Year: 1981
Publisher: Sphinx/Ugly
ISBN: Unknown
Content: 48 pages with colour (well, darkish) illustrations
Giger practically is THE Alien. I mean, he created the alien lifeform in Ridley Scott´s movie Alien, and he is going to be always mostly recognized because of this. Period.
But then again... Giger is an artist. He grew up in a disturbingly peaceful, in his own words, pissfull Swiss town, and his deranged mind started imagining things. Later on, as a grown child, he created a ghost train in the backyard just to amuse his friends (and scare away girls). Later he discovered the power of airbrush - and the mixture flesh and machine with dark colors, and mostly: shadows.
He already had a full body of exquisite, surrealistic art (and a friendship with Dali) on his dancecard, when Ridley Scott approached him. The rest is, as they say, history... and although Giger has since produced an impressive number of alien lifeforms for movies (he was involved in the ill-fated Jodorowsky-adaptation of Dune, just like Chris Foss and Moebius and Jim Burns, and created the alien for the Species movies, or some effects for the Poltergeist franchise) as well as artbooks (Necronomicon 1 & 2, Biomechanics, several film design books), but still it was this little softcover that had the biggest impression on me.
In N.Y. City, Giger explores the strange, deep gorges between the skyscrapers of New York, in his own, fleshly intense, dark form. From every page you can sense the devastation, agoraphobia and strangeness a disordered child must feel in his early life in barriers of a deadly calm civilization - or an alien, visiting and only partially "seeing", smelling our world.
The book is sometimes available through the usual sources (I even saw a French edition once), but unlike the other Giger volumes, it is a bit hard to find nowadays. Yet, it is in my opinion worth every Cent.
Checkout Giger´s website here or here.
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