Book of the day (and book signing Saturday – not to be missed! – details here) > Deanna Templeton: The Swimming Pool. Um Yeah Arts (@deannatempleton, @umyeaharts). “The Swimming Pool is a new photographic essay from California-based street photographer Deanna Templeton that departs from her usual style to offer an expressive, intimate view of the human form underwater. The series was born after an impromptu nude swimming-pool shoot of husband and artist Ed Templeton, which spurred an eight-year journey in the study of light, expression and the enigma of water. Shooting entirely on color and black-and-white film and Polaroid, Templeton sent friends into the pool to be photographed in their truest form. Unlike her street photography, in which subjects were often strangers, Templeton found that creating these portraits required more intimacy and connection—a feeling that is apparent throughout every image in the series, which show strong, liberated individuals, confident and at ease in their most beautiful and vulnerable moments. As Ed Templeton writes in his afterword to this volume, ‘the nude swimmer is floating in a void of quiet solitude, the gentle pressure of being underwater enclosing her form like a baby in a womb and nothing exists outside of this world. A lone figure amidst a sea of blues and greys and frenetic sunlight performing a solitary dance for the photographer above, choosing movements and directions, twisting and swooping, contorting and expelling breaths painting a picture of form and light together.’ The Swimming Pool offers a deep and inspiring view of the human form.” If you can’t make it this Saturday and would like to order a signed copy of Deanna’s book (standard OR deluxe!), you can pre-order it here. $ 55.00

Book of the day > Takashi Homma - The Narcissistic City. MACK (@MACK_books). ‘What kind of gaze does the city license? What kind of gaze does it induce, determine, inform, program, organise? What is the nature of the city as reality, as image and as symbol? What is this object of desire, at once near and ungraspable, fascinating and repulsive, attractive and intractable, necessary and unbearable, intimate and impenetrable, available and inaccessible, that it is for itself as well as for the man of the crowd, for the man in the street, for the man of the city, for those who inhabit it and those merely passing through it, for anyone who knows that it is a labyrinth but nonetheless allows himself to remain trapped in it?’ Hubert Damisch.

“Takashi Homma uses fragments collected in camera obscura constructed in metropolitan areas of Japan and the US to build a city image by image. Homma does not seek to index any particular city but to render a shadow world, a city's unconscious caught in a dark chamber, suspended in the camera’s box. The camera obscura offers a repetition, like the reflection shimmering in Narcissus’s pool. The narcissistic city is a city transfixed upon its own image – a mirror city, laced with repetition (modular) and reflections (glass). A city looking at its reflection, a city caught in a dark chamber, a city observing its camera obscura inversion – flickering inside the camera’s box.”

Book of the day > The Dark Carnival: Portraits from the Endless Night by Derek Ridgers. Carpet Bombing Culture. “For some, heaven will not be a perpetual dawn but rather an endless night - an eternity of the wild hours between dusk and sunrise.The Dark Carnival is a celebration of human beings given the rare space to play out their fantasy visions of themselves, the fleeting impressions of people dressed up for the glorious night caught in all their decadent glory. A unique collection of portraits personally selected by one of the UKs foremost portrait photographers covering alternative London's unique counter-cultural history from Punks, New Romantics, Goths, Disco Queens, Soul Boys, Fetish Worshippers, Rockers, Cyberpunks, Ravers, Clubbers and Party Animals. Derek Ridgers has been a feature in the clubs and on the streets of the capital for over 50 years - indulging in his obsession for documenting the people dressed up for the glorious night.Anyone who loves street style, youth subcultures, portrait photography and the curious human penchant for playing dressing up, will find this collection a darkly fascinating celebration of both night life and decadence.Packed with images exploring DIY fashion, self-expression and the fabulous strangeness of the human animal, ravers of all kinds will spend happy hours gazing at this book, at once a piece of social history and a visual poem, an expression of the fascinations of the author, a feast of luscious crepuscular imagery.” $ 45.00

Book of the day > Daniel Naudé: Sightings of the Sacred. Prestel. “The renowned South African photographer Daniel Naudé’s moving studies of cattle in cultures where they are considered sacred offer unique insight into the lives of the people, the animals, and the spiritual practices that have remained unchanged for thousands of years. For the past two years Daniel Naudé has focused on photographing cattle in societies where these animals are venerated. This beautiful book presents images from parts of Uganda, Madagascar, and India where these animals represent a culture’s most profound beliefs. Naudé photographs his subjects with the same respect any photographer would lend toward humans. Richly colored and exquisitely composed, these portraits capture the animals’ presence and the landscapes they inhabit while also telling us much about cosmology, ancestor worship, culture, and the tradition of spiritual practices that have evolved over the ages. Like the best photographers, Naudé achieves this all within a single photographic frame.” $ 55.00

Book of the day > Wallace Berman: American Aleph. Michael Kohn Gallery. Introduction by Tosh Berman. Text by Claudia Bohn-Spector, Sam Mellon, Ken Allan. And we highly recommend that you visit Kohn Gallery to see the fantastic exhibition that this book accompanies.

“Commemorating the 40th anniversary of the artist’s accidental death at age 50, this volume offers the first substantial survey of the entire oeuvre of Wallace Berman from the late 1940s until 1976. Berman has been long heralded as one of the most significant and influential artists to emerge in Southern California. Spiritually inclined yet steeped in popular culture and the political events of the day, he conducted reconnaissance far beyond the borders of California, mining the American psyche and broadcasting his ideas through mail art, publications, photographs and multilayered art works. Berman intersected with several intriguing cultural moments, starting with his first Los Angeles solo show in 1957 at Ed Kienholz and Walter Hopps’ Ferus Gallery. He also participated in an important 1966 group exhibition in London at the legendary Robert Fraser Gallery, whose other artists included Richard Hamilton, Bruce Conner and Peter Blake--who put Berman’s face among the notable crowd in his cover for the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. As interest in West Coast art has increased over the past 40 years, scholars have viewed Berman as a quintessentially Californian artist whose entourage of likeminded friends was essential to the formation of his creative vision. This volume takes a broader view, reassessing Berman’s significant contributions to the history of 20th-century American art.” $ 59.95

Book of the day > The Tale Of Tomorrow Photography & Architecture: Utopian Architecture in the Modernist Realm. Gestalten. 

"Driven by idealistic visions, utopian architecture aimed to overcome social divisions and political strife, to put us in touch with nature, and to enable us to live humane, healthy lives. For half a century, it was both hope and inspiration. The Tale of Tomorrow surveys this diverse twentieth century phenomenon, featuring renowned works like The House of the Century or the TWA terminal, as well as lesser-known masterpieces, and profiling major thinkers such as Oscar Niemeyer, Le Corbusier, and Eero Saarinen. By digging through archives, corresponding with descendants of departed architects, and restoring photographs, the collection of utopian approaches herein maintains a visual power and infectious optimism. The retro-futuristic epoch is one of the most visually spectacular in architecture’s history. The utopian buildings of the 1960s and 1970s never go out of style. This book compiles radical ideas, rediscovered photos, and visionary structures.” $ 68.00

Book of the day > Chris Killiip: In Flagrante Two. Steidl. “The photographs that Chris Killip took in Northern England between 1973 and 1985 were first published by Secker & Warburg as In Flagrante in 1988, a volume that quickly established itself as the most important 1980s photobook on England and a classic of the genre. Compassionate but unwavering in its gaze, In Flagrante documented industrial Northern England in decline, suffering from the aftershocks of neoliberal economic strategies most brutally embodied in the policies of Margaret Thatcher. ‘The objective history of England doesn't amount to much if you don't believe in it, and I don't,’ reflects Killip. ‘And I don't believe that anyone in these photographs does either, as they face the reality of deindustrialization in a system which regards their lives as disposable.’ Chris Killip: In Flagrante Two revisits the classic photobook with a beautifully produced, radically updated presentation: each double-page spread features a single image on the right side. Strident in its belief in the primacy and power of the photographic image, In Flagrante Two allows for and embraces ambiguities and contradictions arising from the unadorned narrative sequence, completely devoid of text--forcing viewers to truly look, to witness.” $ 75.00

Book of the day > Reigning Men: Fashion in Menswear, 1715-2015. LACMA | Delmonico | Prestel. “This fully illustrated book accompanies one of the most comprehensive exhibitions dedicated solely to three centuries of men’s fashion. The fashionable male may be making a comeback, but early fashion trends centered around what men—not women—were wearing. This intriguing book traces the history of men’s fashion since the 18th century, when young Englishmen imitated foreign dress and manners after touring the European continent. This phenomenon is only one of many explored in sections titled "Revolution/Evolution", "East/West", "Uniformity", "Body Consciousness", and "The Splendid Man". In addition to numerous illustrations of extant menswear, the book captures the 19th-century dandy, a more restrained brand of expensive elegance which became the hallmark of Savile Row; the post-WWII mod, who relished the colorful styles of Carnaby Street; and the 21st-century man—ultra-chic in a sleek suit by day, wearing a flowered tuxedo by night. "Reigning Men" illuminates connections between history and high fashion, traces cultural influences over the centuries, examines how uniforms have profoundly shaped fashionable dress, and reveals that women aren’t the only ones who cinch and pad their bodies.” $ 55.00

Book of the day > Hilma Af Klint: Painting the Unseen. Koenig Books. “Working before Kandinsky and Malevich, Swedish artist Hilma af Klint was arguably the first abstract painter in the history of modern art. Hilma af Klint graduated from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm in 1887, established a studio in the city, and began creating and exhibiting traditional landscapes, botanical drawings and portraits. Privately, however, af Klint was already beginning to discard what she had learned at the Academy in favor of painting the invisible worlds hidden within nature, the spiritual realm and the occult.  As early as 1906, af Klint was working with abstract imagery--giving her a lead of several years in the modernist race to be the first to discover abstraction. She joined a group of four other female artists, “The Five,” which held séances and experimented with automatic writing and drawing--decades before the Surrealists would do something similar.

In 1905, af Klint received a “commission” from the mysterious entity Amaliel to create her most important body of work: The Paintings for the Temple. Hilma af Klint: Painting the Unseen focuses on this important series, consisting of 193 predominately abstract paintings in various series and subgroups. Claiming to act as merely a medium for spiritual forces guiding her hand, af Klint painted a path towards a harmony between the spiritual and material worlds; good and evil; man and woman; religion and science.”