Graham Thomson

In Albino, photojournalist Ana Palacios takes us inside a shelter for people with albinism and reveals what daily life is like for those living with the genetic condition in Tanzania. As Palacios documents, widespread ignorance of the causes of albinism has fed stigmatization, marginalization, persecution, and prejudice within the country. In addition to the social and physical threats that those with albinism face from other Tanzanians, they must also confront the strong possibility of skin cancer a disease for which effective treatment options can be found in the West, but which in Africa tends to reduce life expectancy for those with albinism to under thirty years. Bearing witness to the efforts of a group of Spanish aid workers to promote health and education in Tanzania, Albino highlights their work on programs to improve patient treatment and training for local doctors. In these subtle, complex, and ultimately optimistic images, Palacios shows the moments of struggle, but also joy, that mark the lives of the residents of the shelter.

Juan José Lahuerta’s Columns of Smoke series offers bold new readings of modernity and its key figures while redefining the connections between architecture, ornamentation, and the portrayal of both in print media. The third volume focuses on the Spanish architect Antoni Gaudí (1852–1926), whose spectacular fin-de-siècle bohemian modernism stood in revolutionary contrast to the leading approaches of the day. With the rise of Le Corbusier’s modern style of architecture in the early twentieth century, architects who favored ornamentation and a strong bond with nature, like Gaudí, were relegated to the sidelines. Lahuerta draws on first-hand documents, many previously unpublished, to show that Gaudí, far from being the isolated eccentric seen in other accounts, was keenly aware of the major theories and works of his time and cleverly used industrial processes to produce ornamental details that appear today to be almost handmade. Equally impressive was Gaudí’s ability to capitalize on his fame once in the public eye, as both the architect and his buildings appeared in illustrations in the popular press. His influence on avant-garde artists like Salvador Dalí, who admired the edible appearance of Gaudí’s Casa Milà in Barcelona, and Pablo Picasso, who was fascinated by the eroticism of the Casa Batlló, attests to the architect’s impact far beyond his field. Richly illustrated with rare images from a variety of sources, this highly visual take on Gaudí is also a spirited commentary on the roots of modernism more generally. Entertaining and perceptive, Antoni Gaudí challenges us to reconsider what we thought we knew about this pioneering architect and his distinctive work.

In his Columns of Smoke series, Juan Jose Lahuerta takes on the enormously ambitious task of re-reading modernity, offering us fresh ways of looking at it while drawing new links between the ideas of architecture and ornamentation, with a special focus on how they have been treated in print. While the first volume of Columns of Smoke considered epoch-making architect Adolf Loos's relationship with photography, here Lahuerta turns to the Classical strand in Loos's architecture and to his written work-and specifically his engagement with architectural and artistic theory. Lahuerta pays particular attention to Loos's seminal "Ornament and Crime," the essay that established disornamentation as the signal feature of twentieth-century architecture. Through close analysis of that essay he unearths the racially charged, pseudoscientific ideas from early anthropology that underpin Loos's thinking. Sure to be controversial, this new reading of Loos's landmark writings calls the whole disornamentation project into question, and in the process, it reveals a radically new perspective on a major turn in modern design and culture.