CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/16/2025

An invocation for change, anger aspiring to beauty, in 'David Wojnarowicz: Arthur Rimbaud in New York'

Featured spreads are from David Wojnarowicz: Arthur Rimbaud in New York, collecting the artist’s iconic photographs of a lone figure, disguised by a paper mask of the French miscreant poet Arthur Rimbaud, in a variety of down-and-dirty 1970s NYC urban landscapes. Published to accompany the acclaimed exhibition on view now at The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York, this is a must-have monograph for any photobook collector. “Rimbaud, the proto-punk grandfather of the East Village, embodies a movement of creatives who, like him, have run away as exiles,” Marguerite Van Cook writes, “—from families and societies that want everything to be confined to the literal, the documentable; from anything that is not experiential, or that exalts feelings. This is the vocabulary of the photographs in Arthur Rimbaud in New York. They offer an invocation for change, both artistic and social. Simultaneously and bizarrely, their anger aspires to beauty. The images represent a modern symbolism, reframed in a punk ethos which attempts to find its own aesthetic. Just as Rimbaud did, David seeks to form a new language through the creation of juxtapositions, images and snippets of text, and to expand the repressed vocabulary of sex and love.”