Books by David Wills
Audrey: The 50s
by David Wills
A stunning photographic compilation showcasing Audrey Hepburn’s iconic career in the 1950s—the decade that solidified her place as one of the world’s greatest stars in film and fashion.
Devoted to her most influential decade, Audrey: The 50s brings together in one volume the allure and elegance that made Audrey Hepburn the most iconic figure in modern fashion history. Photographed during the early days of her career, both on the sets of Roman Holiday, Sabrina, Funny Face, and other classic films, and in fashion photo shoots by top photographers who adored and immortalized her, these beautiful black-and-white and color images radiate with Audrey’s waifish charm, ethereal beauty, and effortless style.
Renowned author, curator and photographic preservationist David Wills has carefully selected this collection of two hundred museum-quality photos that capture Audrey in her prime as never before. Audrey: The 50s displays this star at her brightest, and brings her legacy into perfect focus.
Among the highlights: Rare and classic images digitally restored from vintage photographic prints, original studio negatives and transparencies. Never-before-seen publicity photos, scene stills and work shots from the sets of Roman Holiday, Sabrina, Funny Face, Love in the Afternoon, and The Nun’s Story. Previously unpublished "posed candids" of Audrey at home. Beautifully restored advertisements, fan magazine layouts, international film posters and lobby cards. Quotes from photographers, directors, and costars, including William Holden, Gregory Peck, Fred Astaire, Billy Wilder, King Vidor, William Wyler, Edith Head, Hubert de Givenchy, Richard Avedon, Cecil Beaton, and Audrey herself.
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Marilyn: In the Flash
by David Wills
A stunning collection of hundreds of rare and unseen photographs, behind-the-scenes notes, and interviews chronicling the media’s lifelong love affair with Marilyn, created by the acclaimed curator and author of Marilyn Monroe: Metamorphosis.
Though Hollywood goddess Marilyn Monroe was married three times, her longest lasting relationship was with the press—the photographers, reporters, and press agents who followed her every move for nearly two decades, and made her into the greatest icon in Hollywood history. One of the most publicized actresses of her time, Marilyn actively sought out the press, carefully crafting her public image and using events from her private life to further her career. Her romances with baseball legend Joe DiMaggio, playwright Arthur Miller, and others made her a daily feature for newspapers, magazines, and wire services; new images of the star were guaranteed to boost sales.
Drawing on unseen troves from dozens of photographers, archives, and collectors, acclaimed photography expert David Wills brings together an unprecedented array of press photos from throughout Marilyn’s career—including hundreds of unpublished and rare photographs that have been beautifully restored; uncropped and unretouched outtakes; handwritten notations; period captions; clippings; and more. With a foreword by Robert J. Wagner and interviews from key press agents and others, this portfolio of images offers a fresh, indelible portrait of one of the most enduring icons in history and illuminates the special alliance she shared with the press as never before.
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Hollywood Beach Beauties: Sea Sirens, Sun Goddesses, and Summer Style 1930-1970
by David Wills
A glamorous and nostalgic celebration of the summer through stunning retro photographs of Hollywood beauties
The author of the acclaimed photo compilations Vegas Gold, Hollywood in Kodachrome, Marilyn Monroe: Metamorphosis, and Audrey: The 60s, now presents a glamorous and nostalgic celebration of summer at the beach, captured in 150 stunning vintage photographs featuring beloved female celebrities, models, and starlets from the 1930s through the 1970s.
Renowned independent curator and photographic preservationist David Wills commemorates the allure and joy of the sun, the sand, the ocean, and the fashions of endless summer with this sizzling collection. Hollywood Beach Beauties includes more than one-hundred vibrant color images of some of Hollywood’s most timeless stars lounging and playing at one of the most iconic settings: the beach.
Hollywood Beach Beauties highlights the sexy, carefree attitude of the summer, the elegant seaside couture, and the enchanting and alluring beauty of the female form. Included here are candid and stylish photographs featuring stars of yesterday such as Elizabeth Taylor, Rita Hayworth, Audrey Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe, Brigitte Bardot, Sharon Tate, Raquel Welch, Sophia Loren, Dorothy Dandridge, and Nancy Sinatra.
A treasure trove for classic movie mavens, vintage photography enthusiasts, and pop culture aficionados, this stunning theme-driven compendium taps into nostalgia for the joys of summer and captures the dazzling beauty of the seaside and some of the most stylish stars of the big screen in a fresh, unique, and captivating way.
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Audrey: The 60s.
by David Wills
The 1960s was a decade that Hollywood actress and international fashion icon Audrey Hepburn defined with her gamine, elegant style. Audrey: The 60s is a landmark photographic chronicle of her film and fashion career during those tumultuous years. Regarded as one of the most beautiful and best-dressed women in the world, Audrey Hepburn had timeless appeal—and this breathtaking photographic collection compiled by David Wills, author of Marilyn Monroe: Metamorphosis, captures this legendary star at the height of her career—from Breakfast at Tiffany’s to the Vogue fashion shoots with world-class photographers that captured her unique, trendsetting style.
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$40.00
Marilyn Monroe: Metamorphosis
by David Wills
At your fingertips is the most lavish and comprehensivecollection of Marilyn Monroe photographs ever assembled—more than half of whichhave never been published before. Norma Jeane Baker’stransformation into one of the most emulated and iconic Hollywood stars is anepic American story—one that careens from a troubled childhood into the brightnational spotlight before descending into an irrevocable depression. In thisstunning, one-of-a-kind volume, David Wills offers a captivating photographicjourney through Monroe’s meteoric rise and tragic downfall. Featuring thehighest-quality images of Marilyn available anywhere in the world, from candids to film stills to modeling headshots, the images inMarilyn Monroe: Metamorphosis will reawaken casual fans and collectorsalike to Marilyn Monroe at her living best.
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Dorsality: Thinking Back through Technology and Politics (Volume 5) (Posthumanities)
by David Wills
In this highly original book David Wills rethinks not only our nature before all technology but also what we understand to be technology. Rather than considering the human being as something natural that then develops technology, Wills argues, we should instead imagine an originary imbrication of nature and machine that begins with a dorsal turn-a turn that takes place behind our back, outside our field of vision.
With subtle and insightful readings, Wills pursues this sense of what lies behind our idea of the human by rescuing Heidegger’s thinking from a reductionist dismissal of technology, examining different angles on Lévinas’s face-to-face relation, and tracing a politics of friendship and sexuality in Derrida and Sade. He also analyzes versions of exile in Joyce’s rewriting of Homer and Broch’s rewriting of Virgil and discusses how Freud and Rimbaud exemplify the rhetoric of soil and blood that underlies every attempt to draw lines between nations and discriminate between peoples. In closing, Wills demonstrates the political force of rhetoric in a sophisticated analysis of Nietzsche’s oft-quoted declaration that “God is dead.”
Forward motion, Wills ultimately reveals, is an ideology through which we have favored the front-what can be seen-over the aspects of the human and technology that lie behind the back and in the spine-what can be sensed otherwise-and shows that this preference has had profound environmental, political, sexual, and ethical consequences.
David Wills is professor of French and English at the University of Albany (SUNY). He is the author of Prosthesis and Matchbook: Essays in Deconstruction as well as the translator of works by Jacques Derrida, including The Gift of Death.
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Killing Times: The Temporal Technology of the Death Penalty
by David Wills
Killing Times begins with the deceptively simple observation―made by Jacques Derrida in his seminars on the topic―that the death penalty mechanically interrupts mortal time by preempting the typical mortal experience of not knowing at what precise moment we will die. Through a broader examination of what constitutes mortal temporality, David Wills proposes that the so-called machinery of death summoned by the death penalty works by exploiting, or perverting, the machinery of time that is already attached to human existence. Time, Wills argues, functions for us in general as a prosthetic technology, but the application of the death penalty represents a new level of prosthetic intervention into what constitutes the human.
Killing Times traces the logic of the death penalty across a range of sites. Starting with the legal cases whereby American courts have struggled to articulate what methods of execution constitute “cruel and unusual punishment,” Wills goes on to show the ways that technologies of death have themselves evolved in conjunction with ideas of cruelty and instantaneity, from the development of the guillotine and the trap door for hanging, through the firing squad and the electric chair, through today’s controversies surrounding lethal injection. Responding to the legal system’s repeated recourse to storytelling―prosecutors’ and politicians’ endless recounting of the horrors of crimes―Wills gives a careful eye to the narrative, even fictive spaces that surround crime and punishment.
Many of the controversies surrounding capital punishment, Wills argues, revolve around the complex temporality of the death penalty: how its instant works in conjunction with forms of suspension, or extension of time; how its seeming correlation between egregious crime and painless execution is complicated by a number of different discourses.
By pinpointing the temporal technology that marks the death penalty, Wills is able to show capital punishment’s expansive reach, tracing the ways it has come to govern not only executions within the judicial system, but also the opposed but linked categories of the suicide bombing and drone warfare. In discussing the temporal technology of death, Wills elaborates the workings both of the terrorist who produces a simultaneity of crime and “punishment” that bypasses judicial process, and of the security state, in whose remote-control killings the time-space coordinates of “justice” are compressed and at the same time disappear into the black hole of secrecy.
Grounded in a deep ethical and political commitment to death penalty abolition, Wills’s engaging and powerfully argued book pushes the question of capital punishment beyond the confines of legal argument to show how the technology of capital punishment defines and appropriates the instant of death and reconfigures the whole of human mortality.
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Hollywood in Kodachrome
by David Wills, Stephen Schmidt
Hollywood in Kodachrome is a stunning portfolio of the stars of Hollywood's Golden Age, captured in rich, deeply saturated color photographs reproduced from original Kodachrome negatives and curated by collector David Wills and designer Stephen Schmidt, the creative team behind Marilyn Monroe: Metamorphosis and Audrey: The 60s.
From Elizabeth Taylor, Ava Gardner, and Rita Hayworth to Fred Astaire, Humphrey Bogart, and Gregory Peck—and many more—the silver screen’s elite are all here, in the full blush of youth, captured as if they were taken yesterday. But the true star is the medium itself: late-1940s sheet Kodachrome, a film stock that remains legendary for its rich tonal range, precise color, and detail.
Including a foreword by Golden Age star Rhonda Fleming, and featuring more than 200 photos from classic films and publicity shoots, Hollywood in Kodachrome is a magnificent tribute to Hollywood’s most beloved icons, captured at their glamorous best.
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Seventies Glamour
by David Wills
Glamour and grotesquerie; disco and punk; high fashion and low-life passion: the most conflicted and controversial decade in pop culture history blazes back to life in a gloriously decadent collection of images from the runway and the silver screen, the concert stage and the nightclub dance floor.
The 1970s was an era when the glitter of old Hollywood was eclipsed by a gritty new sensibility—a time when legends like Elizabeth Taylor and Liza Minnelli mixed with rising stars from the worlds of punk rock, underground film, fashion, and art. Cutting the deck of glamour with a heady dose of hedonism, sex and violence, the stars of the Seventies—including David Bowie, Debbie Harry, Candy Darling and Sid Vicious—rejected stage-managed images in favor of experiment and self-determination.
In Seventies Glamour, the acclaimed Hollywood photo historian David Wills (Marilyn Monroe: Metamorphosis; Audrey: The 60s) showcases the freewheeling, explosive parade that was the 1970s, highlighting its aesthetic of liberation, sexual freedom and defiant indulgence. Gorgeously reproduced, wittily curated, the photos in Seventies Glamour are as diverse as the decade they celebrate. From Halston posing with his "Halstonettes" and Divine making the scene at Xenon, to Elton John in his plumed excess, and Diane von Fürstenberg wrapped around the Empire State Building, all the exuberance is captured by the superstar photographers of the decade, including Francesco Scavullo, Helmut Newton, Chris von Wangenheim, Michael Childers, Antonio Lopez, Norman Parkinson, Rebecca Blake, Gian Paolo Barbieri, Terence Donovan, Jack Mitchell, Ara Gallant, Anton Perich, Lynn Goldsmith, Brian Aris, Harry Langdon and many more.
A full-length gallery as exotic and dazzling as the decade itself, Seventies Glamour illuminates a time when defying expectations became the quintessence of style.
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Inanimation: Theories of Inorganic Life (Volume 35) (Posthumanities)
by David Wills
Inanimation is the third book by author David Wills to analyze the technology of the human. In Prosthesis, Wills traced our human attachment to external objects back to a necessity within the body itself. In Dorsality, he explored how technology is understood to function behind or before the human. Inanimation proceeds by taking literally the idea of inanimate or inorganic forms of life. Starting from a seemingly naïve question about what it means to say texts “live on” or have a “life of their own,” Inanimation develops a new theory of the inanimate.
Inanimation offers a fresh account of what life is and the ethical and political consequences that follow from this conception. Inspired by Walter Benjamin’s observation that “the idea of life and afterlife in works of art should be regarded with an entirely unmetaphorical objectivity,” the book challenges the coherence and limitations of “what lives,” arguing that there is no clear opposition between a live animate and dead inanimate. Wills identifies three major forms of inorganic life: autobiography, translation, and resonance. Informed by Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze, he explores these forms through wide-ranging case studies. He brings his panoptic vision to bear on thinkers (Descartes, Freud, Derrida, Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, Jean-Luc Nancy, Roland Barthes), writers and poets (Hélène Cixous, Paul Celan, William Carlos Williams, Ernst Jünger, James Joyce, Georges Bataille), and visual artists (Jean-François Millet, Jean-Luc Godard, Paul Klee). With panache and gusto, Wills discovers life-forms well beyond textual remainders and translations, in such disparate “places” as the act of thinking, the death drive, poetic blank space, recorded bird songs, the technology of warfare, and the heart stopped by love.
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Matchbook: Essays in Deconstruction (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics)
by David Wills
Matchbook consists of nine essays written around, or in response to, work published by Jacques Derrida since 1980. The focal point of the essays is the "Envois," which forms part of Derrida's Post Card. Particular attention is paid to how that text articulates with the ethical and political emphases of Derrida's more recent work, but also to its autobiographical conceit.
The "incendiary" reference of the book's title underscores deconstruction's engagement with questions of reading: relations between (slow) reading and the speed of technology, and the political effects of an internationalized deconstruction in a globalized culture. It is in terms of what deconstruction can have us think about the speed of technology and technologies of reading that Derrida's work has made one of its most important contributions to philosophy and literary and cultural studies. The book concentrates on that as proof of the continued relevance of such work.
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Counterpath
by David Wills, Jacques Derrida, Catherine Malabou
Counterpath is a collaborative work by Catherine Malabou and Jacques Derrida that answers to the gamble inherent in the idea of "travelling with" the philosopher of deconstruction. Malabou's readerly text of quotations and commentary demonstrates how Derrida's work, while appearing to be anything but a travelogue, is nevertheless replete with references to geographical and topographical locations, and functions as a kind of counter-Odyssey through meaning, theorizing, and thematizing notions of arrival, drifting, derivation, and catastrophe. In fact, by going straight to the heart of the Derridean idea of "spacing," she finally makes it seem as though Derrida has never written about anything but travel.
Malabou's text is punctuated by a series of postcards received by Derrida from destinations such as Istanbul and Porto, Laguna Beach and Athens, which are inspired by his reading of her evolving discussion. Writing in a familiar and unguarded manner, as if he were "on vacation" from his own writing, Derrida still remains totally faithful to that work and invites the reader to reflect on much of what haunts his texts as well as his daily life, questions of distance and death, the relation to the other, and exile..
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Vegas Gold: The Entertainment Capital of the World 1950-1980
by David Wills
An evocative, glamorous look at the golden years of Las Vegas, captured in more than 125 lush color and black-and-white photographs.
"I love that town. No clocks. No locks. No restrictions."—Marlene Dietrich
The playground in the desert built by the mob and transformed by Howard Hughes, the "fabulous, extraordinary madhouse," that is Las Vegas, Nevada, has long been regarded as the Entertainment Capital of the World. During the post-war boom years, no place was as fascinating as Vegas. Distinguished by millions of colorful neon lights, the sounds of rhumba music, and the clink of silver dollars, Vegas was a recreational colony for Hollywood’s most glamorous and a dream destination for thousands of ordinary Americans.
Vegas Gold vividly showcases the glitz, glamour, and charm of Sin City’s golden years, from the 1950s to the 1980s. An adoring ode to this ultimate adult playground, it celebrates the best of old Las Vegas—the Sands Hotel, the Stardust, Fremont Street, the Golden Nugget, the Riviera Hotel, the Desert Inn, and the Horseshoe—and its legendary headliners, including Frank Sinatra, Marlene Dietrich, Elvis Presley, Liberace, Ann-Margret, Sammy Davis Jr., Eartha Kitt, Noel Coward, and of course, the gorgeous Vegas showgirls. Framed by quotes and short essays that profile the marquee names that made Las Vegas the ultimate destination, the legendary years of this magical city live on in all their glory in Vegas Gold.
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