Book of the day > Dandy Lion: The Black Dandy and Street Style. Published by Aperture. " Suits that pop with loud colors and dazzling patterns, complete with a nearly ubiquitous bowtie, define the style of the new “dandy.” Described as “high-styled rebels” by author Shantrelle P. Lewis, black men with a penchant for color and refined fashion, both new and vintage, have gained popular attention in recent years, influencing mainstream fashion. But black dandyism itself is not new; originating in Enlightenment England’s slave culture, it has continued for generations in black cultures around the world. Now, set against the backdrop of hip-hop culture, this iteration of dandies is redefining what it means to be black, masculine, and fashionable. Dandy Lion presents and celebrates individual dandy personalities, designers and tailors, movements and events that define contemporary dandyism. Throughout the book, self-expression is communicated through personal style, clothing, shoes, hats, and swagger. Lewis’s carefully curated selection of contemporary photographs surveys the movement across the globe in spectacular form, with all of the vibrant patterns, electrifying colors, and fanciful poses of this brilliant style subculture."
 

Book of the day > Jim Jocoy: Order of Appearance. Published by TBW Books. "Almost 20 years after the release of his first monograph, We’re Desperate, produced with the help of Sonic Youth front man Thurston Moore and fashion designer Marc Jacobs and widely regarded as the definitive catalogue of early West Coast punk fashion, Jim Jocoy’s archive of previously unseen photographs has been re-examined and re-considered to compose Order of Appearance, a new body of work that humanizes his young subjects as they go through their daily lives sharing the tender moments of love and loss that came to encapsulate the late 70s and early 80s as the Summer of Love slowly eroded and gave way to punks’ disaffected view of the world.

Unknowingly foreshadowing the AIDS epidemic that would grip underground communities throughout the country, Jocoy’s poignant photos share an intimacy not unlike that found in the work of Nan Goldin, combined with the underground compulsion and clout that permeates the photos of Katsumi Watanabe, and Karlheinz Weinberger.

Spanning three short years from 1977 to 1980, the collection of images is structured in three chapters, vignettes from a one night affair where emotions range from delight to despair, sober to wasted, clear to blurry to half-way-clear-again by morning. 

Jocoy’s ability to reveal these touching moments of restless youth allows us to feel empathetic towards the bruised knees that start the book off and then laugh at the comical horror of a sunburst-yellow clownish car turned violently upside down from a accident. As a photographer, Jocoy has an uncanny capacity to make even a car wreck look like the best time ever." @tbwbooks #jimjocoy

Book of the day > Katherine Bernhardt. Published by CANADA. Edited by Dan Nadel. Text by Nicole Rudick. “This is the first book to provide a comprehensive overview of Katherine Bernhardt’s wildly popular pattern paintings. Spanning 2013 through 2016, it collects over 100 of her brightly colored canvases. Well known for paintings of super models ripped from glossy fashion magazines and, more recently, Morrocan rug motifs, in 2013 Bernhardt dropped all direct quotation and now paints straight from her imagination, mining her own fertile reservoir of experience, imagery and sensation. Since then, Bernhardt has produced paintings that mix an assortment of objects reflecting her daily experiences, from life in New York to her love of Puerto Rico, her Saint Louis roots and family life. The objects are painted with incredible verve and tenacity, and include a jumble of the following items on colorfully activated grounds: watermelon slices, boom boxes, computers, pizza slices, cassette tapes, hamburgers, basketballs, old cell phones, airplanes, fruit, sharks, water, sea turtles, cigarettes, sharpies and keyboards. Bernhardt presents a slightly delirious feeling of New York City, the out-of-date and the up-to-the-minute all in one.”

Book of the day > People in Cars by Mike Mandel. Published by STANLEY/BARKER. "Mike Mandel grew up in the San Fernando Valley, and as an kid in the 1950s could walk just about everywhere he needed to go: to school, or later down the street to the open field to collect rocks or catch lizards. All of his friends lived on his block, so he didn’t think too much about the time he spent in a car. But by the time he reached twenty in 1970, he realised how large a role the car would play in his life, and so began to photograph the inhabitants of 1970s California in their cars.

'On a late afternoon with the light low in the west I’d regularly find my spot on the corner of Victory Blvd. and Coldwater Canyon Ave. in Van Nuys (ironically, so close to home I could easily walk there). It was a busy intersection with a wealth of cars pulling my way to make a right turn. I was using a 28mm wide angle lens on my 35mm camera, which meant that I had to get in pretty close to the window to get my shot, and when I did there would inevitably be a reaction: surprise, amusement, and on some few occasions, annoyance.'

'In contrast to how this project might play out today, it seemed then that people enjoyed being recognised by the camera and readily participated in the playfulness of the moment. It was warm outside, the car windows were open. It was the window that framed and instilled these portraits with the language of the automobile environment'" — Mike Mandel

Book of the day > Entryways of Milan - Ingressi Di Milano. Published by Taschen. "First impressions count, especially in Milano. In this unprecedented photographic journey, editor Karl Kolbitz opens the door to 140 of the city’s most sumptuous entrance halls, captivating in their diversity and splendor. These vibrant Milanese entryways, until now hidden away behind often restrained facades, are revealed as dazzling examples of Italian modernism, mediating public and private space with vivid configurations of color and form, from floors of juxtaposed stones to murals of minimalist geometry.

The collection spans buildings from 1920 to 1970 and showcases the work of some of the city’s most illustrious architects and designers, including , and Luigi Caccia Dominioni, as well as non-pedigreed architecture of equal impact and interest. The photographs for the publication were exclusively created by the Delfino Sisto Legnani, Paola Pansini and Matthew Billings, each evoking the entryways with individual sensibility and a stylistic interplay of detail shots – such as stones, door handles, and handrails – with larger architectural views.

In the well-documented realm of 20th-century Italian design, Kolbitz has stepped over the threshold and delivered a brand new area of enquiry in Milanese modernism. With the rigor of its multi-faceted research, poised photography, and breadth of its featured hallways, this is an invigorating new reference work and an inside look at the city’s design DNA across high to low architecture."

Book of the day > Alice Neel: Uptown. By Hilton Als. Published by David Zwirner Books | Victoria Miro. "Known for her portraits of family, friends, writers, poets, artists, students, singers, salesmen, activists and more, Alice Neel created forthright, intimate and, at times, humorous paintings that quietly engaged with political and social issues. In Alice Neel, Uptown, writer and curator Hilton Als brings together a body of paintings and works on paper of African Americans, Latinos, Asians and other people of color for the first time. Highlighting the innate diversity of Neel’s approach, the selection looks at those often left out of the art-historical canon and how this extraordinary painter captured them; 'what fascinated her was the breadth of humanity that she encountered,' Als writes.

The publication explores Neel’s interest in the diversity of uptown New York and the variety of people among whom she lived. This group of portraits includes well-known figures such as playwright, actress and author Alice Childress, the sociologist Horace R. Cayton, Jr., the community activist Mercedes Arroyo; and the widely published academic Harold Cruse, alongside more anonymous individuals of a nurse, a ballet dancer, a taxi driver, a businessman and a local boy who ran errands for Neel.

In short and illuminating texts on specific works written in his characteristic narrative style, Als writes about the history of each sitter and offers insights into Neel and her work, while adding his own perspective. A contemporary and personal approach to the artist’s oeuvre, Als’ project is 'an attempt to honor not only what Neel saw, but the generosity of her seeing.'”

Book of the day > Ron Jude – Nausea. Published by MACK (@mack_books). “Nausea—taken from the title of Sartre’s 1938 existential novel—is a body of photographs that registers the interiors of public schools in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and Atlanta, Georgia from 1990-92 by American photographer Ron Jude. Departing from mere documentation, however, Jude lures us into peering through windows, doorways and crevices of walls into empty classrooms and corridors, as we become increasingly conscious of the perils of our own gaze. Rousing, rather than abating, the uncertainty of looking, Nausea established the building blocks for the next twenty-five years of Jude’s photographic output, including Other Nature, Alpine Star, Lick Creek Line and Lago.

At the heart of Nausea lies the premise that philosophical inquiry might be filtered and consumed through photographs, just as it is filtered through Sartre’s work of literary fiction. Taking as his subject the banality of institutional learning, the monotonous spaces and objects captured in Nausea serve as a platform for exploring the nexus between the narrative limitations of photography and consciousness. Employing a distinctive visual language, marked by an acute sense of colour, radical framing and shallow focus, Jude created a world both familiar and uncanny, imbued with a pervasive sense of unease.

To mark the 25th anniversary of the inaugural exhibition of Nausea in 1992 at The Photographers’ Gallery in London, Jude has made an entirely new edit of this work. Many of the photographs in this volume have never before been published or exhibited.”

Book of the day > Ashley Hicks: Details. Published by IDEA Books @idea.ltd “Hicks' zooms in on the architectural and decorative details of great British and European houses. The results of this historic snoop around are juxtaposed with his own highly creative and idiosyncratic interiors." "Details by Ashley Hicks is a new interiors book that presents an annotated photographic insight into great historic homes and buildings. Much of the photography was taken by Hicks himself, almost half on his phone, capturing fragments of his own work besides historic interiors, with a focus on the key intersection of materials which Hicks sees as ’the most telling moment of design.’ Properties included are Sir John Soane’s Museum, Montacute House in Somerset, Holkham Hall in Norfolk and Hicks' own rooms at Albany, the exclusive residences hidden between Piccadilly and Savile Row. Limited edition of 500 copies.” @ashleyhicks1970

Book of the day > Nick Cave: Until. Published by Prestel. "This generously illustrated book takes readers inside Nick Cave’s newest work: an enormous, elaborate journey through the workings of the artistic mind. Nick Cave’s “Soundsuits”―exuberant, brightly colored wearable sculptures adorned with buttons, hair, toys and other found objects―have made him one of the best-known contemporary artists. This book documents his most extensive work to date, turning his art inside out. Until fills MASS MoCA’s football field- sized gallery, without a single Soundsuit to be found. Instead Cave takes us inside the belly of one of his iconic sculptures with an immersive environment populated by a dazzling array of found objects, echoing some of Cave’s and America’s most confounding dilemmas: gun violence, racial inequality, injustice within our cities’ police departments, and death. An installation diary and numerous images reveal how an idea becomes reality. Until also incorporates special appearances by dancers, singer/ songwriters, and poets, as well as community forums, and opportunities for public debate and engagement. Transcripts of the first of these events accompany the book’s illustrations. This book features an essay by exhibition Curator Denise Markonish, commentary by David Byrne and Lori E. Lightfoot that contextualizes Cave’s work against today’s headlines, and an excerpt from Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric. Powerful and transformative, Until promises to take its place among the era’s most important artistic statements."

Book of the day > Encyclopedia of Flowers, Vol. 3. Published by Seigensha. “Makoto Azuma and Shunsuke Shiinoki collaborate once again to further their pioneering ‘Encyclopedia of Flowers’ series, which focuses in part on changes that impact floristry, such as the disappearance and new emergence of species, as well as on changing the common perception of flowers. Following the first volume in 2011 and the second in 2015, this third dazzling instalment features a greater variety of styles, reflected in photographs divided into seven chapter-categories that include ‘Coexistence’, ‘Hybrid’, ‘Chiaroscuro’, and ‘Autogenesis’. The myriad arrangements done in Azuma’s singular style are expertly captured by Shiinoki’s camera.”