Book of the Day Posted Oct 07, 2021

Book of the Day > Land of Ibeji

● Purchase ● Here, seeing double is normal.
 
Sanne De Wilde and Bénédicte Kurzen traveled to Yoruba country in Nigeria, where the rate of twin births is ten times higher than elsewhere — a fact that is either celebrated with mythical fervor or condemned. While tracking this history, the photographers created richly intriguing, intensely colorful portraits of twins. They played with the concept of doubling to stage an imaginative photographic story, making use of double apertures, double exposures, reflections, and color filters. With these inventive pictorial processes, the two artists produce magical double portraits.
Book of the Day Posted Oct 06, 2021

Book of the Day > Dazed: 30 Years Confused

● Purchase ● Celebrating 30 years of Dazed’s boundary-pushing storytelling at the forefront of youth culture, this book reveals the past, present, and future of Dazed through its bold cover designs and manifesto-like headlines.
 
In 1991, the first issue of Dazed & Confused was released as a single A2 foldout newsprint by a then 20-year-old Jefferson Hack and the photographer Rankin. Now, 30 years later, what began as a print magazine has gone on to provoke a change in consciousness, becoming a vital cultural manifesto for today. Created for an audience that wants to be both informed and inspired to imagine, its radical approach to publishing means that Dazed is still at the forefront of youth culture today.
 
Split into ten chapters—taken from the magazine’s most memorable cover lines—this book explores how these early manifestos reflect the magazine’s ethos today. Time-traveling from the ’90s to now, a new generation of image makers sit side by side with archival materials to showcase how Dazed has always interpreted celebrity through its own boundary-pushing lens: from Alexander McQueen and David Bowie’s first official, recorded conversation and the designer’s “Fashion-Able?” cover, to a rare appearance and guest-edit by Chelsea Manning, to rapper Young Thug shot by Harley Weir.
Book of the Day Posted Oct 05, 2021

Book of the Day > Marie Tomanova: New York New York

● Purchase ● Vibrant portraits of a new generation of Americans in the throes of cultural transformation
 
New York–based Czech photographer Marie Tomanova (born 1984) follows her 2019 book Young American with a second volume of color portraits of the noughties generation in New York City, paying particular attention to the diverse faces of America’s future and their process of vitally reshaping notions of gender, society and culture. Captivating and sincere, her diaristic work is imbued with the vitality and raw spirit of American youth. Her subjects are photographed at parties, art openings, parks and in apartments with their faces filling the majority of the image frames. They share an intimate gaze that stares directly back at the lens, framed by a variety of hair, makeup, piercings and skin tones.
 
Tomanova grew up in the Czech Republic and since moving to the United States in 2010 she has used photography to capture her feelings of displacement and evolving sense of belonging in America. Taken together, Tomanova’s series of self-portraits and youth photography reflect her introspective look into issues of identity and isolation.
Book of the Day Posted Oct 02, 2021

Book of the Day > American Silence: The Photographs of Robert Adams

● Purchase ● In this expansive monograph, Robert Adams’s compelling and provocative photographs explore the profound questions of our responsibility to the land and the moral dilemmas of progress. Working in Colorado, California, and Oregon from 1965 to 2015, Adams photographed suburban sprawl, strip malls, highways, homes, and the land itself, seeking to reveal both the ravages we have inflicted on the land and its underlying, enduring beauty. His photographs of the western American landscape are imbued with a sense of the sacred. Adams transforms “the silence of light” he sees on the prairie, in the woods, and by the ocean into pictures that not only capture that beauty but can also question our own silent complicity in its desecration by consumerism, industrialization, and the lack of environmental stewardship. This substantial body of work—passionate but restrained, respectful but outraged—is united by the reverential way Adams looks at the world around him, and the almost palpable silence that permeates his art.
Book of the Day Posted Oct 01, 2021

Book of the Day > Bob Thompson: This House Is Mine

● Purchase ● A rich reconsideration of a short-lived but visionary voice in twentieth-century American painting and his enduring relevance
 
Bob Thompson (1937–1966) came to critical acclaim in the late 1950s for paintings of unparalleled figurative complexity and chromatic intensity. Thompson drew upon the Western art-historical canon to formulate a highly personal, expressive language. Tracing the African American artist’s prolific, yet tragically brief, transatlantic career, this volume examines Thompson’s outlier status and pays close attention to his sustained engagements with themes of community, visibility, and justice. As the contributors contextualize the artist’s ambitions and his unique creative process, they reposition Thompson as a predecessor to contemporary artists such as Kerry James Marshall and Kehinde Wiley. Featuring an array of artwork, and never-before-published poems and archival materials, this study situates Thompson’s extraordinary output within ongoing dialogues about the politics of representation.
Book of the Day Posted Sep 29, 2021

Book of the Day > Mina Stone: Lemon, Love & Olive Oil

● Purchase ● Growing up in a close-knit Greek-American household, Mina Stone learned to cook from her Yiayia, who taught her that food doesn’t have to be complicated to be delicious—and that almost any dish can be improved with judicious amounts of lemon, olive oil, and salt. In this deeply personal cookbook, Stone celebrates her grandmother and the other influences that have shaped her life, her career, and her culinary tastes and expertise. Lemon, Love & Olive Oil weaves together more than 80 Mediterranean-style dishes with the stories that inspired them.
 
Stone offers home cooks a taste of her heritage with healthy, flavorful, and uncomplicated dishes such as Syrian Bulgur and Yogurt with Brown Butter Pine Nuts; Persian Figs with Cardamom and Rosewater; Baby Lettuces with Toasted Sesame Seeds, Mint, and Meyer Lemon Yogurt; and Braised Chickpeas with Orange Zest and Garlic Bread Crumbs. These recipes use fresh, flavorful ingredients to create elegantly simple dishes, complemented by beautiful, minimalist photography and original art throughout.
 
A fresh and unconventional fusion of art and food, Lemon, Love & Olive Oil is an engaging (and delicious!) cultural and culinary tour, all complimented by the design of world-renowned artist Urs Fischer.
Book of the Day Posted Sep 25, 2021

Book of the Day > Under Western Skies: Visionary Gardens from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Coast

● Purchase ● From windswept deserts to misty seaside hills and verdant valleys, the natural landscapes of the American West offer an astounding variety of climates for gardens. Under Western Skies reveals thirty-six of the most innovative designs—all embracing and celebrating the very soul of the land on which they grow. For the gardeners featured here, nature is the ultimate inspiration rather than something to be dominated, and Under Western Skies shows the strong connection each garden has with its place. Packed with Atkinson’s stunning photographs and illuminated by Jewell’s deep interest in the relationships between people and the spaces they inhabit, Under Western Skies offers page after page of encouraging ingenuity and inventive design for passionate gardeners who call the West home.
Book of the Day Posted Sep 24, 2021

Book of the Day > Breuer’s Bohemia: The Architect, His Circle, and Midcentury Houses in New England

● Purchase ● The iconic twentieth-century architect Marcel Breuer was a prolific designer of residential architecture, which is often overshadowed by his early renown as a Bauhaus furniture maker and his large-scale projects. Breuer’s Bohemia surveys the houses he designed in Connecticut and Massachusetts from the 1950s through the ’70s, many of which were commissioned by a few culturally progressive clients—chiefly Rufus and Leslie Stillman and Andrew and Jamie Gagarin—who coalesced around him into a dynamic social circle. Included in this scene were prominent cultural figures such as Alexander Calder, Arthur Miller, Francine du Plessix Gray, Philip Roth, and William Styron, and more, marking a unique intersection of postwar architecture, art, and letters.
 
The publication of Breuer’s Bohemia coincides with the feature-length documentary of the same name by author and filmmaker James Crump, exploring Breuer’s explosive residential practice on the East Coast. Through original research and interviews, the voices of principal characters from Breuer’s circle and notable figures from the field of architecture help tell the story of Breuer’s collaborations with his friends and clients, breathing new life into the history of the rich cultural atmosphere of which they all played a vital part.
 
Heavily illustrated with vintage and contemporary photographs as well as rarely seen archival materials, Breuer’s Bohemia is a unique glimpse of a twentieth-century milieu that produced an aesthetic, intellectual, and sometimes sybaritic community during a fertile period of American design and culture.
Book of the Day Posted Sep 23, 2021

Book of the Day > Juergen Teller: Donkey Man and Other Stories

● Purchase ● Annotated in his wry, inimitable voice, Juergen Teller presents over three decades of fashion and editorial work in a groundbreaking volume that combines photography, collage, and candid (and often humorous) autobiography.
 
One of the most influential photographers working today, Juergen Teller creates images that are instantly recognizable. Raw, often overexposed and displaying a spontaneity and candor, Teller’s visual language reflects a measured yet uncompromising sense of rebellion.
 
This book includes landmark editorials with nearly every important fashion label of the era and celebrities from Kate Moss to Charlotte Rampling and Kurt Cobain to Yves Saint Laurent. Outtakes of iconic shoots (including infamous ones with Courtney Love, Cindy Sherman, Marc Jacobs, Victoria Beckham, and Björk) that have never been published will be included in this volume.
 
Teller first broke into fashion in 1996 with a magazine cover of a naked Kristen McMenamy with the word Versace scrawled across her chest. Since then, his fashion photography has been featured in all the international Vogues, AnOther Magazine, Index, Self-Service, W, Details, Purple, i-D, and 032c, among others. A highly sought-after cult hero and the author of many iconic campaigns, Teller has collaborated with the likes of Helmut Lang, Raf Simons, Hedi Slimane, Nicolas Ghesquière, Phoebe Philo, Vivienne Westwood, Miuccia Prada, and Isabel Marant, and shot every season of Marc Jacobs’s ready-to-wear collections from 1998 to 2014.
Book of the Day Posted Sep 22, 2021

Book of the Day > Wim Crouwel: Typographic Architectures

● Purchase ● As a major figure in contemporary European graphic design, Wim Crouwel (1928-2019) has widely influenced the history of the discipline through his extensive practice of design, applied both to the cultural and commercial field. Over the course of his career, he has carried out simultaneously works in the range of typographic creation, visual identities, posters, book design, or scenography.
 
In the 1950s and for decades, Wim Crouwel, whose influence extends beyond borders of the Netherlands to a large extent, has managed to develop an approach to graphic design combining modernist heritage with pop fantasy.
 
Through two texts written by Catherine de Smet and Emmanuel Berard, and one by Wim Crouwel himself, this book testifies the diversity of his work and analyzes his wide range of production in diverse fields such as visual identities, publishing, or poster creation.
 
Abundantly illustrated, this book focuses on the layout of the catalogues made for museums such as the Stedelijk Museum of Amsterdam, as well as on the genesis and presentation of the New Alphabet, created between 1964 and 1967.
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