Book of the day > Anthony Hernandez. [*Mark your calendars for a book signing and discussion with Anthony Hernandez and Thomas Demand on 10/8 at Arcana! In association with PACLA]. Published by SFMOMA with  D.A.P. “Since the early 1970s, when he began photographing on the streets of his native Los Angeles, Anthony Hernandez has consistently pushed his practice into uncharted territory, challenging himself by adopting new formats and subject matter. Moving from black and white to color, from 35mm to large-format cameras, and from the human figure to landscapes to abstracted detail, he has produced an unusually varied body of work united by its arresting beauty and subtle engagement with social issues. At first largely unaware of the formal traditions of the medium, Hernandez developed his own style of street photography, one uniquely attuned to the desolate allure and sprawling expanses of LA.

Published to accompany the photographer’s first retrospective, Anthony Hernandez offers a comprehensive introduction to his career of more than 40 years, tracing his evolution as well as highlighting continuities across his practice. The catalogue represents the full range and breadth of Hernandez’s work, with an extensive plate section that includes many photographs that have never before been exhibited or published.

Anthony Hernandez grew up in a Los Angeles far removed from the idealized Hollywood image of the city. Although he has turned his lens on other landscapes--including Saigon, Rome and various American cities--Los Angeles, and especially the neighborhoods inhabited by the working class, the poor and the homeless, has been his most enduring subject.”

Book of the day > Isamu Noguchi: Playscapes. Published by RM/Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo. “In 1933, the visionary sculptor Isamu Noguchi began making design proposals for children’s playgrounds in New York. The first one, Play Mountain (1933), marked the beginning of the artist’s fascination with exploring points of intersection between sculpture, public spaces and, above all, play. Radically experimental in its approach to children’s recreation, the design asserted, with no apparent precedent, that children’s exercise and entertainment could be stimulated by simply providing earth modulations and steps for running, jumping and sliding.

Noguchi’s playground was a spectacular innovation of design, and something never before seen in New York City’s brief 32-year history of building and operating playgrounds. But Play Mountain also initiated a lengthy period of frustrated endeavor, in which Noguchi only saw one of his park designs become a reality. This changed in the 1970s, when public space policies began to favor artists’ participation in project design. Since then, Noguchi’s pioneering playgrounds have become a touchstone for the revival of interest in the golden era of playground design.

This is the first volume to bring together all of the artist’s investigations into playgrounds over a period of 50 years. It reproduces his beautiful scale models, sketches and photographs of iconic designs, highlighting a little-known facet of one of the most versatile sculptors of the 20th century.”

Book of the day > Grace: The American Vogue Years. Published by Phaidon. “The second and final volume of the collected best work of Vogue editor and international fashion icon Grace Coddington. This handsome slipcased edition showcases work of the last fifteen years by legendary Vogue editor Grace Coddington. The book celebrates seventeen of the master photographers with whom Coddington has collaborated - including Steven Meisel, Annie Leibovitz, Peter Lindbergh (whose photo is below) Craig McDean, David Sims, Mario Testino, and Marcus Piggot and Mert Alas - in a sumptuous compilation of Coddington's most beloved fashion stories.” @phaidonsnaps  

Book of the day > Shakespeare and Company, Paris: A History of the Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart. Published by Shakespeare and Company, Paris. “This first-ever history of the legendary bohemian bookstore in Paris interweaves essays and poetry from dozens of writers associated with the shop with hundreds of never-before-seen archival pieces. George Whitman opened his bookstore in a tumbledown 16th-century building just across the Seine from Notre-Dame in 1951, a decade after the original Shakespeare and Company had closed. Run by Sylvia Beach, it had been the meeting place for the Lost Generation and the first publisher of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Since Whitman picked up the mantle, Shakespeare and Company has served as a home-away-from-home for many celebrated writers, from Jorge Luis Borges to Ray Bradbury, A.M. Homes to Dave Eggers, as well as for young authors and poets. Visitors are invited not only to read the books in the library and to share a pot of tea, but sometimes also to live in the bookstore itself--all for free. More than 30,000 people have stayed at Shakespeare and Company, fulfilling Whitman’s vision of a “socialist utopia masquerading as a bookstore.” Through the prism of the shop’s history, the book traces the lives of literary expats in Paris from 1951 to the present, touching on the Beat Generation, civil rights, May ’68 and the feminist movement--all while pondering that perennial literary question, “What is it about writers and Paris?”@artbook. 

Book of the day > Hannah Höch: Life Portrait - A Collaged Autobiography. The Green Box. “Hannah Höch is best known for her association with the Berlin Dadaists. But her life and artistic career far outlasted Dada, spanning two world wars and most of the 20th century. And at the age of 83, Höch began to look back.

The result was Höch’s last--and largest, at nearly 4 x 5 feet--photo-collage, “Life Portrait,” created between 1972 and 1973. Though she did not originally set out to make an autobiographical work, the collage functions as a kind of self-portrait for the artist, looking back on her life and work while also ironically and poetically commenting on key political, social and artistic events from the previous 50 years. Höch literally inserts herself into the work several times, with photographs of herself at various ages (always identifiable with her trademark bobbed hair), and returns to themes and images which she had addressed throughout her oeuvre, including fashion imagery, news photographs, African art and pictures of plants and animals, which had become typical of her work after the end of the Second World War. London’s Whitechapel Gallery called it ‘a collage of collages.’  Hannah Höch: Life Portrait divides the monumental composition into 38 individual sections, as Höch imagined it, and offers explanatory texts and relevant quotations to complement each section. One of only a few English-language publications on the artist, this volume explores Höch’s final masterpiece, and the life’s work it represents.”

Book of the day > Yoko Ishii - Dear Deer. Little More. “Wild deer inhabit the urban centres of Nara and Miyajima in Japan. Long revered at Nara’s Kasuga Shrine, the animals have been designated a national treasure and are protected. The local government in Miyajima, however, has prohibited the feeding of deer in an attempt to separate them from the human habitat. Yet, some sympathetic people still feed the deer, which are confronted with a shortage of food due to an increasing population. Car accidents caused by the animals have also increased, compounding this serious issue. In her series of photographs, Yoko Ishii shows the freedom deer have to transgress the boundaries between humans and nature.”

Book of the day > Bruce Davidson: Survey. Aperture and Fundación Mapfre. “Bruce Davidson is a pioneer of social documentary photography. He began taking photographs at the age of ten and continued to develop his passion at Rochester Institute of Technology and Yale University. Later called upon for military service, Davidson met Henri Cartier-Bresson in France and was introduced to Magnum Photos. In his work, Davidson prizes his relationship to the subject above all else. From his profound documentation of the civil rights movement to his in-depth study of one derelict block in Harlem, he has immersed himself fully in his projects, which have sometimes taken him several years to complete. He once wrote, 'I often find myself an outsider on the inside, discovering beauty and meaning in the most desperate of situations.

This survey, created in conjunction with an exhibition at Fundación Mapfre in Spain, focuses on the work that has made Davidson one of the most influential documentary photographers to this day. In addition to his civil rights series and his work in Harlem, the book includes Davidson’s well-known series Brooklyn Gang, Subway, and Central Park. The book also highlights more recent projects, such as his explorations of Paris and Los Angeles landscapes.”

Book of the day > Death Takes a Holiday by Darin Mickey. J & L Books (@jandlbooks). “In 2014, New York–based photographer Darin Mickey began documenting a handful of record shops in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania—independently run stores that opened primarily in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s, many of which are now on their last legs, or have recently been shuttered. These stores are the alphabetized havens for the musical successes of a few and the forgotten failures of many. Shot from the perspective of a middle-aged man restlessly clinging to his youth and the hope of finding that elusive artifact to make anxiety subside and keep the reaper at bay, Death Takes a Holiday shows us a community of beautiful recluses brought together by obsession, compulsion and a pure, undying love of music.”

Book of the day > William Eggleston Portraits. Yale University Press. “The eminent American photographer William Eggleston was a pioneer in exploring the artistic potential of color photography. Eggleston made a name for himself with his eccentric, unexpected compositions of everyday life that were nonetheless rife with implied narrative, elevating the commonplace to art. This sumptuously illustrated book features Eggleston’s masterful portraits, including many familiar and beloved images as well as some previously unseen photographs from his long and productive career.  Many of Eggleston’s poetic photographs portray life in his home state of Tennessee, and the people he encountered there. Eggleston frequented the 1970s Memphis club scene, where he met, befriended, and photographed musicians such as fellow Southerners Alex Chilton and Ike Turner. He also photographed celebrities including Dennis Hopper, Walter Hopps, and Eudora Welty, and became a fixture of Andy Warhol’s Factory scene, dating the Warhol protégé Viva. Over the past half century, he has created a powerful and enduring body of work featuring friends and family, musicians, artists, and strangers. In addition to the lavish reproductions of Eggleston’s portraits, this volume includes an essay and chronology, plus an interview with Eggleston and his close family members that gives new insights into his images and artistic process.”

Book of the day > H.R. Giger: Alien Diaries. Edition Patrick Frey. “H.R. Giger worked in the Shepperton Studios near London from February to November 1978, creating the figures and sets for the film Alien (1979) directed by Ridley Scott. The film became an international success, earning Giger an Oscar. In the transcribed Alien Diaries, published here for the first time as a facsimile, HR Giger describes his work in the studios. He writes, sketches, and takes photographs with his Polaroid SX70. With brutal honesty, sarcasm and occasional despair, Giger describes what it is like working for the film industry and how he struggles against all odds — be it the stinginess of producers or the sluggishness of his staff — to see his designs become reality. The Alien Diaries (in German transcription with an English translation) show a little-known personal side of the artist HR Giger and offer an unusual, detailed glimpse into the making of a movie classic through the eyes of a Swiss artist. The book contains almost completely unpublished material, including drawings, Polaroids showing the monster coming to life, and several still shots from the plentiful film material that Giger took in Shepperton.”