For the first time on Gwarlingo, I’ve assembled a list of 26 of my favorite art, photography, film, and design books published this year.

This list is my gift to you this holiday. These are titles I discovered at wonderful local shops like 192 Books in Chelsea, Crescent City Comics and Faulkner House Books in New Orleans, the Mass MoCA store, Hello Hello Books in Maine, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art store.

As always, a percentage of ALL the purchases you make through the Gwarlingo Amazon portal benefit the website. (Yup. Even the purchase of toilet paper, socks, or a new camera added to your shopping cart while purchasing a book counts!)

And for those of you who have a great local shop nearby, you can use the IndieBound link to purchase a title through your local bookstore. If you make the purchase online, Gwarlingo will also receive a small portion of your purchase.

And if your budget doesn’t permit such splurges, ask your local library. Most libraries offer interlibrary loan, a fabulous service that allows you to borrow titles from public and university libraries throughout your state, even if your own library doesn’t have the item in their catalog.

If you enjoy Gwarlingo’s 26 Favorite Art, Photography, Film & Design Books of 2013, I hope you’ll spread the word on Facebook, Twitter, etc.

This in-depth list is my gift to all of the Gwarlingo readers out there who keep this site thriving and free of advertising.Thanks for reading. Happy Holidays!

Interaction of Color: 50th Anniversary Edition & iPad App

By Josef Albers. Yale University Press, 208 pages

Originally conceived as a handbook and teaching aid for artists, instructors, and students, this new edition presents a significantly expanded selection of close to sixty color studies alongside Albers’s original text, demonstrating such principles as color relativity, intensity, and temperature; vibrating and vanishing boundaries; and the illusion of transparency and reversed grounds.

With over a quarter of a million copies sold in its various editions since 1963, Interaction of Color remains an essential resource on color, as pioneering today as when Albers first created it. If you’re an artist, designer, teacher, or reader interested in the subject of color, you’ll want to add this new addition of Albers masterwork to your library.

iPad users will want to check out the Interaction of Color app. This beautifully designed app lets you actually interact with Albers’ images. You can create, share, and save your own color studies. This is an innovative and elegant education tool for art teachers and students alike.

Todd Hido: Excerpts from Silver Meadows

By Todd Hido. Nazraeli Press, 336 pages with 120 four-color plates

Excerpts from Silver Meadows is Hido’s sixth monograph with Nazraeli & his most ambitious project to date. The title of the book, Silver Meadows, is the name of a street that runs through the neighborhood in Kent, Ohio, where the artist grew up. The setting of Hido’s childhood, it also became the creative wellspring for his work. Here, it serves as a point of departure for Hido’s reexamination of a Midwestern suburban upbringing; “a trip through the innocence of childhood and adolescence and into the darker aspects of life beyond.” Beautifully printed on matt Japanese art paper, and featuring an “installation” of tipped-in images on the case binding, Excerpts from Silver Meadows is printed in a first edition of 3,000 copies.

The Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson’s Envelope Poems

By Emily Dickinson, Jen Bervin, Marta Werner, & Susan Howe. New Directions, 272 pages

This book has had positive buzz, and for good reason. I saw my first copy at the fabulous Faulkner House Books in New Orleans, just after the book was released, and loved it so much that I bought a copy on the spot to bring back for a friend’s birthday gift.

The Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson’s Envelope Poems is the first full-color facsimile edition of Emily Dickinson’s manuscripts ever to appear. This deluxe edition of her late writings, presents this crucially important, experimental late work exactly as she wrote it: on scraps of envelopes, offering readers a never-before-possible glimpse into the process of one of our most important poets.

The quality of the paper, printing, and photographs are all first-rate, but the book’s design also contributes to its beauty. Not only does The Gorgeous Nothings include all 52 of Dickinson’s envelope poems, but they are reproduced life-size in full color both front and back, with an accompanying transcription to aid in the reading. Best of all the editors have given each piece plenty of white space on the page, allowing us to fully appreciate not only geometric shapes, but also the sentences and stanzas in Dickinson’s scrawled handwriting.

Envisioned by the artist Jen Bervin and made possible by the extensive research of the Dickinson scholar Marta L. Werner, this book offers a new understanding and appreciation of the genius of Emily Dickinson. You can expect to read more about The Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson’s Envelope Poems on Gwarlingo in the coming weeks!

The Wes Anderson Collection

By Matt Zoller Seitz. Introduction by Michael Chabon. Abrams Books, 336 pages

Anderson’s quirky vision is one most people either love or hate, but he is a masterful fabulist. There are few directors with such an acute eye for color and set design combined with impeccable taste in music. His movies make me laugh out loud—a rarity these days. And what other film soundtrack can successfully combine the music of Benjamin Britten, Françoise Hardy, and Hank Williams?

The Wes Anderson Collection is the first in-depth overview of Anderson’s filmography, guiding readers through his life and career. Previously unpublished photos, artwork, and ephemera complement a book-length conversation between Anderson and award-winning critic Matt Zoller Seitz. There is also an introduction by the awesome Michael Chabon.

Nylon magazine had this to say: “Your coffee table wants—no, scratch that—needs this book . . . Packed with 400 images of everything from behind-the-scenes set shots to makeup inspiration to hand-drawn storyboards, the massive tome is pure eye candy. But in addition to the visuals, Seitz also dives deep into each and every Anderson film.”
 

Holy Bible

By Oliver Chanarin & Adam Broomberg. Mack, 768 pages, 614 color plates

Violence, calamity and the absurdity of war are recorded extensively within The Archive of Modern Conflict, the largest photographic collection of its kind in the world. For Holy Bible, Broomberg and Chanarin mined this archive and overlaid specific images onto each page of the book. As described in Wired.co.uk the images “are representative of the horror and madness of global catastrophes we have become numb to, due to the filtration of those images by mainstream media. Those themes of hardship and horror are common occurrences in the Bible, hence the pair have used the ancient tome to point to a cycle of retribution we appear to be living in still, with a vengeful god today replaced by law and nation.”

“The idea for Holy Bible arose when Broomberg and Chanarin came across Bertolt Brecht‘s own copy of the text. ‘It caught our attention because it has a photograph of a racing car glued to the cover,’ Chanarin told Wired.co.uk.”

“‘Brecht was deeply concerned about the use of photographs in newspapers, something that was relatively new at the time,’ said Chanarin. ‘He was so suspicious of press images that he referred to them as hieroglyphics in need of deciphering or decoding. We share this concern, in fact now more than ever, images of conflict that are distributed in the mainstream media are even less able to affect any real political action.'”

Holy Bible is not just a collectible book, but a work of art in and of itself.

Things Come Apart: A Teardown Manual for Modern Living

by Todd McLellan. Thames & Hudson, 128 pages

These images of a disassembled SLR camera, clock, espresso machines, grand piano, and typewriter are fun and fascinating to study. McLellan’s photographs reveal the inner workings of some of the world’s most iconic designs–parts and pieces we typically don’t see.

Maclean’s describes the evolution of the Canadian photographer’s work in more detail: “When still a child in Saskatoon he disassembled an old stereo his father brought home, tearing it up into its constituent parts. His compulsion just made sense: dad was a carpenter, his mother a technician with Northern Telecom. A few years ago McLellan, now a Toronto-based commercial photographer, got hold of an old rotary phone and, after leaving it plugged into his wall for a few months, took it to his studio with a mind to shooting it. Try as he might, and despite his passion for its sturdy, handsome design, its beauty remained elusive. So he ripped it apart, laid it out like a frog’s dissected body, then dropped its guts from the ceiling. The resulting photographs—innards arrested in midair or spread, with a serial killer’s logic, beneath the lens—are making McLellan famous.”

The photographs are interspersed with essays by notable figures from the worlds of restoration, DIY, and design innovation, who discuss historical examples of teardowns, disassembly, and reverse-engineering.

Todd McLellan, Vintage Typewriter (Photo © Todd McLellan Motion/Stills Inc.)

Henry Darger, Throwaway Boy: The Tragic Life of an Outsider Artist

By Jim Elledge. Overlook, 384 pages

Utterly unknown during his lifetime, Henry Darger led a quiet, secluded existence as a janitor on Chicago’s North Side. But when he died, his landlord discovered a treasure trove of more than three hundred canvases and more than 30,000 manuscript pages depicting a rich, shocking fantasy world—many featuring hermaphroditic children being eviscerated, crucified, and strangled.

While some art historians believe Darger to have been psychotic, Elledge’s thoughtful, sympathetic biography argues that Darger has been tragically misunderstood. His narrative shows Darger as a damaged and fearful gay man, raised in a world unaware of the consequences of child abuse or gay shame.

As Michael Bonesteel writes in his Chicago Tribune review, Elledge, a writer who has published numerous titles in the field of queer culture, “makes the claim, supported by meticulous research conducted over 10 years, that not only was Darger gay, but that his good friend, William Schloeder, was his ‘life partner’ and that they tried to adopt a child together. Once Elledge presents all of the evidence, his hypothesis does seem brilliantly persuasive — amounting to a veritable bombshell in the annals of Darger scholarship — challenging long-held notions about Darger’s personal life and explaining many unanswered questions about his art.”

According to Bonesteel, “a number of opinions have been advanced regarding Darger’s psychological state, including Asperger’s syndrome, post-traumatic stress disorder, gender confusion, obsessive-compulsive disorder and hypergraphia (the overwhelming urge to write). The hypothesis of homosexuality — clearly no longer considered a mental disorder — that Elledge puts forth in his biography is one of the most significant and important contributions to date.”

Drawn from fascinating histories of the vice-ridden districts of 1900s Chicago, tens of thousands of pages of primary source material, and Elledge’s own work in queer history, Henry Darger, Throwaway Boy also features a full-color reproduction of a never-before-seen canvas from a private gallery in New York, as well as a previously undiscovered photograph of Darger with his lifelong companion William Schloeder, or “Whillie” as Henry affectionately referred to him.

Engaging, arresting, and ultimately illuminating, Henry Darger, Throwaway Boy brings alive a complex, brave, and compelling man whose outsider art is both challenging and a triumph over trauma.

Henry Darger’s Chicago Apartment (Photo by Michael Boruch courtesy Intuit: The Centre of Intuitive and Outsider Art)

Super Graphic: A Visual Guide to the Comic Book Universe

By Tim Leong. Chronicle Books, 196 pages

Super Graphic: A Visual Guide to the Comic Book Universe was created by Tim Leong, an art director at Wired magazine. This quirky book maps the graphic world through a collection of pie charts, timelines, bar graphs, scatter plots, and more. As the publisher says, “Super Graphic offers readers a unique look at the intricate and sometimes contradictory storylines that weave their way through comic books, and shares advice for navigating the pages of some of the most popular, longest-running, and best-loved comics and graphic novels out there.”

“From a colorful breakdown of the DC Comics reader demographic to a witty Venn diagram of superhero comic tropes and a Chris Ware sadness scale, this book charts the most arbitrary and monumental characters, moments, and equipment of the wide world of comics.”

(© Tim Leong courtesy Chronicle Books. Click to Enlarge)

Vivian Maier: Self-Portraits

By Vivian Maier, John Maloof, & Elizabeth Avedon. powerHouse Books, 120 pages

For almost forty years Maier worked as a nanny in Chicago. During those years, she took more than 100,000 photographs, primarily of people and cityscapes in Chicago. But her photographs remained unknown and mostly undeveloped until they were discovered by a 26-year-old Chicago historian and real estate agent, John Maloof, in 2007. Maloof bought 30,000 prints and negatives from an auction house that had acquired the photographs from a storage locker that had been sold off when Maier was no longer able to pay her fees.

Many details about Maier’s life are unknown, though Maloof has done a great deal of research. We know that she worked in a sweatshop in New York in her 20s. “She was a Socialist, a Feminist, a movie critic, and a tell-it-like-it-is type of person,” writes Maloof. “She learned English by going to theaters, which she loved. She wore a men’s jacket, men’s shoes, and a large hat most of the time. She was constantly taking pictures, which she didn’t show anyone.” Near the end of her life, it’s possible that Maier was homeless for a time. She lived on Social Security and the children she had cared for in the early 1950s bought her an apartment in the Rogers Park area of Chicago and paid her bills. In 2008, she slipped on ice and hit her head. She never recovered and died in 2009 at the age of 83.

It wasn’t until Maier’s death and the establishment of the Maloof Collection that her arresting photographs, which often depict street scenes in New York and Chicago in the 50s and 60s, began to receive critical recognition. We may never know the entire story of why Maier chose to keep her work private throughout her life, but this talented nanny is finally getting the attention she deserves.

Maloof’s highly acclaimed book, Vivian Maier: Street Photographer, is the best introduction to Maier’s work, and I highly recommend it, as well.

This new collection of images, Vivian Maier: Self-Portraits, reveals the fullest and most intimate portrait of the artist to date with approximately 60 never-before-seen black-and-white and four-color self-portraits culled from the extensive Maloof archive.

(Self-portrait by Vivian Maier courtesy powerHouse Books)

All the Buildings in New York: That I’ve Drawn So Far

By James Gulliver Hancock. Universe, 64 pages

All the Buildings in New York is a love letter to New York City, told through Hancock’s unique and charming drawings of the city’s diverse architectural styles and cityscape. Organized by neighborhoods, the book features iconic New York buildings, such as the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center, and Flatiron Building, as well as the everyday buildings that make up New York City—the boutique shops in SoHo, timeless brownstones in Brooklyn, and rows of busy markets in Chinatown. New Yorkers and tourists alike will savor this one-of-a-kind volume that uniquely celebrates the energy and spirit of the city that never sleeps.

(Photo © James Gulliver Hancock)

Kodachrome Memory: American Pictures 1972-1990

By Nathan Benn, Richard Buckley, and Paul M. Farber. powerHouse Books, 168 pages

“On D-Day 1972, fresh and ready to begin a photo internship at National Geographic, Benn, hitherto a black-and-white photographer, was delivered his marching orders: You shoot Kodachrome now,” writes Matt McCann on Lens:

“I hardly ever shot color until I shot for National Geographic, and then I shot all in color,” Mr. Benn, 63, recalled. “Ninety-nine point nine percent of my photography up until June 6, 1972, was done without color.”

It was a good thing the decision was made for him. Kodachrome was known at the time for rendering rich colors, but also turned out to be remarkably durable: while Ektachrome photos faded and warped over time, Kodachrome images resisted deterioration. So while Mr. Benn didn’t set out to assemble a book 40 years later composed exclusively of Kodachrome work, it happened that that work made up the bulk of his best-preserved images.

As the book’s publishers explain, in revisiting his archive of almost half a million images, and editing his photographs with a 21st-century perspective, Benn “discovered hundreds of unpublished American pictures that appeared inconsequential to editors of the 1970s and 1980s, but now resonate—in beautiful Kodachrome color—with empathic perspectives on everyday life in forgotten neighborhoods.”

“Kodachrome Memory exemplifies forthright storytelling about everyday people and vernacular spaces….An essay by scholar Paul M. Farber contextualizes the creation and selection of these images, offering a fresh perspective about color photography on the eve of the digital revolution.”

(Photo © Nathan Benn courtesy powerHouse Books)

David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition

By David Hockney, Richard Benefield, Sarah Howgate, & Lawrence Weschler. Prestel USA, 228 pages

David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition builds on the success of a recent exhibition organized by the Royal Academy of Arts in London, but encompasses a much larger scope, and includes many portraits, still lifes, and landscapes. In addition to watercolors, charcoals, oil paintings, and works in other media, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco is also the first to exhibit and publish The Arrival of Spring in 2013 (twenty thirteen). This series consists of 25 charcoal drawings, which Hockney describes “as capturing the bleakness of the winter and its exciting transformation to the summer.” David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition includes some of Hockney’s grandest works both in terms of size and concept, such as The Bigger Message, his 30-canvas re-working of Claude Lorrain’s The Sermon on the Mount.

This lush and impeccably produced book features over 100 full-color works of art from museum collections and Hockney’s private studio, including the major new works mentioned above. It also includes multiple-image galleries (spread over gatefolds) of some of his iPad drawings and self-portraits, plus film stills from the artist’s “Cubist” movies. Hockney’s own insight into this latest chapter of his career is found across the book’s pages and is accompanied by thoughtful commentary by renowned critic Lawrence Weschler and art historian Sarah Howgate.

Over a career lasting more than 60 years, David Hockney has consistently displayed a passion “to look deeper and see more,” as Lawrence Wechsler writes in his essay for the exhibition catalog. David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition displays the artist’s constantly searching curiosity, his desire to always move forward, and his unique genius for seeing.

David Hockney, Woldgate Woods, 30 March–21 April 2006. Oil on 6 canvases (36 X 48 inches each) 72 x 144 inches overall (Image © 2013 David Hockney. Photo by Richard Schmidt courtesy the de Young Museum)

Emmet Gowin

By Emmet Gowin, Keith Davis, & Carlos Gollonet. Aperture, 240 pages

While I’m a fan of Gowin’s intimate images of family life (the photographs of his wife Edith are reminiscent of Callahan’s famous images of his own wife, Eleanor), it’s Gowin’s beautiful, abstract aerial images of environmental devastation at Mount St. Helens and the American West that capture my imagination. Edward Burtynsky may be more famous for his jumbo-sized, technically perfect aerial photographs of environmental damage, but Burtynsky lacks Gowin’s warmth and luminescence. This long-awaited survey pays tribute to Gowin’s remarkable career and his impact on the medium.

(Photo via collectordaily.com)

Various Small Books: Referencing Various Small Books by Ed Ruscha

By Jeff Brouws, Wendy Burton, Hermann Zschiegner , Phil Taylor, & Mark Rawlinson. The MIT Press, 288 pages

(Photo by Michelle Aldredge)

William Kentridge: Fortuna

By William Kentridge, Lilian Tone, & Kate McCrickard. Thames and Hudson, 320 pages

If, like me, you missed the William-Kentridge-boat the last time it sailed through, this new book will get you up to speed. William Kentridge: Fortuna is the first major monograph on the widely acclaimed South African artist and brings together nearly two hundred of his works made between 1989 and 2012. Exploring Kentridge’s diverse expressions across a wide range of media, from film and video to sculpture, design, drawing, and printmaking, the book is lavishly illustrated with more than 2,000 images. As the publisher says, “it reveals Kentridge’s love of contradiction and uncertainty, his work moving variously between the personal and political, the static and temporal, the humorous and profound, the real and metaphorical, and between acts of making and of disassembling or erasure.”

“Kentridge’s dynamic way of working in his Johannesburg studio is revealed, a creative process that can be described as an act of performance during which he searches for forms of expression for his powerful and poetic ideas. His own lively commentaries accompany his works, offering indispensable insights into his working methods and creative thinking. Essays by Lilian Tone and Kate McCrickard put his practice into wider context, investigating the conceptual and visual tendencies in Kentridge’s work, and the relationship between his art and his native South Africa.”

(Image © William Kentridge courtesy Thames & Hudson)

Guillermo del Toro Cabinet of Curiosities: My Notebooks, Collections, and Other Obsessions

By Guillermo Del Toro  and Marc Zicree. Harper Design, 256 pages

Del Toro’s biography is one of the most compelling things about this talented filmmaker. “I was not a child who was beaten or locked in a closet,” he told Metronews, “but I really have a very intense relationship with the horror of Catholic guilt and the dogma. My grandmother was like Piper Laurie in Carrie. I was like a chubby version of Carrie. It was very difficult for me to get over that….I would cry at the concept of burning in hell, or the concept of purgatory and original sin. Mexican Catholicism is very, very brutal and very, very gory. That all affected me.”

When del Toro was in his 30s, his father, automotive entrepreneur Federico del Toro, was kidnapped in Guadalajara. Although Federico was eventually released safely, del Toro’s family had to pay twice the ransom originally asked. The event forced the family to leave Mexico.

Del Toro could have easily been derailed by this political and religious oppression, but instead, he channeled it and used it to create his own unique brand of horror—an uncanny mix of politics, authoritarian oppression, fairy tales, mythology, and monsters. “To me, art and storytelling serve primal, spiritual functions in my daily life,” says del Toro. “Whether I’m telling a bedtime story to my kids or trying to mount a movie or write a short story or a novel, I take it very seriously.”

The filmmaker is also a collector of drawings, ephemera, books, posters, notebooks, etc. He even keeps a separate house used exclusively for his collection of books, poster artwork and other belongings pertaining to his work, explaining, “As a kid, I dreamed of having a house with secret passages and a room where it rained 24 hours a day. The point of being over 40 is to fulfill the desires you’ve been harboring since you were 7.”

I once saw a television interview with del Toro where he gave a tour of this special “bleak house,” cluttered with memorabilia, sketchbooks, life-sized monsters, and books. Cabinet of Curiosities, has all of the chaotic, macabre strangeness of that space. In his new book del Toro reveals the inspirations behind his signature style, sharing the contents of his personal notebooks, collections, and other obsessions. The result is an intimate glimpse into the life and mind of one of the world’s most creative visionaries. Complete with running commentary, interview text, and annotations that contextualize the ample visual material, this deluxe compendium also contains contributions from James Cameron, Neil Gaiman, John Landis, and others.

Guillermo del Toro giving a tour of the house that holds all of his memorabilia, drawings, monsters, posters, and ephemera (Video still courtesy Criterion)

The Best American Infographics 2013

By David Byrne and Gareth Cook. Mariner Books, 184 pages

In the era of big data, where information moves faster than ever, infographics provide us with quick, often influential bursts of art and knowledge—on the environment, politics, social issues, health, sports, arts and culture, and more—to digest, to tweet, to share, to go viral. 

The rise of infographics across virtually all print and electronic media—from a striking breakdown of classic cocktails to a graphic tracking 200 influential moments that changed the world to visually arresting depictions of Twitter traffic—reveals patterns in our lives and our world in fresh and surprising ways.The Best American Infographics 2013 captures the finest examples from the past year. This is one of those books any curious friend or family member would appreciate. Or buy it for yourself. It would make a great bathroom book.
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 

John Singer Sargent: Watercolors

By John Singer Sargent, Erica E. Hirshler, Teresa A. Carbone, and Richard Ormond. MFA Publications, 248 pages

Sargent held only two major watercolor exhibitions in the United States during his lifetime. The contents of the first, in 1909, were purchased in their entirety by the Brooklyn Museum of Art. The paintings exhibited in the other, in 1912, were scooped up by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. John Singer Sargent Watercolors reunites nearly 100 works from these collections for the first time, arranging them by themes and subjects: sunlight on stone, figures reclining on grass, patterns of light and shadow. Enhanced by biographical and technical essays, and lavishly illustrated with 175 color reproductions, this publication introduces readers to the full sweep of Sargent’s accomplishments in this medium, in works that delight the eye as well as challenge our understanding of this prodigiously gifted artist.

As the book’s publisher explains, Sargent’s “dynamic and boldly conceived watercolors, created during travels to Tuscan gardens, Alpine retreats, Venetian canals and Bedouin encampments, record unusual motifs that caught his incisive eye.” His approach to the medium was entirely original and went beyond “turn-of-the-century standards for carefully delineated and composed landscapes filled with transparent washes, his confidently bold, dense strokes and loosely defined forms startled critics and fellow practitioners alike. One reviewer of an exhibition in London proclaimed him ‘an eagle in a dove-cote’; another called his work ‘swagger’ watercolors. For Sargent, however, the watercolors were not so much about swagger as about a renewed and liberated approach to painting. In watercolor, his vision became more personal and his works more interconnected, as he considered the way one image–often of a friend or favorite place–enhanced another.”

Whether you’re a fan of Sargent or of the watercolor medium itself, you’ll want to add John Singer Sargent Watercolors to your collection. And if you’re in Boston before January 20th, be sure to visit the Sargent watercolors show at the MFA. This fascinating exhibit of the artist’s watercolors was on view at the Brooklyn Museum earlier this year and is a rare opportunity to see this collection under one roof.

John Singer Sargent, Gourds, 1908. (Photo courtesy MFA Publications via WBUR.org)

Iris Garden

By John Cage & William Gedney. Little Brown Mushroom, 64 pages. Limited edition of 1000 copies

The book combines 22 of John Cage’s stories with 44 of William Gedney’s photographs (including several of the composer himself) with an ingenious design mirroring Cage’s concept of chance. The photographs were selected by Alec Soth and include Gedney’s photographs of New York City, Appalachia, India, and Cage on a mushroom hunt.

This book was recommended by photographer Jason Fulford, who explains that the “texts are a selection of Cage’s one-minute stories. Each story is meant to be read aloud in the space of 60 seconds, so the reader must speed up or slow down, depending on the length. The book design, by Hans Seeger — unbound and intertwined spreads and gatefolds — is meant to encourage chance encounters with the content.”

Alas. The last time I checked, Iris Garden, which had only a 1000-copy print run, was selling quickly from its publisher Little Brown Mushroom. By the time you read this, your only hope of purchasing the book may be from a used or alternative bookseller.

(Photo via suzannerevy.blogspot.com)

Skyscrapers: A History of the World’s Most Extraordinary Buildings

By Judith Dupre. Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 176 pages

So I was thrilled to discover that Judith’s Skyscrapers book has just been revised and updated. This towering book is 18 inches tall and is full of gorgeous, color photos and historical facts about the world’s tallest buildings. The book is a great gift for any architecture or design buff, and the revised edition includes a look at the new One World Trade Center, ten new buildings, and information about some of the recent technological advances in skyscraper construction.

I’ll be publishing an in-depth interview with Judith soon, but until then, check out the publisher’s synopsis of this unique collection of neck-craning architecture:

“Unique in scale and design, Skyscrapers explores in-depth more than 60 buildings, including One World Trade Center, Burj Dubai, the Shanghai World Financial Center, the Petronas Towers, the Tribune Tower, the Lipstick Building, and the Phare Tower. This completely revised and full-color edition presents 10 new buildings, among them The Shard in London (2012, Renzo Piano), the International Commerce Centre in Hong Kong (2010, Kohn Pedersen Fox), the Shanghai Tower (2014, Gensler Architects), and the Kingdom Tower in Jeddah (2018, Adrian Smith), which will be the tallest building in the world when completed.”

“Arranged chronologically by date of building construction, each informative spread has photos of the featured building from various angles, building plans, diagrams, the building’s historical background, and technological information.”

“Skyscrapers also offers additional information on such topics as the ancient roots of skyscrapers and visionary cities of the future, as well as a fascinating interview with Philip Johnson, together with other profiles. New topics include the era of the megatall building, the building of a skyscraper, and the explosive growth of skyscrapers in Dubai and China.” The book also includes an interview with Adrian Smith.

(Photo courtesy Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers)

Tell Me Something: Advice From Documentary Filmmakers

By Jessica Edwards, Film First, 128 pages

With original portraits taken by esteemed photographers, the book features personal stories and anecdotes from the filmmaking trenches. As Edwards writes on the project’s Kickstarter page, “Doc makers are a rare breed, they’re creative, persistent, they’re master storytellers and each film they make is like a graduate degree in their chosen subject. Some of them have spent over 60 years making films, and along they way they’ve learned a lot about how to balance life and art. They’ve got insightful advice for people in any creative field.”

(Photo courtesy Film First)

Garry Winogrand

By Garry Winogrand, Leo Rubinfien, Sarah Greenough, Erin O’Toole, Tod Papageorge, & Sandra S. Phillips. Yale University Press 448 pages

When Winogrand died of gall bladder cancer, in 1984 at age 56. He left behind nearly 300,000 unedited images. Drawing from this enormous output, which at the time of his death included thousands of rolls of undeveloped film and unpublished contact sheets, Garry Winogrand serves as the most substantial compendium of Winogrand’s work to date. This landmark retrospective catalogue looks at the full sweep of Winogrand’s exceptional career, and includes private moments and striking public images of protestors, politicians,and people from marginalized communities.

Lavishly illustrated with both iconic images and photographs that have never been seen before now, and featuring essays by leading scholars of American photography, Garry Winogrand presents a vivid portrait of an artist who unflinchingly captured America’s swings between optimism and upheaval in the postwar era. (Part of the above text is courtesy Yale University Press)

Garry Winogrand, Los Angeles, 1980. (Photo from the Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco)

100 Works of Art That Will Define Our Age

By Kelly Grovier. Thames & Hudson, 320 pages, 396 illustrations, 360 color plates

“Grovier curates a compelling list of one hundred paintings, sculptures, drawings, installations, performances, and video pieces that have made the greatest impact from 1989 to the present. The global cast includes Marina Abramović , Matthew Barney, Christian Boltanski, Louise Bourgeois, Maurizio Cattelan, Marlene Dumas, Olafur Eliasson, Andreas Gursky, Cristina Iglesias, On Kawara, Jeff Koons, Ernesto Neto, Gerhard Richter, Pipilotti Rist, Kara Walker, Cy Twombly, and Ai Weiwei. Many of the pieces reflect the cultural upheavals of recent times, from the collapse of the Berlin Wall to the blossoming of the Arab Spring.

A daring yet convincing analysis of which artworks best capture the zeitgeist of our time, Grovier’s list also provides a much-needed map through the landscape of contemporary art. Illustrations of key works are supplemented by comparative images, and short texts offer a biography of each artwork, tracing its inception and impact, and offering a view not only into the imagination of the artist but into the age in which we live.”

100 Works of Art That Will Define Our Age is an excellent resource for art teachers and libraries, and a must-read for anyone interested in debating the merits of contemporary art.

Christian Marclay’s The Clock is one of the art works featured in Grovier’s book (Photo © Christian Marclay)

The World Atlas of Street Art and Graffiti

by Rafael Schacter & John Fekner. Yale University Press, 400 pages