Book of the Day Posted Jun 03, 2021

Book of the Day > Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians

● Purchase ● In 1979, JEB (Joan E. Biren) self-published her first book, Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians. In a work that was revolutionary for its era, JEB made photographs of lesbians from different ages and backgrounds in their everyday lives—working, playing, raising families, and striving to remake their worlds. The photographs were accompanied by writings from acclaimed authors including Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Joan Nestle, and others. Various women pictured in the book also shared their personal stories. Eye to Eye signaled a radical new way of seeing—moving lesbian lives from the margins to the center, and reversing a history of invisibility. More than just a book, it was an affirmation of the existence of lesbians that helped to propel a political movement. Reprinted for the first time in forty years, Eye to Eye is a faithful reproduction of a work that still resonates today. This edition features additional essays from artist and writer Tee Corinne, former World Cup soccer player Lori Lindsey, and photographer Lola Flash.
Book of the Day Posted Jun 02, 2021

Book of the Day > Hannah Kozak: He Threw The Last Punch Too Hard

● Purchase ● When I was nine, my mother abandoned my family to have an affair. Her lover was violent: he beat her so badly she suffered permanent brain damage and had to be moved into an assisted living facility at age forty one.
 
I have early, fond memories of my mother as a beautiful, passionate, vivacious Guatemalan -esque Sophia Loren. But after she left, I had tremendous feelings of abandonment and rage towards her. I judged her as impetuous, selfish, reckless and negligent. I resented what she did to herself and her family. I carried so much anger, yet whenever I saw her, I was overcome with pity and sadness. Looking at her hand gnarled from brain damage brought forth more emotion than I could bear. For these reasons, I virtually ignored my mother to distance myself from my own pain.
 
But pain ignored does not disappear. I came to realize our relationship needed healing. Thankfully, through graduate work in Spiritual Psychology and with a healer, I was able to dissolve the judgments I carried about my mother and myself and forge a relationship with her. I began to photograph her in December 2009 until 2019, for this project.
 
These photos are meant to take me out of my comfort zone while telling my mother's story of isolation, loneliness, abuse, connection, compassion, forgiveness, family, humanity, grace, joy, and love. I didn’t need to travel the world to deepen my spirituality. My greatest teacher was in front of me my entire life. I just couldn’t see it was my mother, a true Bodhisattva. She forgave me for not visiting her all those decades without uttering a word. I forgave her for leaving our family. Forgiveness happens when you care more about the love in a relationship than the logic of your ego. I no longer pity my mother. She continually inspires me to live by my heart, not my head. The love I feel for her has broken my heart wide open.
Book of the Day Posted Jun 01, 2021

Book of the Day > Gio Ponti (XL)

● Purchase ● To study Gio Ponti’s prolific body of work is to appreciate the clear, unifying vision behind a complex creative universe. A synthesis of the arts, his creations expand intuitively with the Italian grandeur and studied lightness that defined his iconic style. Ponti’s rare capacity to move seamlessly between scales allowed him to approach the design of a teaspoon with the same conviction as he did an entire city. He was as much an architect and designer as he was a publisher, poet, and man. A treasure in its own regard, his contribution is also a distinctive landmark of Italy’s mid-century Renaissance and the modernist values it sought to realize.
 
This new book is the most comprehensive account of Ponti’s work to date, unprecedented in scale and scope. It tracks the development of his oeuvre over 6 decades, with 136 projects indexed and reproduced in high resolution, each object framed by the context in which Ponti had created it. Like windows onto his elusive life, unpublished materials and candid imagery create new dialogues between his famous masterpieces and his lesser-known feats. A rich layer of texts, featuring an extensive biographical essay by Stefano Casciani, was produced in close collaboration with the Gio Ponti Archives offering an intimate insight on his life’s work. Materializing Ponti’s core philosophy of modernity, this book presents architecture as a performing object, a "self-illuminating" stage for his humanistic art de vivre and boundless creativity.
Book of the Day Posted May 28, 2021

Book of the Day > Alessandra Sanguinetti: The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and The Enigmatic Meaning of Their Dreams (Signed)

● Purchase ● For more than two decades, Alessandra Sanguinetti has been photographing the lives of Guillermina and Belinda, two cousins living in rural Argentina, as they move through childhood and youth toward womanhood. This volume, originally published in 2010 and reissued now as the first instalment of a trilogy, chronicles the first five years of their collaboration. Sanguinetti’s images portray a childhood that is both familiar and exceptional. The farmlands of western Buenos Aires province are a particular mix of the modern and traditional, where life is lived in consonance with animals and rugged landscapes. Against this backdrop, Guille and Belinda go through the childhood rites of dressing up and make believe, exploring and appropriating the world around them as they go. As they slip between roles, alternately performing for and being caught by Sanguinetti’s camera, the profound bond between the two girls is unmistakable. Approaching the precipice of early adolescence, their games are imbued with the poignant weight of their dreams and desires as the world of play meets that of reality. By depicting the lives of women and girls within the conventionally masculine world of Argentinan gauchos and farmers, Sanguinetti’s book interrogates the frameworks of mythologies of all kinds, honouring lives that are usually unseen. The Adventures of Guille and Belinda is a portrait of rural childhood at once quiet and poetic, in which the fantastic and the mundane are intimately entwined.
Book of the Day Posted May 27, 2021

Book of the Day > Jim Shaw: Paperback Covers

● Purchase ● Dream-inspired book covers for imaginary pulp novels by Americana connoisseur-bricoleur Jim Shaw
 
Since the 1970s, American artist Jim Shaw (born 1952) has used his multimedia artistic practice as a means of exploring and exploiting pop-culture iconography. This publication focuses on one of the key series in Shaw’s corpus, in which he draws inspiration from the Anglo-American graphic design and illustrative tradition of cheap paperback books. Inspired by the artist's intense dreaming life, the Paperback Covers series (1996–2013) recreates the lurid imagery associated with pulp novels, with vertical canvases that depict fantastical and irreverent imagery: in one, a werewolf in suspenders is struck by an oncoming 18-wheeler; in another, a line of chorus girls dance in front of a vampire and a woman in red as the couple is in engulfed by flames. Though these “books” bear no text, Shaw’s paintings evoke exciting narratives within a single image. All the inventoried Paperback Covers are collected in this softcover volume along with a text by Charlie Fox.
Book of the Day Posted May 25, 2021

Book of the Day > Stephen Shore: Steel Town

● Purchase ● In 1977, Stephen Shore travelled across New York state, Pennsylvania, and eastern Ohio – an area in the midst of industrial decline that would eventually be known as the Rust Belt. Shore met steelworkers who had been thrown out of work by plant closures and photographed their suddenly fragile world: deserted factories, lonely bars, dwindling high streets, and lovingly decorated homes. Across these images, a prosperous middle America is seen teetering on the precipice of disastrous decline. Hope and despair alike lurk restlessly behind the surfaces of shop fronts, domestic interiors, and the fraught expressions of those who confront Shore’s 4x5” view camera. Originally commissioned as an extended photographic report for Fortune Magazine in the vein of Walker Evans, Shore’s multifaceted investigation has only gained political salience in the intervening years. Shore’s subjects – including workers, union leaders, and family members – had voted for Jimmy Carter the year preceding his visit; now he found them disillusioned with the new president, fated to leave behind the Democratic party and become the ‘Reagan Democrats’. Through unfailingly engrossing images by one of the world’s acknowledged masters, Steel Town provides an immersive portrait of a time and place whose significance to our own is ever more urgent.
Book of the Day Posted May 22, 2021

Book of the Day > Come Fly with Me: Flying in Style

● Purchase ● A wistful love letter to the joys of flying and the fun, fashion, and glamour that go with it.
 
Now, more than ever, nothing captures our yearning for travel, freedom, glamour, and adventure than the fantasy of flying away from it all.
 
From Frank Sinatra dressed to the nines in the golden age of Pan Am to celebrities snapped in luxury leisurewear in the lounges today, airports have always afforded the most glamorous glimpses into that most enviable aspect of celebrity life--jet-setting in style.
 
Curated by the renowned photo editor Jodi Peckman, Come Fly with Me is a love letter to the most longed-for escape, told through evocative images of the icons who've made the airport their runway. From John and Yoko waving from the airstairs to Rihanna bustling incognito through the halls, and from Muhammad Ali's crisp-pressed suits to Miley Cyrus's playful onesies, this is a whimsical and welcome reminder when we need it most of the joys of travel.
Book of the Day Posted May 21, 2021

Book of the Day > Trent Parke: Crimson Line

● Purchase ● Born in the Australian steel city of Newcastle, one of Trent Parke’s only early childhood memories is accompanying his mother to pick his dad up from work, travelling through a landscape dominated by ship yards, chimneys, and the BHP steelworks.
 
Throughout his career Parke has always been interested in the transformative powers of light, but it was the ephemeral changing colours of dawn and dusk, the multitude or different reds that made him curious about the colour crimson. He discovered the colour that is used in commercial products is harvested from the crushed and boiled bodies of the female scale insect, the Cochineal. A tiny minute insect who inhabits the pads of the prickly pear cactus and who are farmed for their crimson dye. A dye now used primarily in cosmetics and food colouring.
 
Scarlet, magenta, orange, and crimson, are the coloured dyes produced by the Cochineal and also seem to feature spectacularly in the colours of creation, as seen in an Eagle Nebula during the birth of a new star and recorded by the Hubble space telescope. These colours of birth and blood Parke also remembers from the bath water, the umbilical cord and placenta, at the birth of his sons.
 
‘As soon as the female insect is delivered of its new numerous progeny, it becomes a meer husk and dies; so that great care is taken in Mexico, where it is principally collected, to kill the old ones while big with young, to prevent the young ones escaping into life, and depriving them of that beautiful scarlet dye, so much esteemed by all the world.’ - John Ellis, Esq; 1762.
Book of the Day Posted May 20, 2021

Book of the Day > Ultimate Collector Cars

● Purchase ● For the seasoned car collector or the awestruck newcomer, this double-volume is the unrivaled collector car anthology. Curating 100 of the most exquisite, remarkable, and desirable cars of all time to tell a spellbinding story of automotive design-and-engineering endeavor in the tireless pursuit of ever-greater performance both on and off the track, from the first Indy 500-winning 1910 Marmon Wasp to the futuristic 2020 Aston Martin Valkyrie.
 
Laps ahead of any generic catalog, this superlative volume exudes authority and elegance, settling for nothing less than the very best of the best, and presenting each model with the lavish spreads it deserves, complete with stunning imagery taken by the world’s leading car photographers alongside rare archival treasures, from original factory photos to famous motorsports event posters. Each entry is also accompanied by expert descriptive texts and specs, detailing each car’s make, model, year, engine size, horsepower, top speed, transmission, and all-important production numbers.
 
By passionately tapping into their transatlantic expertise and insider knowledge of car auctions, museums, and collections around the world, design authors Peter and Charlotte Fiell survey the autoworld's finest cars of all time. Their carefully curated selection spans the whole history of the automobile, taking in such rare models as a 1912 Stutz Model A Bearcat, as well as lesser-known jewels such as the astonishing 1937 Talbot-Lago T150-C SS “Goutte d’Eau” Coupé by Figoni et Falaschi.
Book of the Day Posted May 19, 2021

Book of the Day > Carolyn Drake: Knit Club

● Purchase ● A foreboding meditation in the vein of Southern Gothic literature, Drake’s most recent body of work emerged through her collaboration with an enigmatic group of women loosely calling themselves “Knit Club.” The nature of the club is ambiguous. It is a cross between a gang, a cult of mysteries, and a group of friends bound by secrets only they share.
 
The book follows a narrative structure loosely borrowed from Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying–– that is to say, not one omniscient narrator but many disparate stream-of-consciousness voices. We sense the authorship of the photographs to be collaborative, the result of creative play between Drake and the club in which she found herself embedded, their process a kind of alchemy. In the style of the Gothic, Drake’s masterful use of color to create mood opens the door to the tension between the real and the supernatural. What we find, however, is not grotesque but something vital. A community that manages to exist outside the gaze or control of men. Women, children, and mothers, shrouded in masks and mystery to live a life on their own terms.
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