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.”

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.”