Book of the Day Posted Feb 17, 2022

HR Giger: Kookoo 1981

● Purchase ● Published on the 40th anniversary of Debbie Harry’s debut solo album KooKoo (1981), this book collects a rarely seen and unpublished body of photographs by Chris Stein (American, b. 1950), capturing the alchemy of the collaboration between artist H.R. Giger and the Blondie frontwoman and lead vocalist.

Largely taken on the nightmarish sets designed by Giger while working on the cover art and video clips for the album, these photographs by Stein—Blondie’s co-founder and guitarist and Harry’s life-long creative partner—provide unprecedented access to Giger’s charismatic presence and creative process, which unfolded across a wide array of mediums including airbrush painting, sculpture, scenography, concept design, and performance.

The book, designed by Swiss-based art direction firm Kasper-Florio with Samuel Bänziger and featuring a foreword by Alessio Ascari and an essay by Stephanie LaCava, will launch in Berlin with an exhibition at Reference Studios.

As LaCava writes in her essay, “Stein’s photos are essential to Giger’s legacy as an artist, and less so as evidence of celebrity friends. These images secure Giger as the maker of proto-special effects, by showing that they are not special effects at all. These are real objects, props and stylings, not animation, files, or digital ledgers. Giger would further this by acting out the physicality of old school illusion with the sarcophagus, his rabbit in the hat. The story is part of the performance.”

Book of the Day Posted Feb 16, 2022

Book of the Day > Peter Sutherland: Colorado

● Purchase ● Released on the occasion of Peter Sutherland's solo exhibition hosted at Spazio Maiocchi in May 2021, curated by Kaleidoscope and supported by Carhartt WIP and Slam Jam.

Titled “Colorado,” the exhibition featured a new body of work comprised of medium- and large-format photographs, and a new series of collages, and a billboard commission. The accompanying book by the same title, designed by Swiss art direction firm Kasper-Florio, will feature the complete series of photographs and collages, a conversation with Leo Fitzpatrick, and a foreword by Maia Ruth Lee.

After twenty years in New York, during lockdown the artist decided to leave the city and move back to his native Colorado—resulting in a body of work brimming with nature, punctuated by hikes, camping, and fortuitous encounters. In the artist’s own words, “A lot of my work is autobiographical: I’ve used photography to document my own experiences—and being from Colorado, nature was always part of those experiences. Many New Yorkers see nature as a vacation space, but even after all those years there, I’ve never lost the sense of the city being the vacation spot, and nature being home.”

Book of the Day Posted Feb 15, 2022

Book of the Day > HR Giger: NY City - Facsimile Edition (1981-2021)

● Purchase ● Originally published in 1981 by Ugly Publishing Zurich—Giger’s own fictional publishing house—this rare artist book is now republished by KALEIDOSCOPE on the occasion of the “HRGNYC” exhibition at Lomex Gallery, New York.

Collecting memories from the artist’s various trips to New York City, the book features large-format images of the iconic series of 28 paintings he created as a homage to the city he was utterly fascinated with since his childhood. His vision of the city—a habitat of monolithic mazes of heavy machinery interlaced with oversized metallic cockroaches and deep-burrowing subway cars—is juxtaposed with illustrations, personal reflections, press clippings, and the diary of his Hollywood trip in 1979 for Alien’s Oscar win. With a preface by Timothy Leary.

As Giger writes to describe the genesis of the “N.Y. City Series,” “New York itself has been a constant presence throughout the project. Memories keep floating up of this magical city whether I’m actually painting or not. And I keep trying to get a handle on this abyss, the soulless machine they call ‘New York City,’ and to articulate my own reactions and perceptions in the composition.”

Hans Ruedi Giger (1940–2014) was a Swiss surrealist painter, sculptor, and set designer known for his biomechanical creatures, extraterrestrial landscapes, and disturbing sexual machines. In a career that spanned more than five decades, he employed a staggering variety of media, including furniture, movie props, prints, paintings and sculptures, often creating exhibition displays and total environments with the immersive quality of a wunderkammer—including, most notably, the HR Giger Museum in Gruyères. In 1979, his concept design for Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) won an Academy Award for Best Achievement in Visual Effects and catapulted to fame his daunting vision of death and futurism.

Book of the Day Posted Feb 12, 2022

Book of the Day > Signed John Free: End Of The Line — Railroad Tramps Of The Los Angeles Freight Yards

● Purchase ● One day in 1974 John Free took his white dog Casper and his black Nikon camera to the Los Angeles Freight yards on an invite from a stranger to meet under a bridge to see "how a real tramp lives." Under that bridge he found the "Home Guard of the Taylor Yard," at the End of the Line, as far west as one could travel on trains and the best place for an old railroad tramp like shorty, Old Man PeeWee or Bobbi K, to live out their days. It's a part of Los Angeles that is now gone.

"They thought I was interested in the trains but it was their stories, their smiles and my respect for them that kept me coming back."

End of the Line is a collection of John's black and white, candid, full frame available light photographs. These rare historical images document a place an culture that no longer exists. The book also includes the unique and moving stories told to John by the tramps as well as John's approach to getting to know these unique people and his unique photographic techniques. The Foreword by his son Scott describes what it was like growing up as a street photographer's son. Also included are an historical perspective by Kevin Keefe, former editor of Trains Magazine, a glossary of tramp terminology and technical details of the photographs.

Book of the Day Posted Feb 11, 2022

Book of the Day > Nick Haymes: The Last Survivor Is The First Suspect

● Purchase ● The Last Survivor is the First Suspect is at once a celebration and a requiem. The project, captured between 2005 and 2009 by photographer Nick Haymes, is a record of a drifting community of young friends based mainly between two distinct geographic points: Southern California and Tulsa, Oklahoma. The book's narrative merges a sense of joy in documenting burgeoning friendships and bonds, and a looming sense of dread that would ultimately culminate in a series of tragedies.

Weaving throughout Haymes intimate photographs are a series of digital screenshots which Haymes has identified as key to this moment in time, which offer the viewer a secondary narrative of engagement. Social media was still relatively young and Haymes became acutely aware of a new nodal sense of communication between these distinct groups of friends. Platforms such as MySpace, YouTube and online message boards engendered a sense of community by enabling connection, while also setting new and impossible standards and expectations. Diligently collected, these various forms of communication between the characters frame a foreboding.

In Haymes’ own introduction to the book, he accounts how his camera allowed him to compensate for a sense of crippling shyness developed during his teenage years. ’I picked up a camera and hid, discovering I could once again be near people, intimate with them, without having to engage,’ he writes. To create this exhibition and publication, the artist has returned to a body of pictures, piecing together what happened to these people for himself. Here, Haymes invites us to form a contemporary engagement with this specific historic moment, where things are both different and the same in equal measure. L.P. Hartley famously opened his coming-of-age opus The Go-Between ’The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.’ The Last Survivor is the First Suspect shows this sentiment with remarkable clarity.

Book of the Day Posted Feb 09, 2022

Book of the Day > Robert H. Boltz: Dead of Night

● Purchase ● "In the middle of the night, I woke up to a loud noise. Grammy and I ran to the front porch. A car had crashed into a telephone pole. Grammy told me to go back inside. “Right now!!!” When I woke up the next morning, the car was gone.

Several years ago, I bought the photographic archive of Bob Boltz, of West Bend, Wisconsin. Boltz’s primary subject was car crashes; the shots were taken at night. Almost none of his pictures showed the people who’d been injured. Their absence is a haunting reminder of the couple who died outside Grammy Keaton’s home all those many years ago.

Boltz’s nighttime photographs have a richness similar to that of 1930s black-and-white crime films. I like to think he may have been an admirer of movies like Scarface, with Paul Muni, and The Public Enemy, starring James Cagney. Each car is lit with a nightmarish, chiaroscuro quality. His framing matches the technique of horror and suspense films in which shadows provide gloomy details of the surroundings. The photographs remind me of genres where light and dark represent good and evil. This book is a hymn to unsolved mysteries discovered in the dead of night." –Diane Keaton

Book of the Day Posted Feb 05, 2022

Book of the Day > Bauhaus Typography at 100

● Purchase ● An unprecedented look at the school’s typography and print design, from its early expressive tendencies to the functional modernism for which it is famed today

Known for its bold sans-serif typefaces, crisp asymmetrical grids and clean use of negative space, the Bauhaus emerged as the forebearer of a new look—one that seized the tools of mass production in the creation of a radical new art. Today, just over 100 years after the Bauhaus’s opening in 1919, the school’s visual hallmarks have come to define modernity as it appears on the printed page.

The official catalog for Letterform Archive’s inaugural gallery exhibition, Bauhaus Typography at 100 explores the school’s legacy in graphic and typographic design through artifacts of its own making—its books, magazines, course materials, product catalogs, stationery, promotional fliers and other ephemera.

From the book’s beautifully designed pages, readers learn of typographic masters László Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer and Joost Schmidt, who channeled Constructivism’s geometric forms and optimism for industry into printed vehicles for the school’s teachings. Here is where Bauhaus typography—its rejection of serifs and capitals, embrace of experimental alphabets, insistence on universal clarity, and innovation in layering and hierarchy—took its distinctive shape.

The catalog also shines light on the Bauhaus’s lesser-known early forays into expressive lettering and illustration, also tracing the school’s immediate impact on seminal design movements such as the New Typography and, of course, on design practitioners working today. Lavishly illustrated, carefully researched and written, and accompanied by an in-depth introduction from noted Bauhaus expert, author and curator Ellen Lupton, Bauhaus Typography at 100 is a must-have for any fan of modern design.

Book of the Day Posted Feb 04, 2022

Book of the Day > Michael Lesy: Snapshots 1971–77

● Purchase ● In the summer of 1971, Michael Lesy and a friend found most of the snapshots in Snapshots 1971–77 in a dumpster behind a gigantic photo-processing plant in San Francisco. The photos were in the trash because the machines that printed them made them so fast—duplicates, triplicates, quadruplicates—that the people on the processing line couldn’t stop them. Lesy took home thousands of the discards from the dumpster. By the end of the summer, he’d formed his own collection of images of American life.

While Lesy looked through other people’s lives in pictures, the world was coming apart at the seams. The Vietnam War, the murderous rampage of the Manson Family, and the Attica State Prison uprising filled news headlines—and the general public carried on their lives, with hope and abandon and everything in between: chaos, cruelty, familial bonds and breaks, lawlessness, unwitting humor.

Lesy’s collection of snapshots from the 1970s is a time capsule of things familiar and alien. Now, fifty years later, everything and nothing about our lives has changed.

In Wisconsin Death Trip Lesy pulled back the curtain of “the good old days” to reveal the stark reality of American life from 1890 to 1910. The anonymous images in Snapshots 1971–77 serve as prophesies of present-day broken dreams, toils, and tribulations.

Book of the Day Posted Feb 03, 2022

Book of the Day > Matthew Angelo Harrison

● Purchase ● The first monograph on an important young American artist, generously illustrated with color images of his work.

In his sculptures and installations, Matthew Angelo Harrison (b. 1989) engages with the legacies of racism and colonialism, parsing their contemporary connections to labor in the United States through an evolving visual language. With works that merge manufacturing technologies with the formal concerns of modernism and minimalism, the artist questions ideas of authorship and reproduction. Harrison's sculptures often include found objects—including traditional African figurines and auto industry ephemera—encased in resin blocks. Frozen and entombed, these sculptures appear as strangely haunted minimalist objects, both ancient and futuristic. This generously illustrated volume, published in conjunction with two major solo exhibitions, is the first monograph on an important young American artist.

Another specter haunting Harrison's work is that of Detroit's defunct auto industry. A native of Detroit who once worked making prototypes in an auto manufacturing plant, Harrison sometimes employs precision machine-tooling techniques that are derived from those used by auto makers. In other works, Harrison replicates rare African masks and sculptures using hand-built, low-resolution 3D printing machines, rendering large-scale forms in wet clay—fragile, imperfect, and subject to glitches. In addition to color photos of Harrison's work and images that illustrate the artist's relationship to Detroit, the book features essays by curators and art historians Jessica Bell Brown and Elena Filipovic, as well as a conversation between Harrison and musician and theorist DeForrest Brown, Jr., led by curator Taylor Renee Aldridge.

Book of the Day Posted Feb 02, 2022

Book of the Day > Captivate! Fashion Photography from the '90s

● Purchase ● The nineties are back! Fashion icon Claudia Schiffer takes readers on a personal journey through the golden age of the global supermodel.

This richly illustrated book accompanies the first ever exhibition curated by Claudia Schiffer, who brings together the legendary fashion photographers, designers and supermodels, whose visions captivated fashion's most illustrious decade. In the nineties fashion became elevated into a total work of art. This stunning book draws on a rich panorama of amazing characters and places, which made the decade so memorable. Spectacular images by legendary photographers are shown alongside unseen material from Schiffer's private archive. Arthur Elgort's extravagant compositions are shown next to Corinne Day's intimate and immediate style; Ellen von Unwerth's playful, sexy, humorous, and exuberant photographs meet Herb Ritts' sculptural, perfectly composed works; Juergen Teller's provocative photographs contrast with Karl Lagerfeld's elegant and timeless images; and many other iconic photographers are featured. Insightful essays by the fashion industry's leading lights reveal the secrets of a decade, which continues to have a strong influence on the fashion culture of today.