Book of the Day Posted Sep 15, 2020

Book of the Day > Charlie Engman: MOM

● Purchase ● Featuring a luxurious cloth cover and texts by Rachel Cusk and Miranda July, MOM is Charlie Engman’s homage to his mother’s many selves
 
Brooklyn-based photographer Charlie Engman (born 1987) has been shooting portraits of his mother Kathleen McCain Engman since 2009. Collected into a single monograph for the first time, Engman’s striking series portrays the artist’s mother in a variety of surreal scenes, sometimes nude and at other times dressed in a furry red jumpsuit, in the photographer’s studio or in a field on the side of a road.
 
Engman’s work depicts an intense collaboration between photographer and subject that challenges the conventions of portraiture. In addition to Engman’s photography, this publication also includes an essay by novelist Rachel Cusk and a conversation between Kathleen McCain Engman and writer-filmmaker-artist Miranda July, who writes: “I look at Charlie and Kathleen and realize I could dream a little bigger. A little weirder. But how does one raise a child so confident that he can create a world of groundbreaking possibility with his own mother"
Book of the Day Posted Sep 12, 2020

Book of the Day > Mary Ellen Mark: The Book of Everything

● Purchase ● “All of her subjects, no matter how down and out, looked straight back at Ms. Mark, and her camera never flinched. With one fearless project after another, she became one of the preeminent documentary photographers of our time.” –Washington Post
 
Conceived and edited by film director Martin Bell, Mary Ellen Mark’s husband and collaborator for over 30 years, The Book of Everything celebrates in over 600 images and diverse texts Mark’s extraordinary life, work and vision. From 1963 to her death in 2015, Mark told brilliant, intimate, provocative stories of remarkable characters whom she would meet and then engage with—often in perpetuity. There was nothing casual or unprepared about Mark’s approach; she unfailingly empathized with the people and places she photographed.
 
For this comprehensive book Bell has selected images from Mark’s thousands of contact sheets and chromes—from over two million frames in total. These include her own now-iconic choices, those published once and since lost in time, as well as some of her as-yet-unpublished preferences. Bell complements these with a few selections of his own. Along with Mark’s photos made in compelling, often tragic circumstances, The Book of Everything includes recollections from friends, colleagues and many of those she photographed. Mark’s own thoughts reveal doubts and insecurities, her ideas about the individuals and topics she photographed, as well as the challenges of the business of photography.
Book of the Day Posted Sep 11, 2020

Book of the Day > Adam & Eve In The 21St Century: Photographs By Frankie Norris

● Purchase ● Taking Albrecht Durer's iconic 1504 engraving of biblical lovers Adam and Eve's as a starting point, Frankie Norris has spent the past eleven years documenting American couples spanning the ever-expanding spectrum of sexual identity and orientation. The photographer's first book, "Adam & Eve in the 21st Century" captures unguarded moments of attraction and intimacy between scores of couples that encompass virtually every permutation of gender, age, and race. A brand new, pristine example of this striking document limited to three hundred unnumbered copies still sealed in the publisher's shrinkwrap.
Book of the Day Posted Sep 10, 2020

Book of the Day > Anton Corbjin: MOOD/MODE

● Purchase ● In MOOD/MODE, leading international photographer and filmmaker Anton Corbijn presents images from his extensive body of work in which he explores the crossover between photography and the world of fashion - in the broadest sense of the word.
 
Corbijn's portraits of figures such as Alexander McQueen, Tom Waits and Naomi Campbell have now achieved iconic status. As visual director behind Depeche Mode and through his decades-long collaboration with U2 and others, he has made his mark on the way we look at an important aspect of contemporary culture.
 
With MOOD/MODE, Anton Corbijn shows that fashion is everywhere. The book contains some 150 photographs, many of them published for the first time, and its world première was in Knokke-Heist, summer 2020.
Book of the Day Posted Sep 09, 2020

Book of the Day > TAROT

● Purchase ● Trace the hidden history of Tarot in the first volume from TASCHEN’s Library of Esoterica, a series documenting the creative ways we strive to connect to the divine. Artfully arranged according to the sequencing of the Major and Minor Arcana, this visual compendium gathers more than 500 cards and works of original art from around the world in the ultimate exploration of a centuries-old art form.
 
To explore the Tarot is to explore ourselves, to be reminded of the universality of our longing for meaning, for purpose and for a connection to the divine. This 600-year-old tradition reflects not only a history of seekers, but our journey of artistic expression and the ways we communicate our collective human story.
 
For many in the West, Tarot exists in the shadow place of our cultural consciousness, a metaphysical tradition assigned to the dusty glass cabinets of the arcane. Its history, long and obscure, has been passed down through secret writing, oral tradition, and the scholarly tomes of philosophers and sages. Hundreds of years and hundreds of creative hands—mystics and artists often working in collaboration—have transformed what was essentially a parlor game into a source of divination and system of self-exploration, as each new generation has sought to evolve the form and reinterpret the medium.
 
Author Jessica Hundley traces this fascinating history in Tarot, the debut volume in TASCHEN’s Library of Esoterica series. The book explores the symbolic meaning behind more than 500 cards and works of original art, two thirds of which have never been published outside of the decks themselves. It's the first ever visual compendium of its kind, spanning from Medieval to modern, and artfully arranged according to the sequencing of the 78 cards of the Major and Minor Arcana. It explores the powerful influence of Tarot as muse to artists like Salvador Dalí and Niki de Saint Phalle and includes the decks of nearly 100 diverse contemporary artists from around the world, all of whom have embraced the medium for its capacity to push cultural identity forward. Rounding out the volume are excerpts from thinkers such as Éliphas Lévi, Carl Jung, and Joseph Campbell; a foreword by artist Penny Slinger; a guide to reading the cards by Johannes Fiebig; and an essay on oracle decks by Marcella Kroll.
Book of the Day Posted Sep 08, 2020

Book of the Day > Orhan Pamuk: Orange

● Purchase ● The streetscapes of Istanbul as photographed by Nobel prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk in an exquisitely printed clothbound edition
 
The dominant color in Orhan Pamuk's new book of photographs is orange. When the Nobel-Prize-winning novelist is finished with the day's writing, he takes his camera and wanders through Istanbul's various neighborhoods, visiting the backstreets of his town, areas without tourists, spaces that seem neglected and forgotten, spaces with a particular light. This is the orange light of Istanbul's windows and streetlamps that Pamuk knows so well from his childhood—from the Istanbul of 50 years ago, as he mentions in his introduction.
 
But Pamuk also observes that the homely, cosy orange light is slowly being replaced by a new, bright and icy white light from new lightbulbs. His photographs from the backstreets of Istanbul record and preserve the cosy effect of this old, disappearing orange light, as well as the recognition of this new white vision.
 
Whether reflected in well-trodden snow, concentrated as a glaring ball atop a lamppost or subtly present as a diffuse haze, orange literally and aesthetically gives shape to Pamuk's pictures, which reveal to us the unseen corners of his home city.
Book of the Day Posted Sep 05, 2020

Book of the Day > Lisa Yuskavage: Wilderness

● Purchase ● A new focus on the sublime landscapes in Lisa Yuskavage’s voluptuous figure paintings
 
Though she is arguably best known for the voluptuous female nudes that populate her paintings, Lisa Yuskavage’s work is just as focused on the ethereal settings in which these subjects appear. Yuskavage creates finely detailed landscapes that blur the line between the fantastical and the familiar, melding abstraction with realism to depict self-contained worlds. These outdoor scenes defy conventions of landscape painting with surreal color palettes of lush greens and delicate pinks, cast in a gauzy light quality that highlights the almost magical nature of her paintings.
 
Published in conjunction with a joint exhibition between the Aspen Art Museum in Colorado and the Baltimore Museum of Art in Maryland, this volume includes color reproductions of Yuskavage’s paintings and watercolors from the early 1990s to the present, as well as an interview between Yuskavage and fellow artist Mary Weatherford.
Book of the Day Posted Sep 04, 2020

Book of the Day > Young, Gifted and Black: A New Generation of Artists

● Purchase ● What’s new, now and next from contemporary Black artists
 
This book surveys the work of a new generation of Black artists, and also features the voices of a diverse group of curators who are on the cutting edge of contemporary art. As mission-driven collectors, Bernard I. Lumpkin and Carmine D. Boccuzzi have championed emerging artists of African descent through museum loans and institutional support. But there has never been an opportunity to consider their acclaimed collection as a whole until now.
 
Edited by writer Antwaun Sargent (author of The New Black Vanguard: Photography Between Art and Fashion), Young, Gifted and Black draws from this collection to shed new light on works by contemporary artists of African descent. At a moment when debates about the politics of visibility within the art world have taken on renewed urgency, and establishment voices such as the New York Times are declaring that “it has become undeniable that African American artists are making much of the best American art today,”
 
Young, Gifted and Black takes stock of how these new voices are impacting the way we think about identity, politics and art history itself. Young, Gifted and Black contextualizes artworks with contributions from artists, curators and other experts. It features a wide-ranging interview with Bernard Lumpkin and Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem; and an in-depth essay by Antwaun Sargent situating Lumpkin in a long lineage of Black art patrons. A landmark publication, this book illustrates what it means (in the words of Nina Simone) to be young, gifted and Black in contemporary art.
 
Artists include: Mark Bradford, David Hammons, Glenn Ligon, Kerry James Marshall, Julie Mehretu, Adam Pendleton, Pope.L, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Henry Taylor, Mickalene Thomas, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Sadie Barnette, Kevin Beasley, Jordan Casteel, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Bethany Collins, Noah Davis, Cy Gavin, Allison Janae Hamilton, Tomashi Jackson, Samuel Levi Jones, Deana Lawson, Eric N. Mack, Arcmanoro Niles, Jennifer Packer, Christina Quarles, Jacolby Satterwhite, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Sable Elyse Smith, Chanel Thomas, Stacy Lynn Waddell, D’Angelo Lovell Williams, Brenna Youngblood, and more.
Book of the Day Posted Sep 03, 2020

Book of the Day > Debi Cornwall: Necessary Fictions

● Purchase ● From the author of Welcome to Camp America, an eerie exploration of America’s performance of power and identity in the post-9/11 era
 
What are the stories we tell ourselves, the games we play, to manage unsettling realities? Made on ten military bases across the United States since 2016, Necessary Fictions documents mock-village landscapes in the fictional country of “Atropia” and its denizens, roleplayers who enact versions of their past or future selves in realistic training scenarios.
 
Costumed Afghan and Iraqi civilians, many of whom have fled war, now recreate it in the service of the US military. Real soldiers pose in front of camouflage backdrops, dressed by Hollywood makeup artists in “moulage”—fake wounds—as they prepare to deploy.
 
Brooklyn-based conceptual documentary artist and former civil rights lawyer Debi Cornwall (born 1973) photographs this meta-reality—the artifice of war—presented in the book with a variety of texts to provoke critical inquiry about America’s fantasy industrial complex. The book includes an essay by PEN Award–winning critical theorist Sarah Sentilles.
Book of the Day Posted Sep 02, 2020

Book of the Day > Alison Saar: Of Aether and Earthe

● Purchase ● The first extended monograph on Saar, featuring older and more recent works, gorgeously bound in cloth with embossed details
 
Drawing inspiration from the imagery of African, Caribbean and Latin American folk art as well as found objects and her own upbringing in a multiracial artist family, Los Angeles artist Alison Saar (born 1956) creates works that reflect on the duality of body and spirit within the context of a larger cultural setting, focusing in particular on black womanhood. In life-size wooden sculptures and mixed-media portraits, Saar crafts complex narratives about diasporic identity.
 
This publication accompanies an exhibition co-organized by the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College in Claremont, California and the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, California. Alongside photographic reproductions of Saar’s work, the clothbound catalog contains an interview between Saar and the exhibit’s co-curator, never-before-published photographs from the artist’s childhood and poetry by Camille Dungy, Harryette Mullen and Evie Shockley.
more