Book of the Day Posted Sep 22, 2022

Book of the Day > Emma Webster: Behind the Scenes

● Purchase ● Emma Webster’s landscape paintings teleport viewers into the otherworldly. The places she depicts, convincing and hallucinatory, merge spatial expectations with mystifying fantasy. The paintings come from a hybrid sketching-sculpting process within screen-space. Webster first constructs scenes in virtual reality, which she then embellishes with theatrical illumination, to create natural vistas that relish in artifice, drama, and distortion. Of her VR models, Webster says: “Working from within the still-life is more akin to how we go about the world. There can be no ‘outside.’”
Book of the Day Posted Sep 21, 2022

Book of the Day > Unseen Saul Leiter

● Purchase ● A thrilling trove of newly discovered color works from the photographer celebrated for his pioneering painterly vision
 
Now firmly established as one of the world’s greatest photographers, Saul Leiter (1923–2013) was relatively little known until the 2006 publication of Saul Leiter: Early Color, when he was already in his eighties. Choosing to shoot in color when black and white was the norm, Leiter portrayed midcentury New York’s street life with a gorgeous painterliness that evoked the sensuality of his Abstract Expressionist contemporaries Rothko and Newman. His studio in the East Village, where he lived from 1952 until his death in 2013, is now the home of the Saul Leiter Foundation, which has commenced a full-scale survey of his more than 80,000 works.
 
This volume contains works discovered through this project—specifically, color photography from slides never before published or seen by the public. It is edited by Margit Erb and Michael Parillo of the Saul Leiter Foundation, and is embellished with texts that describe how Leiter assembled his slide archive and how it is being catalogued and restored.
Book of the Day Posted Sep 21, 2022

Book of the Day > The Art of Ron Cobb

● Purchase ● During his sixty-year career, Ron Cobb provided concept art for some of the biggest films in sci-fi cinema. From designing spaceships for Alien, Dark Star, and Firefly and Delorean from Back to the Future to character designs for Conan the Barbarian and creature concepts for Star Wars and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Ron has left a legacy of artwork behind to inspire future generations of concept artists.
 
This beautiful coffee table book is full to the brim with Ron Cobb’s artwork from throughout his career and includes exclusive insights from the talent he worked with along the way, including James Cameron, Joe Johnston, Robert Zemeckis, Bob Gale, and Nick Castle.
Book of the Day Posted Sep 20, 2022

Book of the Day > Mark Neville: Stop Tanks With Books (Second Edition)

● Purchase ● British artist Mark Neville moved home and studio from London to live in Kyiv, Ukraine, last year. With 100,000 Russian troops amassed on the Ukrainian border and the whole country on the cusp of war, Neville’s book project, Stop Tanks With Books, calls on the international community to urgently support Ukraine and help deter further Russian invasion.
 
Since 2015 Neville has been documenting life in Ukraine, with subjects ranging from holidaymakers on the beaches of Odessa, to the Roma communities on the Hungarian border, the churchgoers and nightclubbers of Kyiv, to both civilians and soldiers living on the frontline in Eastern Ukraine. Eighty of Neville’s photographs are brought together in this book, edited by David Campany, together with short stories about the conflict from Ukrainian novelist Lyuba Yakimchuk; research from the Centre of Eastern European Studies in Berlin about the 2.5 million Ukrainians already displaced by the war; and a call to action for the international community.
 
Employing his unique, activist strategy of a targeted book dissemination, Neville sent out 750 complimentary copies of the book’s first edition to key policymakers, opinion-makers, ambassadors, members of parliament, members of the international community and its media, as well as those involved directly in peace talks. The aim is for recipients of this book to be prompted into real action which will result in an end to the war, an end to the killing in Eastern Ukraine, and the withdrawal of Russian forces from occupied territories in Donbas and Crimea. An additional 750 copies were also available through Nazraeli Press for general distribution internationally, and quickly sold out.
 
Neville wrote in the first edition: “The atmosphere is extremely tense. Bomb shelters and siren drills are being prepared in the capital. Do we stay and fight? Or do we flee Ukraine completely? I wonder what the international response would be if Stockholm, London, Paris, or New York were threatened with an unprovoked and imminent invasion by Russia? Our book is a prayer and a necessary plea to the international community and Nazraeli Press and I have pulled out all the stops to get our book printed and disseminated before Putin invades." Published post-invasion, this important second edition of the book includes an updated artist’s statement and maps.
Book of the Day Posted Sep 17, 2022

Book of the Day > Rosamond Purcell: Nature Stands Aside

● Purchase ● The first comprehensive book in more than twenty years of the artist’s haunting and textural photographic work, published to accompany a major retrospective at the Addison Gallery of American Art.
 
A definitive monograph to accompany the first museum survey of the renowned photographer and conceptual artist Rosamond Purcell (b. 1942), known for her strangely beautiful, often unsettling photographs of objects from the natural and man-made world.
 
With more than 150 illustrations, the book reflects the breadth of the artist’s career from the late 1960s to the present day, and includes photographs, assemblages, collages, and installations that serve to illuminate and explore the shifting boundaries between art and science. From large-format Polaroid prints to objects rescued from obscurity, Purcell’s empathetic, evocative, multifaceted work explores the interstices between the unsettling and the sublime, the beautiful and the bizarre, the natural and the manufactured.
 
With thoughtful and insightful texts from an eclectic list of critical voices—including the acclaimed documentary filmmaker Errol Morris and the writer Christoph Irmscher—and featuring an interview between Purcell and fellow contemporary artist Mark Dion, this book rejuvenates the critical approach Purcell’s work and brings to light the evolution of a remarkable career.
Book of the Day Posted Sep 16, 2022

Book of the Day > Marc Karzen: Late Night Bumpers - 40th Anniversary Edition

● Purchase ● Television shows use images, animations, photographs or graphics before and after commercials as a way of identifying to the channel surfing viewer what they are watching and create a cushion between the show and commercials. These images are called bumpers. In broadcasting, if a local affiliate switched from a local spot back to the network’s show and was off by a second or two, bumpers close that gap.
 
Over 11 years from 1982-1992, I photographed a series of slice of life New York moments that punctuated segments and guests on Late Night with David Letterman.
 
This work is all pre-digital, predates Photoshop and everything was shot on 35mm and 120 film cameras.
 
Graphics art director Bob Pook, graphics producer Edd Hall and I set off into the night over the years to find as many possible ways to integrate the Late Night with David Letterman name into New York life.
 
These Bumpers challenged viewers to find where and how the show title was integrated into an image as they were only on screen for 3 seconds at a time.
 
Sometimes we brought props that we put in camera. But for most images, our team of designers, Bill Shortridge, Arlen Schumer and Bob Pook prepared the prints with rub-on type, glued on polaroids, air brush and markers onto the mounted chromogenic master C-prints.
 
Finally, Dave had approval of all images before they made the airwaves.
 
Enjoy having a look again, even if it's for the first time!
Book of the Day Posted Sep 15, 2022

Book of the Day > Betye Saar: Serious Moonlight

● Purchase ● Rarely seen installation works that exemplify this pioneering artist’s critical focus on Black identity and Black feminism
 
Showcasing a lesser-known aspect of Saar’s art, Betye Saar: Serious Moonlight provides new insights into her explorations of ritual, spirituality and cosmologies, as well as themes of the African diaspora. Featured here are significant installations created by Saar from 1980 to 1998, including Oasis (1984), a work that will be reconfigured at ICA Miami’s Saar exhibition for the first time in more than 30 years.
 
With compelling scholarship and rich illustration—combining new installation photography and archival material—the monograph provides a fresh look at this significant artist’s critical and influential practice. Betye Saar: Serious Moonlight reinforces and celebrates Saar’s standing as a visionary artist, storyteller and mythmaker, and the ongoing significance and relevance of her work to the most pressing issues in America today.
Book of the Day Posted Sep 14, 2022

Book of the Day > Thomas Hoepker: The Way It Was

● Purchase ● Two road trips—one in black and white, the other color—across two Americas, nearly 60 years apart
 
Magnum photographer (and former Magnum president) Thomas Hoepker (born 1936) was 27 years old when he set out on his ambitious journey across the United States—one that took him from coast to coast and back again over the course of three months and resulted in thousands of photos. The year was 1963 and Hoepker had been commissioned by the German magazine Kristall to “discover” America through his camera. The photo reportages he made, published in five issues of the magazine across dozens of pages, revealed Hoepker’s complex, skeptical and sometimes melancholy view of the American every day, in big cities, small towns and all in between. His was an unromanticized vision in which the decadent existed alongside the desolate, the glitter with the grit.
 
As much as Hoepker recognized that the problematic American dream could go unfulfilled, he was fascinated with the country (settling in New York in 1976), and in 2020—at the age of 84 and after a successful career as a photojournalist and president of Magnum Photos—he once again set out on a road trip throughout the US. The Way It Was: Road Trips USA juxtaposes Hoepker’s color photographs from this trip with his original black-and-white images, taking us on a journey both through his changing sense of America and through time.
Book of the Day Posted Sep 13, 2022

Book of the Day > Johnny Ryan: Barely Human

● Purchase ● The cartoons that keep getting Johnny Ryan banned from Instagram, collected for the first time as one big ol' exquisitely gross picture book! Johnny Ryan's compulsion to flout any and all accepted standards of decency in his humor and cartoons have not only garnered him a tremendous following — Instagram has banned him multiple times with hundreds of posts scrubbed from those accounts. (He can be found, currently, at @johnnyryanjohnnyryan1). Guess what? We've got 'em! Over 500 of the grossest, crudest, most surrealistic, scatological, and of course hilarious cartoons you'll ever see, presented with loving care in this gorgeous, oversized collection with fine art paper. They may not meet with your approval, but you will laugh. Crafted throughout the pandemic and posted daily, these cartoons helped keep both the author and hundreds of thousands of others sane during the past two years. From conventional gag cartoons to pieces decidedly unconventional and almost Dadaist in their humor, these are some of the most visually imaginative — and comedically brilliant — single-panel cartoons ever conceived, whether in the service of boner jokes or sheer visual absurdism.
Book of the Day Posted Sep 10, 2022

Book of the Day > Colin Sussingham: Be L’eau

● Purchase ● Shot between 2019-2021 this body of work takes the audience into another dimension. A space that is colorful and dramatic, beautiful and eerie, where bodies are celebrated and the subject can let go. The pressure of water, the lack of visibility, gravity, and breath, are the forces that create the calm and the tension, the grace and the struggle, the release and the resistance.
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