Book of the Day Posted Feb 01, 2022

Book of the Day > David Hockney: Moving Focus

Purchase ● A unique overview of David Hockney's prolific range and activity
 
David Hockney has been delighting and challenging audiences for sixty years and celebrated artworks from across his career are at the centre of Tate’s outstanding collection. This book features over a hundred of these paintings, prints, drawings and photographs, helping the reader to understand the artist’s changing sources of inspiration and, crucially, where his work is going. Beginning in the 1950s when he made his first steps to becoming a modern artist, the publication charts Hockney’s ground-breaking images of the early 1960s through to his famous depictions of the Los Angeles cityscape. It also looks at Hockney’s much-loved portraits from the 1970s and his discovery of a new way of dealing with time, space and perspective he called ‘Moving Focus’, as well as more recent landscapes and digital images that demonstrate his lifelong preoccupation with pictorial space and how we look at and experience the world around us.
 
As well as providing a unique overview of Hockney’s prolific range and activity, this book features new texts and responses to his work by established and emerging voices from the worlds of art, design, literature and performance. Breathing new life into the nexus of Tate’s collection, it speaks to the artist’s refusal to conform during periods of uncertainty and polarization as he traversed the boundaries of class, sexuality and high art and how his work still surprises, unsettles and addresses younger generations of viewers.
Book of the Day Posted Jan 28, 2022

Book of the Day > Marchand and Meffre: Movie Theaters

Purchase ● Following on the heels of their incredibly successful The Ruins of Detroit, this major new project by the prolific French photographer duo Marchand/Meffre, poignantly eulogizes and celebrates the tattered remains of hundreds of movie theaters across America.
 
They are in every American city and town—grandiose movie palaces, constructed during the heyday of the entertainment industry, that now stand abandoned, empty, decaying, or repurposed. Since 2005, the acclaimed photographic duo Marchand/Meffre have been traveling across the US to visit these early 20th-century relics. In hundreds of lushly colored images, they have captured the rich architectural diversity of the theaters’ exteriors, from neo renaissance to neo-Gothic, art nouveau to Bauhaus, and neo-Byzantine to Jugendstill. They have also stepped inside to capture the commonalities of a dying culture— crumbling plaster, rows of broken crushed-velvet seats, peeling paint, defunct equipment, and abandoned concession stands—as well as their transformation into bingo halls, warehouses, fitness centers, flea markets, parking lots, and grocery stores. Using a large format camera, the photographers’ carefully composed images range from landscape exteriors to starkly beautiful closeups. Presented here in a gorgeous oversized format, exquisitely printed with superior inks and spot varnish, this illustrated eulogy for the American movie palace is certain to become a modern-day classic.

 

Book of the Day Posted Jan 26, 2022

Book of the Day > Brian Blomerth: Mycelium Wassonii

Purchase ● Brian Blomerth first fused his singularly irreverent underground comix style with heavily-researched history in 2019’s Bicycle Day, a Technicolor retelling of the discovery of LSD. Now, the illustrator and graphic novelist continues his wild and woolly excursions into the history of mind expansion with Mycelium Wassonii, an account of the lives and trips of R. Gordon and Valentina Wasson, the pioneering scientist couple responsible for popularizing the use of psychedelic mushrooms in the United States. The Wassons’ journeys took them from Russian folk wisdom to midcentury Manhattan, from the indigenous traditions of the Mazatec people of Mexico to the mysteries of ancient Rome. A globetrotting vision of science and mysticism with appearances by J.P. Morgan, Robert Graves, Life Magazine, and the CIA, Mycelium Wassonii is a visual biography and a tragic love story as only Blomerth’s Isograph pen can render it.
Book of the Day Posted Jan 25, 2022

Book of the Day > Greg Hunt: 20th Century Summer

Purchase ● 20th CENTURY SUMMER by Greg Hunt, renowned skateboarding filmmaker and photographer, features 41 previously unpublished black-and-white photographs from Greg's first ever rolls of film, exposed with a hand-me-down Minolta X-700 35mm camera while on an American skateboarding tour in the summer of 1995.

“The images are in loose chronological order, but the exact location of most is unknown. Everything was captured on twelves rolls of film with my first camera, a used Minolta X-700 I received as a gift just weeks before. Shot with no photographic training or aspiration, these pictures are simply an intuitive reaction to my life at the time.” – Greg Hunt
Book of the Day Posted Jan 21, 2022

Book of the Day > Viviane Sassen: Venus & Mercury

Purchase ● Acclaimed Dutch photographer Viviane Sassen collaborates with legendary book designer Irma Boom to offer a fresh and radical vision of the Palace of Versailles. A storied site of history, opulence, and political power, France’s Palace of Versailles has long captured the imagination of both the public and many acclaimed photographers. In 2018, Viviane Sassen was invited by Versailles to make a series of photographs throughout its vast grounds. For six months, she was given free rein, often after official hours, when the buildings were empty, to wander and photograph the palace’s extravagant gardens, gilded baroque interiors, and even Marie Antoinette’s private correspondence. Venus & Mercury is Versailles as you’ve never seen the storied locale before. Drawn to the bodies represented in the palace’s many marble statues, Sassen created hybrid forms that play with notions of sexuality and gender and call to mind traditions of Surrealist art and the work of figures such as Hans Bellmer. The book, featuring more than one hundred images, brims with Sassen’s surprising, pigment-splashed photomontages that play with vivid color and abstracted forms—and a group of women, born and raised in the town beyond the palace walls, appears throughout the book, modern-day protagonists photographed within grand palatial chambers. A series of poems by Marjolijn van Heemstra, commissioned by Sassen, allude to histories of intrigue in court society. Conceived and designed by iconic bookmaker Irma Boom, Venus & Mercury is a unique art object with a double-gatefold cover, packaged in a custom-made box, each individually painted by Sassen. Printed in a limited edition of 1,000 copies
Book of the Day Posted Jan 20, 2022

Book of the Day > Mario Ayala: Aut Of Body

Purchase ● For Ayala, growing up and currently living and working in Los Angeles, the car is an ever present force, figuratively and literally indispensable. He is part of a wave of painters using representative analogy and unconventional combinations of motives to echo a discursive reality. The auto body shop as subject is calling to mind an operating room repairing, replacing and manipulating organs, tendons, muscles and features. By conflating the terms auto body and out of body, Ayala conjures an idea of the obtainable epitome of strength. How an individual can transcend the limits of the body to gain great reach and shield oneself from imposed restraints. The works contain object symbols, imagery that Ayala places throughout the compositions which refer to elements close to the artist, specific to his home city. If you know, you know.
Book of the Day Posted Jan 19, 2022

Book of the Day > Nadine Ijewere: Our Own Selves

Purchase ● A celebration of identity and individual human beauty, this vibrant monograph is the first book dedicated to fashion photographer Nadine Ijewere—the first Black woman photographer to land a cover of Vogue in the magazine’s 125-year history.
 
Dazzling color, dreamlike backgrounds, and a fierce gaze are the hallmarks of Ijewere’s work. But most important to the London photographer is subversion of traditional concepts of beauty. In fashion work, editorials, advertisements, and film stills, Ijewere draws not only on her roots in Nigeria and Jamaica, but also on her own experiences as a young Black woman in South East London whose skin color, hair, and body type were nowhere to be found in the pages of magazines. Ijewere’s vibrantly colored, brilliantly staged pictures often focus on themes of identity and diversity, and feature nontraditional subjects that celebrate the uniqueness of disparate cultures. This first monograph includes images from her series of Jamaicans across different generations; photographs of young people defying gender norms on the streets of Lagos; along with editorial work she has created for Vogue, and fashion shoots for Stella McCartney, Dior, Gap, Hermes, and Valentino. At the vanguard of a history-changing artistic movement, Ijewere’s remarkable career has made her one of the most sought-after fashion photographers working today.
Book of the Day Posted Jan 18, 2022

Book of the Day > Rinko Kawauchi: Illuminance: The Tenth Anniversary Edition

Purchase ● Ten years after publishing Illuminance in 2011, Aperture is delighted to bring this beloved book back into print, retaining Rinko Kawauchi’s original sequence and signature melding of keenly observed gestures, quotidian detail, and a finely honed palette.
 
On the book’s original release, Alec Soth declared Illuminance “an exquisitely produced monograph [that] should make Rinko a household name.” An expanded edition with additional texts by curator David Chandler; philosopher Masatake Shinohara; and Aperture’s creative director, Lesley A. Martin, this reissue contributes new context to and perspective on Kawauchi’s influential work. Extraordinarily poetic, brimming with imagination and sensibility, and following international acclaim, this exquisite ten-year anniversary edition will entice lovers of photography once again.
Book of the Day Posted Jan 15, 2022

Book of the Day > Jake Reinhart: Laurel Mountain Laurel

Purchase ● Laurel Mountain Laurel: the title is a sort of rough palindrome, appropriate for Jake Reinhart’s vision, in which time is reflected upon itself and the end is also the beginning (and is also the end). The transient and the enduring are revealed to be one and the same.
 
These photographs – somehow both tender and unsparing – were made in Southwestern Pennsylvania, in the Youghiogheny region. One surviving translation has it that “Yough” means four, and “henné” means stream. “I’ve been along those four streams, and I’ve seen how they come together;” Reinhart says, “losing their specificity yet retaining what is inherent to each – creating something larger and joining places and people that would otherwise appear disjointed and separate.”
 
As for the streams, so for the images in Laurel Mountain Laurel: individual pictures exist essentially, while together they bind both space and time – the eternal and the geological brought into a semblance of coherence with the fragile and the human. We see that, despite our best efforts to erase and exploit, the land will ultimately have its own way, and on its own schedule.
Book of the Day Posted Jan 14, 2022

Book of the Day > Standing On The Corner Art Ensemble & Dozie Kanu: Function

Purchase ● A postcard book that serves as an accompaniment to Standing On The Corner Art Ensemble's new movie "Function: An Exhibition-Index Film" made in collaboration with the Studio Museum Harlem and sculptor Dozie Kanu. The piece is part film essay, part performance film and mediates upon time, memory, forgetfulness, sculpture, anti-prophetics and the time travel function of images -- both still and moving -- how they depict the past and simultaneously reveal conditions of the future. The book is symbolic of that idea; stills from the film have been converted to postcards meant to physically travel time and space.
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