 2007/2008 (International Yearbook Communication Design)
Seite aus dem Katalog Designpreis der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 2009