John Waters: Change Of Life

During the past forty years, film director John Waters - once crowned The Pope of Trash by William Burroughs and now hailed as the genius behind Broadway's smash-hit musical Hairspray - has moved from the margins of culture to the mainstream. Ever subversive and happy to raise the issues that polite society works hard to suppress, Waters has helped to liberate us from social restrictions and norms. In that process, he has created hilarious and provocative filmed entertainment. And since he picked up a still camera more than ten years ago, he has reinvented himself as a visual artist.
Scrutinizing videotapes of over-the-top Hollywood movies and forgotten art films that had long obsessed, amused, and fascinated him, Waters started to photograph video stills off his television screen. The moments that he captured became the raw material for artworks that Waters began to call his little movies. In these photographic sequences, Waters continues to skewer cultural symbols and stereotypes, and to elaborate on the cultural and subcultural themes that have been central to all his work: race, sex, sanctimony, glamour, class, family politics, celebrity, religion, the media, and the allure of crime.
John Waters : Change of Life, published on the occasion of Waters's first major exhibition, presents a survey of his still photographic works and stills from his earliest and seldom seen no-budget films: Hag in a Black Leather Jacket, Roman Candles, and Eat Your Makeup. The book also includes images of objects from Water's personal collection that reflect his ongoing fascination with photographic imagery, the mass media, and some of the more outrageous expressions of American popular culture.
Accompanying these artworks, film stills, and quirky images are contributions by cultural and art historians that zero in on Waters's cinematic mind and photographic eye, and on surprising artworks that speak for themselves in more subtle and complex ways than might ever be expected.