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.

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 Ed Panar and Melissa Catanese will each be here with their respective new books: IN THE VICINITY (@edpanar / @deadbeatclub) and VOYAGERS (@melissa_catanese) @the.ice.plant).  Please join us to celebrate!

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In 'In The Vicinity,' Ed Panar navigates a remote corner of Mendocino County, an area located within the Emerald Triangle, also known as the heart of California’s cannabis culture. Hidden under the cover of densely forested mountain sides, foothills and valleys, the cannabis plant is leading the way and being tended to: cultivated and revered for its potent economic, psychotropic, and mythological values. We find ourselves in the midst of a secretive world where clandestine operations take place behind rambling fence lines, locked gates, and dusty dirt roads in an ever shifting gray area of legalization, self-sufficiency and raw capitalistic impulses. The plant itself—the primary star of the scene—remains elusive in this Edenic rural atmosphere, where some of the most productive outdoor cultivation of this multi-billion dollar cash crop is occurring just out of sight.

The photographs in In The Vicinity were made between 2007 and 2017, during the sunset chapter of a distinctly Wild West era of this thriving industry. Struck by the natural beauty of the sparsely populated, rugged terrain against the psychedelic blending of the seasons, Panar set out to describe the outwardly idyllic terroir of endless sun-soaked ridges rolling beneath snow-capped mountains that provide the dramatic backdrop and ideal conditions for outdoor growing of the cannabis plant. We have the feeling of being inside a cloistered farming community, though we are kept at a respectful distance. Just beneath our noses—sometimes quite literally, like catching a hint of the distinctive sweet skunky fragrance in the wind— we find traces of the timeless pursuit of seeking the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, even as the slow and uneven path away from prohibition enters a new phase of uncertainty, especially for small producers and farmers.

The quiet clarity of Panar’s photographs—landscape, still life, details and the occasional nonhuman observer— provide an open ended invitation to consider not only an area within and along the edges of this industry, but also the gray areas of photographic representation and its ability to provide “documentary” insight into something as elusive and enigmatic as the allure of this mythical plant and the emerging modern cannabis economy.

Book of the Day > Led Zeppelin by Led Zeppelin. Published by Reel Art Press. “Led Zeppelin by Led Zeppelin is the first and only official illustrated book to be produced in collaboration with the members of the band. Celebrating 50 years since their formation, it covers the group’s unparalleled musical career and features photographs of Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones and John Bonham on and offstage, in candid moments and in the recording studio. This definitive 400-page volume includes previously unpublished photos, artwork from the Led Zeppelin archives and contributions from photographers around the world.”

Book of the Day > Viviane Sassen: Hot Mirror. Published by Prestel in conjunction with The Hepworth Wakefield. “Published on the occasion of the exhibition Viviane Sassen: Hot Mirror at The Hepworth Wakefield, a survey of work by the internationally renowned Dutch artist and photographer Viviane Sassen (b.1972). This mid-career retrospective volume is a creative collaboration between Sassen and designer Irma Boom and is published by Prestel. It includes an insightful interview with the artist, a contextualizing essay by The Hepworth Wakefield curator, Eleanor Clayton and Sassen’s own thoughtful writings.

This publication focuses on Sassen’s fine art photography, revealing a surrealist undercurrent in her work. Sassen recognizes Surrealism as one of her earliest artistic influences, seen in the uncanny shadows, fragmented bodies, and otherworldly landscapes she captures in her work.

In addition to the images from the acclaimed series ‘Umbra’, this volume drawes form the series ‘Flamboya’, in which Sassen returned to Kenya, ‘Oarasomnia’, a dreamlime exploration of sleep, ‘Roxane’ a mutual portrait created with her muse, Roxane Danset, and the ‘Pikin Slee’ series, a journey to a remote village in Suriname. Selected by Sassen herself from across the last ten years, the images draw on the surrealist strategies of collage and unexpected juxtapositions to give a survey of her practice.”

Book of the Day > John Waters: Indecent Exposure. Published by University of California Press in conjunction with the Baltimore Museum of Art. “It has been more than fifty years since John Waters filmed his first short on the roof of his parents’ Baltimore home. Over the following decades, Waters has developed a reputation as an uncompromising cultural force not only in cinema, but also in visual art, writing, and performance. This major retrospective examines the artist’s influential career through more than 160 photographs, sculptures, soundworks, and videos he has made since the early 1990s. These works deploy Waters’s renegade humor to reveal the ways that mass media and celebrity embody cultural attitudes, moral codes, and shared tragedy.

Waters has broadened our understanding of American individualism, particularly as it relates to queer identity, racial equality, and freedom of expression. In bringing “bad taste” to the walls of galleries and museums, he tugs at the curtain of exclusivity that can divide art from human experience. Waters freely manipulates an image bank of less-than-sacred, low-brow references—Elizabeth Taylor’s hairstyles, his own self-portraits, and pictures of individuals brought into the limelight through his films, including his counterculture muse Divine—to entice viewers to engage with his astute and provocative observations about society.

This richly illustrated book explores themes including the artist’s childhood and identity; Pop culture and the movie business; Waters’s satirical take on the contemporary art world; and the transgressive power of images. The catalogue features essays by BMA Senior Curator of Contemporary Art Kristen Hileman; art historian and activist Jonathan David Katz; critic, curator, and artist Robert Storr; as well as an interview with Waters by photographer Wolfgang Tillmans.”

Book of the Day > Dimensionism: Modern Art in the Age of Einstein. Published by MIT Press. "In the early twentieth century, influenced by advances in science that included Einstein's theory of relativity and newly powerful microscopic and telescopic lenses, artists were inspired to expand their art—to capture a new metareality that went beyond human perception into unseen dimensions. In 1936, the Hungarian poet Charles Sirató authored the Dimensionist Manifesto, signaling a new movement that called on artists to transcend “all the old borders and barriers of the arts.” The manifesto was the first attempt to systematize the mass of changes that we now call modern art, and was endorsed by an impressive array of artists, including Jean Arp, Alexander Calder, Robert Delaunay, Sonia Delaunay, César Domela, Marcel Duchamp, Wassily Kandinsky, Joan Miró, László Moholy-Nagy, Ben Nicholson, Enrico Prampolini, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp. Dimensionism is the first book in English to explore how these and other “Dimensionists” responded to the scientific breakthroughs of their era.

The book, which accompanies a traveling exhibition, reproduces works by the manifesto's initial endorsers and by such artists as Georges Braque, Joseph Cornell, Helen Lundeberg, Man Ray, Herbert Matter, Isamu Noguchi, Pablo Picasso, Kay Sage, Patrick Sullivan, and Dorothea Tanning. It also offers essays by prominent art historians that examine Sirató's now almost-forgotten text and the artists who searched for a means of expression that obliterated old conceptions and parameters. Appearing for the first time in English is Sirató's own “History of the Dimensionist Manifesto,” written in 1966. The book brings aa long-forgotten voice and text back into circulation."

Book of the Day > Jenny Saville. Published by Rizzoli. “Thirteen years after her first Rizzoli monograph, British artist Jenny Saville, an original member of the Young British Artists, releases her most definitive book, including never-before-published paintings from her most recent exhibition at Gagosian in New York. This much-anticipated volume unites new work with many of Saville's paintings and drawings to date, accompanied by essays that explore Saville's continuing fascination with the human body within a broad art-historical context. The book also features Saville in an extensive conversation with acclaimed American photographer Sally Mann. An illustrated chronology of Saville's career completes this elegant volume. This beautifully produced monograph is an important addition to the library on one of the world's most influential and enduring living painters.”

Book of the Day > Masahisa Fukase. Published by Editions Xavier Barral. "Among the most radical and original photographers of his generation, Masahisa Fukase was famous for The Solitude of Ravens (1991), in which these birds of doom, in flocks or alone, blacken the pages of the book in inky, somber, calligraphic clusters; in 2010 it was voted the best photobook of the past 25 years by the British Journal of Photography. Fukase also has a lesser-known corpus of collages, self-portraits, photographs reworked as sketches, black-and-white prints, Polaroids and more. This book brings together all of his work for the very first time.

Its editors, Simon Baker, director of the Maison européenne de la photographie, Paris, and Tomo Kosuga, director of the Masahisa Fukase Archives, Tokyo, have assembled 26 series from Fukase's oeuvre, including Memories of Father; The Solitude of Ravens; his portraits of cats; his famous self-portraits taken in a bathtub with a waterproof camera; and many previously unpublished works. Fukase tried his hand at everything, and this essential volume, at more than 400 pages, at last reveals the full breadth of his imagination in an English-language publication.

Born in 1934 on the island of Hokkaido, in the north of Japan, into a family of studio photographers, Masahisa Fukase began a career as a freelance reporter in the late 1960s. In 1971 he published his first photography book, consisting of group portraits of his family. In 1974, he cofounded the Workshop Photography School with Shomei Tomatsu, Eikoh Hosoe, Noriaki Yokosuka, Nobuyoshi Araki and Daido Moriyama; that same year, MoMA in New York dedicated a milestone exhibition to them (New Japanese Photography). In 1992, at the age of 58, following a fall, Fukase was maintained on life support until his death in 2012."

Book of the day > Andy Burgess: Modernist House Paintings. Published by Nazraeli Press. “Nazraeli Press is proud to announce the publication of Andy Burgess: Modernist House Paintings. Representing over ten years of work by contemporary painter Andy Burgess, this exquisite monograph highlights the artist’s significant paintings in oil and acrylic completed since his move to the American Southwest from his native London in 2009. Representing an extensive exploration of modernist and mid-century homes, such as The Stahl House and The Kaufmann House, these colorful and abstracted works allow Burgess to reinterpret iconic buildings with a heightened, dream-like intensity. Printed on luscious warm-toned paper with exceptionally high quality reproductions, this crisp, clean book sequences an impressive body of work, curated like a mid-career retrospective. A foreword by gallerist Cynthia Corbett and a comprehensive essay by Tucson Museum of Art curator Julie Sasse, Ph.D. complement the artist’s images and lend insight and perspective into his creative process."