Bettina Rheims’ fascinating portraiture of Russian socialite Olga Rodionova is now available for pre-order at a more accessible price than the previously available limited edition. Order it now at Amazon.com

Russian oligarch + fearless spouse + French photographer = SEXY!
Olga Rodionova is a renowned beauty among Moscow’s fashionable jet-set. When her husband, a powerful Russian oligarch, decided to commission her nude photo-portrait, he turned to internationally acclaimed French photographer Bettina Rheims. It was an unusual request for an artist of Rheims’ stature but, inspired by Olga’s charisma, Rheims set up a shoot in her own country house, creating a series of provocative, intimate images that transcend mere pornography. Delighted by the results, Olga’s husband proposed a book project with Olga as its subject. A second shoot followed, with sado-masochistic props and male and female partners playing sex games with Olga. A third, inspired by Marie-Antoinette, took place entirely in the studio. The result is The Book of Olga, a refreshingly bold, modern and fearless celebration of female beauty, fantasy and sensuality. With over 100 images, and an introduction by controversial French author Catherine Millet, this unique book is both a love poem, and a powerful artistic statement. Following its phenomenal success and media coverage, now available in this trade hardcover edition!
About the Author

Publisher: Taschen
Hardcover: 256 pages

Link: Bettina Rheims: The Book of Olga (hardcover edition)

Link: Bettina Rheims: The Book of Olga (Limited Edition)

Howard Huang’s anime-inspired glamour girls

When photographer Howard Huang began shopping his fashion book around New York in 2002 he had no idea he was about to become the master of urban photography. Back then the Taiwanese immigrant thought “urban girls” were just women who lived in the city, explaining, “English is my second language; I was still learning.” Nonetheless, when the editor of Black Men magazine asked if he knew how to shoot sexy women he said, “Sure!” and set about staging the magazine’s voluptuous singers, models and actresses in fantasies inspired by his love of comic books and anime.

His composite photos feature exotic locales, lush interiors, or the neon-washed nighttime streets of Manhattan. His shapely heroines, including singer Jacki-O, actress Vida Guerra and reality TV stars Hoopz, Deelishis and Risky Jones, escape on sleek motorcycles; rob banks with guns drawn and Halliburton cases spilling money; brandish swords like Japanese assassins; conjure fire; hunt big game, and generally kick ass while displaying their own generous posteriors in photos reminiscent of video games. “The trick is to rework an image to enhance my vision, without drawing attention to cheesy Photoshop special effects”, says Huang, who studied under digital effects master Michel Tcherevkoff. The result is a unique marriage of the new pictorialism with classic glamour photography, and a look at the little known niche market of African-American and Latina bikini models, collectively known as Urban Girls.

Publisher: Taschen
Hardcover: 256 pages

available for pre-order: Howard Huang’s Urban Girls

Publisher: Taschen
Hardcover: 372 pages
available for pre-order: Bettina Rheims & Serge Bramly: Rose, C’est Paris

Description:
Bettina Rheims and Serge Bramly’s Rose, c’est Paris is both a photographic monograph and a feature-length film on DVD. This extraordinary work of art, in two different but interlocking and complimentary formats, defies easy categorization. For in this multi-layered opus of poetic symbolism, photographer Bettina Rheims and artist Serge Bramly evoke the City of Light in a completely novel way: this is a Paris of surrealist visions, confused identities, artistic phantoms, unseen manipulation, obsession, fetish, and seething desire.

Equal parts erotica, fashion shoot, art monograph, metaphysical mystery, social and cultural archaeology of the French capital, and neo-noir arthouse film—Rose, c’est Paris is all this and more.
In a surrealistic inversion of the oft-imitated 1954 Parisian photobook by Ed van Elsken, Love On The Left Bank, this mesmerising work is the meandering tale of twin sisters, known only as B and R, and a third principal—the city itself. When R returns to their apartment and learns that B has been abducted following a violent struggle, a dreamlike detective story unfolds in black and white on the streets, in the cafés and cabarets, groceries and museums, usines abondonées, and grands hotels of Paris.

But even this notional plot is submerged under layers of echoes, of references and homages to artists like René Magritte, Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dalí, and Man Ray; to the brilliant amorality of the Fantômas pulp novels of the early 20th century and to various mythical sites and monuments of Paris.
What happened to the missing sister? Was there a plot? Was she really kidnapped? Is she alive or dead? Was it murder? Suicide? Or just a nightmare? Or is she now a punk rocker, a prostitute, a cabaret dancer, or possibly even a nun? Did she marry and flee to India? Does R know more than she claims? Or perhaps B has adopted her sister’s identity—and it is in fact R who has gone missing…
Rheims and Bramly create a series of extraordinary tableaux suggesting all these possibilities and many more. Featuring a host of extraordinary figures, notably Naomi Campbell, Michelle Yeoh, Monica Bellucci, Charlotte Rampling, Valérie Lemercier, Inès Sastre, Anna Mouglalis, Audrey Marnay, Anthony Delon, Rona Hartner, Jean-Pierre Kalfon, Azzedine Alaïa, Louise Bourgoin and Hélèna Noguerra, to family members, fashion models, porn stars and the beautiful people of Paris, Rose, c’est Paris is immediately accessible as a delicious visual treat, a refreshingly original work of erotica, and a celebration of Paris that sidesteps all the usual clichés. And yet the work remains infinitely mysterious in the way it plays with genre and narrative, allusion and expectation. Like the city itself, it can never be fully defined or explained, only experienced again and again.

*Available in a XL-format Collector’s Edition of 1,500 copies, each numbered and signed by Bettina Rheims and Serge Bramly. Also available in two Art Editions of 100 copies each, with a signed and numbered original print.

Publisher: Taschen
Hardcover: 372 pages
available for pre-order: The Big Butt Book
Description:
The Kama Sutra gives detailed instructions on how to spank it. Contemporary Italians touch it for luck before placing a bet. Americans are having it cosmetically enhanced at rates approaching breast enlargement surgery. The female butt, tush, culo, or derrière has always inspired awe, fantasy, and slavish devotion.

Curiously, its primary purpose is functional rather than aesthetic: butts balance our bodies while running, according to biologists. But ask any pygophiliac—as fundament fans are clinically termed—and you’ll get the same answer: female hindquarters exist to please the eye, the hands, and parts south. A pert posterior causes instant arousal, as Zora Neale Hurston observed in Their Eyes Were Watching God: “The men noticed her firm buttocks like she had grape fruits in her hip pockets.” Or, as rapper Sir Mix-a-lot proclaimed, “My anaconda don’t want none, unless you’ve got buns, hun.”

Having all but disappeared from western culture in the breast-obsessed second half of the 20th century, the fully formed fanny is currently enjoying a massive resurgence, attributed by some to American actress Jennifer Lopez, by others to the rise of booty-centric hip hop culture. Yet this rage for shapely butts is nothing new. The ancient Greeks worshipped at the temple of Aphrodite Kallipygos, Goddess of the Beautiful Buttocks, while a womanly rump has always been an object of worship in most of the southern hemisphere.
The Big Butt Book explores this perennial fascination with female booty—from small and taut to large and sumptuous—in the fourth installment of Dian Hanson’s critically acclaimed body parts series. Over 400 photos from 1900 to the present day are contextualized by interviews with porn icon John (Buttman) Stagliano, filmmaker Tinto Brass, artist Robert Crumb, bootylicious butt queens Buffie The Body, Coco and Brazil’s Watermelon Woman, plus Eve Howard and her life-long spanking obsession.

available for pre-order: The Big Butt Book

The second volume of the Frannie Adam’s fascinating Portraits series.

Photographer: Frannie Adams
Hardcover: 96 pages
Description
The first edition of Pussy Portraits quickly achieved cult status. Now we present the second volume of this globally unique bestseller, in which self-confident young women cheerfully and proudly present their vulval worlds. Just as every woman has her own personality, so too does her vulva, and the natural beauty of both await discovery! Texts in German, English & French.

Buy It now from Amazon!

link: Pussy Portraits 2

Link: Pussy Portraits 1
link: www.frannieadams.com

Publisher: Taschen
Paperback: 960 pages
Description:
A graphic exploration of the origin of hardcore

Long, long ago, in the year 1965, there was no explicit pornography. There was the odd grainy stag film, the occasional French postcard, the rare Cuban chapbook or homemade Polaroid, but the glossy professional color pornography ubiquitous to modern society did not exist. The man who changed all that was Berth Milton of Stockholm, with his audacious little digest, Private. He and Private were directly responsible for Swedish Parliament’s decision to treat sexually explicit materials as protected free speech, leading to the abolition of obscenity laws over most of northern Europe. With its smiling, exuberantly uninhibited models, Private created a fantasy of Sweden as the most liberated country on earth, a sexual wonderland that enchanted men around the globe. Publisher Milton was the magazine’s sole photographer, so the Private paradise was very much his personal dream. Genius and tyrant, he insisted on only the best for his magazine, rising in the 1970s to become the Hugh Hefner of Hardcore.

This five volume, 960-page mini-boxed set presents the best of Private from 1970 to 1979. Each 192-page book features seven to 10 of the best photo sets, arranged in chronological order, produced from the original color transparencies. Also included are photos never seen in the magazine, plus behind-the-scenes photos of Milton at work and all of the magazine covers. Vintage art, ads, and editorials complete this fascinating look at the birth of pornography and the infamous Swedish Sin.

available now:
link: The Private Collection Box: 1970-1979