Book of the Day > Alex Prager: Silver Lake Drive. Published by Chronicle Books. "Photographer Alex Prager is an essential cultural figure: one of the truly original image makers of our time. Working fluidly between photography and film, she creates elaborate scenes that reference a wide range of influences, including Hollywood and experimental cinema, popular culture and street photography. These delicately staged compositions are famliar yet strange, utterly compelling, and unerringly memorable. Silver Lake Drive presents more than 120 images from her career to date: the early Polyester and Big Valley series; Prager's first collaborations with actor Bryce Dallas Howard; the tour-de-force of Face in the Crowd-- shot on a Hollywood sound stage with over 150 performers; and her 2016 commission for the Paris Opera, La Grande Sortie. Featuring an introduction by Michael Govan, Director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; essays by Clare Grafik of the Photographers' Gallery and Michael Mansfield of the Ogunquit Museum of American Art; and an in-depth interview with the artist by Nathalie Herschdorfer of the Museum of Fine Arts, Le Locle, this deluxe hardcover volume is a must-have for those who follow Prager's career and an ideal inititation for new audiences everywhere." 

Book of the Day > Artists and Their Books / Books and Their Artists. Published by Getty Publications. “This stunning volume illuminates the current moment of artists’ engagement with books, revealing them as an essential medium in contemporary art. Ever innovative and predictably diverse in their physical formats, artists’ books occupy a creative space between the familiar four-cornered object and challenging works of art that effectively question every preconception of what a book can be. Many artists specialize in producing self-contained art projects in the form of books, like Ken Campbell and Susan King, or they establish small presses, like Simon Cutts and Erica Van Horn’s Coracle Press or Harry and Sandra Reese’s Turkey Press. Countless others who are primarily known as sculptors, painters, or performance artists carry on a parallel practice in artists’ books, including Anselm Kiefer, Annette Messager, Ed Ruscha, and Richard Tuttle. Artists and Their Books / Books and Their Artistsincludes over one hundred important examples selected from the Getty Research Institute’s Special Collections of more than six thousand editions and unique artists’ books.

This volume also presents precursors to the artist’s book, such as Joris Hoefnagel’s sixteenth-century calligraphy masterpiece; single-sheet episodes from Albrecht Dürer’s Life of Mary, designed to be either broadsides or a book; early illustrated scientific works; and avant-garde publications. Twentieth-century works reveal the impact of artists’ books on Pop Art, Fluxus, Conceptualism, feminist art, and postmodernism. The selection of books by an international range of artists who have chosen to work with texts and images on paper provokes new inquiry into the nature of art and books in contemporary culture.”

This volume accompanies an exhibition on view at the Getty Research Institute at the Getty Center June 26 to October 28, 2018.

Book of the Day > Lars Tunbjörk. Published by Max Ström. “Initially inspired by Swedish masters such as Christer Strömholm, as well as Stephen Shore and William Eggleston, Lars Tunbjörk (1956-2015) was one of the great and truly original European photographers. Tunbjörk's international breakthrough came in 1993 with the photobook Country beside Itself. Celebrated by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger as "an acute observer of modern life," Tunbjörk's color images amplified the mundane and the absurd in a quietly surreal fashion using the hard light of flash photography, which became his signature style and influenced a subsequent generation of photographers. His best-known photobook series include Office (2001), which depicts office workers in bizarre chance positions, and Home (2003), in which everyday items such as flowers or armchairs are made to reveal a quiet absurdity in Swedish suburbia. With more than 250 images, this volume constitutes the most substantial overview of his work.”

Book of the Day > Hilma Af Klint. Published by University of Chicago Press. “At the turn of the twentieth century, Swedish artist Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) created a body of work that left visible reality behind, exploring the radical possibilities of abstraction years before Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, or Piet Mondrian. Many consider her the first trained artist to create abstract paintings. With Hilma af Klint: Notes and Methods, we get to experience the arc of af Klint’s artistic investigation in her own words.

Hilma af Klint studied at the Royal Swedish Academy in Stockholm where she was part of the first generation of female students.  Up until the beginning of the century, she painted mainly landscapes and detailed botanical studies. Her work from this period was that of a young artist of her time who meticulously observed the world around her. But, like many of her contemporaries, af Klint was also interested in the invisible relationships that shape our world, believing strongly in a spiritual dimension. She joined the Theosophical Society, and, with four fellow female members who together called themselves “The Five,” began to study mediumship.  Between 1906 and 1915, purportedly guided by a higher power, af Klint created 193 individual works that, in both scale and scope of imagery, are like no other art created at that time. Botanically inspired images and mystical symbols, diagrams, words, and geometric series, all form part of af Klint’s abstract language. These abstract techniques would not be seen again until years later.
 

Notes and Methods presents facsimile reproductions of a wide array of af Klint’s early notebooks accompanied by the first English translation of af Klint’s extensive writings. It contains the rarely seen “Blue Notebooks,” hand-painted and annotated catalogues af Klint created of her most famous series “Paintings for the Temple,” and a dictionary compiled by af Klint of the words and letters found in her work. This extraordinary collection is edited by and copublished with Christine Burgin, and features an introduction by Iris Müller-Westermann. It will stand as an important and timely contribution to the legacy of Hilma af Klint.”

Book of the Day > Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph.  Published by Aperture. "Deana Lawson is one of the most compelling photographers of her generation. Over the last ten years, she has created a visionary language to describe identities through intimate portraiture and striking accounts of ceremonies and rituals. Using medium- and large-format cameras, Lawson works with models she meets in the United States and on travels in the Caribbean and Africa to construct arresting, highly structured, and deliberately theatrical scenes animated by an exquisite range of color and attention to surprising details: bedding and furniture in domestic interiors or lush plants in Edenic gardens. The body—often nude—is central. Throughout her work, which invites comparison to the photography of Diane Arbus, Jeff Wall, and Carrie Mae Weems, Lawson seeks to portray the personal and the powerful. Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph features forty beautifully reproduced photographs, an essay by the acclaimed writer Zadie Smith, and an expansive conversation with the artist Arthur Jafa.

Book of the Day > Specific Museums of Greater Los Angeles. Printed by Tiny Splendor Press. "There are over 600 museums in the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area, yet when people speak generally of our local museums, there is a strong chance they are referring only to a handful of the largest and most well-known. These institutions are relevant and important, their reac is impressive, their funding secure... but what of the smaller museums, which rarely (if ever) receive meaningful exposure? Even among the more idiosyncratic institutions, there seems to be an accepted subset of those that frequently make the lists of Museums-You-Didn't-Know-Existed. Which are the places still being overlooked, and why should we care? In this book, I have focused on 25 of what I'm calling 'specific' museums throughout the Los Angeles region, with an eye towards geographic and thematic diversity and an emphasis on the under-appreciated. Many of them have missions so narrowly defined that they are not inclined to evolve in the course of their existence. A number of them represent the worlds people construct, and the countless ways one might choose to live or identify. All of them are, I think, completely fascinating and worthwhile." - Todd Lerew

We’re having a photobook all-star signing event tomorrow! Come join us with our friends at @the.ice.plant and @deadbeatclub and @skinnerboox for the west coast launch of 4 fantastic books by Michael Schmelling, Jake Longstreth, Ed Panar, and Melissa Catanese. 

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TULARE by Jake Longstreth. From 2008 to 2012, often in the dead of summer, American painter Jake Longstreth photographed the dusty, utilitarian Central Valley of California, a severe inland topography formerly occupied by the massive Tulare Lake. With a tonal restraint echoing the style of his own flatly realistic paintings, Longstreth’s photographs capture the hazy, blinding sunlight and muted palette of this region, a topography that has been transformed from a lush, wild terrain—celebrated by John Muir in 1868 as “one smooth, continuous bed of honey-bloom”—into the monotonously fertile industrial farmland it is today. “Millions of people pass over the dry lake-bed in their cars every year, unaware of its previous existence,” Longstreth notes with ambivalent fascination. “A Taco Bell now stands roughly where the shores of Tulare Lake once were.”

We’re having a photobook all-star signing event tomorrow! Come join us with our friends at @the.ice.plant and @deadbeatclub and @skinnerboox for the west coast launch of 4 fantastic books by Michael Schmelling, Jake Longstreth, Ed Panar, and Melissa Catanese. 

YOUR BLUES (published by @the.ice.plant and @skinnerboox) by Michael Schmelling. In 2013, the Museum of Contemporary Photography commissioned American photographer Michael Schmelling to make a new series of photographs about music in his hometown of Chicago. First shown as the solo exhibition Your Blues in 2014 (curated by Karen Irvine), this ambitious body of work now takes form of an artist book, co-published by The Ice Plant and Skinnerboox. Schmelling spent eighteen months immersed in the project, crisscrossing Chicago alone at night, making his way into basement shows, crowded clubs, parties, and recording studios (“waiting in the dark for a communal experience with strangers,” as he describes it), documenting both the communal culture at large — musicians and fans alike — and the DIY individualism of the characters involved. Focusing on niche and local acts in unconventional venues, Schmelling’s work reflects a vibrant, fluid crossover between the region’s music genres, a diffuse legacy that encompasses the blues, punk, psychedelic jazz, rap, emo, hardcore, and house music. In Chicago “there’s no dominant cultural tradition,” writes musician Tim Kinsella in an essay included in the book. “The dominant form is hybridity.” Teeming with enthralled bodies and ecstatic faces, Your Blues is an energetic and intimate document of a time and place, featuring over 200 meticulously sequenced photographs, puzzled together through subtle rhythms and recurring visual riffs, infusing Schmelling’s own personal photo-cryptology into the evolving musical history of the city.

THIS SATURDAY (4-6), we’re having a photobook all-star signing event! Come join us with our friends at @the.ice.plant and @deadbeatclub for the west coast launch of 4 fantastic books by Melissa Catanese, Jake Longstreth, Ed Panar, and Michael Schmelling. @spaces_corners power couple Melissa Catanese and Ed Panar will each be here with their respective new books: VOYAGERS (@melissa_catanese / @the.ice.plant).   and IN THE VICINITY (@edpanar / @deadbeatclubpress). Please join us to celebrate!

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VOYAGERS: Where do our minds go when we read books, magazines, and letters? Do we seek an escape, a portal to another world? A secret, a truth, a pleasant distraction? Voyagers, edited by Melissa Catanese (author of Dive Dark Dream Slow), consists almost entirely of anonymous black & white snapshots of people in various postures of reading — in living rooms, on beds, at the beach, eating breakfast. We can’t see what these readers are thinking, but Catanese occasionally breaks the hypnotic typological rhythm to reveal a new photographic element — a pyramid, a starry night, sunlight glowing through a window — giving us brief glimpses of the readers’ potential narrative journeys. A wordless book with the size and feel of a vintage paperback found at a flea market, Voyagers reminds us of the power and intimacy of our relationship to ‘reading devices,’ and evokes an exotic nostalgia for our recent pre-digital culture. As with Catanese’s prior books, the images were judiciously selected from the collection of Peter J. Cohen, a celebrated trove of more than 20,000 vernacular photographs from the early- to mid-twentieth century.