[December 10, 2020]

DISTANZ and Ashkan Sahihi Launch new book The New York Years

Ashkan Sahihi, photographer and photojournalist, announces the launch of his newest book entitled, Ashkan Sahihi The New York Years. With hundreds of photographs of celebrities, artists, and personalities from all walks of New York City life, Sahihi chronicles three decades of his time living in New York City beginning in the late 1980s through 2015. The book, featuring Willem Dafoe on the cover, details pages of emotional portraits and candid photographs of many of the city's most iconic residents and cultural luminaries, including Tom Wolfe (News - Alert), David Bowie, Woody Allen, Cindy Sherman, Louis Farrakhan, Jeff Koons, Frank Stella, Richard Prince, A Tribe Called Quest, Kurt Vonnegut, Carole King, Yoko Ono, Calvin Klein, Jesus and the Mary Chain and a range of hip-hop artists including, 50 Cent, Funkmaster Flex and Method Man. The dedication page features Olin Roenpage, Kaveh Sheibani, and David J. Cohen, who is also featured in the book.

The prints and polaroid slides from Sahihi's extensive archives, often shot on assignment, tell a story of the time and the environment they were taken in, many digitized versions convey the effects that age has had on the analog originals. The book captures the people that make up the fabric and vitality that is every era in New York City. The tome is both reflective and thoughtful and the collective images within represent that which makes New York the city that it is. Most taken in the pre-digital/pre-I Phone (News - Alert) era of photographic portraiture, the pages within Sahihi's work capture a soulfulness impossible to replicate and many subjects are no longer living.

Ashkan Sahihi said, "When I arrived, New York City was the center of the creative univers - a destination for artists and artistic types. It is a city that accepts the unaccepted, that allows for and even embraces self-reinvention. It is a place where an exchange of energy happens and the aura of the nightlife, music, fashion, and art scenes comingle and give inspiration to those who seek it. It is my hope that this book encapsulates this essence of New York through the portraits of some of its most interesting and notable citizens."

About the Author: Ashkan Sahihi was born in Tehran in 1963 and grew up in Germany. He moved to New York in the spring of 1987. Working for notable magazines such as ZEIT Magazine, the New Yorker, and Vogue, Sahihi portrayed the city and its faces. After turning his focus to conceptual series in the late 1990s, Sahihi had exhibitions at MoMA/PS1/New York, Macro/Rome, the Akademie der Künste/Berlin, and the Andrea Rosen Gallery/New York, showing amongst others the most well-known of his early series, Drugs. Living in New York, Istanbul and London, Sahihi's work continuously attempted to engage the political discourse he deems lacking in substance. Drawing on familiar visual languages but employing them in unexpected ways, he challenges the viewer's and subject's comfort level as well as his own. Since 2013, Sahihi's has permanently lived and worked in Berlin. A collection of 225 of his portraits from The New York Years will be published by in December 2020.

Ashkan Sahihi The New York Years will be available at MoMA, The Whitney Museum of Contemporary Art, and PS1 bookstores, among others.

To download a high-resolution image of the book cover, please use the link here. To purchase the book, please use the link here.

ABOUT DISTANZ

DISTANZ publishes books on contemporary art, photography, architecture, and design. As a Berlin-based publisher DISTANZ works with leading museums and institutions worldwide to create exhibition catalogs and produces monographs on selected artists. The imprint also features experimental but high-quality artist books printed in Germany and distributed worldwide.

Credit for the book must read: © The New York Years by Ashkan Sahihi, Baker & Taylor, 2020. Images, which may not be reproduced in any way without written permission from the author, are available to accompany your coverage, and are to be credited Ashkan Sahihi. For info about the book please contact Hampton Carney at Paul Wilmot Communications at 212-206-7447 or [email protected].

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