
Book Signing, 10/13 > Lloyd Ziff: New York / Los Angeles
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We're so happy that Christina Kim's Los Angeles includes Arcana! And we're honored to be the site of her forthcoming installation and to celebrate the "dosa glossary a-z" with a printed matter launch and sale, December 16th and 17th. The installation will remain on view for a month. Read the whole piece in the Financial Times' Hot To Spend It section here, and visit dosa.com to learn all about the beautiful and admirable things that Christina Kim does when she's not visiting bookstores!
"On Sundays I also like to visit my favourite bookstores. Caravan has been dealing in secondhand books for 60 years and has a fantastic range of old travel titles. The owner, Leonard Bernstein, will call me if an interesting book comes in. And then there’s Arcana, which is in Culver City and specialises in art books. I have quite a big library at home with a lot of reference, style, architecture and art books. "
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Book of the day > The Definitive Maria Callas. Published by Roads Publishing. “Maria Callas is the definition of an icon. Perhaps the most renowned and influential opera singer of all time, she is revered not just for her otherworldly voice and dramatic flair but for her passion, beauty and innate sense of style. The fire and intensity of her personal life paralleled the dramatic roles she interpreted so passionately. Working closely with the Fondaziono Proge Marzotto, the Italian arts trust who acquired the archive of Maria Callas in 2013; and Karl van Zoggel, head of the International Maria Callas Club, ROADS is delighted to present The Definitive Maria Callas: The Life of a Diva in Unseen Pictures. A lavish visual biography, the books showcases never-before-seen intimate letters, personal photographs and Callas’s private collection of recipes. A comprehensive and joyous exploration of the life and work of Maria Callas, it is the perfect book for opera aficionados and casual admirers alike.”
Book of the day > Jessica Backhaus: six degrees of freedom. Published by Kehrer (@kehrerverlag ). “Jessica Backhaus examines universal questions of human existence. Based on her own life story she inquires after the significance of knowing the roots of one’s own existence and to what extent it is possible to re-elaborate these – usually prescribed – roots. Initially unconsciously, then ever more purposefully the photographer, who grew up in a family of artists, at some point in her life set off in search of her own background. On this journey she visits places of her childhood and youth and fills the gaps in her memories. With her photographs she symbolically captures the essence of this search and of her life stages. Simultaneously, she pulls off the balancing act of keeping the images open for the beholder. Her photographs possess metaphoric potential and work against the grain of a classic social documentary photography. They alternate between realism and abstraction. Jessica Backhaus is regarded as one of the most important representatives of contemporary photography in Germany. Her works are internationally exhibited, published and are found in major collections. "Six degrees of freedom" is her sixth photobook at Kehrer Verlag and deals with the great universal themes of background, yearning, identity, and destiny.”
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Book of the day > Saul Bass: 20 Iconic Film Posters. Published by Laurence King. “This collection of 20 iconic movie posters by Saul Bass, one of the greatest American designers of the 20th century, is a must for graphic designers and film fans. Each poster is removable and designed to fit the standard frame size 12 x 16 inches.
The posters included are: The Man with the Golden Arm; Saint Joan; Love in the Afternoon; Bonjour Tristesse; The Big Country; Vertigo; Anatomy of a Murder; Exodus; Spartacus; The Magnificent Seven; Advise & Consent; The Cardinal; In Harm's Way; Bunny Lake is Missing; Seconds; Grand Prix; The Fixer; Such Good Friends; The Shining; Schindler's List.”
Book of the day (and book signing tomorrow (10/1, 4-6!) > Randi Malkin Steinberger: No Circus. Published by Damiani. They’re in most neighborhoods in Los Angeles - houses shrouded in brightly colored vinyl tarps being fumigated for termites. Noted photographer Randi Malkin Steinberger first encountered these tented houses when she moved to Southern California in the early 1990s. In her new book No Circus from Damiani and DAP, tented houses have become sculptural abstractions and enigmatic monuments inserted into the ordinariness of suburban streets.
Steinberger’s sixty-nine color photographs are accompanied by D.J. Waldie’s essay that ranges from the mating habits of termites, to the chemistry of fumigation, to the phenomenology of a shrouded house. “Houses haunt themselves” he writes. “While we’re away, the chair improvises a sitter, the door frame a passing figure, and the bed a sleeper. To be something more than a windbreak or a covering from rain or a frail barrier, a home must have dreamers inside. A house undreamed in is already neglected. Joining us along with Ms. Steinberger and Mr. Waldie will be the book's designer - and Deadbeat Club head honcho Clint Woodside - along with a special musical performance by composer Gavin Gamboa. Evoking the language of insects - both real and imagined - as well as the sounds of quarantine, Mr. Gamboa of The Teaching Machine collective will provide a backdrop of chirping, clicking, whirling, buzzing oscillations to the event! @123randi @gavartgamhag @artbook @ damiani_books
Book of the day > ZZYZX by Gregory Halpern. Published by MACK (@mack_books).” The early settlers dubbed California The Golden State, and The Land of Milk and Honey. Today there are the obvious ironies – sprawl, spaghetti junctions and skid row—but the place is not so easily distilled or visualized, either as a clichéd paradise or as its demise. There’s a strange kind of harmony when it’s all seen together—the sublime, the psychedelic, the self-destructive. Like all places, it’s unpredictable and contradictory, but to greater extremes. Cultures and histories coexist, the beautiful sits next to the ugly, the redemptive next to the despairing, and all under a strange and singular light, as transcendent as it is harsh.
The pictures in this book begin in the desert east of Los Angeles and move west through the city, ending at the Pacific. This general westward movement alludes to a thirst for water, as well as the original expansion of America, which was born in the East and which hungrily drove itself West until reaching the Pacific, thereby fulfilling its “manifest” destiny.
The people, places, and animals in the book did exist before Halpern’s camera, but he has sewn these photographs into a work of fiction or fantasy—a structure, sequence and edit which, like Los Angeles itself, teeters on the brink of collapsing under the weight of its own strangely-shaped mass.”
Book of the day > The Moon 1968–1972. Published by T. Adler Books. “NASA’s Apollo program landed the first humans on the moon in 1969. In the next three years, Apollo sent 10 more men to the moon in five subsequent missions. The first moon landing in particular is a legendarily well-documented event, representing one of those rare moments in which the world was united in awe, witnessing the feat together on their television screens. But each Apollo mission also generated hundreds of photographs, many of which have only recently been released by NASA. A selection of these images--shot by the astronauts themselves with suit-mounted and handheld Hasselblad cameras--are gathered in this beautifully designed, affordable volume.
Many of the photographs, though shot originally for scientific, documentary purposes, have an extraordinary snapshot quality, boasting inadvertently artful compositions and effects: in one, a pair of astronaut’s legs emerges upside down from the bottom of the frame; in another, a striding astronaut appears to glow against the black recesses of space.
Contextualized with background information about the Apollo Missions and the role of photographic documentation in them, the photographs in The Moon 1968–1972 are fascinating documents of the majesty of outer space, but also record the surface of the moon as a landscape of wonder.“