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Podcast: New Books in Art
Episode: John Brian King, “Nude Reagan” (Spurl Editions, 2016)
Description: Nude Reagan (Spurl Editions, 2016) is John Brian King’s second book of photography. His first book, LAX: Photographs of Los Angeles 1980-84, was published by Spurl Editions in 2015. For his most recent book, King photographed twenty-three nude female models with a Fujifilm Instax Mini 8 camera in an empty Palm Springs office space. Each model wore the same Ronald Reagan mask, striking any pose she liked. Deliberately unsettling, these photographs depict Reagan as a demon and specter haunting the modern world. Evoking the dead conservative president, the models wear the hideous dark-eyed mask anemic and wrinkled and morph into unerotic, fr...