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About the Book:
In 1998, Ellen Jong was at a party on Canal Street in New York’s TriBeCa. As the bathroom line was too long, she headed to the street to take a leak. Jong squatted just behind some junked furniture on the curb of the sidewalk, and her pee trickled down like wet paint on a wall. Being a photographer, she had her Yashica T4 with her, and turned around to her suspect puddle to capture what she thought looked more like blood in a murder scene than pee. Since that fateful urination, Jong has captured her tracks through New York, Miami, Shanghai, and Mexico, the countryside, woodside, and seaside, under moonlight and opposite sunset.
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Since then, Jong has amassed a sizeable body of work, a collection of images that fuse documentary, landscape, and fine art photography and portraiture into a uniquely personal statement. The work, exhibited at various galleries, is all gathered in Pees on Earth, a collection of images that are at once challenging, provocative, intriguing, courageous, amusing, and beautiful. These images capture not only Jong’s rebellious exuberance, but also offer a comment on what constitutes the personal and the political. Pees on Earth is a statement about the ownership of self, of sensuality, of humanity, and of womanhood—all expressed with beauty and a great deal of humor. There’s a sigh of relief on every page of Pees on Earth. Her photographs assert Jong’s place on the planet, and because we all share the act, they assert ours too. It is a manifesto for our collective existence, a cry for all sentient beings: “I am! I pee!”
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About the Author:
Ellen Jong’s first camera was her father’s old Canon that he took around the world with him years before. She started shooting with it her senior year at the Bronx High School of Science, in her hometown of New York City. In 1999, her photography was first published in zing magazine but was not commercially recognized until 2002 when celebrated by Surface magazine’s Avantguardian #5. Since, her work has been seen in Vogue, InStyle, Anthem, Playgirl, BlackBook, and The Fader. Jong also pursues her art in photography and other media. Most recently, a multi-media and interactive installation appeared in the Scope Art Fair NY in 2005. Jong lives and works in New York City.
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Miss Rosen’s Contribution:
Art Direction, Photo Editing & Sequencing, Text Editing, Production Management, Publicity, Advertising, and Event Planning.
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Coordinated international publicity campaign including coverage in
Ad Week, Bizarre, Black Book, Cool Hunting, Gawker, The Limbaugh Letter, Marie Claure Italia,
Photo-Eye, News of the Weird, New York Post, Publishers Weekly, and Time Out New York, among others.
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PHOTOGRAPHY | WOMEN’S STUDIES | FULL BLADDERS
HC, 11.25 x 7.25 inches, 112 pages, 80 four-color and b/w photos
ISBN: 1-57687-317-X, $29.95
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Photographs ©Ellen Jong
Cover courtesy of powerHouse Books