Book of the Day > Pittori di Cinema. Published by Lazy Dog Press. "In the wake of the Second World War, and above all, from the Sixties on, the Italian film industry began to commission artists to illustrate and promote its films. They were to sum up the entire movie plot in a single image, communicating at a glance all the emotion of a narrative. They were “cinema artists”. This 432-page volume addresses the work of twenty-nine artists, spanning the years between the Forties and the Nineties, with over 500 colour illustrations, including sketches, drafts and previously unpublished works from private collections, as well as works that were rejected or used in other ways. Maurizio Baroni, a passionate expert, author and collector, draws on his own large personal archive – now housed at Bologna Cineteca – to examine forty years of Italian cinema through playbills and posters. The works, divided by artist, are annotated by Andrea Mi and Luca Barcelona, whose critical essay skillfully analyses all aspects linked to illustration and lettering respectively, in relation to their message. The artists are introduced by Alessandra Cesselon, giving an overview of their work from the artistic point of view. The book is aimed at film-lovers and collectors, but also graphic designers and illustrators as well as students and professionals, as a historical record and an inspiration for future generations of communicators."

Book of the Day > Bruce Talamon: Soul, R&B, Funk Photographs 1972-1982. Published by Taschen. “Talamon saw it all during the golden age of soul, R&B, and funk. Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, this young African American photographer from Los Angeles found himself backstage with an all-access pass to the heart of the music scene. He caught his first big break landing a position as a staff photographer at SOUL Newspaper in LA in the early 1970s, just as soul, R&B, and funk were becoming part of the mainstream. He captured the rehearsals and sound checks, recording sessions and costume fittings, the quiet reflective moments and life on the road, and, of course, the wild photo shoots and memorable performances. These photographs define an era famed for its glamour, fabulous fashions, and utter devotion to the groove.

Including close to 300 photographs from 1972 to 1982, the extensive Talamon archives are presented in full detail for the first time. Whether you’re a diehard soul fan or a thrilled newcomer to the aesthetic magic of the 1970s, the collection exudes the infectious spirit of an exuberant age. Featuring icons such as Earth, Wind & Fire; Marvin Gaye; Diana Ross; Parliament-Funkadelic; Al Green; Gil Scott-Heron; James Brown; Barry White; Rick James; Aretha Franklin; the Jackson Five; Donna Summer; and Chaka Khan and many others; there are also several stops at the legendary Soul Trainstudios. Talamon documented a visual period in black music that lasted way past the midnight hour and will never come again.”

Book of the Day > Janet Delaney: Public Matters. Published by Mack Books. "Capturing the spirit of protest and parade, Public Matters brings together photographs made by Janet Delaney in Reagan-era San Francisco. At this turbulent time in the mid eighties, Delaney was living in the primarily Latino neighbourhood of the Mission District. She would spend the weekends photographing public gatherings, from the annual Cinco de Mayo parade, to the Peace, Jobs and Justice marches, which rallied against the U.S. invasion of Nicaragua. If political governance was regressing, the West Coast city was a place where, as Delaney remembers, ‘progressive ideas would always be upheld.’ Celebrating multiculturalism and collective struggles for social justice, Public Matters surfaces at a juncture when the message of building bridges is needed now more than ever.

In the vintage glow of her sun-drenched images, Delaney leads us in and out of crowds – among demonstrators, fair-goers, cross-dressers, union organisers, beauty pageants, dancers, salesmen, mothers, kids, and market punters – searching for as many intimate moments as she found collective voices. Fearlessly upbeat, her photographs nevertheless intimate a time when, as Delaney recollects, people ‘were reeling from the shift to a conservative government. The demands of the 1960s were addressed in the 70s: the end of the Vietnam war, women’s rights, environmental issues, gay rights, to name a few. Then when Reagan was elected all this came to a halt.’ And as soon as the streets were filled with placards – ‘babies are for loving, not for bombing’; ‘Hatred can never cure the disease of fear, only love can do that’ – Delaney was there, in the middle of the maelstrom, making pictures of public matters."

Book of the Day > W.E.B. Dubois's Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America. Published by Princeton Architectural Press.

"The colorful charts, graphs, and maps presented at the 1900 Paris Exposition by famed sociologist and black rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois offered a view into the lives of black Americans, conveying a literal and figurative representation of "the color line." From advances in education to the lingering effects of slavery, these prophetic infographics —beautiful in design and powerful in content—make visible a wide spectrum of black experience. W. E. B. Du Bois's Data Portraits collects the complete set of graphics in full color for the first time, making their insights and innovations available to a contemporary imagination. As Maria Popova wrote, these data portraits shaped how "Du Bois himself thought about sociology, informing the ideas with which he set the world ablaze three years later in The Souls of Black Folk."

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." 

Please join us on Sunday, November 4th from 4:00 –6:00 PM, with

Dewey Nicks and publisher T. Adler Books to celebrate the the launch of 

Dewey Nicks: Polaroids of Women.
 

If you cannot attend, you can order signed copies of this lovely book here.

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 > 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"