Book of the day > The Photographer's Cookbook. Aperture/George Eastman Museum. “In the late 1970s, the George Eastman Museum approached a group of photographers to ask for their favorite recipes and food-related photographs to go with them, in pursuit of publishing a cookbook. Playing off George Eastman’s own famous recipe for lemon meringue pie, as well as former director Beaumont Newhall’s love of food, the cookbook grew from the idea that photographers’ talent in the darkroom must also translate into special skills in the kitchen. The recipes do not disappoint, with Robert Adams’ Big Sugar Cookies, Ansel Adams’ Poached Eggs in Beer, Richard Avedon’s Royal Pot Roast, Imogen Cunningham’s Borscht, William Eggleston’s Cheese Grits Casserole, Stephen Shore’s Key Lime Pie Supreme and Ed Ruscha’s Cactus Omelette, to name a few. The book was never published, and the materials have remained in George Eastman Museum’s collection ever since. Now, nearly 40 years later, this extensive and distinctive archive of untouched recipes and photographs is published in The Photographer’s Cookbook for the first time. The book provides a time capsule of contemporary photographers of the 1970s—many before they made a name for themselves—as well as a fascinating look at how they depicted food, family and home, taking readers behind the camera and into the hearts and stomachs of some of photography’s most important practitioners.”

Book of the day > Undercover by Jun Takahashi. Rizzoli. “The first comprehensive book on the work of Jun Takahashi of UNDERCOVER, an icon of Harajuku streetwear and the presumptive heir to the heavy mantle of Japanese deconstruction. Takahashi Jun’s fashion is not born out of an excessively intellectualized agenda. While not quite populist, his generative influences are instead romantic—even gothic. A fixture of the Paris collections for more than ten years—plus seventeen uninterrupted seasons in Tokyo prior to that—Takahashi’s life’s work confirms a maturation from self-conscious artifice and rebel pastiche to a steely, withering elegance all his own. Hailing from Gunma Prefecture like his friend NIGO® of *A Bathing Ape®, Takahashi’s long association with the undisputed king of Ura-Harajuku in the early 1990s is now the stuff of local fashion lore. But Takahashi would blaze an entirely different path to legend and notoriety. The violent rending and hasty reassembly that characterized his early work, its calculated imperfections and sutured seams, have given way to collections that he himself now calls "sexy and feminine." UNDERCOVER is insightfully curated with fashion-filled chapters devoted to Takahashi’s sketches, graphic work, collaborations, and most innovative designs to date. Lavishly illustrated with more than 200 photographs and in-depth essays by fashion writers, curators, and colleagues, this book gives readers first time access into Takahashi’s UNDERCOVER, one of the most desired and multidimensional clothing lines in contemporary fashion.”
 

Book of the day > Ed Ruscha and the Great American West. University of California Press & Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. “The renowned artist Ed Ruscha was born in Nebraska, grew up in Oklahoma, and has lived and worked in Southern California since the late 1950s. Beginning in 1956, road trips across the American Southwest furnished a conceptual trove of themes and motifs that he mined throughout his career. The everyday landscapes of the West, especially as experienced from the automobile—gas stations, billboards, building facades, parking lots, and long stretches of roadway—are the primary motifs of his often deadpan and instantly recognizable paintings and works on paper, as well as his influential artist books such as Twentysix Gasoline Stations and All the Buildings on the Sunset Strip. His iconic word images—declaring Adios, Rodeo, Wheels over Indian Trails, and Honey . . . I Twisted through More Damn Traffic to Get Here—further underscore a contemporary Western sensibility. Ruscha’s interest in what the real West has become—and Hollywood’s version of it—plays out across his oeuvre. The cinematic sources of his subject matter can be seen in his silhouette pictures, which often appear to be grainy stills from old Hollywood movies. They feature images of the contemporary West, such as parking lots and swimming pools, but also of its historical past: covered wagons, buffalo, teepees, and howling coyotes. Featuring essays by Karin Breuer and D.J. Waldie, plus a fascinating interview with the artist conducted by Kerry Brougher, this stunning catalogue, produced in close collaboration with the Ruscha studio, offers the first full exploration of the painter’s lifelong fascination with the romantic concept and modern reality of the evolving American West.”

Book of the day > Sofia Borges: The Swamp. MACK.  “Reality as mud as dense as air” reads the spine of Sofia Borges’ book The Swamp, and equally, the series of photographs that she presents is as leaden as it is impenetrable. Spanning a seven-year period, it largely records Borges’ countless visits to natural history museums, zoos, aquariums and research centres, where the artifice of reality became her point of focus. For Borges, displays such as habitat dioramas serve as the ultimate form of representation, where objects have the virtuous task of representing “themselves” – a type, genre or group that is inherently bound to language through layers of history and meaning. As a motionless walrus lies in its plastic Antarctic locale and the beady eye of a fossilised bird catches your glance, what glares back at you from the depths of The Swamp is not the thing itself, but the image, of an image, of an image.

‘What I seek are images, which, in their very artifice, are able to present themselves as a problem’, Borges has said. Beyond the comical absurdity of museological spectacles that spawn the living dead, The Swamp takes aim at the notion that images can be ‘read’. Taking inspiration from the insoluble language of Beckett on the one hand, and the cinematic mind-twists of Lynch on the other, Borges disrupts logical processes of comprehension, offering seemingly random sequences of images, whose monstrous forms and coarse surfaces purposefully assault the senses.” @mack_books

Book of the day > Kaleidoscope #27: Sterling Ruby Takeover. Summer 2016. @kaleidoscopemagazine “This issue is a key to enter the world of Los Angeles-based artist Sterling Ruby, exclusively playing the double role of subject and guest editor. Conceived as a viral, aggressive takeover of the magazine’s architecture, content and design, this hyper-vertical survey is the result of an intense dialogue with the artist and his studio, comprised of 160+ pages on his exuberant work and vision.

Ruby’s cover portrait is drawn from an extensive series shot by photographer Max Farago at the artist’s massive industrial studio space in LA. Inside, the Sterling Ruby Takeover decodes the artist’s grammar through an intimate conversation with artist Piero Golia and newly commissioned writings by Alex Gartenfeld, Donatien Grau, Aram Moshayedi, Ross Simonini, Paul Schimmel and Catherine Taft; while his network of influences is explored through a series of guest features dedicated to his peers, heroes and collaborators, including Huma Bhabha (by Massimiliano Gioni), Cassils (by Francesca Gavin), Mike Davis (by Sterling Ruby), John Divola (by Alexander Shulan), Cyprien Gaillard (by Natalia Valencia Arango), Ron Nagle (by Sterling Ruby), Nancy Rubins (by Sterling Ruby), Raf Simons (by Alessio Ascari) and Melanie Schiff (by Sarah Workneh). All of this content is punctuated by stunning visual contributions especially created by Ruby for the magazine’s pages, comprising an unseen presentation of his Work Wear modeled by the entire studio team.” #sterlingruby

Book of the day > Gus Van Sant: Icons. La Cinématèque Française with Actes Sud. “Gus Van Sant: Icons offers insight into the world of filmmaker Gus Van Sant, published on the occasion of a major exhibition at the Cinémathèque française in Paris. This comprehensive monograph surveys the full range of Van Sant’s artistry from photography and painting to music, filtered through the perspective of his films. The exhibition and catalogue are a thoroughly original take on a distinctive filmmaker, bringing together all facets of his work for the first time and offering a fresh vision of his iconic filmmaking.

The heart of Gus Van Sant: Icons is a previously unpublished interview with Van Sant conducted in Portland in June 2015 by Matthieu Orléans, the exhibition’s curator. In a wide-ranging conversation, the two men discuss the whole scope of Van Sant’s work and inspirations. Van Sant connects himself to a lineage of other artists, citing William Burroughs, William Eggleston, Harmony Korine and Ed Ruscha as influences. The filmmaker offers firsthand anecdotes and in-depth appraisals of the production processes of each of his movies, from the experimental shorts of the 1970s to his most recent film, Sea of Trees, presented at the Cannes Festival in May 2015.”

Book of the day + Book Signing/Celebration tomorrow! > Bettina Hubby: Thanks for the Mammaries. LAND & Klowden Mann. “Published by LAND (@nomadicdivision), with support from KlowdenMann (@klowdenmann) the book documents the various iterations of Hubby’s ongoing project, Thanks for the Mammaries: The Facebook Feed, which arose from her public announcement of her breast cancer diagnosis and the response it garnered from friends near and far. Join us, along with LAND and Klowden Mann next Sunday to celebrate with Bettina and see the launch of her new artist edition – “What will she DOOB next?” Details at arcanabooks.com.

BETTINA HUBBY: THANKS FOR THE MAMMARIES

SUNDAY, JULY 10th FROM 4:00 - 6:00 PM
WITH SPECIAL MUSICAL GUEST JANET KLEIN,
AND FEATURING CUPCAKES, WINE, AND MORE!
 

Please join us, Klowden Mann, and LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division) on Sunday, July 10th, 2016 from 4:00 to 6:00 PM to celebrate the release of Bettina Hubby’s Thanks for the Mammaries. This artist's book, published by LAND with support from Klowden Mann, documents the various iterations of Hubby’s ongoing project Thanks for the Mammaries, the Facebook feed which was originally installed at the LAND HQ from October through November of 2015.
 
In 2014, Hubby announced her Breast Cancer diagnosis on Facebook and asked her friends and community to submit “boob-related imagery.” People showered Hubby with images, videos, and verbiage that helped her heal, and inspired her to pay it forward. Touched by the uplifting effect of this communal support, Hubby sent out a call to artists to submit works for an exhibition. The exhibitions and online Facebook feed displayed the outpouring of support that resulted from Hubby’s call to action; selections of which are documented in the publication. “What continues to bring me the most satisfaction is the feedback regarding my approach, in that it has been positively impacting and inspiring people who have (and even many who have not) faced illness in their lives, or in their loved ones’ lives. This is why I wanted to release this as a book to a wider audience. This book is dedicated to the medicinal power of boobishness”.
 
In addition, the artist’s new limited multiple, B(*)(*)B DOOB, produced by Klowden Mann, will also be unveiled at the event. The serial edition consists of eight Hubby-centric self-portrait figurines created using DOOB-3D printing technology. The first in the series will be a portrait of Hubby that directly relates to Thanks for the Mammaries. These figures will be published quarterly, and offered by subscription individually.

If you cannot attend but wish to purchase a signed copy of Thanks for the Mammaries please place your online order here by noon on Sunday or call us at 310-458-1499.

Book of the day  > Revelations: Iconography of the Salpêtrière. Paris 1875–1918. Editorial RM. “Drawing from 32 volumes of photographs published between 1875 and 1918, editor Javier Viver has assembled this superbly produced compilation of portraits of patients at the Parisian psychiatric hospital the Salpêtrière during its years of directorship under Jean-Martin Charcot, the founder of modern neurology.

The Iconographie de La Salpêtrière is one of the first photographic archives in the field of clinical psychiatry. It constituted an effort to catalogue the unclassifiable through new photographic-documentary techniques. The realm of the marginal –whatever failed to fit into the rational logic of the modern project– was subject to dissection at La Salpêtrière. It was systematically measured, documented, and classified.

In this operation, however, the use of photography fostered the incorporation of spectacle and, with it, an entire network of complicities between patients and photographers. The spectacle of La Salpêtrière became a variety show at every Tuesday session, played out in front of a representative sampling of cultural and scientific elites, through the induction of contortions by hypnosis, epileptic seizures, and fits of hysteria, and the registry and exhibition of cabinets of curiosities, biological rarities, freaks, and other phenomena.

The result is an unprecedented photographic archive, a witness to the colonial era, assembled with the “panoptic” intent of a disciplinary regime, and a systematic documentation of the limits of the human soul.

Based on field work with more than 4,000 photographs and thirty-two volumes published between 1875 and 1918, Javier Viver has assembled a new compilation and edition of the iconography of the celebrated Parisian hospital. Beyond its very original clinical interpretation, the archive is presented in a contemporary critical context, open to new readings, associations, and levels of interpretation.” $ 65.00