Hardcover with dust jacket. Texts by Cindy Sherman and Richard Price (Contributor).

"The work of the American artist Robert Longo (born 1953) spans a wide range of media: painting, drawing, photography, installation, as well as music and film. Longo first became famous in the 1980s with his series Men in the Cities: larger-than-life black-and-white drawings of men and women in business attire, their bodies contorted and twisting, shaking and turning as if dancing to music—music that, however, is absent. The source and inspiration for Longo’s famous series were photographs of his friends, taken between 1976 and 1982 on New York rooftops. Our book Robert Longo – Men in the Cities brings together these rarely seen images, which, with their intensity and individuality, constitute a stand-alone artistic statement. Schirmer/Mosel is now issuing a new edition of this much-acclaimed photo book, featuring 94 of Robert Longo’s photographs.

With the series Men in the Cities, Robert Longo strove early on to merge and distill the many facets and media of his artistic practice. A still from the Rainer Werner Fassbinder film The American Soldier first gave Longo the visual concept for this body of work. Initially, he used images from magazines, newspapers, or film stills as models. Then he began employing friends—who later became quite famous—such as Cindy Sherman, Gretchen Bender, Larry Gagosian, Brooke Alexander, and Glenn Branca as models. On the roof of his New York loft, he had them dodge objects that were thrown or swung at them, photographing how they writhed, bent, and fell. This yielded allegorical images of neatly dressed businessmen (and women) who, under the impact of an invisible yet apparently violent force, perform a kind of danse macabre of modern life.

Cindy Sherman—herself an internationally renowned artist and a close friend of Longo’s since their student days at Buffalo State College—wrote a personal foreword. Excerpts from an interview conducted in 1987 by writer and screenwriter Richard Price accompany the images." (translation of the German press release of the publisher)

Pages: 128
Place: München
Year: 2009
Publisher: Schirmer / Mosel
Size: 23 x 29 cm (approx.)

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