Profane Waste

By Gretchen Rubin, Dana Hoey, Gretchen Craft Rubin

Jewels buried in a grave, cigarettes smoked in $100 bills, champagne poured into a bathtub--these perverse, irrational acts are also somehow thrilling. Profane Waste explores the workings of an unacknowledged taboo: the taboo against willful dissipation. Dana Hoey, an acclaimed photographer appearing here in her first book, presents a series of 30 haunting images that are at once ultra-real and uncanny. Bestselling biographer and social critic Gretchen Rubin uses lucid analysis and explosive examples--the actions of Rauschenberg, Jesus, Ivan Boesky, Thoreau and Goebbels, among others--to demonstrate the power of the title concept. Together, Hoey's photographs and Rubin's provocative arguments create a shock of recognition: they lay bare intentions that stand outside the conventional goals of acquisition and accumulation.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0974364835
• ISBN13: 9780974364834
• Release Date: June 2006
• Publisher: Gregory R. Miller & Company
• Length: 80 Pages
• Weight: 1.62 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 10.2" x 9.4"