Twelve Days of Christmas Books: Collectible

Visit Dawsons' Bookshop online for rare books, particularly art, photography, and So-Cal/Western Americana history, and for awesome fine art photography. Seriously cool stuff. If you are not sure what you're looking for, sign up to receive the Dawsons' emails right away and you will receive periodic highlights from the collection for sale (not too many and always intriguing; you'll be glad to find these in your inbox).

There are offerings to suit most wallets. From more humbly fascinating items like Marcia Rittenhouse Wynn's turn-of the century stories set in the Upper Mojave Desert in a first edition (1945) with a gorgeous screenprinted cover (above), to "the post-Provoke masterpiece of Japanese photobooks," Masahisa Fukase's Karasu (Ravens) (below).

Proprietor/curator Michael Dawson also offers museum quality art photographs. Photographers represented range from the iconic, including Ansel Adams, to deserving lesser-knowns. Currently the Web site features the Sanford H. Roth collection; Roth moved from New York to Paris where he fell in with and photographed the culturati who would become lifelong friends, including Colette, Picasso, and Cocteau. Roth went on to photograph film stars in Hollywood and Eurpope, becoming famous for his portraits of James Dean.

Bastille day parade - 1950-55. Sanford H. Roth

Twelve Days of Christmas Books: Photography

Timothy H. O’Sullivan, Black Cañon, Colorado River, From Camp 8, Looking, Above, 1871, Albumen print, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. Check out the Art Tattler International Web site for a great preview.

Day one in twelve days of books from my wishlist.

Two gorgeous photography books available in the Art Institute gift shop, good for a destination shopping trip.

Check out the exhibit: Timothy H. O'Sullivan: The King Survey Photographs. Then pick up the book: Framing the West: The Survey Photographs of Timothy H. O'Sullivan for any fans of photography generally, history, Western Americana. General book and art lovers should find interest in O'Sullivan's photos too; much of his work finds men (and their essentials and accoutrements for survival and exploration) dwarfed within awesome, overwhelming landscapes, beautiful, certainly, and the images are charged with a current of foreboding. Both the "pure" landscapes and views incorporating the human form similarly suggest stories and spark the imagination.

You can order direct from Yale Univ. Press too.

 
























Richard Misrach is a longtime favorite. Misrach's 2010 book Destroy This Memory looks at post-Katrina New Orleans. Misrach's eye is unique, his technique is dropdead gorgeous (let's just say he is considered responsible for "bringing color photography back"), and his subjects are meat and gristle, so his books are all substantial, worth the investment and deserving permanent shelfspace, as the images bear ongoing examination.

In his Modern Art Notes for the Artinfo blog, Tyler Green describes Misrach's gestalt for his Katrina book: "Misrach’s book focuses not on the totality of the devastation but on one way New Orleanians responded to it. . . . New Orleanians spray-painted messages on their homes, cars and propped-up boards of plywood. The graffiti are warnings, announcements, pleas and even sly jokes shared with neighbors, government, city officials and neighbors. They are among New Orleanians’ first written responses to their hell."

 

According to Green: "Misrach didn’t just make his pictures into a book, he printed them and gifted full sets of prints to five museums that serve as storehouses of our visual record of ourselves and our culture: the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery, the MFA Houston, SFMOMA and the New Orleans Museum of Art.  Misrach is also donating the royalties from book sales to the Make it Right Foundation, which is active in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. (Readers may also click here to give to Make it Right.)"

If you're not in Chicago, or you can't make a visit to the Art Insitutitue, Destroy This Memory is offered at a nice sale price via the publisher at: Aperture Foundation (while you're there, if you subscribe to the magazine, at a 50% discount, you get a free copy of Aperture's Masters of Photography series: Paul Strand with your subscription). 

“I’ve come to believe that beauty can be a very powerful conveyor of difficult ideas.”—Richard Misrach 

(If you do make it to the museum, you can always pick up a membership for someone you love, a year's worth of beauty and its effects.)

Fulk Nerra

I just started a history of The Crusades, by Thomas Asbridge. It's off to a raring start, setting the pre-Crusades scene with the tale of Fulk Nerra:

In the year 1000 , the county of Anjou (in west-central France) was ruled by Fulk Nerra (987–1040), a brutal and rapacious warlord. Fulk spent most of his fifty-three years in power locked in near-constant struggle: fighting on every front to retain control of his unruly county; scheming to preserve his independence from the feeble French monarchy; and preying upon his neighbors in search of land and plunder. He was a man accustomed to violence, both on and off the battlefield—capable of burning his wife at the stake for adultery and of orchestrating the ruthless murder of a royal courtier.

But for all the blood on his hands, Fulk was also a committed Christian—one who recognised that his brutish ways were, by the tenets of his faith, inherently sinful, and thus might lead to his eternal damnation. The count himself admitted in a letter that he had 'caused a great deal of bloodshed in various battles' and was therefore 'terrified by the fear of Hell'. In the hope of purifying his soul, he made three pilgrimages to Jerusalem, more than 2,000 miles away. On the last of these journeys, now an old man, Fulk was said to have been led naked to the Holy Sepulchre--the site of Jesus' death and resurrection—with a leash around his neck, being beaten by his servant while he begged Christ for forgiveness.

While the story is accessible in a "Johnny Depp-could-play-Fulk-Nerra-in-the-movie" way, I've been mulling over Fulk's life and excesses for days. The violence, even evil; the companion remorse, sense of culpability, and epic and increasingly desperate acts of penitence. The first pilgrimage didn't mend Fulk's ways; and the second pilgrimage didn't mend Fulk's ways; it's so "us" that there is a third pilgrimage.

Engraving by Gustave Doré for the Bibliotheque des Croisades.