In 1936, an American ornithologist named James Bond published the definitive taxonomy Birds of the West Indies. Ian Fleming, an active bird-watcher living in Jamaica, appropriated the name for his novel’s lead character. He found it “flat and colourless,” a fitting choice for a character intended to be “anonymous. . . a blunt instrument in the hands of the government.” In Field Guide to Birds of the West Indies, Taryn Simon (1975) casts herself as James Bond (19

The very first day I spent photographing Rome (it was the heat of September 2007), my assistant took me to Testaccio to show me the old slaughterhouse. The area was almost completely abandoned, inhabited by tramps and hungry dogs, and was beginning to succumb to gentrification, but it was not hard to imagine the guts flowing down the drains and the moans and moans of the beasts. The assistant, who was an astute musician as wel

Happiness and melancholy are the extremes within which all the human and artistic adventure of Ettore Sottsass is placed: happiness of having belonged to a lost yet always present Eden, which is childhood, and at the same time melancholy for not being able to relive it, not being able to stop the time. Giuseppe Varchetta, psychologist and photographer, began photographing Ettore Sottsass in 1978, when the designer was already sixty, and followed him until his las

The photography of Walker Evans (1903-75) is introduced in a new, redesigned and expanded edition of Aperture’s classic book from its Masters of Photography series. Evans helped define documentary photography and is considered one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. He captured the American experience from the late 1920s to the early 1970s with graceful articulation. From 1935 to 1937, Evans documented rural America during the Great Depression while working for the Far

The legendary independent London bookstore Better Books on the Charing Cross Road was the hub for Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Alexander Trocchi, John Latham, Jeff Nuttall, Bob Cobbing, Barry Miles, Gustav Metzger and countless others, for their ideas and approaches to art, film, literature and activism. With its unique range of books, offbeat events, poetry readings, film screenings, and happenings, Better Books became the hot spot of London’s 1960s counter-culture scene. Now, mor