The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection

Nuclear Enchantment: Photographs by Patrick Nagatani with an essay by Eugenia Parry Janis (University of New Mexico Press). Nagatani is a Japanese-American born in Chicago thirteen days after Hiroshima, where he had relatives. In 1987 he was drawn to New Mexico, as the nexus of the birth of the nuclear age. His photographic constructions often juxtapose high-tech and Native-American imagery of the area and his work is drenched with unnatural colors, reminiscent of Sandy Skoaglund’s green radioactive cats. On the cover you’ve got a green sky, nuclear workers in protective gear, and bats flying right at you. Satire, fantasy, horror all mix in this SF apocalyptic art.

H. R. Gigers Necronomicon (Morpheus International) is the first hardcover and first U. S. edition of this oversized art book. It opens with an essay on the fantastique in art by Clive Barker, and continues with commentary by Giger on his childhood and the various real-life influences on his visionary art (much of it inspired by his nightmares and dreams). Photographs of Giger, from childhood to adulthood with his family and friends, sketches and full-page color paintings of projects including those for Jodorowsky’s ill-fated production of the film Dune and album cover art for Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s Brain Salad Surgery. His art is erotic and horrific, as shown by the sets he designed for Alien. As beautiful and creepy as last year’s Biomechanics.

Mary Ellen Mark 25 Years, edited by Marianne Fulton (Bulfinch Press/Little Brown), is a retrospective of her strongest images, including many that are quite justly famous. Included in the book are mostly unpublished photographs of Indian circuses. All the work is black-and-white; Mark was inspired by the black-and-white work of Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Marion Post Wolcott and W. Eugene Smith. She works best in this medium. Many of her photographs have been about people on the fringes of society—inmates of mental institutions (her Ward 81 series), her prostitutes in Falkland Road: Prostitutes of Bombay (which took ten years to obtain financial backing and access to the women), the dying in Calcutta and runaways in Seattle. Powerful photo essays. One hundred thirty tritone illustrations.

Ralph Eugene Meatyard: An American Visionary (Rizzoli) who died in 1972 of cancer, was a photographic contemporary of Minor White and Paul Strand. He moved in a completely different direction from their sharp, “realistic” type of photography. Perhaps because the manipulation of photographic object into phantasms was not then in vogue, his work is rarely mentioned in historical surveys. Meatyard’s best work deals with death and decay; his photographs show children in ghostlike poses, in grotesque masks. His final series, “The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater” taken from 1969-1971 pair Meatyard’s wife, Made-lyn, who appears in each picture, with one of his friends or family members. The two figures are set in informal but staid poses in a suburban setting and each figure wears a mask. Madelyn s mask depicts an old woman with exaggerated, oversized, sad features the Lucybelle Crater of the title (the name is taken from a Flannery O’Connor story). Worth a look.

Twin Palm Publishers-Twelvetrees Press publishes some wonderfully strange art books. A selection of some of the books they’ve published in the last few years:

Sleeping Beauty: A History of Memorial Photography in America by Stanley B. Burns, M.D. Between 1830 and 1940 it was not uncommon for people to have postmortem photographs taken of their loved ones. In many of the photos the dead look as if they’re merely sleeping, in others there’s no effort to disguise blood coming from the nose or mouth, or rashes from whatever disease caused a child’s death. Seventy-six color plates. Dr. Burns is an opthalmic surgeon and photographic historian and archivist. He owns 100,000 vintage prints. Twenty thousand of these are early medical photographs from 1839-1920 and make up the largest collection of its kind in the world. Some of these appear in the 1987 book, Masterpieces of Medical Photography: Selections from the Bums Archive edited by Joel-Peter Witkin. They include tintypes, daguerreotypes and photographs of wounded Civil War veterans. Both an historical document of medicine and an indictment of war. Not pretty.

In the book Gods of Earth and Heaven (also by Joel-Peter Witkin) cadavers, transsexuals and animals are carefully arranged to create a mythology from Witkin’s own mind. Second printing. The out-of-print photography book Joel-Peter Witkin, which I’ve seen selling for $200, may be reprinted soon. (Twin Palms Publishers, 2400 North Lake Avenue, Altadena, CA 91001).

Bernie Wrightson: A Look Back edited by Christopher Zavisa (Underwood-Miller) is a lovingly executed retrospective of the comic book artist who created Swamp Thing. I first saw Wrightson’s work several years ago in a Northampton, Massachusetts, bookstore (coincidentally, the gallery that represents Barry Moser’s work is also in Northampton). It was his 1977 black-and-white illustrated version of the great Mary Shelley novel Frankenstein. I was struck by the fine detail of his drawings. I knew nothing about the artist, but later learned that he was a contemporary artist. Bernie Wrightson: A Look Back showcases, along with Wrightson’s illustrations for Frankenstein (with sketches, copious notes and alternate versions of scenes), his early work, his experiments in style, technique, and medium—in actuality, his evolution as a multifaceted artist. The book is a hefty 360 pages, lavishly illustrated. Highly recommended.