Men in the Cities: Photographs 1976-1982

Before Robert Longo drew them at mural scale, the contorted figures of Men in the Cities were friends on a Manhattan rooftop, pelted with objects while he shot roll after roll. This book is that source archive, published as photographs in their own right.

Schirmer/Mosel's 2009 volume gathers ninety-four photographs made between 1976 and 1982, the raw material from which Longo built the charcoal and graphite drawings that came to stand for the anxious affluence of the Reagan years. The models were his downtown circle, among them Cindy Sherman, Gretchen Bender, Glenn Branca, Brooke Alexander and Larry Gagosian, roped and toppled on the roof of his loft. Sherman contributes a personal foreword, and the book reprints Richard Price's 1987 interview with the artist, in which Longo traces the series to a still from Fassbinder's The American Soldier. Texts run in English and German.

Longo (b. 1953) came out of the Pictures Generation by way of Hallwalls, the artist-run space he co-founded in Buffalo, and has worked since across drawing, sculpture, film and music. His later charcoal series have taken up sharks, waves, nuclear tests and news photographs at the same punishing scale.