Japanese Cinema: A Personal Journey

Peter Cowie’s Japanese Cinema: A Personal Journey profiles some of Japan’s greatest directors and features concise reviews of their key films. Cowie has previously written a more substantial book on Akira Kurosawa, which divided Kurosawa’s films into modern and historical narratives (the traditional Japanese distinction between gendai-geki and jidai-geki), though in Japanese Cinema he focuses almost entirely on Kurosawa’s samurai films.

The book is a short primer on the major figures in Japanese film, and includes chapters on Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi, Hayao Miyazaki, and others. It’s dedicated to the late Donald Richie, who wrote influential studies of Kurosawa (The Films of Akira Kurosawa) and Japanese cinema history (A Hundred Years of Japanese Film). Cowie writes a chapter on the Japanese new wave, though David Desser’s book Eros Plus Massacre is a more comprehensive account.

Cowie has written and published dozens of books on cinema, from an early monograph on Orson Welles (A Ribbon of Dreams) to a recent biography of Ingmar Bergman (God and the Devil). His books on the making of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now are indispensable; his second Godfather book was published fifteen years after the first, and he also wrote a book on another 1970s classic, Annie Hall.

6th October 1976

On 6th October 1976, forty-six people, most of whom were students, were killed in a military massacre at Thammasat University in Bangkok. The bodies of the victims were desecrated by baying mobs, and the incident remains one of the most shocking moments in Thailand’s modern history.

The Thammasat students had been protesting against the return from exile of Thanom Kittikachorn, the coup leader who had fled into exile in 1973. The circumstances surrounding Thanom’s arrival back in Thailand in September 1976 remain unclear: was his return orchestrated by the military to provoke a demonstration and justify another coup? (Thanom had previously returned in December 1974, against the wishes of the prime minister. On that occasion, 10,000 Thammasat students protested against him, and he left the country again two days later.)

On 25th September 1976, two anti-Thanom activists (Choomporn Thummai and Vichai Kasripongsa) were hanged by the police, and on 4th October 1976 a group of Thammasat students staged a reenactment of the hanging. One of the students who posed as a victim, Apinan Buahapakdee, coincidentally bore a passing resemblance to Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn (who is now King Rama X).

On its front page on 6th October 1976, the nationalist Dao Siam (ดาวสยาม) newspaper printed Apinan’s photograph and accused the students of hanging the Prince in effigy. Again, the circumstances are unclear, and there are rumours that the photo was retouched to accentuate the royal resemblance.

Militia groups (the Village Scouts, Nawaphon, and Red Gaurs) joined the police and army in storming the Thammasat campus, and a coup took place later that day. I have collected various items related to 6th October, including cassettes, records, CDs, DVDs, videotapes, books, magazines, and newspapers.

14th October 1973

The events of 14th October 1973 led to the collapse of a dictatorship, followed by three years of democratic government in Thailand. The roots of the revolution can be traced back six months earlier, when a helicopter crashed in the Thung Yai wildlife sanctuary. The crash caused a national scandal, as the helicopter was part of an illegal poaching expedition organised by senior military figures.

Students from Ramkhanhaeng University published a dossier about the controversy, บันทึกลับจากทุ่งใหญ่ (‘secret notes on Thung Yai’). They were suspended from their courses, triggering protests at Democracy Monument calling for their reinstatement. Student activism increased, developing into a wider campaign against the military government led by Thanom Kittikachorn.

By 11th October 1973, around 50,000 protesters demonstrated at Thammasat University. Two days later, they marched to Democracy Monument, and the number of demonstrators swelled to 500,000. On 14th October 1973, the military opened fire on the students — killing seventy-seven people — and there were rumours that Thanom’s son Narong shot protesters from a military helicopter.

To appease the protesters, the government agreed to begin drafting a new constitution, and protest leader Seksan Prasertkul sought assurances from King Rama IX that this promise would be kept. Just as in May 1992, Bhumibol’s actions resolved the conflict: Thanom, Narong, and Praphas Charusathien (known as the three tyrants) fled in to exile, and a civilian prime minister was appointed. (Three years later, Thanom returned, and a violent coup took place on 6th October 1976.)

I have collected various items related to 14th October, including cassettes, records, CDs, videotapes, VCDs, books, magazines, and newspapers. (The event is known in Thai as วันมหาวิปโยค, or ‘the day of great sorrow’.)

‘Black May’ 1992

Army commander Suchinda Kraprayoon led a coup in 1991, and his junta installed Anand Panyarachun as a civilian prime minister. But after an election in 1992, Suchinda replaced Anand as PM, leading to anti-military demonstrations in Bangkok.

Chamlong Srimuang led a crowd of more than 200,000 protesters at Sanam Luang on 17th May 1992. The following morning, the army fired live rounds into the crowd, and Chamlong was arrested. The protest spread to Democracy Monument on Ratchadamnoen Avenue, and the nearby Royal Hotel became a field hospital for the injured.

After two more days of clashes — and fifty-two deaths — King Rama IX held a televised meeting with Chamlong and Suchinda, after which Suchinda resigned as prime minister. This was Bhumibol’s most direct public intervention in politics, and footage of the two men kneeling in front of him created the impression that royal authority superseded political leadership.

I have collected various items related to the events of ‘Black May’, including cassettes, videotapes, books, magazines, and newspapers published during the protest. (Black May is known in Thai as พฤษภาทมิฬ, or ‘savage May’.)

Lucky Loser:How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success

US President Donald Trump has filed a defamation lawsuit against the publisher and authors of Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success. The book, by New York Times reporters Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig, was published last year. Buettner and Craig won the Pulitzer Prize for their investigations into Trump’s finances, and the book is an expanded account of their findings.

Trump’s lawsuit, filed on 15th September at the US District Court in Florida, describes Lucky Loser as “filled with repugnant distortions and fabrications about President Trump”. He is seeking an extraordinary $15 billion in damages, though the case will almost certainly be dismissed, as the book is a work of meticulous investigative journalism. (The lawsuit specifies multiple passages that contain allegedly defamatory statements, on pp. 5–8, 69, 148, 159, 166, 184, 219, 270, 290, 300–301, 313, 352–354, 360, 366, 398, 444–445, and 448–449.)

(The lawsuit also cites three New York Times articles — one of which is an extract from the book — as defamatory. The articles were published online and in print, in the weeks leading up to last year’s US election, though the lawsuit refers only to the online versions.)

Today, a judge dismissed the lawsuit, though he gave Trump’s legal team four weeks to submit a revised version. In a brief written order, judge Steven D. Merryday described the lawsuit as “decidedly improper and impermissible.” He argued that its focus on recounting Trump’s electoral success and business career was immaterial to the legal case, noting that it contained “abundant, florid, and enervating detail.” He stipulated that any resubmitted version must be under forty pages long, as opposed to the rambling eighty-five-page original suit.

This is only the second time that Trump has personally taken legal action against a publisher during his presidency. The first occasion was earlier this year, when he sued The Wall Street Journal, claiming that a letter he wrote to Jeffrey Epstein didn’t exist. Since the WSJ lawsuit was filed, the letter has been published, and Trump continues to deny that he wrote it, even though it’s clearly signed by him.

Trump has sued numerous other media figures and news organisations over the years, including Bill Maher and CNN. He sued Bob Woodward for copyright infringement, though that case was dismissed. His lawsuit against E. Jean Carroll was also dismissed. His unsuccessful lawsuit against Timothy L. O’Brien’s book TrumpNation sought $5 billion in damages.

Trump has never won a libel case in court, though he has received settlements in two cases. ABC settled after he sued them last year. CBS also agreed to an out-of-court settlement earlier this year after he sued them in 2024.

Occasionally, Trump has filed defamation suits indirectly via his organisations or relatives. His brother sued their niece, Mary Trump, in 2020, though the case was dismissed. A suit filed against the NYT by his presidential campaign also failed. His wife won undisclosed damages from The Daily Telegraph in 2019, and she was awarded $3 million in damages from the Daily Mail in 2017.

Lucky Loser is the twenty-second Trump tome on the Dateline Bangkok bookshelf. The others are: TrumpNation, War, The Divider, Betrayal, Confidence Man, Fire and Fury, Too Much and Never Enough, Fear, Rage, Peril, I Alone Can Fix It, A Very Stable Genius, Inside Trump’s White House, The United States of Trump, Trump’s Enemies, The Trump White House, The Room Where It Happened, Team of Five, American Carnage, The Cost, and the audiobook The Trump Tapes.

ความฝันของชายผู้กลายเป็นดาวฤกษ์ (‘the dream of a man who became a star’)

Today is the nineteenth anniversary of the 2006 coup, and Napat Treepalawisetkun’s new fantasy novel ความฝันของชายผู้กลายเป็นดาวฤกษ์ (‘the dream of a man who became a star’) explores the impact of that event on Thai society. In the book, ‘impact’ is taken literally, as a giant meteorite strikes the country in September 2006. The celestial object is a metaphor for the disruptive effects of the coup, though the book is also one of several recent novels that refer to the 1976 massacre at Thammast University.

The book will be released next month, a day before the anniversary of the Thammasat incident. Napat previously directed the film We Will Forget It Again (แล้วเราจะลืมมันอีกครั้ง), which addressed another tragic political milestone: the killing of protesters at Ratchaprasong in 2010. In Napat’s short drama, a victim of the crackdown returns as a ghost, a trickle of blood running down her face, to be reunited with her surviving daughters.

Manga: A New History of Japanese Comics

Frederik L. Schodt’s book Manga! Manga! first introduced Japanese manga comics to Western readers more than thirty years ago, and since then there have been several coffee-table books on the subject. But Eike Exner’s Manga: A New History of Japanese Comics, published this month, is the first complete narrative history of manga.

Based on archival research in Japan, Exner’s book is a revisionist study that deviates from the standard account of other manga historians, who have characterised manga as the culmination of a thousand-year history of inherently Japanese visual culture. Exner previously challenged this myth in Comics and the Origins of Manga, and his new work is a significant expansion of that earlier book’s scope.

As he writes in the introduction to Manga, “this book seeks to provide a coherent account of how comics were established in Japan, how comics have changed over the decades, and how an entire industry arose around Japanese comics and turned the country into the world’s largest exporter of comics.” The book also includes a manga chronology, detailed endnotes, and an extensive bibliography.

Exner’s book is likely to become the standard history of manga, though there are other useful books on the topic. Manga Design (revised as 100 Manga Artists), by Amano Masanao and Julius Wiedemann, profiles mangaka (manga artists). Schodt translated Toshio Ban’s The Osamu Tezuka Story, a biography of the most influential mangaka. Helen McCarthy’s The Art of Osamu Tezuka is a monograph on Tesuka’s manga and anime.

Face with Tears of Joy:A Natural History of Emoji

Keith Houston’s Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji, published last month, is the first comprehensive history of emoji. As its back cover claims, the book “tells the whole story of emoji for the first time.”

Shigetaka Kurita is credited as the inventor of emoji, as he designed a set of pictograms for the Japanese telecom firm Docomo in 1999. But, as Houston explains, Kurita had several predecessors: similar icons were created for a Sharp PDA in 1988, and for a Pioneer cellphone in 1997.

Face with Tears of Joy is not the first book to cover the history of emoji: The Story of Emoji, by Gavin Lucas, was published almost a decade earlier. (Houston’s book doesn’t mention Lucas at all.) With almost fifty pages of notes, Face with Tears of Joy is more detailed than The Story of Emoji, though The Story of Emoji is significant as it includes an interview with Kurita.

Keir Starmer: The Biography

Tom Baldwin’s biography of UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, first published before last year’s election, was based on many hours spent with Starmer, his family, and senior Labour Party colleagues. This remarkable level of access led to a surprisingly intimate portrait of an intensely private politician, and the book has now been updated to include coverage of Starmer’s first year in office. Baldwin profiled Starmer for The Observer in June, and that interview is expanded in the revised paperback of Keir Starmer: The Biography.

Baldwin is a former Times and Telegraph journalist, though he was also head of communications for Labour throughout the coalition government, so his biography is broadly sympathetic to its subject. He acknowledges that he isn’t an impartial observer, and describes Starmer as “a man whom I both like and trust but sometimes find hard to fathom.” And the PM’s colleagues seemingly feel the same way about him: “Those who have worked closely with Starmer mix deep affection with tearing-their-hair-out frustration because they... yearn for a clearly defined project that identifies their purpose. They want a ‘Starmerism’. And he just won’t give them one.”

In his introduction, Baldwin makes clear that “it’s only fair to warn those hoping to find these pages spattered with blood that they will be disappointed.” The other key Starmer book published this year, Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund’s Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer, seems brutally direct in comparison, and Baldwin accurately describes it as “a blood-stained account of Labour’s transformation over the past five years, in which Starmer himself was largely absent.”

Maguire and Pogrund quote a Starmer advisor saying: “He thinks he’s driving the train, but we’ve sat him at the front of the DLR.” (The Docklands Light Railway uses driverless trains.) Get In leaves the reader in no doubt that Starmer’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney is in the driving seat — and that its authors have the same access to high-level Labour sources as Andrew Rawnsley had in the New Labour era.

Donald Trump v. Bob Woodward

Donald Trump’s lawsuit against Bob Woodward and the publisher Simon and Schuster was dismissed today. Trump had claimed that Woodward’s audiobook The Trump Tapes — featuring Woodward’s recordings of his interviews with Trump — was released without prior authorisation.

Trump’s lawsuit, seeking $50 million in damages, argued that the publication of the tapes violated his copyright. Judge Paul Gardephe of the Southern District of New York ruled that Trump could not be considered a co-author of the audiobook, and that the publication of the interviews constituted fair use under copyright law.

One on One SeriesKisho Kurokawa: Nakagin Capsule Tower

The Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo, designed by architect Kisho Kurokawa and completed in 1972, was an icon of the Japanese Metabolism movement. The building was comprised of movable, connectable, and replaceable capsules, and it epitomised Metabolism’s focus on expandability, flexibility, and adaptability. In his new book on the tower, Evangelos Kotsioris calls it “one of the most discussed and written about modern buildings of the 20th century”.

Each capsule was a tiny, self-contained studio apartment, complete with a built-in entertainment console. A single porthole-style window provided natural light — though not fresh air, as the windows didn’t open. The concept was unique and original, and although no more capsule towers were built, Nakagin continues to influence current architectural trends such as capsule hotels and micro apartments.

Sadly, exactly fifty years after its construction, the tower was demolished in 2022. By that point, it had fallen into disrepair — its capsules were never replaced, as had been originally envisioned. (When I visited the building in 2016, it was largely unoccupied.) The Museum of Modern Art in New York purchased one of the project’s 140 capsules, which went on display this month.

Kisho Kurokawa: Nakagin Capsule Tower, published next month, is the first English-language publication on the tower. It’s part of MoMA’s One on One Series, monographs on individual works of art from the museum’s permanent collection. (Project Japan by Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist, a comprehensive history of Metabolism, is also essential reading.)

It’s about Time:Performing between the Past and Tomorrow in Chulayarnnon Siriphol’s I a Pixel, We the People

Chulayarnnon Siriphol’s exhibition I a Pixel, We the People (ข้าพเจ้าคือพิกเซล, พวกเราคือประชาชน) will close later this month, and the artist took part in a Q&A session with Sam I-shan at BangkokCityCity Gallery yesterday. The event was titled It’s about Time: Performing between the Past and Tomorrow in Chulayarnnon Siriphol’s I a Pixel, We the People, named after an essay on Chulayarnnon’s work published by the gallery.

Chulayarnnon spoke about the two phases of his artistic career. His early short films were more personal, whereas his work became more overtly political following the Ratchaprasong crackdown in 2010: “it quite changed my life when the Thailand political crisis came, about 2010”. This aligns him with the “Post-Ratchaprasong art” movement identified by the journal Read (อ่าน; vol. 3, no. 2), and he made a similar comment in an interview for Thai Cinema Uncensored, explaining when he “turned to be interested in the political situation.”

In the Q&A, Chulayarnnon also discussed the consequences of the political climate for artists: “self-censorship is still existing: for me, sometimes I did that.” He contrasted the student protests of 2020 and 2021 — when Thai artists were more blunt in their political satire — with the current atmosphere: “for now, we need thought-provoking [art], but no need to be hardcore”. He also highlighted the threats that “hardcore” artists face: “I don’t want to be in jail, but I respect them.”

Sam I-shan’s essay booklet is twenty-four pages long, and has been published in a limited edition of twenty-four copies (each with a unique cover photos), reflecting the twenty-four-hour duration of Chulayarnnon’s video installation. The author identifies subtle political metaphors in the exhibition: she notes that the day-long running time “might parallel the cyclical nature of Thai politics,” and she argues that the piles of clothes in the gallery space “stand for all people disenfranchised by... Thailand’s political system, with some of these bodies literally absent, having been imprisoned, exiled, disappeared or killed.”

Pink Flamingos: A Screenplay

“Filth is my politics, filth is my life!”
— Babs Johnson

The script for Pink Flamingos, by John Waters, was published this month as Pink Flamingos: A Screenplay. (It was previously available as part of Trash Trio and Pink Flamingos and Other Filth, collections of three Waters screenplays.) The script begins with a note of self-deprecation, describing “the atrocious voice of the Narrator” — the film was narrated by Waters himself. It ends with a description of the film’s infamous final sequence, involving what was intended to be “a Hungarian sheepdog.”

Pink Flamingos is a masterpiece of bad taste. On its first release in 1972, it was described as obscene and compared to Luis Buñuel’s notoriously shocking silent film Un chien andalou (‘an Andalusian dog’). It remains the ultimate example of transgressive cinema, breaking every cultural taboo, and it’s been shown twice in Thailand: in 2017 at the Bad Taste Café in Bangkok, and in 2023 at the Thai Film Archive in Salaya.

Screenprints: A History

Screenprinting is a relatively recent technique, when compared to other forms of printmaking such as engraving, aquatints, monotypes, and lithography. Even the term ‘screenprint’ itself has not yet been standardised, as it’s used synonymously with ‘serigraph’ and ‘silkscreen’.

There have been several general histories of printmaking, including Six Centuries of Fine Prints (by Carl Zigrosser, who coined the term ‘serigraph’) and Prints (co-written by Richard S. Field, who curated the Silkscreen exhibition in 1971). Also, Fritz Eichenberg’s monumental The Art of the Print has chapters on screenprinting. But it was only this year that the first history of screenprinting as an artistic medium was published.

Screenprints: A History, by Gill Saunders, traces the origins of screenprinting to Japanese katagami and French pochoir stencilling techniques. The book also covers artists such as Andy Warhol, who produced Pop Art screenprints with Chris Prater, the printer who was “almost single-handedly responsible for the metamorphosis of screenprinting into a fine art.” Eduardo Paolozzi collaborated with Prater on a dozen screenprints titled As Is When, described by Saunders as “the medium’s first masterpiece.”

Screenprints is a comprehensive history of its subject. Published by Thames and Hudson, it’s also elegantly designed and typeset. Most, though not all, of its illustrations are from the Victoria and Albert Museum collection, and the book is the first in an annual V&A series covering the histories of individual printmaking techniques. Given the high standard set by this first book, the others — on linocuts, etchings, and woodcuts, forthcoming over the next three years — are now eagerly anticipated.

Bitch: The Journey of a Word

“If bitch is to be reclaimed, only women can reclaim the word. But reclamation isn’t the answer for everyone... we have to concede that bitch hasn’t been entirely rehabilitated. But we have to acknowledge its fluidity. Bitch is a flexible word that can be both good and bad. For centuries, bitch was an insult. In recent decades, some women have adopted bitch as an empowering label. Others reject the word. Bitch is battling a long history of invective use and many simply don’t like the word and don’t want to reclaim it.”
— Bitch

Karen Stollznow’s Bitch: The Journey of a Word, published last year, is a fascinating cultural history of ‘bitch’. The book covers changing social attitudes towards the word, and feminist efforts to reappropriate it: “Taking control of the word and turning the definition on its head, bitch got a feminist facelift, becoming a descriptor for an ambitious, independent, and strong woman.”

It was Jo Freeman, in The Bitch Manifesto, who launched the first campaign to reclaim ‘bitch’: “A woman should be proud to declare she is a Bitch, because Bitch is Beautiful. It should be an act of affirmation by self and not negation by others.” (The Bitch Manifesto first appeared in a 1970 anthology of feminist theory, alongside Kate Millett’s essay Sexual Politics.) The word’s reclamation went mainstream in the 1990s, when Bitch became the title of a long-running feminist magazine and a hit Meredith Brooks single.

Stollznow’s book is well researched and comprehensive, though it does become quite repetitive. For example, she poses the same question at least three times: “Has bitch truly been rehabilitated to mean something wholly positive? Can bitch be reclaimed... should it be?... Has bitch been — can it be — reclaimed?... Can bitch ever be fully reclaimed? The truth is that it probably won’t be.”

Also, when it comes to answering this question, Stollznow tends to sit on the fence: “Of course, there are ongoing attempts to reclaim bitch, to take out its sting. There is also much backlash against this reclamation, which will likely continue too... Some people will continue to try to reclaim the word. But for others, bitch isn’t reclaimed, and can’t be, because of its considerable baggage.” Ultimately, she concludes that the word’s reappropriation must be universal before it can be effective: “Unfortunately, the ways women try to reclaim bitch do not diminish its stigmatizing power in the hands of others, and especially men.”

Sluts: The Truth about Slutshaming and What We Can Do to Fight It

Beth Ashley’s Sluts: The Truth about Slutshaming and What We Can Do to Fight It, published last year, is the latest in a series of feminist books about the misogynistic term ‘slut’. It follows This Is What a Feminist Slut Looks Like, a 2015 account of the SlutWalk movement, and Wordslut, a 2019 guide to reclaiming sexist language.

Ashley writes about the social and linguistic stigmatisation of promiscuous women, but can ‘slut’ ever be reappropriated as a positive term? She explains that reclamation is not straightforward: “There is immense power in taking ownership of language traditionally used against you. Many people see this as an act of strength, handing it back to the people who’ve been originally hurt by the words. But it’s important to note that not everyone is there yet... ‘Slut’ is a difficult word for a lot of us. That’s no surprise. It has heavy connotations and a painful history; it’s loaded with stigma.”

Ultimately, Ashley concludes that reappropriating ‘slut’ is both desirable and achievable: “Personally, I want to reclaim the word... I believe that if we shout it loud enough, the term could eventually become used in the right way. For me and many others, taking back the word slut is a powerful, rebellious thing to do. It allows people to exercise freedom, release themselves from shame, cope with past trauma and celebrate their sexuality.”

Ashley cites Bikini Kill singer Kathleen Hanna, who wrote ‘SLUT’ on her stomach in the early 1990s, as a trailblazer of reclamation. But there are other women who have also self-identified as sluts. Madonna, for example, named her video company Slutco in the 1980s and, writing in The Sunday Times (24th August 2003), Kate Spicer argued: “A fashionable woman can take those phallocentric terms of abuse like slut and slag and nasty girl and turn them into labels of postfeminist fabulousness”. The issue was even covered by Sex and the City, in an episode titled Are We Sluts? (“Are we simply romantically challenged or are we sluts?”)

Germaine Greer’s pioneering 1971 article I Am a Whore, published in the underground press magazine Suck (no. 6), laid the groundwork for all subsequent feminist writing on ‘slut’ and similar pejoratives. Greer argued that, rather than using ‘whore’ as an insult, “you’ve got to come out the other way around and make whore a sacred word like it used to be and it still can be”. (Her biographer, Christine Wallace, fundamentally misread Greer’s argument, writing that “it takes a truly eccentric and bizarre kind of feminism for one to identify as a prostitute”.)

Stone: Ancient Craft to Modern Mastery

Stone: Ancient Craft to Modern Mastery, by Richard Rhodes, is one of the only publications in English to provide a general history of stone as an architectural material. The book includes an extensive glossary, endnotes, and bibliography, and it has an impressive cover that reproduces the surface texture of stone. In his introduction, Rhodes emphasises the cultural significance of stone buildings: “The ruins of stone and masonry architecture testify to war and destruction, to the rise and fall of cities and civilizations.”

Rhodes is apparently the last surviving apprentice of a medieval Italian guild of stonemasons. He stresses that this organisation is not affiliated with “the secret-handshake Masons”, though he describes it in equally conspiratorial terms. Several chapters of the book are devoted to the guild’s supposedly “Sacred Rules” of stonemasonry, and Rhodes claims that he is “sharing these secrets for the first time.” (This all feels a bit too much like Dan Brown to me.)

Stone is one of several recent books on architectural materials. Others include Concrete, Brick, Stone, and Wood (a series by William Hall); Glass in Architecture (by Michael Wigginton); Brick (by James W.P. Campbell); Architecture in Wood (by Will Pryce); Arish (by Sandra Piesik); Corrugated Iron (by Simon Holloway and Adam Mornement); and The Art of Earth Architecture (by Jean Dethier).

Spray Nation: 1980s NYC Graffiti Photographs

Martha Cooper collaborated with fellow photographer Henry Chalfant on Subway Art, a record of New York subway graffiti that became known as the graffiti bible. Almost forty years later, in 2022, a more substantial selection of Cooper’s photography was published in Spray Nation: 1980s NYC Graffiti Photographs. The book also includes essays on Cooper’s seminal influence on graffiti history, describing her as “the grand dame of street art photography”.

The very first book on street art was The Faith of Graffiti, from 1974. Chalfant co-wrote Spraycan Art with James Prigoff. Trespass covers the history of graffiti. There are also two books on the Bangkok graffiti scene: Bangkok Street Art and Bangkok Street Art and Graffiti (สตรีทอาร์ตกับกราฟฟิตีในกรุงเทพฯ).