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Taylor-Wood, Sam (Artist/Photographer); Taylor-Johnson, Sam & Visser, Hripsime (Contributor) : The Passion Cycle

BAWAG Foundation, Vienna, Austria, 2003

First Edition / First Printing. As New in No Dust Jacket, As Issued. Unpaginated. Exhibition Catalog, presented as an Artist Book. One of the most beautiful erotic art photography books of our time. The first and only edition. Published in a small and limited print run as a hardcover original only. There is no ISBN. The Catalog is now rare. A brilliant production by Sam Taylor-Wood and FUEL: Oversize-volume format. Red cloth boards with black titles embossed on the cover and spine, as issued. Photographs by Sam Taylor-Wood. Afterword by Hripsime Visser. Printed on pristine-white, thick uncoated stock paper in Vienna, Austria to the highest standards. Without DJ, as issued. Published on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name held at the BAWAG Foundation Vienna from September 19 through November 30, 2003. Presents Sam Taylor-Wood's "The Passion Cycle". A feverish sequence of a couple having sex. The images are presented as postcard-size "souvenirs". Arranged in a non-linear, anti-narrative order, Sam Taylor-Wood makes us view the images randomly rather than sequentially, in keeping with the "collecting" aspect of the project. Now, the one thing about sex, whether routine or extreme, is that it always happens in a narrative-like, beginning/middle/end sequence: Pre-coitus, coitus, post-coitus. And while every photographic image is discrete, photography books make some kind of narrative possible, that is, a sequence that yields a storyline (as in the work of Robert Frank or Nan Goldin). Artist/photographer/film-maker Sam Taylor-Wood's approach in "The Passion Cycle" is about photography's fundamentally opposite possibility: The photograph as a sensory experience, as a performance, and as a cycle that comes full circle (rather than a linear story that has a beginning, middle, and end). After all, people still look at photographs randomly, going from this image and that. "Inspired by shunga, which depicts sexuality in a frank and unvarnished manner, the small format of the images refers to the voyeuristic relation that the collector has with shunga prints, comparable to that of the late 19th-century European collector of erotic photographs" (Hripsime Visser). The point of collecting is the same as looking at photographs: One does it in no particular order. Sam Taylor-Wood (she has remarried and now goes by Sam Taylor-Johnson) has explored her fascination with sex further, this time for a huge global audience: She directed the film adaptation of "Fifty Shades of Grey" (2015), for which she hand-picked Jamie Dornan, an impeccable choice, in his breakthrough role as the eponymous hero. An absolute "must-have" title for Sam Taylor-Wood collectors. This title is an erotic photography classic. As far as we know, this is the only copy of the Exhibition Catalog/Artist Book available online and is in especially fine condition: Clean, crisp, and bright, a pristine beauty. A rare copy thus. 25 color plates. One of the most brilliant artist/photographers of our time. A fine collectible copy. (SEE ALSO OTHER SAM TAYLOR-WOOD TITLE IN OUR CATALOG).

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