Between 1994 and 1995, Christopher Wool shot a series of photographs in downtown New York City that he calls East Broadway Breakdown, after a street on the Lower East Side, the neighborhood where he lives and works. Taken at night using a 35 mm camera, the pictures feature the city's signature streets with their dilapidated storefronts and ramshackle staircases leading up to anonymous spaces. The high contrast images are often hard to read, producing, rather than coherent images, seemingly random forms that emerge from skewed camera angles. Like his paintings, Wool's photographs hover between abstraction and representation, forcing viewers to confront their desire for visual coherence while offering an alternative construct for picture-making today.
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Boyd Rice / Twilight Man
First pressing limited to 1000 copies. Twilight Man follows Rice through San Francisco's darkest crevices during his time as a responder for the Twilight Alarm Company.
Excerpt from Twilight Man Chinatown: When the tourists empty the streets, the rats come out. When the neon turns off is when I'm on the clock. I carry a gun. I'm an alarm agent. Chinatown is another world, existing separate and distinct from the world that surrounds it. It is a city within a city, perhaps even a town within a city. Think you know or understand it - you're wrong. Beneath its quaint facade lurks a hidden world with its own hidden history and its own hidden laws. It's a world I inhabit on an almost nightly basis, from around midnight 'til dawn. If you're a businessman in the district, I'm your best friend, the only living soul keeping a watchful eye on your assets when the streets are empty but for rodents, night and fog. If you're a lowlife trying to rip off those businesses, I'm paid to stop you. My job is simple. If an alarm goes off in an establishment, I'm informed by radio and dispatched to the address. If the place appears to be secure and unmolested I call it in as a false alarm. If someone is up to no good, I take 'em down. My tag is agent 1225, and I work for Twilight Alarm Company. This is my story.
Motoyuki Daifu / Lovesody
Out of print.
8.75″x11.3″
100 signed and numbered (out of a total run of 300)
From the publisher:
LOVESODY by Motoyuki Daifu is an intimate portrait of the photographer’s relationship with a single young mother and her two children. Suffused with joy and melancholy, the images capture all the intimacies of young love burning fast and bright. In Daifu’s introduction, he announces that their ‘lovesody’ (a portmanteau of love and rhapsody) lasted for six months—a statement that while endearing, hints also at a kind of sadness. All the while, Daifu’s relationship with his subject remains in constant flux—from father figure, to lover, and even to the role of child.
Daifu’s images in all their frenetic quality allow the viewer to dive right in to the picture—to see and almost feel, touch, smell and hear. Firing on all senses, Daifu offers a multi-layered dialogue with the viewer, where one can almost taste the milk desired by the needy newborn, see the snot and grime, and taste the molten butter on thick cut toast. Added to this is Daifu’s ambigious position, whereby his gaze repeatedly shifts from that of amorous admirer, to that of a protective father, and finally to the role of a child himself. His image of a swollen breast amounts to both the lover’s gaze on the object of his desire, and also that of a child demanding his sustenance.
LOVESODY in its structure can clearly be seen as part of a photo dairy tradition within Japanese photography (Nobuyoshi Araki’s Sentimental Journey as an example).It is a book containing a clear timeframe and narrative, but in content, Daifu’s work remains apart from many of his contemporaries.In his previous series’, Daifu focused on his own family and the idiosyncrasies within. Chaos and imbalance reign, and we are often shown an intimate erosion of realities—the order, structure, and stoicism often associated with contemporary Japan are wholly absent, all the while marking Daifu as a more accurate recorder of a new, and uncertain time, a time when generations are shifting and values change on a daily basis. Added to this, in a country with a staggering age imbalance and birth rates at a critical low, LOVESODY is a pure anomaly.
LOVESODY is Motoyuki Daifu’s first publication, and coincides with a solo exhibition of the same name at Lombard Freid Projects in New York City. Daifu was previously featured in ‘Minor Cropping may Occur.’ a group photographic exhibition in early 2011. Reviewed favourably by several notable publications, Daifu’s work within the exhibition was highlighted by The New York Times and The New Yorker.
Takashi Homma / Mushrooms From the Forest
First edition limited to 950 copies. Choice of beige or blue cover subject to availability.
From publisher: "The earthquake and subsequent tsunami of March 11th, 2011, near Japan�s Tohoku region, led to the catastrophic equipment failures and nuclear disaster of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station.Six months later, on September 15th, the Japanese government prohibited the gathering and ingestion of any mushrooms grown in the forty-three cities of Fukushima prefecture. Traces of radiation exceeding safety limits were detected in some wild mushroom varieties.Fungi inherently absorb radiation much more rapidly than other organisms.My Geiger counter detected a greatly elevated level of radiation in the lush forests of Fukushima when compared to the region�s urban areas. The wild mushrooms in the photographs assembled here are from those forests.
Takashi Homma, who started his career as a photographer in the 1990s, selected immature children and young folks as a photographic subject. Tokyo Suburbia, which is his early renowned artwork, presents their living environment and overall atmosphere by photography. Throughout his career, Homma has presented his photography themed on urban cities, although in addition to cities his field photography has been greatly expanded. He has photographed mountains, sea, and our surrounding world widely while displaying an amazing eye for detail. Mushrooms From The Forest 2011 by Takashi Homma is an artwork undertaken to photograph the forest and mushrooms.
The forest is one of the most common places for us to feel the nature, and we also take care of and maintain the forest. The forest is a part of our surrounding world and has had a deep relationship with us. An accident happened in a forest in Japan. High radiation levels were recorded there, and therefore collecting and eating the mushrooms from this forest has not been approved."
Carol Bove /The Middle Pillar
Text by Cathleen Chafee
Karma, New York, 2013
28 pages
13 × 9 1/2 inches
Edition of 1,000
Out of Print
“In 2004 Carol Bove described her interest in what she called the provocative “shady places” of display: “A gradient that starts with a small, personal domestic object and goes through art objects, installation art, site-specific works, environments, installation design, architecture, etc.” Her use of historical objects and texts belongs to this larger project dedicated to undermining binaries, often the either/or distinctions between site-specific installations and autonomous artworks.”
Takashi Homma: Hyper Ballad: Icelandic Suburban Landscapes (Japanese)
Tankobon Hardcover: 112 pages
Publisher: Switch Publishing (1997)
Language: Japanese
ISBN-10: 4916017854
ISBN-13: 978-4916017857
Package Dimensions: 9.6 x 7.4 x 0.5 inches
Condition: Good
Motoyuki Daifu / Project Family
Published by Dashwood Books, 2013
edition of 500 copies
softcover / 50 pages / 9.5 x 7 in
Release Date: 03/01/2013
From publisher: “Project Family documents the chaotic home life of young Japanese photographer Daifu Motoyuki. Seven family members and a cat all squeezed into the small five-room house where he was raised in Yokohama. A light-hearted look at domestic life in contemporary Japan.”
In Alphabetical Order: File Under: Graphic Design, Schools, or Werkplaats Typografie
Edited by Stuart Bailey. Text by Paul Elliman, Anthony Froshaug, Melle Hammer, Robin Kinross, Norman Potter.
PUBLISHER: NAI PUBLISHERS
PUBLISHED: MARCH 2003
ISBN-10: 9056622722
ISBN-13: 9789056622725
FORMAT: PAPERBACK
SUBJECT: DESIGN / GRAPHIC ARTS / TYPOGRAPHY
From publisher: “This is a schizophrenic book. Between its covers are: a book about typography and graphic design, arranged around recent work from a single source and incubator, the Werkplaats Typografie (Typography Workshop/WT) in Arnheim, the Netherlands; a book about a specific approach and pedagogy, the methods that the WT uses to study and practice graphic design, in which students integrate all aspects of the discipline and its forms in their own expressive vocabulary; a book that presents a broad selection of work from a "school-in-progress," the WT, along with texts that articulate their common foundations and ideas. Actually, perhaps it suffers not so much from schizophrenia as from multiple-personality disorder. In any case, the WT was founded five years ago as a postgraduate course in graphic design; it functions both as a training site and a studio where professional commissions are executed for a varied clientele. Published in conjunction with Werkplaats Typografie.”
Richard Hell, Christopher Wool / Psychopts
Publisher JMc & GHB editions, NY 2008
Dimensions: 22.5 x 18 cm, paperback , sewn bound, offset printing, b/w
From publisher: “This collaborative artists’ book emerges from a collaboration between the writer/musician Richard Hell and the painter Christopher Wool and focuses on their mutual interest in experiences associated with reading. The two artists create images using a selection of word pairings that would appear conceptually estranged but share a subliminal connection. The resulting book balances precariously between rationally ordered sense and polymorphous chaotic association, asking the reader to engage in its associative wordplay and poetic investigations. Published in conjunction with the 2008 exhibition at John McWhinnie at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller and Art Gallery.”
