How does photography come to life? How do you transform 2-D into 3-D? Can a photograph move on the printed page? This newest issue of the high-concept fashion quarterly Visionaire pushes the limits of paper with an issue devoted to pop-ups. Visionaire 55: Surprise presents 12 hardcover pop-up books, boxed together, with projects by Steven Meisel, Mario Testino, Steven Klein, Sophie Calle, Andreas Gursky, Cai Guo-Qiang, Guido Mocafico, S0lve Sundsb0, Yayoi Kusama, Gareth Pugh and Alasdair McLellan. Together, the pop-up folios are housed in a cloth-covered case with a magnetized closure and an engraved metal plaque. Surprise is a collaboration with the internationally renowned Champagne house, Krug.
Sophie Calle was born in Paris in 1953. Since the 1980s, her work has been shown at galleries and museums throughout the world, including the Whitney Museum of American Art and The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Tate Modern, London and Paris’s Centre Pompidou, which hosted a major retrospective in 2005. In 2007, Calle represents France at the Venice Biennale. Cai Guo-Qiang was born in Quanzhou, Fujian Province, in 1957. He has lived and worked outside of China since 1986, first in Japan and subsequently, beginning in 1995, in New York City. Cai Guo-Qiang has been appointed Director of Visual and Special Effects, and is a core member of the creative team, for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, which will take place in Herzog & de Meuron’s highly anticipated stadium complex and will be televised to an estimated audience of four billion people, globally. Andreas Gursky was born in 1955 in Leipzig, East Germany, and studied at the prestigious Kunstakademie, Dusseldorf. His first solo gallery show was held at Galerie Johnen & Schottle, Cologne, in 1988. A solo museum exhibition followed the next year, at the Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld. By this time, Gursky was increasing the scale of his photographs, and by the 90s was using the largest photographic paper available; by 2000 he was combining sheets to make images larger still. In the early 1990s Gursky began to use digital technology for retouching and altering negatives, and more recently he has produced work entirely fabricated by computer. Gursky has had recent solo exhibitions at Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, and White Cube, London. A major mid-career retrospective traveled the world in 2001, with U.S. stops at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Steven Klein has collaborated on portraits with Madonna, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Tom Ford, and others that have appeared in magazines such as W, Arena Homme Plus, and Italian, American, and L’Uomo Vogue. By Sophie Calle (Author), Cai Guo-Qiang (Author), Andreas Gursky (Author), Steven Klein (Photographer) www.amazon.com