FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: powerHouse Books is pleased to announce the June 2015 release of Such Mean Estate
Why lies He in such mean estate The films cited in this body of work are about the cataclysmic destruction caused by human interference or negligence. The agents of such destruction vary in form: unstable weather and atmosphere; global poverty; nuclear fallout; and chemical or disease-induced pestilence including, in extreme cases, zombie hordes. Though the tones of such films range from somber and disturbing, to gory, to campy and humorous, they often reach the same conclusion of extreme or total annihilation. These photographs also transform the cinema, which has grand scale and mass-cultural scope, into an object that is personal and intimate. The pictures, a somewhat irreverent homage to these films, are a dissection of entertainment that is fantastic but also functions as a warning and--possibly--a harbinger of things to come.
Ryan Spencer is an artist, producer and photography book editor based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the University of Colorado and received his MFA in photography from Pratt University. His series of Polaroids, Romance & Adventure, which chronicled the history of The World Trade Center in popular film was exhibited at Dust Gallery in Las Vegas, Nevada and featured in NY Arts magazine in 2006. He was recently a producer and technical director for the theatrical presentation American Power, featuring photographer Mitch Epstein and musician Erik Friedlander, which premiered at Les Rencontres d'Arles in 2011 and made its US premier at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 2013. He is also a contributing writer and photographer for BOMB Magazine. Such Mean Estate is Ryan Spencer's first monograph and first publication with powerHouse Books. Leslie Jamison is the author of The Empathy Exams, a New York Times bestselling essay collection, and the novel, The Gin Closet, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Award. Her work has appeared in Harper's, Oxford American, A Public Space, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Believer, and the New York Times, where she is a regular columnist for the Sunday Book Review. She is currently finishing a doctoral dissertation at Yale about addiction narratives. A preview is available by clicking here: Such Mean Estate Film / Fine Art Photography / Disasters High-res scans to your specification are available upon request; scanning from the book or lifting images from the mechanical file are strictly prohibited. Mandatory credit line: From Such Mean Estate by Ryan Spencer, published by powerHouse Books. For more information, please contact: |
