Book of the Day Posted Jun 29, 2022

Book of the Day > Campbell Addy: Feeling Seen

Purchase ● Candid and personal, dazzling with color and immediacy, this first and only monograph of a rising star of the photography scene features work from major labels and magazines, outtakes from shoots, and newly commissioned texts by Edward Enninful and Ekow Eshun on the importance of authentic diversity behind and in front of the camera.
 
From major portraits of the likes of Kendall Jenner, FKA Twigs, and Tyler, the Creator to cover shoots for leading magazines such as Time, Rolling Stone, and Garage, Campbell Addy has quickly become one of the most in-demand photographers of his generation. The book opens with a foreword by British Vogue’s editor-in-chief, Edward Enninful, discussing the powerful intersection of photography, race, beauty, and representation. This is followed by a broad selection of Addy’s striking photographs, which range from prominent fashion and magazine commissions to candid portraiture. Featuring recognizable cover shots alongside unpublished outtakes and unseen photography, viewers are afforded insight into Addy’s creative process on set. Quotes from leading Black figures including Naomi Campbell and Nadine Ijewere are woven between Addy’s striking imagery, in which these trailblazing Black creatives reflect on the first time they felt seen in their industry. The book closes with a deeper exploration of Addy’s more personal imagery and influences, paying tribute to the heritage of Black photographers through the work of Ajamu and James Barnor. In conversation with curator and writer Ekow Eshun, Addy balances his own experiences as a queer, Black photographer who left his Jehovah’s Witness family home at sixteen with broader questions of identity, intimacy, and art which face many creatives today. Charged with energy, compassion and authenticity, this inaugural monograph signals a major talent whose influence and stature will only grow with time.
Book of the Day Posted Jun 28, 2022

Book of the Day > *Signed* Lilia Luganskaia: Hortus

Purchase ● History teaches us that a language of flowers can communicate endless things about the culture in which it emerged, and herein lies Lilia Luganskaia's interest. Taking inspiration from the world of 19th Century sentimental flower books, Hortus presents itself as a set of notes towards a modern handbook for contemporary floriography, considering what the discipline might look like today. By collecting common flora across one year in the urban gardens around her home in Amsterdam and cross-referencing their meanings with publications from the past, Luganskaia reflects on their natures, their roles, and the symbolic familiarity they might hold for the communities living with them. A female artist and reader of the twenty-first century, she seeks out the essence of modern life through her lens, and through flowers, just like the women who came before her.” The Hortus project is an open investigation into the nature of seemingly common objects through 'Floriography', urban gardens, and the history of female rights. Hortus was inspired by urban gardens in West Amsterdam and created with its plants by Lilia Luganskaia.
Book of the Day Posted Jun 25, 2022

Book of the Day > Paul Newman: Blue-Eyed Cool

Purchase ● Once, when asked how he’d like to be remembered, Paul Newman replied: "I’d like to be remembered as a guy who tried. Tried to be part of his times, tried to help people communicate with one another, tried to find some decency in his own life, tried to extend himself as a human being."
 
As an actor who became a film star, Newman repeatedly tapped into his times and in doing so redefined what movie stardom could be. Newman was a new kind of movie star, bringing a particular authenticity, intensity and sensitivity to his performances.
 
Throughout his career, Newman was extensively photographed: these images enriched film audiences’ connection to him as a cool and graceful presence both on and off-screen.
 
Milton Greene, Douglas Kirkland, Lawrence Fried, Terry O’Neill, Al Satterwhite and Eva Sereny are amongst the photographers who worked with Newman on and off-set across his career. From early-stage work with his wife, Joanne Woodward, to his love of racing cars, to the essential 1980s drama Absence of Malice to the great success of the new western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and the cult favorites, Pocket Money and The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, Newman’s movies were an essential part of American culture.
 
With comment and contributions from the photographers, Paul Newman: Blue Eyed Cool, gathers together portraits, stage, racing and on-set photography — including never before seen images — in a celebration of an actor who was always… cool.
 
Paul Newman: Blue Eyed Cool is a must-have for fans who see in Newman’s work and in his life a true hero.
Book of the Day Posted Jun 24, 2022

Book of the Day > Francesca Woodman: Alternate Stories

Purchase ● Classic and previously unseen photographs and archival materials by a genius of staged photography, with a new essay by Chris Kraus
 
This elegant volume presents more than 40 vintage photographs by the pioneering American photographer Francesca Woodman (1958–81), many of which have never before been seen. These photographs span the creative arc of the artist’s life, focusing on the varied thought processes, interests and influences that inspired her work.
 
Clustered thematically, Francesca Woodman: Alternate Stories highlights previously unexplored relational contexts, drawing deeply on Woodman's formative years in Providence, Rhode Island, and Italy, and featuring previously unpublished photographs and archival materials.
 
In the newly commissioned essay “Impure Alchemy,” critic and novelist Chris Kraus explores Francesca Woodman’s life via her work, drawing upon her journals and letters as primary source materials, and exploring the technical means and literary strategies that animate Woodman's works.
 
Francesca Woodman: Alternate Stories portrays the artist’s lasting impact on generations of artists, and offers a compendium of images, which, as Kraus writes, still “inspire new mysteries and questions.”
Book of the Day Posted Jun 23, 2022

Book of the Day > Amir Zaki: Building + Becoming

Purchase ● Co-published with DoppelHouse Press, Amir Zaki’s Building + Becoming brings together 272 pages of full color work by the Orange County, CA–based hyperrealist photographer, accompanied by an interview with curator and writer Corrina Peipon and an essay co-authored by critics Jennifer Ashton and Walter Benn Michaels.
 
Building + Becoming is a sculptural monograph, designed as a double gatefold which opens to a full width of roughly forty inches, allowing the reader to explore both sets of images and texts in different combinations. The multiple series by Zaki captured within these sets address, respectively, the built and the natural, including rocks, carvings, suspended landscapes, and manipulated California beach architecture. Like his skateparks these environments are uncannily quiet and devoid of people.
 
Corrina Peipon’s interview with Zaki explores the artist’s personal history and concerns about photography and technology. “I am interested in the attraction and repulsion that a photograph which depicts something familiar and unfamiliar, initially welcoming yet somewhat alienating, can elicit in a viewer and me. I am looking for a kind of strangeness within the commonplace. Ultimately, I use digital technology as a means to an end. I am trying to make photographs that manifest the world I desire.”
 
Jennifer Ashton and Walter Benn Michaels’ essay offers insight into Zaki’s manipulation of space through "evenness," which is accomplished by creating a perfectly technically focused object: “The point is not that the pictures overcome physical limits, but that they violate the logic of our eyesight.” Referencing the history of landscape and modern photography in California, Michaels and Ashton show that Zaki’s insistence on marrying technology seamlessly with this tradition results in continuity, an “addition through subtraction” of the third-dimension.
Book of the Day Posted Jun 22, 2022

Book of the Day > Wendy Red Star: Delegation

Purchase ● Delegation is the first comprehensive monograph by Apsáalooke/Crow artist Wendy Red Star, whose photography recasts historical narratives with wit, candor, and a feminist, Indigenous perspective. Red Star centers Native American life and material culture through imaginative self-portraiture, vivid collages, archival interventions, and site-specific installations. Whether referencing nineteenth-century Crow leaders or 1980s pulp fiction, museum collections or family pictures, she constantly questions the role of the photographer in shaping Indigenous representation. Including a dynamic array of Red Star’s lens-based works from 2006 to the present, and a range of essays, stories, and poems, Delegation is a spirited testament to an influential artist’s singular vision.
Book of the Day Posted Jun 17, 2022

Book of the Day > Dr. Woo: Everything is Permanent

Purchase ● Everthing is Permanent features a visual compilation of the evolution of Woo’s intricate single-needle designs and most beloved pieces. A special introduction is given by Zoe Kravitz and Paul Mittleman, and art direction is led by Brian Roettinger of Perron-Roettinger. “The book means a lot to me- it’s a collection of a lot of different drawings and tattoos that represent my creative path to where I am now,” said Dr. Woo. “It’s just a small glimpse into the last decade or so, but hopefully we can build in different volumes and add more stories and more ideas to inspire others who look through them”
Book of the Day Posted Jun 15, 2022

Book of the Day > Gordon Parks: Pittsburgh Grease Plant, 1944/46

Purchase ● Class, race and labor in a Pittsburgh plant: a rarely seen series by Gordon Parks
 
By 1944, Gordon Parks had established himself as a photographer who freely navigated the fields of press and commercial photography, with an unparalleled humanist perspective. That year, Roy Stryker—the former Farm Security Administration official who was now heading the public relations department for the Standard Oil Company (New Jersey)—commissioned Parks to travel to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to document the Penola, Inc. Grease Plant.
 
Employing his signature style, Parks spent two years chronicling the plant’s industry—critical to Pittsburgh’s history and character—by photographing its workers. The resulting photographs, dramatically staged and lit and striking in their composition, showed the range of activities engaged in by Black and white workers, divided as they were by roles, race and class. The images were used as marketing materials and made available to local and national newspapers, as well as corporate magazines and newsletters. However, they served as much more than documentation of industry, enduring as an exploration of labor and its social and economic ramifications in World War II America by one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.
 
Featuring more than 100 photographs, many previously unpublished, this is the first book to focus exclusively on Parks’ photographs for the Standard Oil Company, illuminating an important chapter in his career prior to his landmark career as a staff photographer for Life.
Book of the Day Posted Jun 10, 2022

Book of the Day > Rose Tarlow: Three Houses

Purchase ● Inspired by memories of her beloved California childhood home Windrift, lost in a fire in 1970, renowned interior designer Rose Tarlow showcases her three current family homes in this sumptuous volume, not only preserving treasured memories for her own family but also providing a masterclass in interior design for enthusiasts and professionals alike. Often referred to as “the decorator’s decorator,” Tarlow’s distinctive style has won her numerous international accolades, and her own houses are the embodiment of her thriving design philosophy, exuding the charming eccentricity and uncompromising quality that truly make a house a home. Featuring her Santa Barbara getaway, her spectacular LA mansion, and her magical Provençal retreat, Rose Tarlow: Three Houses presents her own personal archive, a treasure trove of precious memories and design inspiration for future generations, never to be lost again.
Book of the Day Posted Jun 09, 2022

Book of the Day > Nick Cave: Forothermore

Purchase ● With a wealth of images and commentary, this is the essential career survey of Cave's socially responsive art
 
The definitive volume on the ever-evolving and shape-shifting work of the Chicago-based artist, Nick Cave: Forothermore highlights the way Cave’s practice has shifted and continues to shift in response to our history and current moment of cultural crisis. Including several new, never-before-seen works, the book shows an artist at the height of his power.
 
Addressing topics ranging from art history to social justice, Nick Cave: Forothermore includes essays from Naomi Beckwith, Romi Crawford, Antwaun Sargent, Malik Gaines, Krista Thompson and Meida Teresa McNeal. Punctuating these contributions are interviews with the artist exploring his life, work and teaching practice, as well as a roundtable discussion between Cave and dancer Damita Jo Freeman, musician Nona Hendryx and publisher Linda Johnson Rice on Cave's art and influences, as well as pivotal cultural phenomena from Soul Train to Ebony magazine. Nick Cave: Forothermore reveals the way art, music, fashion and performance can help us envision a more just future.
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