The first monograph on Ari Marcopoulos, published to accompany the first retrospective of his work at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum, gathering works from three decades. Marcopoulos came to New York in 1979 and quickly became part of the downtown art scene that included Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Robert Mapplethorpe. Since then he has become recognised as a key documentarian of contemporary culture as it unfolds, recording the emerging hip-hop scene, shooting snowboarders hurtling down vertical mountain faces and chronicling the vicissitudes of his own family life, his works unerringly capturing the zeitgeist without sentimentality or voyeurism. The pages mix black-and-white and colour: two people with a boombox beside a parked car, a shirtless young man in a bath and a close portrait of a teenager in a backwards cap, and the cover pairs the title with a graffiti-covered street corner. The book was named one of the most beautiful Swiss books of 2009.