Harmony Korine

Mike Mills

Aaron Rose

Chris Johanson

Alex Baker

Mark Gonzales

Victoria Lynn

Barry McGee

Shepard Fairey

Ryan McGinness

Ed Templeton

Margaret Kilgallen

Alexander Rodchenko

Jorge Macchi

Christian Strike

The greatest cultural accomplishments in history have never been the result of the brainstorms of marketing men, corporate focus groups or any homogenized methods; they have always happened organically. More often than not, these manifestations have been the result of a few like-minded people coming together to create something new and original for no other purpose than a common love of doing it. In the 1990s, a loose-knit group of American artists and creators, many just out of their teens, began their careers in just such a way. Influenced by the popular underground youth subcultures of the day, such as skateboarding, graffiti, street fashion and independent music, artists like Shepard Fairey, Mark Gonzales, Spike Jonze, Margaret Kilgallen, Mike Mills, Barry McGee, Phil Frost, Chris Johanson, Harmony Korine and Ed Templeton began to create art that reflected the lifestyles they led. Many had no formal training and almost no conception of the inner workings of the art world. They learned their crafts through practice, trial and error, and good old-fashioned innovation. Not since the Beat Generation have we seen a group of creative individuals with such a unified aesthetic sense and varied cultural facets. The world of art has been greatly affected by their accomplishments as have the worlds of fashion, music, literature, film, and, ironically, athletics. Beautiful Losers is a retrospective celebration of this spirit, with hundreds of artworks by over two dozen artists, from precursors like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Larry Clark, to more recent adherents Ryan McGinness, KAWS and Geoff McFetridge. Work in all conceivable mediums is included, plus reproductions of reams of ephemera. The accompanying essays are contributed by a half-dozen writers who have championed these beautiful losers from the start. This paperback reprint includes more pages, more images, an exhibition checklist, installation shots from a variety of exhibitions and an interview with Beautiful Losers advocate Agnes B.

Contemporary Art & Street Culture

Beautiful Losers

the shaping and mishaping effects of growing up a specimen in the suburban domestic incubator ...

Deformer

Eleven years in the making and compiling more than 30 years of material, Ed Templeton's scrapbook of his upbringing in suburban Orange County California is a much-anticipated book. Its photographs give a sun-drenched glimpse of what it might be like to be young and alive in the "suburban domestic incubator" of Orange County, conveyed in the idiom of Nan Goldin or Larry Clark (and with a sharp eye for the streets that recalls Garry Winogrand or Eugene Richards). For like his groundbreaking predecessors, Templeton is always a participant in the scenes he shoots. From the Alleged Press series curated by Aaron Rose, Deformerinterweaves disciplinary letters from Templeton's grandfather and religious notes from his mother with sketches, snapshots, telling images and the occasional brutal tale, laying out an unresolved narrative that plunges readers headlong into Templeton's chaotic youth and his reliance on art and skateboarding to accommodate its stresses and joys. "Skateboarding allowed me to travel the world, and that showed me that where I live is totally messed up," he observes. "That perspective has fueled me and been a source for my art." Through photographs, stories and ephemera of all sorts from his youth and teenage years, Templeton offers readers an intensely close and personal look at an artist's coming of age. Deformeris also available in a boxed limited edition which comes with a signed and numbered photograph by Ed Templeton.

The Shaping and Mishaping Effects of Growing Up a Specimen in the Suburban Domestic Incubator (and the Subsequent Paradigm Shift Upon Exit)

Thomas Campbell

Scott Hulet

"Growing up in southern California, artist, photographer and filmmaker Thomas Campbell was raised on the DIY aesthetic of the early 1980s skateboarding culture. Photography tips came from like-minded fellow photographers employed in the skateboarding press rather than from school, and art history was a matter of osmosis, not academia. In the mid-1990s, Campbell moved to New York and immersed himself in the scene around Alleged Gallery, where he quickly befriended and exhibited among the generation of artists who would star in the landmark 2004 exhibition Beautiful Losers. Campbell began documenting surfing culture in the late 1990s through both photography and film. His first feature-length film, The Seedling, came out in 1999, followed by Sprout in 2004 and The Present in 2009. Campbell's surfing photography has long been admired among by fellow surfers for its lack of gloss finish; unlike most, he eschews the familiar fish-eye shots or tightly cropped land angles. The first of ten projected volumes in Um Yeah Press' surf photobook series, Slide Your Brains Out compiles work from the past 15 years. Often lo-fi and gritty, other times lush and saturated, Campbell's compositions--which include portraits and action shots of some of the best surfers in the world--are always surprising and full of emotion, from melancholy to exultation"--Résumé de l'éditeur.

Slide Your Brains Out

Deanna Templeton

"Contemporary Suburbium is a photographic meditation on living in the suburbs of Orange County, California -- specifically, Huntington Beach, a seaside town on the outer extremities of the population surrounding Los Angeles. Once dotted with orange trees, oil drilling and summer cottages for the rich, Huntington Beach is now a popular beach destination for vacationers, and the old cottages are being replaced with tall modern three-story houses. The photographs in this book are a look at the people of this traditionally conservative stronghold, the disaffected youth, the fortunate (and less fortunate), as they venture out from behind fences, walls, and endless blocks of tract housing. Reading like two opposing coming-of-age novellas about the same place, Contemporary Suburbium offers a gritty and sunbaked, yet romantic view of Southern California, and of the twenty-first century in its own adolescence"--Publisher's website.

Contemporary Suburbium

Ed Templeton

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