Tim Palen’s First Photo Collection, GUTS.

[HorrorBob]

Fine Art Photography Meets Horror’s Cutting Edge
In Tim Palen’s First Photo Collection, GUTS

Website: www.gutsbook.com

Tim Palen's photography combines the best of John Waters and Joel-Peter Witkin, without ever going too far so that the image loses its power.
-- Eli Roth, Writer/Director of HOSTEL and HOSTEL PART II

Award-winning fine art photographer Tim Palen serves up a visionary collection of images in his debut book collection GUTS, culled from his work in and around the marketing of six cutting-edge horror films. The 110-page book includes movie and event posters, production stills, outtakes, and location photos. The cover image -- a photograph of red, glistening meat -- telegraphs both the nature and sensibility of the work inside: sensual, sophisticated and veined with a drolly macabre sense of humor.

GUTS is published by Baby Tattoo Press. The Summer 2007 first printing is now on sale at the publisher’s website (http://www.gutsbook.com), and at select specialty bookstores including Forbidden Planet in New York City and Golden Apple in Los Angeles. The summer run includes a very limited special edition, which presents GUTS like a package of supermarket beef, shrink-wrapped and nestled on a foam tray. Adding to the illusion, the cover of the limited edition will not include type. Baby Tattoo will issue a second printing in Fall 2007.

GUTS demonstrates Palen’s mastery of the bold, alluring and unsettling image that is intrinsic to the horror genre’s enduring power. GUTS gathers for the first time Palen’s eye-catching posters for three years of the SAW Blood Drive, an annual Halloween event benefiting the Red Cross. White looks anything but innocent in these campaigns starring a bevy of seductive nurses, angels of questionable mercy who appear quite eager to draw blood. Other highlights include a series of haunting photographs shot at Iceland’s otherworldly Blue Lagoon during a visit to the set of Eli Roth’s HOSTEL II. GUTS also opens a window onto Palen’s collaboration with several filmmakers who have taken horror in a new direction, and includes commentary by Roth (HOSTEL I, HOSTEL II) and Darren Lynn Bousman (SAW II, SAW III, SAW IV), among others.

Palen’s twelve-year photography career encompasses editorial, advertising, fashion and portraiture. His work has appeared in such publications as Premiere, Paper, Vibe, Redbook, Penthouse, The New York Observer, and Flaunt Magazine. In 2006, Hollywood Life Magazine’s Behind the Camera Awards honored him for his impact on the movie industry with its “Movie Marketing Ninja” Award. His fine art photography for movie posters has also garnered numerous Hollywood Reporter Key Art Awards, which honor achievements in the creative advertising community.

Palen is currently Co-President of Theatrical Marketing at Lionsgate. He and his partner divide their time between Los Angeles and Joshua Tree, CA.