MITCH EPSTEIN IN CONVERSATION WITH JAMES WELLING REGARDING "NEW YORK ARBOR"

We're most excited to be hosting two of America's greatest contemporary photographers together here in conjunction with the release of Mitch Epstein's hot-off-the-press "New York Arbor".

"This new work is a series of photographs of the idiosyncratic trees that inhabit New York City. These pictures underscore the importance of trees to urban life and their complex relationship to their human counterparts. Rooted in New York’s sidewalks, parks, and cemeteries, some trees grow wild, some are contortionists adapting to constrictive surroundings, while others are pruned into prize specimens. As urban development closes in on them, surprisingly, New York’s trees continue to thrive".

From 2011 to 2012, Epstein explored New York’s five boroughs in search of remarkable trees, often returning to photograph the same trees through the changing seasons and light. Many of these trees, Epstein learned, were planted in one context—a farm or nursery, for instance—and had survived to be part of another, a city street or public garden; and most will likely outlive us to find their habitat continue to change. The cumulative effect of these photographs is to invert people’s usual view of their city: trees no longer function as background, but instead dominate the human life and architecture around them".

 

JOHN VAN HAMERSVELD:
50 YEARS OF GRAPHIC DESIGN
Foreword by Shepard Fairey
Published by Gingko Press

We're thrilled to welcome esteemed graphic artist, photographer and illustrator John Van Hamersveld to Arcana on June 8th! "In a career spanning fifty years, Van Hamersveld has designed album covers for bands such as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Grateful Dead, The Beach Boys, Jefferson Airplane, Kiss and Blondie, and graced such magazines as Rolling Stone, Esquire and Billboard with his illustrations - all the while experimenting with new media and techniques. Few individuals have had such a lasting and ongoing impact on graphic design, popular art and culture.

An iconic image has a tremendous ability to influence society, acting as both a symbol for a moment in time and as a harbinger for change. Instantly recognizable, it can become invested with our hopes and dreams, both on a personal and a cultural level.  Creating such work is not mere happenstance, but is thanks to the deliberate choices and groundbreaking talents of a small handful of visionary artists and designers. John Van Hamersveld is one such creator, having produced such timeless images as the Endless Summer movie poster and the Jimi Hendrix Pinnacle poster."

John is a longtime frequenter of our shop that has produced several of the 20th Century's most significant and recognizable posters. We will have a small selection of these available to be signed along with his spectacular new book.

TODD HIDO:
EXCERPTS FROM SILVER MEADOWS
 

Printed Matter's  LA ART BOOK FAIR
January 31st - February 3rd

at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA

Celebrate with author Ron Avery the release of a stunning tribute to one of Hollywood's greatest photographers, andone of this season's most sought after titles!

SID AVERY:
THE ART OF THE HOLLYWOOD SNAPSHOT
 

ANTHONY HERNANDEZ + TORBJØRN RØDLAND:
MACK BOOKS IN L.A. AT ARCANA THIS THURSDAY

PLEASE JOIN US FROM 6-8:00 PM THURSDAY, DECEMBER 13th  FOR REFRESHMENTS AND PRE-HOLIDAY CONSUMERISM AS WE WELCOME TWO PHOTOGRAPHIC TITANS AND CELEBRATE THEIR HOT-OFF-THE-PRESSES NEW RELEASES!
 

Anthony Hernandez: Rodeo Drive, 1984

Rodeo Drive, 1984 is Anthony Hernandez' series of forty-one photographic images of shoppers on Beverly Hills’ infamous commercial thoroughfare. His subjects appear to be caught unaware, glancing up as they walk, or daydreaming as they wait to be served in its landscape of tony shops and restaurants.  Hernandez poses as a dispassionate observer, recording the big hair, wide shoulders and cinched waists of the 1980s in sunlit photographs.

He does not simply document the urban experience, but reveals in his images the complexity of social spaces, implying economic disparity and racial divide. Layers of socio-economic tension are exposed on the street in an overt symbol of civic success; as Lewis Baltz observes, “these are the victors...enjoying the spoils of their victory on Rodeo Drive”. Working in the 1970s, Hernandez and his contemporaries (including Lewis Baltz and Terry Wild) were interested in photographing the social landscape of Los Angeles. His work was included in the landmark exhibition The Crowded Vacancy at the Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon) in 1971, which introduced to the public a new type of American landscape photography - four years prior to New Topographics.

This sumptuous new MACK Books release presents in print for the first time Anthony Hernandez' wry assessment of Reagan-era consumerism.
 

Torbjørn Rødland: Vanilla Partner

Torbjørn Rødland's photography is direct but idiosyncratic; pushing at the boundaries of aesthetic and social norms. His fifth book, Vanilla Partner, continues in this vein, combining images of fetishized isolation in a layout that rejects the linear structure of thematic photography books.

Rødland's practice navigates through the problematic and seemingly unchanging heart of popular photography. Accepting neither the humanist realism of most photographic portraiture nor the postmodern role-play, Vanilla Partner explores the cultural complexities and archaic foundation of contemporary image-making. Reconstructed scenes of ultra-soft BDSM read like twisted metaphors for photography’s ability to freeze or capture. The book title, dripping in innuendo, also poses a question about the ambiguity of the relationship between the artist and his medium. Is Rødland acknowledging the medium’s straight foundation or does he see himself dominated by it? Many of the images also have explicit political references, often linked to the 1980 US Presidential election.

Vanilla Partner brings together works made in Oslo, Tokyo, Beijing and Rødland’s current home, Los Angeles. Only just released, it has already appeared on several "Best of" photography books lists for 2012!

101 ESSENTIAL ROCK RECORDS:
THE GOLDEN AGE OF VINYL FROMTHE BEATLES TO THE SEX PISTOLS

by JEFF GOLD
 

The book shines a light on one hundred and one rock albums - from the well known to the obscure - that changed music forever. From The Beatles' 1963 UK debut Please Please Me through the Sex Pistols' 1977 classic Never Mind The Bollocks, its focus is vinyl’s “Golden Age”; beginning with the explosion of album sales brought on by Beatlemania, and ending in the late seventies with the advent of Sony’s Walkman - and the cassette overtaking the LP as the dominant music format.

Already featured in the pages of Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, and SPIN, this awesome compendium of rock 'n' roll scholarship is a must-have for any music fan, and the perfect holiday gift. Come celebrate with our longtime friend (and Lee's colleague at Rhino Records oh-so-many years ago) Jeff Gold, contributor Gene Sculatti, guest DJ Zach Cowie (spinning albums featured in the book) and any number of familiar faces this Sunday!

STEVE SCHAPIRO: THEN AND NOW

Please join us on Sunday, December 2nd between 5:00 and 7:00 PM for a book signing with observer, aesthete, chronicler, and fine photographer Scott Schuman for his latest book, THE SARTORIALIST: CLOSER.

Schuman's blog thesartorialist.com remains one of the most-read in the fashion world and continues to grow in popularity as Scott travels further and more widely. His second book, THE SARTORIALIST: CLOSER emcompasses the diverse style and visual attitude of people as far afield as Japan, Korea, London, Milan, New York, Paris, and beyond.

In it Mr.Schuman looks deeper and with great breadth at human style, and the way it is expressed across the world. Always reacting to an inspirational moment, the images in his new book continue to reflect Scott's unique sensibility and vision.
 

RICHARD MISRACH:
Petrochemical America
 

Petrochemical America features Richard Misrach’s haunting photographic record of Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor, accompanied by landscape architect Kate Orff’s Ecological Atlas - a series of “throughlines”; speculative drawings developed through research and mapping of data from the region. Their joint effort depicts and unpacks the complex cultural, physical, and economic ecologies along one hundred and fifty miles of the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, an area of intense chemical production that first garnered public attention as "Cancer Alley" when unusual occurrences of cancer were discovered in the region. This collaboration has resulted in an unprecedented, multilayered document presenting a unique narrative of visual information. Petrochemical America offers in-depth analysis of the causes of decades of environmental abuse along the largest river system in North America. Even more critically, the project offers an extensively researched guidebook to the way in which the petrochemical industry has permeated every facet of contemporary life. What is revealed over the course of the book is that this area - although complicated by its own regional histories and particularities - may well be an apt metaphor for the global impact of petrochemicals on the human landscape as a whole.

Richard Misrach has a long-standing personal connection with New Orleans and the surrounding region. Destroy This Memory, his previous Aperture monograph, is a record of the graffiti left on houses and cars in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina that won the award for Best Photobook of the Year 2011 at PhotoEspaña. Another standout success was his 2007 large-format On the Beach, a sublime visual meditation on the relationship between humankind and the environment, which is as spectacular as it is unsettling. Aperture has also published Violent Legacies and Golden Gate, which has been re-released in 2012 on the occasion of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the iconic bridge.