Amazon.com
John Waters has been thumbing his nose at Hollywood for more than 30 years, creating movies that are both shocking and hilarious. Now he reveals another obsession, yet another string to his artistic bow. In this collection of photographs, Waters uses his camera to "re-direct" his favorite movies, juxtaposing images to create works that explore, expand upon, and sometimes overturn the intentions of the original directors. In Susan Slade, for example, he distills an early 1960s melodrama into 16 photographs. The resulting images manage somehow to combine kitschy appeal with a degree of emotional impact that transcends that of the film itself. Waters also works with images from his own life and movies--including a sequence filmed in 1966 where Divine plays Jackie Kennedy in a reenactment of JFK's assassination. In another bravura performance, Liz Taylor is transformed through plastic surgery into Waters himself.
Waters admits that his project is to photograph "a favorite movie the way I want to remember it, no matter what the original director had in mind." The result is a collection that documents one man's obsessive and deeply kinky love affair with movies--the kind of love affair in which one partner brings a whip and the other brings a gallon of olive oil and a volleyball team.
Ingram
John Waters, famed underground director of such outrageous, cult classics as Pink Flamingos, Polyester, Hairspray, Cry Baby and Serial Mom, "re-directs" forgotten art films, obscure melodramas, lurid pot-boilers and his own early films in the form of photographic story boards made up of stills. The resulting work is this brilliant twist-off from Waters' absurd, comic view of life, and the images are as funny and delightfully edged as the very best of his films. Waters shakes the fantasies of normalcy into a new, often delicious, taste of Heaven. 165 photos, 150 in color.
