Book of the Day Posted Oct 09, 2020

Book of the Day > Chernobyl: A Stalkers’ Guide

● Purchase ● In Chernobyl: A Stalkers’ Guide, researcher Darmon Richter journeys into the contemporary Exclusion Zone, venturing deeper than any previously published account. While thousands of foreign visitors congregate around a handful of curated sites, beyond the tourist hotspots lies a wild and mysterious land the size of a small country. In the forests of Chernobyl, historic village settlements and Soviet-era utopianism have lain abandoned since the time of the disaster – overshadowed by vast, unearthly mega-structures designed to win the Cold War.
 
Richter combines photographs of discoveries made during his numerous visits to the Zone with the voices of those who witnessed history – engineers, scientists, police and evacuees. He explores evacuated regions in both Ukraine and Belarus, finding forgotten ghost towns and Soviet monuments lost deep in irradiated forests. He gains exclusive access inside the most secure areas of the power plant itself, and joins the ‘stalkers’ of Chernobyl as he sets out on a high-stakes illegal hike to the heart of the Exclusion Zone.
Book of the Day Posted Oct 08, 2020

Book of the Day > Guerrilla Girls: The Art of Behaving Badly

● Purchase ● Guerrilla Girls: The Art of Behaving Badly is the first book to catalog the entire career of the Guerrilla Girls from 1985 to present.
 
The Guerrilla girls are a collective of political feminist artists who expose discrimination and corruption in art, film, politics, and pop culture all around the world. This book explores all their provocative street campaigns, unforgettable media appearances, and large-scale exhibitions. Each copy comes with a punch-out gorilla mask that invites readers to step up and join the movement themselves. In 1985, a group of masked feminist avengers—known as the Guerrilla Girls—papered downtown Manhattan with posters calling out the Museum of Modern Art for its lack of representation of female artists. They quickly became a global phenomenon, and the fearless activists have produced hundreds of posters, stickers, and billboards ever since.
Book of the Day Posted Oct 07, 2020

Book of the Day > Barkley L. Hendricks: Basketball

● Purchase ● The court, the ball and the hoop: Barkley Hendricks paints basketball
 
The third installment in Skira and Jack Shainman Gallery’s five-volume overview of American artist Barkley L. Hendricks (1945-2017) explores the artist’s relationship to basketball, which provided a significant source of artistic inspiration throughout his life.
 
In his Basketball series, Hendricks applied his keen compositional sense and stylish use of color to depictions of the sport’s essential elements: hoops, nets, backboards and, of course, basketballs themselves. In one painting, the image of a basketball about to make its way into a hoop is repeated twice on a round canvas; on another circular canvas, the iconic black ribs of a basketball are rendered in a bold orange to create a minimalistic yet instantly recognizable pattern.
 
A study in movement and geometry, Hendricks’ paintings offer a uniquely compelling perspective on the sport as an artistic pursuit. This book’s focus on this aspect of Hendricks’ work allows for a detail-oriented study of the artist’s techniques as a painter.
Book of the Day Posted Oct 06, 2020

Book of the Day > To Make Their Own Way in the World: The Enduring Legacy of the Zealy Daguerreotypes

● Purchase ● To Make Their Own Way in the World is a profound consideration of some of the most challenging images in the history of photography: fifteen daguerreotypes of Alfred, Delia, Drana, Fassena, Jack, Jem, and Renty—men and women of African descent who were enslaved in South Carolina.
 
Photographed by Joseph T. Zealy for Harvard professor Louis Agassiz in 1850, they were rediscovered at Harvard’s Peabody Museum in 1976. This groundbreaking multidisciplinary volume features essays by prominent scholars who explore such topics as the identities of the people depicted in the daguerreotypes, the close relationship between photography and race, and visual narratives of slavery and its lasting effects.
 
With over two hundred illustrations, including new photography by Carrie Mae Weems, this book frames the Zealy daguerreotypes as works of urgent engagement.
Book of the Day Posted Oct 03, 2020

Book of the Day > Paul Graham: A1 - The Great North Road

● Purchase ● A1 - The Great North Road was Paul Graham's first book, published in 1983. Despite the UK having a vibrant photographic scene at the time, there were only handful of monographic books - Chris Killip and Martin Parr had one each - and no dedicated publishers or distributors. Graham had to self-publish A1, but as the first colour book, it had a startling impact on British photography. Uniting the tradition of social documentary with the fresh approach of new colour, A1 - The Great North Road was transformative on photography in the UK and paved the way for a new generation of British colour photographers to emerge, from Nick Waplington to Anna Fox, Richard Billingham to Tom Wood.
 
Spanning the full length of England and into Edinburgh, Graham travelled repeatedly along the 'Great North Road' with a large format camera, to record the people, buildings, and landscape of early 1980's Britain. Now 40 years old, this book is as much art as it is a historical document of the years of Margaret Thatcher’s government and the UK’s declining industrial base.
 
Graham went on to complete Beyond Caring (1985) and Troubled Land (1986), both of which became iconic bodies of work. Originally self-published and now rare, Graham's 1980's trilogy of books will be re-published over the coming years by MACK, ending with a limited edition box set of all 3 volumes.
Book of the Day Posted Oct 02, 2020

Book of the Day > Robert Crumb. Sketchbook, Vol. 5: 1989–1998

● Purchase ● As this volume opens we find our hero at age 46, solidly into the midlife crises years. Crumb has lived his entire life in anxious, introspective, self-flagellating crises, however, so the middle years bring only a refinement of his lifelong turmoil and further honing of artistic talent. More words accompany the drawings, demonstrating Crumb’s brilliant powers of observation, as in a long paragraph devoted to an encounter with one of brother Maxon’s vegan turds, and a poetic paean to the heartbreak of life and aging. The family’s move to Sauve, France, in 1991 is heralded by a switch from portraits of apple-cheeked American girls sketched while waiting for food in California cafes to portraits of girls in French cafes, by pastorals of rampant French countryside, and by haunting tableau of homeless beggars in the Metro.
 
The most notable new character in this sketchbook is a turbaned holy man named, by young Sophie Crumb, Roman Dodo, who seems loosely inspired by Robert’s brother Maxon. Patricia Pig, a cheerful human/porcine hybrid also debuts, alongside portraits of girlfriends present and past.
 
As the artist advances into his mid-50s, towards the end of the volume, fantasies of regression to childhood dependence on strong female figures, and even of a good death, carried away on the back of a sturdy young angel, speak less of angst than acceptance of the aging process. Our curmudgeon finds a measure of peace, a certain French acceptance, of the cruel whims of fate. Until the final pages, when he pronounces himself, out of nowhere, “such a fucking QUEER.”
 
All in all, another killer volume.
Book of the Day Posted Oct 01, 2020

Book of the Day > Planet Wax: Sci-Fi/Fantasy Soundtracks on Vinyl

● Purchase ● Do you crank up your stereo and conduct air symphonies to John Williams' Star Wars? Know all of the lyrics to "The NeverEnding Story" or "Xanadu?" Have a burgeoning collection of space disco albums? Well, pluck those Ceti Alpha eels out of your ears and open this book – we've got you covered.
 
From the orchestral bombast of Jerry Goldsmith's Star Trek: The Motion Picture score, to the muscle-flexing might of Basil Poledouris' Conan the Barbarian, to the dreamy electronic soundscapes of Vangelis' Blade Runner and the pop styling of the Flash Gordon soundtrack, science fiction and fantasy films have inspired some of the most beloved and memorable soundtracks in film history.
 
Planet Wax covers the best, as well as the most unique and underrated scores the sci-fi and fantasy genres have to offer, while showcasing their original vinyl LP artwork over 240 pages. Franchises like Mad Max, The Terminator, and even the Indiana Jones films are spotlighted, along with television classics such as Doctor Who and Star Trek, making Planet Wax the definitive discography of soundtracks from the films and shows of the '60s, '70s, '80s, and '90s that shaped multiple generations.
 
Featuring over twenty interviews, including composers Stu Phillips (Battlestar Galactica), Laurence Rosenthal (Clash of the Titans), and directors Richard Donner (Superman) and Nicholas Meyer (Star Trek II), Planet Wax chronicles an era in film and music when the sounds were given as much prominence as the interstellar imagery.
Book of the Day Posted Sep 30, 2020

Book of the Day > Paul Smith

● Purchase ● A timely celebration of British design legend Sir Paul Smith and his one-of-a-kind creativity This new monograph captures the unique spirit of British fashion icon Sir Paul Smith through 50 objects chosen by Sir Paul himself for the inspiration they have provided him over the years — from a wax plate of spaghetti and a Dieter Rams radio to a Mario Bellini Cab chair and a bicycle seat. Each object has impacted his worldview, his creative process, and his adherence to a design approach that's always imbued with distinctly British wit and eccentricity.
Book of the Day Posted Sep 29, 2020

Book of the Day > SWAMP MONSTERS: Photographs from the 2020 Republican National Convention

● Purchase ● SWAMP MONSTERS commemorates the historically frightful 2020 Republican National Convention with a series of photographs made by Tucson-based artist and publisher Phil Zimmermann as the spectacle unfolded on his television screen from August 24-27. This rogues’ gallery of hideous video portraits is printed in garish full color in an unbound tabloid newspaper format, and published in a limited edition of 666 copies. A portion of the proceeds will be donated to the Arizona Democratic Party.

Book of the Day Posted Sep 26, 2020

Book of the Day > Philip Guston: A Life Spent Painting

● Purchase ● Philip Guston: A Life Spent Painting is an authoritative and comprehensive survey of the life and work of the visionary and influential painter Philip Guston.
 
Driven and consumed by art, Philip Guston painted and drew compulsively. This book takes the reader from his early social realist murals and the Abstract Expressionist works of the 1950s and early 1960s to the powerful new language of figurative painting, which he developed in the late 1960s and 1970s. Drawing on more than thirty years of his own research, the critic and curator, Robert Storr, maps Guston’s entire career in one definitive volume, providing a substantial, accessible, and revealing analysis of his work.
 
With more than 900 images, the book illustrates Guston’s key works, many unpublished paintings and drawings, and photographs showing the artist’s life at home, his work in the studio, and his relationship with fellow artists. An illustrated chronology, drawn from the Guston Foundation’s archives, contextualizes
 
Guston’s life and provides in-depth coverage of his many exhibitions. Guston was also able to speak about art with unrivalled passion and fluency. In celebration of this, the book features a final section devoted to Guston’s own thoughts on his drawing and one of his great heroes—Piero della Francesca.
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