Photo By Gail

This quote by the late great David Bowie — “Tomorrow Belongs to Those Who Can Hear it Coming” — gets a vibrant new life when printed on the spines of horizontally stacked book that have been wrapped in pink paper or vinyl. According to this source, “Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming” was the slogan David Bowie coined to promote Heroes, the second installment of his great Berlin album trilogy. It neatly captures one of his most important talents: to intuit the future and draw it forward into the popular culture of the present.

Sometimes he would simply grasp the importance of a trend, as when he understood that the arrival of the internet would transform the economics of the music industry and the relationship between artists and audiences. But more often it was his artistry in self-reinvention that opened up new modes of cultural expression or brought shooting up to the surface deeper social trends. When he famously threw his arms round Mick Ronson’s shoulders on Top of the Pops, he was doing more than advertising his bisexuality. He was helping catalyze the liberation in the politics of sexual identity that would unfold in the 1970s.

Photographed at the New York Now Home Show at Javits Center in February of 2018.