ARTBOOK BLOG

RECENT POSTS

DATE 6/21/2023

Book Soup presents Roger A. Deakins, James Deakins and David Canfield on 'Byways'

DATE 6/14/2023

LIVE from NYPL Livestream: Joel Meyerowitz with Lorenzo Braca on 'The Pleasure of Seeing'

DATE 6/11/2023

"Unlike anything ever played before." Joel Coen's take on Lee Friedlander

DATE 6/8/2023

LJ Roberts embroiders their queer and trans community in 'Carry You With Me

DATE 6/7/2023

Pride Month Staff Pick: ‘Jack Pierson: Less and more’

DATE 6/5/2023

Pride Month Staff Pick: ‘Eric Hart Jr.: When I Think about Power’

DATE 6/1/2023

🌈 Take Pride, June 2023! 🌈

DATE 6/1/2023

Pride Month printed matter

DATE 5/30/2023

The lost voices of African American ancestry in 'Whitfield Lovell: Deep River'

DATE 5/28/2023

In celebration of Memorial Day, classic Lee Friedlander

DATE 5/27/2023

Artbook at Hauser & Wirth LA Bookstore presents J. Grant Brittain launching 'PUSH: 80s Skateboarding Photography'

DATE 5/22/2023

Joy and magnificence in Marilyn Minter's 'Elder Sex'

DATE 5/20/2023

Museum Store of the Month: MFA Houston Shop


IMAGE GALLERY

"Unlike anything ever played before." Joel Coen's take on Lee Friedlander

DATE 6/11/2023

"Unlike anything ever played before." Joel Coen's take on Lee Friedlander

“New York City” (1969) is reproduced from Lee Friedlander Framed by Joel Coen, in which the acclaimed filmmaker applies his renowned editing skills and sense of play to the selection of 70 personally intriguing photographs by the legendary American photographer of the social landscape. "I found it a daunting task to choose just a few images from Lee Friedlander’s vast career," Coen writes. "Where to start? As a picture maker myself I was drawn more to his beautifully strange sense of composition than to any specific subject. And as a filmmaker, I liked the idea of creating a sequence that would highlight Lee’s unusual approach to framing—his splitting, splintering, repeating, fracturing and reassembling elements into new and impossible compositions. I was also interested in the fact that Lee is a jazz enthusiast, and that he began his career by making pictures of musicians. If all art aspires to the condition of music, then Lee is a jazzman with a camera, and the sound he gets out of his instrument is unlike anything ever played before."

LJ Roberts embroiders their queer and trans community in 'Carry You With Me

DATE 6/8/2023

LJ Roberts embroiders their queer and trans community in 'Carry You With Me

“David John Sokolowski & Michael Tikili” (2014) is reproduced from LJ Roberts: Carry You With Me, collecting a decade’s worth of embroidered portraits of the artist’s friends, collaborators and lovers within the queer and trans community. Roberts notes the place or places where each piece was stitched and writes a note about its meaning. In this case: “David is in a flashy coat, the kind my Jewish grandmother would wear to a restaurant. His green mascara highlights his eyes. Michael is adorned in a leather harness; his sultry gaze matches his lush gold chain. We spend so much time readying ourselves for parties. We search for outfits that generate just the right electricity to power us until early morning, or, if we are lucky, dawn. Leaning on the bar, we work to get the attention of the bare-chested bartender. Trying to get the 8-Ball into the corner pocket is a weekend well-spent. The ritual of dressing together—adjusting suspenders, buckling straps, collective swipes of red lipstick, and then shimmying into a too-tight tube-top—is just as vibrant and raucous as the party we end up at.”

Pride Month Staff Pick: ‘Jack Pierson: Less and more’

DATE 6/7/2023

Pride Month Staff Pick: ‘Jack Pierson: Less and more’

Featured drawing (2020)—with its titular phrase in black marker—is reproduced from Jack Pierson: Less and more, a staff pick for Pride Month 2023. “I like to tell this story about where my obsession with stuff comes from,” Pierson writes. “During the height of the AIDS pandemic in New York, every night after the clubs along Second Avenue closed, there was an open market of people selling stuff on the street on bedspreads and blankets. I would be out night after night, after a club, maybe a little high, and looking at this stuff. You’d get to certain blankets and you could tell it was all of a piece. This was somebody’s stuff and clearly a gay person because there’d be this stack of little physique magazines, an ashtray from Capri, or there’d be a particularly good Hawaiian shirt. At the time, I thought to myself, because also I’m super square, ‘This is all stolen. I shouldn’t really buy it, but the porno magazines are only twenty-five cents and they’re five dollars at Physique Memorabilia. I’ll take these.’ I’d look at it and I’d think, ‘Oh my God, this gay life is so … something.’ Then it finally dawned on me. They weren’t stolen, this was all stuff scavenged from garbage cans of gay guys dying of AIDS. And I realized I could easily be one of them. That loosened me up. I’d come to New York with the idea that I was like Jean-Michel Basquiat and would be riding on the Concorde with Grace Jones. But these objects made me think, ‘Who the fuck am I? This isn’t going to happen for me and I’ll probably be dead before it does.’ Something about knowing that just made me want to leave a trace.”

DATE 4/22/2023

Salt of the Earth

Salt of the Earth

DATE 4/20/2023

Heads up for 4/20!

Heads up for 4/20!

DATE 3/20/2023

Welcome, Spring!

Welcome, Spring!

DATE 2/9/2023

Pure Couture

Pure Couture

DATE 1/21/2023

Into the meat grinder

Into the meat grinder

DATE 1/10/2023

Why Omaha?

Why Omaha?