Candyland book

Brett Lloyd’s Candyland is a new publication from Dashwood Books documenting Lloyd’s nine months living with the legendary American photographer David Armstrong at his Bed-Stuy brownstone in 2012: an otherworldly vision of the sun setting on a now-lost world of bohemian freedom; in the beating heart of New York City’s suburbs, yet somehow outside of time and place. 
 
In the spring of 2012, the British photographer Brett Lloyd arrived at a brownstone in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighbourhood of Brooklyn, New York, and crossed the threshold into Candyland. 
 
Candyland may have served as a nickname for the home and studio of the late, legendary David Armstrong—the American photographer whose bracingly intimate portraits of his friends and lovers earned him a global cult following—but it also grew to serve as a neat reflection of the way Lloyd perceived the place where he spent that long summer, autumn, and winter, before he returned to London in January 2013. A house with an otherworldly quality, filled with a rag-tag bunch of creatives; in the beating heart of New York City’s suburbs, yet somehow outside of time and place. 
 
A decade later, it’s this very spirit that underpins the title for Lloyd’s latest book, Candyland, released by Dashwood Books later this month. The 108-page publication not only pays homage to a major influence and mentor of Lloyd’s, but serves as a time capsule of the sun setting on a now-lost world of bohemian freedom, as Armstrong was already planning to sell his home when the images were made. The book’s collage-like approach reflects the rickety charm of the house itself, compiled from the various images—Pentax photographs, scans of scrapbooks, iPhone snaps, self-shot images from the Photo Booth app—that Lloyd accumulated during his stay there. So too is Amstrong himself a recurring figure throughout the images, working at his desk, smoking a cigarette, gazing wistfully at a Christmas tree, almost always in his signature black Ray-Bans. 
 
For Lloyd, the act of documenting the characters that drifted through Armstrong’s home was as surreal for him as the images themselves: he recalls walking through its rooms and recognizing the wallpapers and trinkets and light fixtures that had served as the backdrop to some of his hero’s most beloved images. With Candyland, Lloyd invites a new generation to step through the doors of Armstrong’s strange paradise and discover his vision of off-kilter, otherworldly sensuality for themselves. “It felt fantastical in there," Lloyd remembers. “It was another world.” 
 
Publisher: Dashwood Books. 
Design by Martha Naranjo Sandoval 
Text: Brett Lloyd
Soft cover
First edition
108 Pages
6.1875 x 8.25 inches
Printed at Wilco Art Books, Amersfoort
Production by Jos Morree, Fine Books 
 
Available to purchase online at Dashbook books:
 
https://www.dashwoodbooks.com/pages/books/26247/brett-lloyd/candyland