Cyclops

Published to great fanfare in 1994, the original $75 edition of Cyclops has since become a coveted item in the collector's market. Now this astonishing collection of photographs--which range from Tupac Shakur posing with a pistol to a goat's-foot fetish in Marrakesh--is at last available in a small-edition format. "Albert Watson is surely one of this century's foremost photographers."--Entertainment Weekly. 246 quadratone photos.

Style is substance in Watson's photography--the style of fashion, faux crime, hypersex, and celebrity. There is a slightly jagged edge to his take on the world, but it is an edge safely dulled by a carefully cultivated aestheticism that makes the pictures go down easy. That said, Watson is undeniably a powerful magazine photographer whose darkly beautiful images (reproduced herein by Agfa's new CristalRaser technology) glisten with seductively described surfaces. His subjects range from travel photos of Marrakesh to celebrity portraits to fashion fiction (in a lengthy "Malcolm X Fashion Story"). Interspersed--and perhaps constituting the book's central thread--are strange object-portraits of Moroccan fetishes and other, more contemporary fetish objects. The crazy quilt of typefaces used for the captions and mercifully short text might be seen as avant-garde, or more cynically as the computer work of a designer with multiple personality disorder--as style as substance, in any case. Gretchen Garner