Book of the day > Emmanuelle Andrianjafy: Nothing's in Vain. Published by MACK. "In 2011, Malagasy photographer Emmanuelle Andrianjafy arrived in the port city of Dakar, situated on the westernmost African coast, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. Nothing’s in Vain is Adrianjafy’s response to the experience of uprooting to the Senegalese capital, a city as vibrant as it is disorientating. Embracing the chaos of an unfamiliar world, she takes us on an exploratory journey through a metropolis in constant flux between construction and deconstruction. The sequence of images careens between street scenes, portraits, landscapes, and close-up details, recreating her fluctuating experience of the multiple faces of the city. Nothing’s in Vain is the winner of the MACK First Book Award 2017. The First Book Award 2017 is published with support from Wilson Centre for Photography, Kraszna-Krausz Foundation and optimal media."

Book of the day > The Others by Derek Ridgers. Published by IDEA @idea.ltd. Images from the London nightclub scene, 1980-1986 by perpetual Arcana favorite, Derek Ridgers.

Book of the day > Masjid - Selected Mosques From The Islamic World. Published by Atsa Architects."Compiled by architect Azim A. Aziz, this anthology of mosques is a valuable resource for architects and cultural historians alike. With profiles of more than 100 mosques, from celebrated ancient structures like the Dome of the Rock and the Hagia Sophia, or architectural paragons like the Taj Mahal and the Great Mosque of Djenné in Mali, to lesser known and modern interpretations of the typology, a spectrum of buildings of all scales is covered. Besides a glossary of names and terms, the volume touches upon the principles of Islamic architecture, geometric patterns and calligraphy, and regional styles, and gives a selected history of the various empires of the world as well."

Book of the day > Stephen Shore: Selected Works, 1973-1981. Published by Aperture. Texts and image selections by Wes Anderson, Quentin Bajac, David Campany, Paul Graham, Guido Guidi, Takashi Homma, An-My Lê, Michael Lesy, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Richard Prince, Francine Prose, Ed Ruscha, Britt Salvesen, Taryn Simon, Thomas Struth, Lynne Tillman. "Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places is indisputably a canonic body of work—a touchstone for those interested in photography and the American landscape. Remarkably, despite having been the focus of numerous shows and books, including the eponymous 1982 Aperture classic (expanded and reissued several times), this series of photographs has yet to be explored in its entirety. Over the past five years, Shore has scanned hundreds of negatives shot between 1973 and 1981. In this volume, Aperture has invited an international group of fifteen photographers, curators, authors, and cultural figures to select ten images apiece from this rarely seen cache of images. Each portfolio offers an idiosyncratic and revealing commentary on why this body of work continues to astound; how it has impacted the work of new generations of photography and the medium at large; and proposes new insight on Shore’s unique vision of America as transmuted in this totemic series." 

Book of the day > Sam Contis: Deep Springs. Published by MACK. " 'Contis’s photographs capture the strange beauty of macro and microcosmic views in the high desert. The indistinguishableness of earth and body and the sensual echoes of human and animal give her works an Ovidian sense of imminent metamorphoses.' – Lawrence Rinder

The images in Sam Contis's Deep Springs were made in a remote desert valley east of the Sierra Nevada. The work centers on a small, all-male liberal arts college, founded in 1917 by the educational pioneer L. L. Nunn.

The college and its surroundings provide a stage on which Contis explores the construction of myth, place, and masculine identity. Bringing together new photographs with pictures made by the first students at the college a century ago, Deep Springs engages with the enduring image of the American West––one that Hollywood, mass media, and the history of American photography have imprinted into the collective psyche."

Book(s) of the day > Dayanita Singh: Museum Bhavan. Published by Steidl. “With Museum Bhavan, Dayanita Singh (forges a new space between publishing and the museum, an experience where books have the same--if not greater--artistic value as prints hanging on a gallery wall. Consisting of 10 individual “museums” in book form, Museum Bhavan is a miniature version of Singh’s eponymous traveling exhibition, with prints placed in folding expanding wooden structures.

The images in Museum Bhavan have been intuitively grouped into lyrical chapters in a visual story such as 'Little Ladies Museum' and 'Ongoing Museum,' as well as more specific series such as 'Museum of Machines' As in Singh’s first project, Sent a Letter (2008), the books are housed in a handmade box and fold out into accordion-like strips which the artist encourages viewers to install and curate as they wish in their own homes. The exhibition thus becomes a book, and the book an exhibition."

Book of the day > Frank Walter: The Last Universal Man, 1926–2009. Published by Radius Books @radius_books.  “Antiguan artist and writer Frank Walter was an eccentric character now considered to be vastly under-recognized. Intellectually brilliant, Walter entertained delusions of aristocratic grandeur, namely the belief that the white slave-owners in his family linked him to the noble houses of Europe. The self-styled “7th Prince of the West Indies, Lord of Follies and the Ding-a-Ding Nook” produced paintings that dealt with race, class and social identity, as well as abstract explorations of nuclear energy, portraits both real and imagined—including Hitler playing cricket, and Prince Charles and Princess Diana as Adam and Eve—and miniature landscapes of Scotland, the country that he fell in love with during a visit in 1960. Walter typically painted in oil on rudimentary materials, with a marked immediacy and naivety. The first man of color to manage an Antiguan sugar plantation, Walter spent the last decades of his life in an isolated rustic home in Antigua, surrounded by his writings, paintings, and carvings. Coinciding with Antigua and Barbuda’s inaugural National Pavilion at Venice Biennale 2017, The Last Universal Man is the first comprehensive monograph of this important Caribbean artist. Defying categorization as an outsider or self-taught artist, Walter worked as a writer, composer, sculptor, and painter.”

Book of the day > Vineland by Dan Monick and Clint Woodside (@danmonickphoto + @clintwoodside) . Co-published by Cash Machine (@cashmachinela) + Dead Beat Club (@deadbeatclub). Only a few copies remain from the big show at  Voilld (with Communee) in Tokyo!  Woodside and Monick present here "a visual road trip through the forgotten neighborhoods of the San Fernando Valley, a place 'where the American dream was peddled, then crashed and burned as much as, if not more than, anywhere in the US'." 

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