Joel Grey’s photography, with it’s characteristic perspective on decaying urban life, has expanded even further in his latest work, The Billboard Papers: Photographs by Joel Grey. Grey takes the constant transformation and changing iconography that bombards New Yorkers daily and exposes it through depictions of the layered exteriors of city billboards. Despite their place in the marketing capital of the world, the unique dynamic created from persistent covering and re-covering of these facade layers has gone unnoticed and undocumented - until now. Coinciding with an exhibition that will be open until October 19th at Steven Kasher Gallery , Pointed Leaf Press has released The Billboard Papers as a limited edition hardcover. It will be Grey’s fourth book of photographs, and his fourth collaboration with acclaimed book designer Sam Shahid, Musée Magazine’s own esteemed Creative Director.
Pictures I Had To Take, Grey’s first monograph, published by powerHouse Books in 2003, showed work created over a 30 year period. His second book, Looking Hard at Unexamined Things, published by Steidl in 2006, featured all new work and highlighted industrial sites, abandoned buildings, graffiti, wall art, detritus and public works from Los Angeles and New York to Berlin and Venice. Grey’s third book, 1.3 – Images from My Phone, published by powerHouse Books in 2010, is a groundbreaking and critically acclaimed collection of mobile phone photography.
Grey’s work has been the subject of solo shows in New York, Los Angeles and Berlin. His photographs are part of the permanent collection of The Whitney Museum of American Art and the New York Public Library. In 2010, Steven Kasher Gallery presented 1.3: New Color Images by Joel Grey, an exhibition of Grey’s mobile phone photography.
