Book of the day > Curtis Moffat: Silver Society: Experimental Photography and Design, 1923-1935. Published by Steidl. "This deluxe monograph is the perfect gift for the fashion lover who has everything. Published by Steidl, it collects the abstract photographs and breathtaking portraits of an overlooked Modernist master of the 1920s and 30s. This is the first publication on the American modernist photographer Curtis Moffat (1887-1949), who is known for his dynamic abstract photographs, innovative color still lifes and some of the most glamorous society portraits of the early 20th century. He was also a pivotal figure in modernist interior design and furniture. Living in London throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, in the era of the "Bright Young Things," Moffat produced stylish photographic portraits of leading figures in high society, theatre and the arts, including Cecil Beaton, the Sitwells, Nancy Cunard, Lady Diana Cooper, Tallulah Bankhead and Daphne du Maurier. In 2003 and 2007, Moffat's daughter, Penelope Smail, generously donated her father's extensive archive to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. This book is drawn from that archive and includes, in addition, digital reconstructions of color images from original tri-carbro process black-and-white negatives. It reveals Moffat's pioneering but hitherto little-known photography in all its depth and beauty."
 

Book of the day and book signing tomorrow (3/11, 4-6!) > Gordon B. Kaufmann (Master Architects of Southern California 1920-1940). Published by Angel City Press. "Master Architects of Southern California 1920-1940 is a new twelve volume series overseen by Marc Appleton, Bret Parsons, and Steve Vaught that showcases the work of the Golden Era’s most important residential architects. Featuring period photographs of the work of legendary names in the region's architecture, these monographs are devoted to the period when oil barons, film industry moguls, bankers, and successful entrepreneurs who were new to Los Angeles sought to hire the most accomplished and talented architects they could find.

The premiere volume showcases Gordon B. Kaufmann, whose design for Greystone - the famed Beverly Hills domicile he created for E.L. Doheny Jr. and Lucy Doheny - catapulted him to the top of his field. Combining elements of English Gothic and Jacobean styles, the fifty-five room manor for the son and daughter-in-law of the then-richest man in the United States became the largest private residence in Southern California.

Though Kaufmann’s name and legacy have since dimmed to all but architectural historians and savvy realtors, his stamp is all over Southern California, and Greystone is hardly his only notable achievement. GORDON B. KAUFMANN includes a detailed career biography that chronicles numerous residential projects he designed, including homes for legendary Los Angeles families with names like Chandler, Janss, Adamson, Getz, and Hampshur-Jones, to name a few. In addition, Kaufmann designed Hoover Dam, the Los Angeles Times Building, Caltech’s Athenaeum, Santa Anita Park, and other important local landmarks.

The period from 1920 to 1940 was an era of incredible homes that utilized the very best building materials available, prior to their being needed for the nation's World War II effort. Notes co-author Bret Parsons “Artisans were still crafting the best details from those remarkable materials; redwood two-by-fours still measured two-inches by four-inches”. These residences defined Los Angeles as a city whose architectural heritage was in the making. “These were the homes that made architectural history, yet few were properly documented.” 

Join us tomorrow (Saturday, 3/11, 4:00-6:00) or purchase a signed copy here.

Book of the day > Damn Son Where Did You Find This? A Book about US Hiphop Mixtape Cover Art. Published by Koenig Books. "The first book ever to focus on the cover art of the modern US hip hop CD mixtape. From the bootleg recordings of Kool Herc in the 1970s to Lil’ Wayne, Jay-Z, Nicki Minaj and Drake’s latest opus, CD mixtapes have been and continue to be an essential part of hip hop culture. A visual world that reached unseen levels at the turn of the millennium, uncensored, unregulated and extreme, it is the most anarchic of all genres of graphic design.

To make their music stand apart from the dozens of mixtapes regularly released on sites like datpiff.com, hip hop artists rely on cover art to catch listeners’ eyes. The race for attention-grabbing covers led mixtapes to adopt a lurid movie-poster aesthetic: flashy and explosive.

Freed from label guidelines, legal opinion and moral hindrances, the five designers featured in Damn Son Where Did You Find This?—KidEight, Miami Kaos, Mike Rev and Tansta & Skrilla—created covers for the likes of Lil’ Wayne, Jay-Z, Nicki Minaj, Drake, Gucci Mane, Rick Ross, The Game, Tupac, Eminem, Raekwon, 2Chainz, Young Jeezy and A$AP. Along with 500 of these covers, interviews with the designers recount how they entered the hip hop mixtape industry, taking us through the creative process, describing how visual trends have come and gone, and how designing mixtape covers changed the trajectories of their lives. Originally published as a limited edition of 400 hand-numbered copies (which quickly sold out), Damn Son Where Did You Find This? is at last available as a trade edition."

Book of the day > Raymond Pettibon: A Pen of All Work. Published by Phaidon in association with the New Museum. " The most comprehensive monograph in print on this provocative artist, who has helped to redefine contemporary art. This thorough, multifaceted assessment of Raymond Pettibon's entire career to date includes nearly 700 images, contributions from important figures in the art-historical and cultural fields, and a recent interview with the artist. Beginning with childhood drawings, the book moves through to his mature work, which embraces both high and low culture." @phaidonsnaps @newmuseum

Book of the day > Watercolors by Finn Juhl. Published by Hatje Cantz. “Among the great Danish designers, Finn Juhl  ranks alongside such giants as Hans J. Wegner and Arne Jacobsen. He was particularly well known for his sculptural, seemingly organic tables, chairs and sofas, but the complex interior designs that he developed in the 1940s and ‘50s were also enormously successful. These include the Danish Embassy in Washington, DC, and the conference room of the United Nations Trusteeship Council in New York.
However, it is not widely known that Finn Juhl was also a talented watercolor painter who used the medium to devise gorgeous, exacting sketches of his pieces. For the first time, this publication allows readers to take a unique look at the designer’s working methods. Here, more than 125 subtle works on paper communicate the ingenuity of their creator. Finn Juhl’s furniture classics, living concepts and interior designs can finally be experienced in all their complexity, as one traces their development from genesis to realization.” @hatjecantzverlag

Book of the day > Sergio Larrain: Valparaíso. Published by Aperture. "A notoriously reclusive artist, Sergio Larrain had a photographic career that was relatively short before he retreated to the Chilean countryside in the late 1960s to study meditation. Nevertheless, he is widely celebrated for his experimental process and the raw imagery he produced throughout Europe and Latin America. His most well-known project, Valparaíso, began in 1957 while he was traveling with poet Pablo Neruda for Du magazine. When the photographs were first published in 1991, Larrain informed the publishers that he had made his own facsimile of the book, reflecting how he would have constructed the layout, and now this facsimile is beautifully produced for the first time in book form. Including text by the celebrated Pablo Neruda as well as correspondence between Larrain and Henri Cartier-Bresson, Valparaíso presents the long-awaited return of this rare and renowned body of work."@aperturefnd 
 

Book of the day > Karolin Klüppel: Kingdom of Girls. Published by Hatje Cantz. “The pictures in German photographer Karolin Klüppel’s (born 1985) new monograph, Kingdom of Girls, are distinguished by their contemplative aesthetic. The girls’ faces reveal the lifeworld and culture of the Khasi, an indigenous people in the Indian state of Meghalaya with a matrilineal social system: the youngest daughter is given preference in the order of succession. When she marries, her husband moves into her family’s home, and the children receive the mother’s name. Only the birth of a daughter guarantees the continuity of the clan. Between 2013 and 2015, the photographer spent a total of ten months in the Khasi village of Mawlynnong, where she captured these magical images.”

Book of the day > Love & Hate & Other Mysteries : Found Altered Snapshots from the Collection of Thierry Struvay. Published by August Editions. “A photograph is forever. Or is it? Culled from the vast vernacular photographic collection of Thierry Struvay, Love & Hate & Other Mysteries presents a funny, often poignant and truthful glimpse into the human condition. The unassuming and elegantly designed hardcover publication explodes once opened with 100 found black-and- white and color photographs that have been manually altered by scissors or pen or physically attacked in a fit of rage. Some deletions, such as a missing face in the shape of a heart or oval, were clearly intended for a locket. Others, however, contain angrily scratched-out heads and bodies or are simply torn in half. A third group feature manipulations more mysterious in nature: strange cut-outs that hint at a mix of emotions and motives. Together with a poetic introductory text by Glenn O'Brien, the photographs suggest a wide range of human drama, from affection to anger and much in between.”

Book of the day > Ecologies of Power: Countermapping the Logistical Landscapes and Military Geographies of the U.S. Department of Defense. Published by The MIT Press. “This book is not about war, nor is it a history of war. Avoiding the shock and awe of wartime images, it explores the contemporary spatial configurations of power camouflaged in the infrastructures, environments, and scales of military operations. Instead of wartime highs, this book starts with drawdown lows, when demobilization and decommissioning morph into realignment and prepositioning. It is in this transitional milieu that the full material magnitudes and geographic entanglements of contemporary militarism are laid bare. Through this perpetual cycle of build up and breakdown, the U.S. Department of Defense -- the single largest developer, landowner, equipment contractor, and energy consumer in the world -- has engineered a planetary assemblage of "operational environments" in which militarized, demilitarized, and non-militarized landscapes are increasingly inextricable.

In a series of critical cartographic essays, Pierre Bélanger and Alexander Arroyo trace this footprint far beyond the battlefield, countermapping the geographies of U.S. militarism across five of the most important and embattled operational environments: the ocean, the atmosphere, the highway, the city, and the desert. From the Indian Ocean atoll of Diego Garcia to the defense-contractor archipelago around Washington, D.C.; from the A01 Highway circling Afghanistan's high-altitude steppe to surveillance satellites pinging the planet from low-earth orbit; and from the vast cold chain conveying military perishables worldwide to the global constellation of military dumps, sinks, and scrapyards, the book unearths the logistical infrastructures and residual landscapes that render strategy spatial, militarism material, and power operational. In so doing, Bélanger and Arroyo reveal unseen ecologies of power at work in the making and unmaking of environments -- operational, built, and otherwise -- to come.”

Book of the day > See Red Women’s Workshop: Feminist Posters 1974-1990. Published by Four Corners Books. "A feminist silkscreen poster collective founded in London in 1974 by three former art students, the See Red Women’s Workshop grew out of a shared desire to combat sexist images of women and to create positive and challenging alternatives. Women from different backgrounds came together to make posters and calendars that tackled issues of sexuality, identity and oppression. With humor and bold, colorful graphics, See Red expressed the personal experiences of women as well as their role in wider struggles for change.
Written by See Red members, detailing the group’s history up until the closure of the workshop in 1990, and with a foreword by celebrated feminist historian Sheila Rowbotham, See Red Women’s Workshop features all of the collective’s original screenprints and posters. Confronting negative stereotypes, questioning the role of women in society, and promoting women’s self-determination, the power and energy of these images reflect an important and dynamic era of women’s liberation—with continued relevance for today.”