Book of the Day Posted Jul 21, 2020

Book of the Day > John Currin: Men

● Purchase ● Edited by Alison M. Gingeras, Text by Jamieson Webster and Naomi Fry
 
A revealing look at the evolution of male iconography in the work of one of the foremost painters of his generation.
 
Since raising the ire of the early-1990s arts establishment with his deliberately provocative portrayals of women, John Currin has been best known for his brazen, militantly incorrect female iconography. Yet Currin has represented a range of masculine identities throughout his career as well.
 
This volume is the first to focus exclusively on this aspect of his work, examining the evolution of his equally provocative depictions of men. It ranges from little-known early works on paper and a series of kitschy paintings of men with beards to signature eccentric figures such as the elderly reader in the painting 2070 (2005) and his more baroque genre scenes featuring male couples. Published to accompany the exhibition John Currin: My Life as a Man at the Dallas Contemporary, it offers a revealing new assessment of Currin's pictorial examinations of sexual politics.
Book of the Day Posted Jul 18, 2020

Book of the Day > Gordon Parks: The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957

● Purchase ● Gordon Parks’ ethically complex depictions of crime in New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles, with previously unseen photographs
 
When Life magazine asked Gordon Parks to illustrate a recurring series of articles on crime in the United States in 1957, he had already been a staff photographer for nearly a decade, the first African American to hold this position. Parks embarked on a six-week journey that took him and a reporter to the streets of New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Unlike much of his prior work, the images made were in color. The resulting eight-page photo-essay “The Atmosphere of Crime” was noteworthy not only for its bold aesthetic sophistication, but also for how it challenged stereotypes about criminality then pervasive in the mainstream media. They provided a richly hued, cinematic portrayal of a largely hidden world: that of violence, police work and incarceration, seen with empathy and candor.
 
Parks rejected clichés of delinquency, drug use and corruption, opting for a more nuanced view that reflected the social and economic factors tied to criminal behavior and afforded a rare window into the working lives of those charged with preventing and prosecuting it. Transcending the romanticism of the gangster film, the suspense of the crime caper and the racially biased depictions of criminality then prevalent in American popular culture, Parks coaxed his camera to record reality so vividly and compellingly that it would allow Life’s readers to see the complexity of these chronically oversimplified situations. The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957 includes an expansive selection of never-before-published photographs from Parks’ original reportage.
Events Posted Jul 18, 2020

Stephen Shore LIVE with Mack Books, 7/22!

In lieu of our cancelled April event with Stephen Shore, we are thrilled to share an exclusive and in-depth conversation organized by Mack Books  between Stephen Shore and LACMA curator Britt Salvesen, discussing Shore’s distinctive photographic work: from pioneering the aesthetic of the great American road trip, the new vanguard of Instagram photography, and how he practices the act of seeing.

 

We have a few signed copies still available for purchase on our website – snap one up while you can!
 

More event info (and request an email reminder) here.
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USA/Canada: Wednesday 22 July - 19:00 EDT (NY, Toronto), 16:00 PDT (LA).
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UK/EUROPE: Thursday 23 July, 19:00 BST (London).
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FRANCE: Thursday 23rd July, 18:30 CEST (Paris) – with French Subtitles.
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JAPAN: Thursday 23rd July, 18:30 JST (Tokyo) – with Japanese subtitles.
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AUSTRALIA: Thursday 23rd July, 19:00 AEST (Sydney, Melbourne).

 

Book of the Day Posted Jul 17, 2020

Book of the Day > Van Nuys Boulevard 1972

● Purchase ● American car culture at its vibrant best
 
Wednesday night was Cruise Night in the San Fernando Valley, a suburb of Los Angeles. The stretch on Van Nuys Boulevard between Ventura Boulevard on the southern end, and well past Sherman Way to the north, teemed with kids and cars from all over Southern California on Wednesday nights. It was a terrific place to both see and be seen, and to show off your ride as well.
 
Gas was cheap, times were great, and the boulevard hummed with life during the evenings. Even the draft during the Vietnam War did not dampen the street scene. By 1972, the year Rick McCloskey went to Van Nuys to shoot his series of photographs, the culture on the boulevard had become an amalgamation of divergent lifestyles, automobiles – used and new – and some very different looks and styles. There were tribes of van kids – surfers mostly – low-riders, muscle cars, street racers, Volkswagen owners, and many more, and of course, thousands of young people. The idea of retro had arrived as well, with some young people emulating the look and style of the 1950s. Of course, there were individuals who had to be there for work. In making these images, Rick McCloskey set about portraying the young people, their cars, and the iconic background settings.
 
Today, young people no longer have anything similar to the past boulevard gathering places, where so many people can enjoy just being there together. Akin to starlight still trickling in from a long vanished world, these photographic images are what we have left.
Book of the Day Posted Jul 16, 2020

Book of the Day > Artemisia

● Purchase ● The first exhibition catalogue dedicated only to Artemisia
 
Gentileschi Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–1654 or later) is the most celebrated woman artist of the baroque period in Italy. Her career spanned more than 40 years, as she moved between Rome, where she was raised and trained by her father, Orazio Gentileschi, to Florence, where she gained artistic independence and became the first female member of the city’s academy of artists, and to Venice, London, and Naples. Often featuring heroic female subjects, her paintings were predominantly intended for private clients. Today they are recognized for their dramatic power and originality, showing Artemisia to be one of the most compelling storytellers of her time. This beautiful book includes essays on her life and career; a discussion of her personal and artistic relationship with her father; a summary of critical writings and an overview of the wide range of approaches to Artemisia’s work since her rediscovery by feminist art historians more than 50 years ago; a more personal insight into Artemisia through her letters; a discussion of the artist’s self-representation in her work; and an essay dedicated to her painting technique.
Book of the Day Posted Jul 15, 2020

Book of the Day > PUBLIC Issue 3

● Purchase ● Public is a biannual arts and fashion journal with an emphasis on experimental work. Offering a unique perspective on subjects in life, each subject is archived and its theme never repeated. Issue 3 features work by Roxane Danset, Sian Davey, Frank Lebron, Gary David Moore, Guinevere van Seenus, Jack Webb, and Tom Wood.
 
In a unique collaboration, Siân Davey works with stylist Gary David Moore to cover youth and innocence. She revisits her daughter Martha as a subject, now aged 21, in a series of portraits at their family home in Devon (Siân's original series ‘Martha’ was displayed at The National Portrait Gallery in London, and captured her daughter at age 16). Frank Lebon covers family, having documented an intimate family holiday last summer in Spain for the issue. Iconic supermodel turned photographer Guinevere van Seenus collaborates with stylist Roxane Danset to capture a series of self portraits that form a reflective study on herself as a strong, middle aged women. Tom Wood casts his eye on the relationship between men and women through decades of covering communities in Liverpool, England. And finally, Jack Webb explores the emotional highs and lows between a group of friends and family on a night out in a Yorkshire pub, captured in 1996.
Book of the Day Posted Jul 14, 2020

Book of the Day > John Cage: A Mycological Foray: Variations on Mushrooms

● Purchase ● Foraging for mushrooms with John Cage: writing, art, photography and ephemera from an idiosyncratic chapter in the composer's life
 
Imagined as an extended mushroom-foraging expedition, John Cage: A Mycological Foray gathers together Cage’s mushroom-themed compositions, photographs, illustrations and ephemera. Indeterminacy Stories and other writings by Cage are interwoven throughout the first volume within a central essay examining Cage’s enduring relationship with mycology. Also included is a transcript of Cage’s 1983 performance, MUSHROOMS et Variationes. The second volume is the inaugural reproduction of Cage’s 1972 portfolio, Mushroom Book, authored in collaboration with illustrator Lois Long and botanist Alexander H. Smith. Readers are thus drawn through the landscape of Cage’s mycologically centred oeuvre and interests, discovering assorted works, images, compositions, philosophies and ephemera, as one might encounter assorted fungi and flora while foraging.
Book of the Day Posted Jul 11, 2020

Book of the Day > Soviet Signs and Street Relics

● Purchase ● Russia’s forgotten world of avant-garde public signage—the latest in Fuel’s collectible Soviet series
 
For this volume, French photographer Jason Guilbeau has used Google Street View to virtually navigate Russia and the former USSR, searching for examples of a forgotten Soviet empire. The subjects of these unlikely photographs are incidental to the purpose of Google Street View—captured by serendipity, rather than design, they are accorded a common vernacular. Once found, Guilbeau strips the images of their practical use by removing the navigational markers, transforming them according to his own vision.
 
From remote rural roadsides to densely populated cities, the photographs reveal traces of history in plain sight: a brutalist hammer and sickle stands in a remote field; a jet fighter is anchored to the ground by its concrete exhaust plume; a skeletal tractor sits on a cast-iron platform; a village sign resembles a constructivist sculpture. Passersby seem oblivious to these objects. Relinquished by the present they have become part of the composition of everyday life, too distant in time and too ubiquitous in nature to be recorded by anything other than an indiscriminate automaton.
 
This collection of photographs portrays a surreal reality: it is a document of a vanishing era, captured by an omniscient technology that is continually deleting and replenishing itself—an inadvertent definition of Russia today.
Book of the Day Posted Jul 10, 2020

Book of the Day > Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin: Through the Unusual Door

● Purchase ● Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin: Through the Unusual Door examines the thirty-eight-year relationship between painter Beauford Delaney (born in Knoxville, 1901; died in Paris, 1979) and writer James Baldwin (born in New York, 1924; died in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France, 1987) and the ways their ongoing intellectual exchange shaped each other’s creative output and worldview. This full-color publication documents the groundbreaking exhibition organized by the Knoxville Museum of Art (KMA) and is drawn from the KMA’s extensive Delaney holdings, from public and private collections around the country, and from unpublished photographs and papers held by the Knoxville-based estate of Beauford Delaney. This book seeks to identify and disentangle the skein of influences that grew over and around a complex, lifelong relationship with a selection of Delaney’s works that reflects the powerful presence of Baldwin in Delaney’s life. While no other figure in Beauford Delaney’s extensive social orbit approaches James Baldwin in the extent and duration of influence, none of the major exhibitions of Delaney’s work has explored in any depth the creative exchange between the two.
 
The volume also includes essays by Mary Campbell, whose research currently focuses on James Baldwin and Beauford Delaney within the context of the civil rights movement; Glenn Ligon, an internationally acclaimed New York-based artist with intimate knowledge of Baldwin’s writings, Delaney’s art, and American history and society; Levi Prombaum, a curatorial assistant at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum who did his doctoral research at University College London on Delaney’s portraits of James Baldwin; and Stephen Wicks, the Knoxville Museum of Art’s Barbara W. and Bernard E. Bernstein Curator, who has guided the KMA’s curatorial department for over 25 years and was instrumental in building the world’s largest and most comprehensive public collection of Beauford Delaney’s art at the KMA.
Book of the Day Posted Jul 09, 2020

Book of the Day > It Don’t Mean a Thing: Photographs by Saul Leiter With a Story by Paul Auster

● Purchase ● It Don’t Mean a Thing is the second volume in The Gould Collection, a series of books that brings together contemporary photographers with short story and prose writers.
 
Volume two presents fifty-eight photographs by Saul Leiter with the story It Don’t Mean a Thing by Paul Auster. Black-and-white and color photographs by Leiter from 1947 through the 1970s—with many images never before published—are paired with Auster’s tale of interlinked life events and chance encounters. Reflections on New York City, its urban rhythm, people and places, feature prominently in both artists’ work and provide a unifying focus for the book.
 
The Gould Collection was created to honor the memory of Christophe Crison, a photobook collector from Paris who died prematurely in 2015 at the age of forty-five. The photographers and writers showcased throughout the series are artists whose works Christophe admired.
 
For volume two of the collection, we searched for inspiration in the neatly ordered rows of photobooks and short story anthologies that line the bookshelves in the Paris apartment where Christophe (known online as Gould Bookbinder) lived with his wife and two sons. It’s been two years since he died and sadly, our email inboxes have stopped pinging with his excited messages about photobook and short story discoveries. His presence remains strong, but as we began to prepare this volume, we had to remind ourselves of all his favorite photographers and writers. An inquiring email was sent to his wife: What is on the bookshelves? Who are we overlooking? For this volume, she reminded us that the choices were obvious: Saul Leiter and Paul Auster, two keen observers of New York City, a place where Christophe felt truly happy.
 
It Don’t Mean a Thing: Photographs by Saul Leiter with a Story by Paul Auster is a bilingual publication. Auster’s story, the artists’ biographies and supporting texts are printed in both English and Japanese (with story translation by Motoyuki Shibata).
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