Contempo

About this book

Electricity surges across the page. Skyscrapers crowd the skyline; radios, traffic and newspaper headlines compete for attention. John Vassos pictures America moving at a speed its inhabitants can barely control.

Created with texts by Ruth Vassos, this 1929 book gives modern life an extravagant Art Deco treatment. Its subjects include advertising, the subway, Prohibition, department stores, the cinema and commercialism. The images turn familiar features of urban life into severe, theatrical shapes. Their excitement is inseparable from anxiety about a civilisation increasingly organised around machines, spectacle and consumption.