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 > Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool. Published by Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University.

"Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool accompanies the first career retrospective of the renowned American artist Barkley L. Hendricks, curated by Trevor Schoonmaker at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University from February 7, 2008 through July 13, 2008. Hendricks was born in 1945 in Philadelphia. His unique work contains elements of both American realism and postmodernism, occupying a space between the portraitists Chuck Close and Alex Katz and the pioneering black conceptualists David Hammons and Adrian Piper. Hendricks is best known for his life-sized portraits of people of color from the urban northeast. His bold portrayal of his subject's attitude and style elevates the common person to celebrity status. Cool, empowering, and sometimes confrontational, Hendricks' artistic privileging of a culturally complex black body has paved the way for today's younger generation of artists.

This richly illustrated book contains 100 color images of paintings created from 1964 to the present. It focuses primarily on the artist's full-figure portraits, as well as lesser known early works and the artist's more recent portal-like landscape paintings. The catalog includes the most comprehensive biography and bibliography on Hendricks to date, a timeline of the artist's life, and an interview with the artist by Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem. It also includes essays by Barkley L. Hendricks, Duke University art historian Richard J. Powell, exhibition curator Trevor Schoonmaker, and Franklin Sirmans, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Menil Collection.Publication of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University"

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.

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.”