Book of the Day Posted Jun 02, 2022

Book of the Day > *SIGNED​* Peter Fetterman: The Power of Photography

● Purchase ● The power of photography lies in its ability to ignite emotions across barriers of language and culture. This selection of iconic images, compiled by pioneering collector and gallerist Peter Fetterman, celebrates the photograph’s unique capacity for sensibility.
 
Peter has been championing the photographic arts for over 30 years. He runs what is arguably the most important commercial photography gallery in the world. During the long months of lockdown, Peter ‘exhibited’ one photograph per day, accompanied by inspirational text, quotes and poetry. This digital collection struck a chord with followers from around the world. The Power of Photography presents 120 outstanding images from the series, along with Peter’s insightful words.
 
This carefully curated selection offers an inspiring overview of the medium while paying homage to masters of the art. From the bizarre Boschian fantasies of Melvin Sokolsky to the haunting humanity of Ansel Adams’s family portraits; from Miho Kajioka’s interpretation of traditional Japanese aesthetics of to the joyful everyday scenes of Evelyn Hofer; from rare interior shots by famed nude photographer Ruth Bernhard to Bruce Davidson’s wistful depiction of young men playing ballgames on a street; this book gathers some of the most unique and heartening photographs from the 20th century. Each image is a time capsule, offering us a glimpse into days gone past. Yet each photograph also speaks of tranquility, peace, and hope for the future.
Events Posted Jun 01, 2022

Book Signing at Arcana 6/11/22 > Arthur Grace: Communism(s): A Cold War Album

PLEASE JOIN US FOR A BOOK SIGNING ON SATURDAY, JUNE 11TH, 4:00 - 6:00!
 
ARTHUR GRACE: COMMUNISM(S):  A COLD WAR ALBUM

 

For most people in the West, the realities of life behind the Iron Curtain have faded into caricatures of police state repression and bread lines. With the world seemingly again divided between democracies and authoritarian regimes, it is essential that we understand the reality of life in the Soviet Bloc. noted American photojournalist Arthur Grace was uniquely placed to provide that context.

 

During the 1970s and 1980s Grace traveled extensively behind the Iron Curtain, working primarily for news magazines. One of only a small corps of Western photographers with ongoing access, he was able to delve into the most ordinary corners of people’s daily lives, while also covering significant events. Many of the photographs in this remarkable book are effectively psychological portraits that leave the viewer with a sense of the gamut of emotions in that era.

 

Illustrated with over one hundred and twenty black-and-white images - nearly all previously unpublished, Communism(s) gives an unprecedented glimpse behind the veil of a not-so-distant time filled with harsh realities unseen by nearly all but those that lived through it. Shot in the USSR, Poland, Romania, Yugoslavia and the German Democratic Republic, here are portraits of factory workers, farmers, churchgoers, vacationers and loitering teens juxtaposed with the GDR’s imposing Social Realist-designed apartment blocks, annual May Day Parades, Poland’s Solidarity movement (and the subsequent imposition of martial law) and the vastness of Moscow’s Red Square.

 

Beautifully printed in Italy by publisher Damiani Editore, Communism(s) was co-edited by Arthur Grace, Arcana's own Lee Kaplan, and Deadbeat Club Press' Clint Woodside, who also contributed the book's striking design. Read some of its impressive advance reviews from The New York Times, Washington Post, and The Sunday London Times, and join us Saturday, June 11th to acquire your own copy of this timely document signed by photographer Arthur Grace

 

If you cannot attend, place an order here for your very own copy of Communism(s) signed by Arthur Grace to be picked up at the store or shipped to you after the event.
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Book of the Day Posted May 28, 2022

Book of the Day > The Clash: All the Albums All the Songs

● Purchase ● Established in 1976 at the fore London’s punk rock insurgence, The Clash would outlast their peers while creating some of the most influential albums in rock ’n’ roll history. Author Martin Popoff dissects each of the Clash’s ninety-one studio tracks, examining the circumstances that led to their creation, the recording processes, the historical contexts and more. In addition, introductory essays set the scene for the band’s six studio releases (including the double LP London Calling and the triple Sandinista!) and feature sidebars detailing studios, release dates, personnel, and more. Illustrated with rare performance and offstage photography, along with images of 7-inch singles sleeves and gig posters, the resulting volume is a fitting tribute to the foursome whose staunch political stance and groundbreaking amalgam of punk, rockabilly, reggae, and hip-hop earned the title “The Only Band That Matters.”
Book of the Day Posted May 27, 2022

Book of the Day > Please Send to Real Life: Ray Johnson Photographs

● Purchase ● A widely connected pioneer of Pop and mail art, Ray Johnson was described as ‘New York’s most famous unknown artist.’ Best known for his dense, allusive collages, he stopped exhibiting in 1991, but his output did not diminish. Between 1992 and 1994, using 137 disposable cameras, he created a large body of work that is only now coming to light. Staging his artworks in settings near his home in Locust Valley, Long Island — parking lots, sidewalks, beaches, cemeteries — Johnson made photographs that make the world of everyday ‘real life’ a part of his art. Within a few months, he devised a large new freestanding format for the simplified collages he began calling the ‘movie stars’ of his camera tableaux. When he swam to his death at sea on 13 January 1995, Johnson left behind a vast archive that included over three thousand of the late photographs. What he called his ‘new career as a photographer,’ which makes its debut in print here, marked the close of a romance with the camera that had spanned four decades of relentless invention.
Book of the Day Posted May 25, 2022

Book of the Day > Frédéric Bruly Bouabré: World Unbound

● Purchase ● The first museum survey of the visionary polymath from Côte d'Ivoire
 
The Ivorian artist Frédéric Bruly Bouabré created an unmistakable and entirely unique body of work, first as a writer and linguist, and then in a dazzling series of colorful drawings on a multitude of subjects, from his native Bété culture to the urban milieu of Abidjan to the all-encompassing themes of fraternity, equality and global understanding. All but unknown even in his home country of Côte d’Ivoire, Bouabré found international recognition in 1989 when he participated in the landmark Paris exhibition Magiciens de la terre, and his work has since been the subject of solo and group exhibitions around the world.
 
Published to accompany the first museum survey of Bouabré’s work in North America, this catalog offers a vivid account of the artist’s long and multifaceted career, including a detailed chronology of his life and reproductions of more than six hundred of his drawings. An essay by curator Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi introduces Bouabré to a new audience, illuminating his significance as both an important African creator and one of the most intriguing artists of the 20th century.
Book of the Day Posted May 24, 2022

Book of the Day > Judith Joy Ross: Photographs 1978–2015

● Purchase ● Judith Joy Ross: Photographs 1978–2015 is an illuminating retrospective that explores the life and career of a revered American photographer, illustrated by two hundred of her images, many never before seen or published.
 
The work of Judith Joy Ross marks a watershed in the lineage of the photographic portrait. Her pictures—unpretentious, quietly penetrating, startling in their transparency—consistently achieve the capacity to glimpse the past, present, and perhaps even the future of the individuals who stand before her lens. Adolescents swim at a local municipal park, ordinary people are at work and play. From immigrants and refugees, to tech workers and students, military reservists and civilians—all are incisively rendered with equal tenderness in Ross’s black-and-white, large-format portraits.
 
Published alongside the largest exhibition to feature Ross’s work to date, and drawn from her extensive archive of photographs made over the span of more than thirty-five years, Judith Joy Ross: Photographs 1978–2015 encompasses the best work of this influential photographer.
Book of the Day Posted May 21, 2022

Book of the Day > Poetic Practical: The Unrealized Work of Chris Burden

● Purchase ● Poetic Practical offers the first examination of Chris Burden's unrealized projects, featuring never-before-seen archival materials and newly commissioned photography of Burden's studio and property. This extensively illustrated book includes 435 images, featuring never-before-seen archival materials and newly commissioned photography of Burden's studio and property. Burden's work, whether realized or unrealized, was fundamentally driven by a speculative approach to artistic production, one that compelled him to interrogate the physical limits of his own body, social mores, institutional capabilities, and scientific forces. Above all, his work repeatedly sought to test the thresholds of presumed impossibility, making his unrealized works the ultimate example of such measures. The sixty-seven artworks included in this publication offer a unique and unprecedented perspective on the life and working process of this formidable artist.
Book of the Day Posted May 19, 2022

Book of the Day > Karlheinz Weinberger: Mediterraneo

● Purchase ● The photographs presented in this volume carry a special status in the extensive oeuvre of Karlheinz Weinberger. To this day, Weinberger is best known for his photographs of the Halbstarke and of Rockers, as well as for his nudes. A different aspect of Weinberger’s work was already highlighted in the previous volume on Sports, showcasing photographs of wrestlers, football players, gymnasts, and body builders. This volume offers just as exciting a discovery, assembling the photographs that he took on several trips to the Mediterranean. A few of them are well known–such as the picture of the Esso man, which has reached cult status–but most have never been published before the release of this book.
 
Many of the photographs shown were shot in and around Agrigento (Palma di Montechiaro, San Leone). Over the years, Weinberger expanded his travels to include the Lipari Islands and Lampedusa, Lecce and Naples. Twice he visited the other side of the Mediterranean Basin: he went to Tangier in 1963 and 1964.
 
His interest was not limited to men and their physiques, however. He also documented the traditional life of the South, in the cities and the country-side, at the ports and the beaches, often imbuing these subjects with a filmic quality reminiscent of Visconti’s La Terra Trema (1948) and Pasolini’s Accattone (1961).
Book of the Day Posted May 18, 2022

Book of the Day > Sandro Miller: Crowns -- My Hair, My Soul, My Freedom

● Purchase ● A photographic panorama of the creativity and variety of Black women's hairstyles
 
In Crowns: My Hair, My Soul, My Freedom American photographer Sandro Miller (born 1958) celebrates the social endurance, cultural heritage and self-expression of Black women through their hairstyles. In this series of portraits, each subject is posed in front of either a strikingly black or vibrant geometric background that serves to highlight the models’ skin tones and accentuates their ultra-stylized hair, whether a halo of bright gold curls or crimson locks swept into an elegant bun. Each image is based on the relevant model’s “hair story” and pays homage to her personal fashion sense, documenting the many unspoken ways in which Black women assert their autonomy through their physical appearance. In this project, Miller seeks to recognize and honor Black women’s creativity and beauty while celebrating their social endurance and cultural memory at the same time.
Book of the Day Posted May 17, 2022

Book of the Day > Barry McGee: Fuzz Gathering

● Purchase ● This zine by Barry McGee gathers a number of his own photographs, collages, and drawings to create a unique visual language composed of geometrical patterns and recurring symbols. It was published on the occasion of his exhibition towards the end of 2021 at the Perrotin Gallery in Paris. Born and educated in San Francisco, McGee produces works that are candid and insightful observations of modern society, but always with an emphasis on contributing to marginalised communities. He is associated with the Mission School, which emerged in the early 1990s and is primarily influenced by urban realism, graffiti, and American folk art, with a focus on social activism.
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