Artbook at MoMA PS1

12/27/2022

12/22/2022

A reflection on 'Joan Didion: What She Means,' by Theodora Gallant Helgason. 'Joan Didion: What She Means' and numerous Joan Didion titles are available at our bookstore. Open today and tomorrow until 6pm.

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Didion's Place

I don’t remember the first time I read Didion, but I do remember the first time I read her obsessively, writing her words down in my journal, sometimes the same ones over and over again. It was when I lived in California – her home state and the protagonist of much of her writing. Didion’s interest in California touched me, her observations, about the Californian beautiful and the Californian ugly, felt like one magnificent, intuitive truth. And I could see this truth from my window, gazing out at the desert mountains, or the coastline, or the suburbs, or the cities. I was in it. I was part of this truth.

Of all the writers I have read, Didion is, by far, the most informed by place. It’s no wonder that New York and California fight over who deserves her legacy more. She described them both with the kind of care that only a Californian or New Yorker would. California she was given. New York, she chose. In California, she was born, and in New York, she died. California raised Joan and New York raised Didion.

The words we use to describe our homes become how we remember them, and how we conceptualize our position in them. Hilton Als observes in Joan Didion: What She Means:

part of Didion’s genius was to make language out of the landscape she knew—the punishing terrain of California’s Central Valley, with its glaring hot summers and winter floods, its stark flatness, river snakes, taciturn ranchers, and lurking danger.

Writing is a visual art. Didion’s desert snakes and drying rivers are the brushstrokes that invite the reader into the place that is her mind. These pictures, painted vividly, grant access to a feeling that originates from a different place and time, metamorphizing something temporary and ephemeral into something that will outlive its own creator and witness.

Her skill as a visual artist was in always letting you know where she stood in the picture, as both the maker and a subject, asking you to look through her lens with her, and to observe her, standing in the desert, gazing back at you.

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04/27/2022

Pre-order signed copies of books by artist David Horvitz here!
https://artbookstores.com/DH-THUMBNAIL

03/27/2022

"Letters Home" by Jonas and Adolfas Mekas is a riveting new book from Lithuanian publisher Post Scriptum. Visit the Bookstore or link below to purchase this extraordinarily personal look into the life of Jonas Mekas, “the godfather of American avant-garde cinema,” and his family.
https://artbookstores.com/Jonas-Mekas-Letters-Home

After fleeing war-torn Europe in 1949, brothers Jonas and Adolfas settled in New York and for decades wrote home to their beloved mother in Lithuania. "Letters Home" presents a selection of this correspondence alongside a trove of family photographs. Each book contains a bookmark that doubles as a paper letter knife, needed to open its uncut pages and access facsimiles of the Mekas brothers’ handwritten letters. It is a touchingly intimate invitation, to break open each page and peer into the deeply self-reflective lives within.

11/15/2021

Celebration of a merging of three minds—Martin Parr, Maurizio Cattelan, Pierpaolo Ferrari—in Book and Exhibition as ToiletMartin PaperParr.

On Saturday, November 20 at 2PM EST (7PM GMT / 8PM CET), Artbook @ MoMA PS1 Bookstore and Damiani will host a live Zoom discussion between Martin Parr, Pierpaolo Ferrari and Villa Medici director Sam Stourdzé, who art-directed their current Toiletpaper & Martin Parr exhibition in Rome. The trio will discuss Parr’s longtime collaboration with 'Toiletpaper,' including the ToiletMartin PaperParr Book' and exhibition. Register and order signed books here: artbookstores.com/ToiletMartin-PaperParr

Martin Parr is a British photographer whose unflinching, critical perspective and wry images of contemporary life have made him a notable figure in the world of photography for 40 years. Parr is best known for his use of gaudy colors paired with the themes of leisure, consumerism and wealth.

Parr did not start by photographing in color. After attending Manchester Polytechnic (1970-73), he photographed small town communities in northern England and Ireland in black and white. His debut photobook, 'Bad Weather' (1982), is solely monochrome. The book is imbued with Parr's British perspective and dry sense of humor: he utilized a flash bulb and an underwater camera to capture comically surreal photographs of Brits hurriedly seeking shelter from the endless variety of "bad weather" that regularly befall them.

Parr transitioned to color photography soon after, citing such American photographers as Joel Meyerowitz, William Eggleston and Stephen Shore as influences. In Parr’s book 'The Last Resort' (1986), photos taken between 1983 and 1985 in the beach vacation destination of New Brighton, beach-goers are seen tanning and eating ice cream at a seaside teeming with dirty cement, tossed litter and crying babies. The photographs, with their garish color and unflattering lighting, introduced many Parr’s photographic approach.

While Parr continued to pursue themes of leisure and class in England through photography with 'The Cost of Living' (1986-1988), he also set his sights on global and mass tourism in 'Life’s a Beach' (1986), a collection of photographs from far-flung shores, and 'Small World' (1990-2017), a series of images that aimed to demystify the mythology of tourist hotspots such as Stonehenge, the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the Eiffel Tower, by revealing their stark and unsavory reality.

Parr is an avid collector of photobooks and a longtime champion of young photographers. In 2014 he founded the Martin Parr Foundation to support emerging, established and overlooked photographers whose work focuses on Britain and Ireland. Parr has also published more than 120 books of his own photographs and edited 30 others.

Parr’s recent collaborations with 'Toiletpaper,' a photo-based magazine that features provocatively staged color photographs, and its founders, Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari, is a logical partnership that builds upon the special Martin Parr edition of 'Toiletpaper' published in 2018.

'ToiletMartin PaperParr Book' (2020) is a large format, hardcover photobook that recontextualizes Parr’s most iconic images by presenting them alongside photographs from 'Toiletpaper'’s archive. Bound by a brash style and a vibrant color palette, the photographs by Parr, Cattelan and Ferrari cohere to form a reimagined look into their respective oeuvres.

The book subsequently inspired the exhibition 'Toiletpaper & Martin Parr' (July 2, 2021-February 27, 2022) at the Villa Medici, which displays photographs from 'ToiletMartin PaperParr Book' in playful ways that befit the photographs’ content, as the juxtaposition between the intentionally caustic aesthetic of the monumental prints and the environment in which they are exhibited—the classical gardens of a Renaissance palace—highlight the surreal mirror reflection of us and our ways.

--Yeon Cho, Artbook @ MoMA PS Bookstore

[Pictured: 'ToiletMartin PaperParr Book' (2020) alone (1) and with the ToiletMartin PaperParr magazine (2018) (2&3) and Toiletpaper umbrella (4).]

11/14/2021

Pre-order SIGNED copies of 'ToiletMartin PaperParr Book' and register for the Sat, Nov 20 online event here! https://artbookstores.com/ToiletMartin-PaperParr

Online Event
Martin Parr & TOILETPAPER in conversation with Sam Stourdzé
Artbook at MoMA PS1 Bookstore
Saturday, November 20 at 2.00 PM Eastern Time (USA and Canada)

Artbook @ MoMA PS1 Bookstore and Damiani invite you to the online book discussion of Martin Parr, Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari’s ToiletMartin PaperParr Book. In this online event, photographer Martin Parr, Toiletpaper’s Pierpaolo Ferrari and curator Sam Stourdzé will discuss the longtime collaboration between Parr and Toiletpaper and their current Villa Medici - Villa Médicis exhibition in Rome, art directed by Stourdzé and inspired by the ToiletMartin PaperParr Book.

To register please click here https://bit.ly/3wCnT5O

Artbook / D.A.P. Thames & Hudson Interart Snapper Von Schwaben Sky Arte