Book of the day > Oscar Abolafia: Icons By Oscar. Terra (TerraLanoo)." Frank. Sammie. Twiggy. Sophia. Elizabeth. Elvis. Priscilla. Jim. Marlene. John. Yoko. Ginger. Janis. Mick. Jack. Fred. Salvador. Cher. Audrey. Dolly. Elton. Marlon... Very few celebrities are so iconic that a single name is all that's needed in order to immediately recognise them. One photographer has captured each and every one of these icons - and more besides - on film. He goes by the name of Oscar Abolafia. You can call him Oscar.   Oscar Abolafia is an American photographer known for his outstanding photojournalism of the celebrities that made the 1960s and 70s truly extraordinary. At a young age, William Vandivert, one of the founders of Magnum Photos, took him on as an assistant and showed him the ropes about technical and lighting skills. Abolafia's work made the pages of world-famous magazines such as People Magazine, Vanity Fair and Harper's Bazaar. Over a span of 50 years of work in the field of photography, he was able to build personal and intimate relationships with the most enduring stars of our age, such as the Kennedys, Liz Taylor, Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra, to name but a few. Icons by Oscar is the MENDO initiative that has opened up, for the first time ever, Oscar Abolafia's treasure trove of more than 300,000 intimate and iconic photographs. A carefully curated conversation with the iconic figures from our past starts now.”

Book of the day > Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round so Our Thoughts Can Change Direction. Museum of Modern Art + Kunsthaus Zürich. “By rejecting consistency, Picabia powerfully asserted the artist's freedom to change.  Published in conjunction with the first large-scale retrospective of Picabia’s work in the United States since 1970, Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round so Our Thoughts Can Change Direction is a sweeping survey of the artist’s profoundly innovative and influential career. Among the great modern artists of the past century, Picabia is one of the most elusive, given his extreme eclecticism and persistent acts of self-contradiction. Though known as a Dadaist, Picabia’s ongoing stylistic shifts, from Impressionism to radical abstraction, from mechanical imagery to pseudo-classicism and from photo-based realism to art informel remain to be assessed in depth. Similarly, the breadth of his practice, which encompassed poetry, film and performance, is under-recognized. Each makes him a figure relevant for contemporary artists, while his career as a whole challenges familiar narratives of modernism. This volume presents over 100 paintings, complemented by works on paper, publications, and film. Featuring some 500 illustrations and 14 essays, it examines the full range of Picabia’s oeuvre. Authors including distinguished professors George Baker, Briony Fer and David Joselit, and renowned Picabia scholars Carole Boulbès and Arnauld Pierre, discuss a varied series of topics, including the corporeal character of Picabia’s abstractions, his unexpected turn to mechanical painting, his experiments with materials and source imagery, the problems of his politics and his contemporary legacy. A richly illustrated chronology details the expanded nature of Picabia’s visual production—from press polemics to party organizing.”

Book of the day > Slash: A Punk Magazine from Los Angeles: 1977-1980. “The legendary punk and new wave alternative weekly magazine Slash was founded in Los Angeles in 1977 by Steve Samiof, and published a total of 29 print issues before its demise in 1980 (though it had a second life as the punk label Slash Records, which was eventually bought by Warner Bros. Records in 1999). In its brief run, Slash defined the punk subculture in Los Angeles and beyond with the comic strip Jimbo by Gary Panter and photographs by Melanie Nissen, the co-founding publisher and longtime photo editor. Writing by Jeffrey Lee Pierce, Chris D., Pleasant Gehman and Claude “Kickboy Face” Bessy explored reggae, blues and rockabilly in addition to punk and new wave.  Slash diagnosed the nascent punk scene’s challenge to the music industry and established its own oppositional voice in the editorial of its very first issue, staking a position against disco, Elvis and concept albums, and declaring: ‘Enough is enough, partner! About time we squeezed the pus out and sent the filthy rich old farts of rock ’n’ roll to retirement homes in Florida where they belong.’ Slash: A Punk Magazine From Los Angeles, 1977–80 pays homage to the magazine’s legacy with facsimile reproductions of every cover from the publication’s run and reprints of some of the magazine’s best articles and interviews. These are interspersed with new essays, reportage and oral histories from Exene Cervenka, KK Barrett, Gary Panter, Vivien Goldman, Richard Meltzer, Cali Thornhill DeWitt, Chris D., Bryan Ray Turcotte, Chris Morris, Ann Summa and Allan MacDowell, among others, telling the story of this critical chapter in the history of American media.” @hatandbeardpress

Book of the day > Bill Henson. Editions Bessard. “Limited edition of 750 copies with a Signed C-Print inside the book. Lenticular cover. Bill Henson is a visionary explorer of twilight zones, between nature and civilization, youth and adulthood, male and female. His photographs are painterly tableaux that continue the traditions of romantic literature and painting.” @editionsbessard

Book of the day > The Photographer's Cookbook. Aperture/George Eastman Museum. “In the late 1970s, the George Eastman Museum approached a group of photographers to ask for their favorite recipes and food-related photographs to go with them, in pursuit of publishing a cookbook. Playing off George Eastman’s own famous recipe for lemon meringue pie, as well as former director Beaumont Newhall’s love of food, the cookbook grew from the idea that photographers’ talent in the darkroom must also translate into special skills in the kitchen. The recipes do not disappoint, with Robert Adams’ Big Sugar Cookies, Ansel Adams’ Poached Eggs in Beer, Richard Avedon’s Royal Pot Roast, Imogen Cunningham’s Borscht, William Eggleston’s Cheese Grits Casserole, Stephen Shore’s Key Lime Pie Supreme and Ed Ruscha’s Cactus Omelette, to name a few. The book was never published, and the materials have remained in George Eastman Museum’s collection ever since. Now, nearly 40 years later, this extensive and distinctive archive of untouched recipes and photographs is published in The Photographer’s Cookbook for the first time. The book provides a time capsule of contemporary photographers of the 1970s—many before they made a name for themselves—as well as a fascinating look at how they depicted food, family and home, taking readers behind the camera and into the hearts and stomachs of some of photography’s most important practitioners.”

Book of the day > Undercover by Jun Takahashi. Rizzoli. “The first comprehensive book on the work of Jun Takahashi of UNDERCOVER, an icon of Harajuku streetwear and the presumptive heir to the heavy mantle of Japanese deconstruction. Takahashi Jun’s fashion is not born out of an excessively intellectualized agenda. While not quite populist, his generative influences are instead romantic—even gothic. A fixture of the Paris collections for more than ten years—plus seventeen uninterrupted seasons in Tokyo prior to that—Takahashi’s life’s work confirms a maturation from self-conscious artifice and rebel pastiche to a steely, withering elegance all his own. Hailing from Gunma Prefecture like his friend NIGO® of *A Bathing Ape®, Takahashi’s long association with the undisputed king of Ura-Harajuku in the early 1990s is now the stuff of local fashion lore. But Takahashi would blaze an entirely different path to legend and notoriety. The violent rending and hasty reassembly that characterized his early work, its calculated imperfections and sutured seams, have given way to collections that he himself now calls "sexy and feminine." UNDERCOVER is insightfully curated with fashion-filled chapters devoted to Takahashi’s sketches, graphic work, collaborations, and most innovative designs to date. Lavishly illustrated with more than 200 photographs and in-depth essays by fashion writers, curators, and colleagues, this book gives readers first time access into Takahashi’s UNDERCOVER, one of the most desired and multidimensional clothing lines in contemporary fashion.”
 

Book of the day > Ed Ruscha and the Great American West. University of California Press & Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. “The renowned artist Ed Ruscha was born in Nebraska, grew up in Oklahoma, and has lived and worked in Southern California since the late 1950s. Beginning in 1956, road trips across the American Southwest furnished a conceptual trove of themes and motifs that he mined throughout his career. The everyday landscapes of the West, especially as experienced from the automobile—gas stations, billboards, building facades, parking lots, and long stretches of roadway—are the primary motifs of his often deadpan and instantly recognizable paintings and works on paper, as well as his influential artist books such as Twentysix Gasoline Stations and All the Buildings on the Sunset Strip. His iconic word images—declaring Adios, Rodeo, Wheels over Indian Trails, and Honey . . . I Twisted through More Damn Traffic to Get Here—further underscore a contemporary Western sensibility. Ruscha’s interest in what the real West has become—and Hollywood’s version of it—plays out across his oeuvre. The cinematic sources of his subject matter can be seen in his silhouette pictures, which often appear to be grainy stills from old Hollywood movies. They feature images of the contemporary West, such as parking lots and swimming pools, but also of its historical past: covered wagons, buffalo, teepees, and howling coyotes. Featuring essays by Karin Breuer and D.J. Waldie, plus a fascinating interview with the artist conducted by Kerry Brougher, this stunning catalogue, produced in close collaboration with the Ruscha studio, offers the first full exploration of the painter’s lifelong fascination with the romantic concept and modern reality of the evolving American West.”

Book of the day > Sofia Borges: The Swamp. MACK.  “Reality as mud as dense as air” reads the spine of Sofia Borges’ book The Swamp, and equally, the series of photographs that she presents is as leaden as it is impenetrable. Spanning a seven-year period, it largely records Borges’ countless visits to natural history museums, zoos, aquariums and research centres, where the artifice of reality became her point of focus. For Borges, displays such as habitat dioramas serve as the ultimate form of representation, where objects have the virtuous task of representing “themselves” – a type, genre or group that is inherently bound to language through layers of history and meaning. As a motionless walrus lies in its plastic Antarctic locale and the beady eye of a fossilised bird catches your glance, what glares back at you from the depths of The Swamp is not the thing itself, but the image, of an image, of an image.

‘What I seek are images, which, in their very artifice, are able to present themselves as a problem’, Borges has said. Beyond the comical absurdity of museological spectacles that spawn the living dead, The Swamp takes aim at the notion that images can be ‘read’. Taking inspiration from the insoluble language of Beckett on the one hand, and the cinematic mind-twists of Lynch on the other, Borges disrupts logical processes of comprehension, offering seemingly random sequences of images, whose monstrous forms and coarse surfaces purposefully assault the senses.” @mack_books

Book of the day > Kaleidoscope #27: Sterling Ruby Takeover. Summer 2016. @kaleidoscopemagazine “This issue is a key to enter the world of Los Angeles-based artist Sterling Ruby, exclusively playing the double role of subject and guest editor. Conceived as a viral, aggressive takeover of the magazine’s architecture, content and design, this hyper-vertical survey is the result of an intense dialogue with the artist and his studio, comprised of 160+ pages on his exuberant work and vision.

Ruby’s cover portrait is drawn from an extensive series shot by photographer Max Farago at the artist’s massive industrial studio space in LA. Inside, the Sterling Ruby Takeover decodes the artist’s grammar through an intimate conversation with artist Piero Golia and newly commissioned writings by Alex Gartenfeld, Donatien Grau, Aram Moshayedi, Ross Simonini, Paul Schimmel and Catherine Taft; while his network of influences is explored through a series of guest features dedicated to his peers, heroes and collaborators, including Huma Bhabha (by Massimiliano Gioni), Cassils (by Francesca Gavin), Mike Davis (by Sterling Ruby), John Divola (by Alexander Shulan), Cyprien Gaillard (by Natalia Valencia Arango), Ron Nagle (by Sterling Ruby), Nancy Rubins (by Sterling Ruby), Raf Simons (by Alessio Ascari) and Melanie Schiff (by Sarah Workneh). All of this content is punctuated by stunning visual contributions especially created by Ruby for the magazine’s pages, comprising an unseen presentation of his Work Wear modeled by the entire studio team.” #sterlingruby

Book of the day > Gus Van Sant: Icons. La Cinématèque Française with Actes Sud. “Gus Van Sant: Icons offers insight into the world of filmmaker Gus Van Sant, published on the occasion of a major exhibition at the Cinémathèque française in Paris. This comprehensive monograph surveys the full range of Van Sant’s artistry from photography and painting to music, filtered through the perspective of his films. The exhibition and catalogue are a thoroughly original take on a distinctive filmmaker, bringing together all facets of his work for the first time and offering a fresh vision of his iconic filmmaking.

The heart of Gus Van Sant: Icons is a previously unpublished interview with Van Sant conducted in Portland in June 2015 by Matthieu Orléans, the exhibition’s curator. In a wide-ranging conversation, the two men discuss the whole scope of Van Sant’s work and inspirations. Van Sant connects himself to a lineage of other artists, citing William Burroughs, William Eggleston, Harmony Korine and Ed Ruscha as influences. The filmmaker offers firsthand anecdotes and in-depth appraisals of the production processes of each of his movies, from the experimental shorts of the 1970s to his most recent film, Sea of Trees, presented at the Cannes Festival in May 2015.”