A sumptuous and revelatory collection of 20th-century iconography.
A set of portraits from an artist who helped to define an era of celebrity.
Photographer Edie Baskin’s distinctive hand-tinted images helped to set the aesthetically adventurous tone of the cultural juggernaut Saturday Night Live from the program’s first episode in 1975. She would go on to photograph the show’s hosts and musical guests for the next 25 years (the images would typically appear as “bumpers” between ad breaks), and her instantly recognizable shots of Steve Martin (perhaps her signature muse) or Elliott Gould or Sissy Spacek deliver memory-evoking kicks. Baskin’s images for SNL may bring Andy Warhol’s celebrity Polaroid snapshots to mind, but their effects are markedly different. While Warhol’s often harsh, cold, and flat portraits distance the viewer from the subjects, Baskin’s vibrant enhancements (she used a variety of techniques to add pigment to her black-and-white shots) reveal quirky, human qualities—the viewer leans in, their relationship with the subject deepened. The brilliant and tragic Richard Pryor, for example, pictured wearing a psychedelic pink sweater, vibrates against a stark black background, his eyes full of the pain of the world. Some of Baskin’s pieces suggest well-known paintings: The photographer grants Shelley Duvall’s elongated features the languorous elegance of a Modigliani odalisque; a delicate image of Jodie Foster with straw-colored hair and sky-blue eyes seems plucked from an Andrew Wyeth canvas. At the other end of the spectrum, Rodney Dangerfield pulses with the inhuman energy and anarchic hilarity of a Warner Bros. cartoon. The cumulative effect of the collection is one of piercing nostalgia for a vanished era of show business that now seems impossibly human-scaled. Baskin’s subjects, as ecstatically celebrated here, were not like the machine-tooled, media-trained, TikTok-ready stars of the moment; they could be lumpy, awkward, weird, unpolished, real. The miracle of Baskin’s technique was that her alterations to the objective documentary “truth” of her photographs only made the work feel more authentic, more revealing of the subjects’ essential natures—a captivating magic trick that works again and again.
A sumptuous and revelatory collection of 20th-century iconography.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781788843430
Page Count: 216
Publisher: ACC Art Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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