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contexts, drawing deeply on Woodman's formative years in Providence, Rhode Island, and Italy, and featuring previously unpublished photographs and archival materials.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.
Miscellany Posted Jun 09, 2022

Closing Early Thursday 6/16!

We will be closing at 5:00 PM on Thursday, June 16th for a private event at the store. 

Thanks for your understanding!

 

 

Book of the Day Posted Jun 07, 2022

Book of the Day > The Cobrasnake: Y2Ks Archive

● Purchase ● A love letter to a time before Instagram and the legendary party scenes of the 2000s that brought together the new millennium’s rising stars of pop culture.
 
Under the moniker the Cobrasnake, the photographer Mark Hunter captured the party scenes of Los Angeles and New York during the hipster-glam heyday of the 2000s—and in doing so defined the look of a generation. Armed with just a Polaroid and a primitive website, Cobrasnake captured pioneers of youth culture from Kanye West and Steve Aoki to Jeremy Scott, Katy Perry, and Virgil Abloh—icons of the indie pop world in the making. Intimately connected with the people around him and keyed-in to the edgier fringes of the fashion, music, and art worlds, Hunter photographed influencers before they were influencers, in the wild and at play from the streets of LA to NYC and beyond. Collected here for the first time are more than three hundred of Cobrasnake’s favorite images alongside ephemera, from concert tickets and backstage passes to outtakes and unseen photographs from his many adventures. These photographs are records of the last generation of partiers to predate the livestreaming of culture afforded by today’s social media—capturing the energy and vibrancy of a time before Instagram.
Book of the Day Posted Jun 03, 2022

Book of the Day > Vanessa Winship: Snow

● Purchase ● In Snow, Vanessa Winship’s latest monograph, we see that what’s not entirely comprehended is far more compelling than what is well understood. Perhaps that’s a truism, but it’s one that is rejuvenated and refreshed by each new and peculiar telling. This book is just such a revelation.
 
The origins of Snow lie in a commission (this from an artist who very rarely works on assignment, although Winship says she often approaches things “as if I have somehow been sent by someone”), but the photographer’s interest in what she found soon eclipsed anything that could properly be thought of as a “story.” So, she made repeated trips to a particular landscape – and, notably, a particular season – in order to fathom what it was that had disconcerted her in the initial making of these photographs.
 
Winship is well known and highly regarded for her intimate portraits, but in Snow we experience a noticeable physical distance between the photographer and her subjects. What little the viewer can possibly grasp onto is the subtle repetition of the humblest elements of the earth. Collectively, the pictures come to embody the artist’s struggle to connect and to make sense of this place while ultimately acknowledging that she, like us all, is nothing but a stranger in this world.
 
This estrangement is echoed in a piece of fiction – by the poet and novelist Jem Poster – that’s woven through Snow. It tells of a female portrait photographer and her recalcitrant subject. But this character is not Winship, and the sitter is not someone in a Winship photograph. Poster’s is a fiction based on an imagistic construct – another beguiling layer in a complicated book that seeks always to expose the slipperiness of narrative and to destabilize easy readings.
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