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Purchase ● 20th CENTURY SUMMER by Greg Hunt, renowned skateboarding filmmaker and photographer, features 41 previously unpublished black-and-white photographs from Greg's first ever rolls of film, exposed with a hand-me-down Minolta X-700 35mm camera while on an American skateboarding tour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.
Book of the Day Posted Jan 13, 2022

Book of the Day > Sadie Barnette: Legacy and Legend

● Purchase ● Sadie Barnette’s celebratory installations explore collective and familial histories in glittering, speculative spaces
 
Oakland-based multimedia artist Sadie Barnette (born 1984) has made groundbreaking explorations of her own family’s history and archives. She situates her father Rodney Barnette’s activism, including his founding of the Black Panther chapter in Compton, CA, and his surveillance by the FBI, in the social history of California and global histories of resistance against racial injustice. Through government documents, photography, writing, installation and her signature use of hot pink, Barnette transforms the bond between father and daughter into an art that speaks to the power of community action. This volume features several new works created for the exhibition, as well as a reproduction of the zine Barnette created as a tribute to her father’s New Eagle Creek Saloon, the first Black-owned gay bar in San Francisco.
Book of the Day Posted Jan 12, 2022

Book of the Day > Senon Williams: Words Don't Mean Much

● Purchase ● ★ Join us for a book signing with Senon Williams on Saturday, January 29th, 4:00 - 6:00 PM ★
 
The old adage “a picture is worth a thousand words” is turned on its side in Words Don't Mean Much, Senon Williams’ new book of aphoristic phrasing. Far fewer words are needed to create an illuminating image in the mind’s eye, conjuring immediate multi-sensory experiences.
 
This book of poems is derived from the text in Williams’ ink on paper drawings, a sampling of which are pictured at left. The drawings are textual extractions and gather momentum within the book, exhibiting great attention to materials and craftsmanship. Every detail, from select paper to classic typeface, has been considered. An object, not unlike a sculpture, can be viewed from all sides, handled— and leafed through in the case of this book—front to back, back to front, or randomly opened. Words Don't Mean Much is a small pocket book, easy to conceal. A book to keep all to yourself or share int4mately.
 
Native to Los Angeles, Senon Williams is a lifelong visual artist and musician. His longtime study of economy with words and multiple meanings centers on the desire to create glimpses into the inherent human struggle, both ancient and contemporary. Williams’ work finds space in the natural—exposing outstanding and devastating stages of human evolution.
Book of the Day Posted Jan 11, 2022

Book of the Day > Richard Mosse: Displaced

● Purchase ● The Fondazione MAST presents the catalogue of the first-ever anthological exhibition of Irish artist Richard Mosse.
 
From his early photographs in Iraq, on the US-Mexico border and in the Balkans to the images of the Infra project taken in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, from the imposing Heat Maps of refugee camps on the route to Europe to his most recent works shot in the Amazon rainforest, Mosse explores the possibilities of documentary photography today, between the recording of reality and art.
 
116 large-format photographs of great visual impact are accompanied by the critical essay of the exhibition’s curator Urs Stahel and by the contributions of Michael J. Kavanagh, reporting on Congo and Central Africa since 2004 for the Economist, Bloomberg News, the New York Times, BBC, among many other outlets; Christian Viveros-Fauné, curator-at-large at the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum; and Ivo Quaranta, professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Bologna.
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