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(More customer reviews)Amy Arbus' fascination with the theater is celebrated in this fine collection of large photographs called 'the fourth wall' - one additional dimension to the life of the actor on the stage portraying characters in a play, yet taking those actors out of context and placing them in the streets in surroundings that carry the fantasy or illusion of theater into the clangor of daily life.
The photographs themselves are carefully staged and well constructed, a trademark for this fine artist who carries her heritage form her mother Diane Arbus to even higher extremes. Both artists are concerned with the theatrics of real life - Diane with the accidents of nature, Amy with the magnification of make believe. The photographs in this collection have been seen in other publications (though some appear here for the first time), but the pleasure in thumbing through the many pages of these well known actors, in costume from particular plays, re-posed in a non-proscenium arch in the theater of life in which we all live, gives the felling of sitting with this book a ticket to the inner lives of actors and the playwrights from whose works these excerpts were transplanted. Each photograph is accompanied by a capsule of the play in question - along with some commentary that adds to the flavor of the monograph.
This is a book that will please collectors of fine art photography as well as devotees of the theater an those curious about the off stage appearances of our finest actors along Broadway. Grady Harp, March 09
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What happens when a performing actor leaves behind his lines, staging, sets, and lighting, and steps beyond the fourth wall? For three years, Amy Arbus has been exploring this question in a series of dramatic portraits of celebrated actors, both on and off Broadway. Fully costumed but stripped of their context, Arbus's actors remain in character as they step outside the fiction of theater into the reality of the world beyond. Staged in anonymous public spaces--in theater lobbies, on city streets, in parks, and in stage door alleys--Arbus's images achieve an unexpected blend of spectacle and high art; formality and sontaneity; vulnerability and pretense. Collected in The Fourth Wall are some of the modern stage's most gifted actors, including Alan Cumming in Cabaret, John Malkovitch in Lost Land, Liev Schreiber in Talk Radio, Ed Harris in Wrecks, Cherry Jones in Doubt, Christine Ebersol in Grey Gardens, and Ethan Hawke and Martha Plimpton in The Coast of Utopia. Actors are included from such successful and ambitioud productions as Wicked, The Light in the Piazza, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and The Color Purple, to name but a few. Portraits are accompanied by synopses of the plays as well as quotes from a number of the actors portrayed. In 2006's critically acclaimed book On the Street, Arbus focused her lens on those who dressed to express themselves--now she turns her attention to those who dress to become someone else. The result is a collection of potent photographs that pay remarkable tribute to contemporary theater and the performers who bring fantasy to life.
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