Hardcover. Pasadena CA, Pasadena Museum of California Art, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 149 pages, illustrated in color. Bright, clean copy in similar dust jacket. Catalog of an exhibition organised by the Pasadena Museum of Californian Art and held there and at the Gibbes Museum, Charleston, South Carolina, in 2005-6. The book presents 77 works, reproduced in excellent colour as half and full page plates, including nudes, figures and urban and rural landscapes. William Gerdts offers a scene-setting Introduction after which Solon provides an in-depth study of the artist's life and work. This includes his marriage, travels abroad including Europe, Panama and Mexico, experience as an aerial photographer in the Great War, return to Southern California and life in Pasadena, a region that was recommended for health reasons, and a final decade marked by ill-health that contributed to the general decline in his reputation outside of the local art community.
Hardcover. New York, Abbeville Press, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 328 pages, illustrated throughout with 213 plates in color and b&w. Maroon cloth with white title to spine, pictorial dust jacket. Beautiful copy. Like new. The rich artistic and social history of the Arts and Crafts movement in California, as well as the highly collectible objects it produced. In a brief but intensely prolific period between about 1895 and 1930. Essays by Leslie Greene Bowman, Bruce Kamerling, Cheryl Robertson, Joseph A. Taylor, David C. Streatfield, Karen J. Weitze and Richard Guy Wilson.
Hardcover. New York, The Monacelli Press, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover. Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. A beautifully produced monograph devoted to the paintings and drawings of John Altoon, a central figure in the Los Angeles art scene of the 1950s and 1960s. Haunting and erotic, Altoon's colorful paintings and intimate drawings capture the magical moment in postwar California between the Beat Generation and the sexual and psychedelic revolution of the late '60s.
Hardcover. NY, Reagan Books, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 272 pages. Through striking illustrations and stunning photographs, Bohemian Modern explores the unique structural and interior designs that have put California's ultra-chic Silver Lake neighborhood at the forefront of a new style phenomenon. One of the country's most renowned modernist architects, Barbara Bestor has fully embraced and perfected Silver Lake's "bohemian modern" style: a practical philosophy that is Californian in origin but achievable anywhere. It is a look that favors raw, authentic materials, brilliant colors, creative space planning, and a natural flow between indoors and outdoors. The results, as Bohemian Modern presents, are striking: a flawlessly restored Neutra house decorated with both whimsy and restraint, a rooftop constructed for viewing the stars, a lavish outdoor garden delicately integrated into the surrounding architecture, a double-sided bookcase that soars three stories and serves as a functional art installation...there is no limit to the creativity and beauty of Silver Lake style.
Hardcover. Gottingen, Germany, Steidl, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 56 pages. Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. Bruce Davidson describes the genesis of this project thus: "Esquire's editors sent me to Los Angeles, and when I landed at LA International Airport I noticed giant palm trees growing in the parking lot. I ordered a hamburger through a microphone speaker in a drive-in called Tiny Naylor's. The freeways were blank and brilliant, chromium-plated bumpers reflected the Pacific Ocean, but the air quality was said to be bad. People looking like mannequins seemed at peace on the Sunset Strip while others were euphoric as they watered the desert. I stood there ready with my Leica, aware of my shadow on the pavement. I walked up to strangers, framed, focused and in a split second of alienations and cynicism, pressed the shutter button. Suddenly I had an awakening that led me to another level of visual understanding. But in the end, for some unknown reasons, the editors rejected the pictures, and I had to return home with a big box of prints, put them in a drawer, and forgot all about the trip."
Hardcover. Sausalito CA, Windgate Press, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 172 pages illustrated in color. These beautiful and colorful promotional materials were designed to attract tourists and home seekers to the Golden State. Produced by the thousands, these now rare publications touted California as a land of perpetual spring and boundless opportunity. Many of the posters in this book are part of a special collection held at the California State Library. Clean copy.
Softcover. San Francisco, CA, Chronicle Books, 6th pr., 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 180 pages. Softcover. Black and white pictures throughout. Clean tight copy.
Softcover. San Francisco, Chronicle Books, 1st, 1980, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 142 pages, 8"x8' . This book documents 100 'decorated sheds' that were built in the 1920s-'40s, including giant cream-cans, flower-potslemons, pumpkins, cats, dogs, owls, Mother Hubbard's boots, etc. Mostly b&w photos.
Hardcover. NY, Abrams, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 176 pages. Brings together photography, designs, stills, and ads to chronicle California-influenced fashions between 1850 and the present, from Rudi Gernreich's infamous topless bathing suit to the celebrity designs of Bob Mackie and Jean Louis.
Hardcover. San Francisco, Chronicle, 1st, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 112 pages. Hardcover. Black & white photography. Viewer in rear. No dust jacket issued. Clean, tight copy.
Softcover. Omaha NE, Union Pacific System , 1930, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover booklet, 48 pages, stapled mauve paper covers with embossed design stamped in gilt, pink and black. A travel guide for passengers on the Union Pacific, b&w illustrations throughout. Excellent condition, bright, unmarked.
Hardcover. New York, Arno Press, reprint, 1976, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 227 pages plus 112 b&w and color plates. Cream colored boards. Light smudging to covers and edges. Else a very clean, tight copy. A facsimile reprint of the 1935 first edition, a study of 19th century lithography in California.
Hardcover. Los Angeles, CA, Getty Research Institute, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 320 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Very clean, unmarked copy still in publishers shrink-wrap. Color photographs throughout. California Video presents the first comprehensive survey of the history of video art in California. Since the late 1960s
Hardcover. New York, Random House, 1st, 1939, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Non- paginated. Hardcover. Extensive b&w photographs throughout. Illustrated title page. Some edge wear to top edge, otherwise clean, tight copy.
Hardcover. Los Angeles, Angel City Press, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, illustrated boards, 100 pages. We may never be able to toast Frank Sinatra with a Flame of Love martini, join Jimmy and Gloria Stewart over calf's liver and onions, or share a steaming bowl of Boiled Beef Belmont with the President and Mrs. Reagan on Tuesday nights. But we can come close. CHASEN'S has every great recipe that kept the stars coming back for more, plus its fascinating text stirs delivers the dish on the restaurant and its famous fans. Recipes include the world famous Chasen's Chili that Elizabeth Taylor had air-freighted to the Cleopatra set in Italy, the Chicken Pot Pie served to Queen Elizabeth, the Shirley Temple cocktail that Chasen's bartender invented for the curly-topped star, and a host of other favorites including Deviled Beef Bones, Banana Shortcake, Sole Hitchcock, Coupe Snowball, and the dish President Reagan always ordered, Boiled Beef Belmont.
Hardcover. NY, Rizzoli, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, More than a century ago, when Abbot Kinney built his Venice-of-America with its network of canals and fanciful buildings, cultural aspirations were high. Over the years, this aura of fantasy and imaginative possibility endured as integral to the zeitgeist of the place. Today, this spirit of innovation and creativity is richly expressed in the vintage bungalows and cottages that have been embraced and brought back to life by homeowners more in love with place than size. Stalwart survivors of the ebb and flow of the area's fortunes over a century, these small homes channel the creative spirit of the place and provide a welcome counterpoint to oversize houses. Color, landscape, treasured collections, personal narrative, contemporary overlays and additions, art and craft, and inventive design--all combine in various ways to produce domestic environments with unique and deeply personal points of view.
Hardcover. Nevada City CA, Carl Mautz Publishung, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Oblong hardcover. 111 pages. Researched and edited by Susan Herzig and Paul Hertzman. Essay by Peter Palmquist. Includes 60 illustrations with 47 color and duotone plates.
Softcover. NewYork, Aperture, 2nd, 1973, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Vol. 1: 214 pages. Softcover. B/w illustrations throughout. Covers slightly yellow with age, clean inside and intact. Vol. 2: 290 pages. Softcover. B/w illustrations throughout. Covers slightly yellow with age, clean inside and intact. Soil/stain on bottom foredge, does not affect pages. From the back cover of Vol. 1: "To see, to react, to create; these are the fundamentals of all art production. But also to share is the measure of the great artist and the great person. In both his magnificent photographs and in the confidences and clarifications of his Daybook, Edward Weston takes us into himself and shares with us his particular mirror of beauty and compassion."
Hardcover. Chicago, IL, Laird & Lee, 1st, 1906, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 186 pages. Hardcover. Illustrated front cover. Photo illustrated throughout. Green cloth spine. Original binding with a touch of water staining on front cover right corner. Pages and edges have a touch of tanning from age, doesn't affect text or images. Spine is becoming separated from coverboard, but still attached and repairable. "A vivid and realistic story graphically depicting San Fancisco's great fire."
Softcover. Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 1st, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover. 314 pages, b&w illustrations. In 1930 the Olmsted Brothers and Harland Bartholomew & Associates submitted a report, "Parks, Playgrounds, and Beaches for the Los Angeles Region," to the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce. After a day or two of coverage in the newspapers, the report dropped from sight. The plan set out a system of parks and parkways, children's playgrounds, and public beaches. It is a model of ambitious, intelligent, sensitive planning commissioned at a time when land was available, if only the city planners had had the fortitude and vision to act on its recommendations. "Parks, Playgrounds, and Beaches" has become a highly valued but difficult-to-find document. In this book, Greg Hise and William Deverell examine the reasons it was called for, analyze why it failed, and open a discussion about the future of urban public space. In addition to their introduction and a facsimile reproduction of the report, Eden by Design includes a dialogue between Hise, Deverell, and widely admired landscape architect Laurie Olin that illuminates the significance of the Olmsted-Bartholomew report and situates it in the history of American landscape planning. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, WW Norton & Co, 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 580 pages, 16 pages of illustrations. Eternity Street tells the story of a violent place in a violent time: the rise of Los Angeles from its origins as a small Mexican pueblo. In a masterful narrative, John Mack Faragher relates a dramatic history of conquest and ethnic suppression, of collective disorder and interpersonal conflict. Eternity Street recounts the struggle to achieve justice amid the turmoil of a loosely governed frontier, and it delivers a piercing look at the birth of this quintessentially American city. In the 1850s, the City of Angels was infamous as one of the most murderous societies in America. Saloons teemed with rowdy crowds of Indians and Californios, Mexicans and Americans. Men ambled down dusty streets, armed with Colt revolvers and Bowie knives. A closer look reveals characters acting in unexpected ways: a newspaper editor advocating lynch law in the name of racial justice; hundreds of Latinos massing to attack the county jail, determined to lynch a hooligan from Texas. Murder and mayhem in Edenic southern California. "There is no brighter sun...no country where nature is more lavish of her exuberant fullness," an Angeleno wrote in 1853. "And yet, with all our natural beauties and advantages, there is no country where human life is of so little account. Men hack one another to pieces with pistols and other cutlery as if God's image were of no more worth than the life of one of the two or three thousand ownerless dogs that prowl about our streets and make night hideous." Like-new.
Hardcover. New York , Booth-Clibborn Editions, 1st, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Like new in publishers shrink-wrap. Color photographs by Greenfield.
Hardcover. Los Angeles, Bunker Hill Publishing Inc, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 96 pages. Illustrated throughout in color and b&w. Clean, unmarked copy in excellent condition. In the 80 images throughout this book, Haas has forced Nature to do his bidding. Still, Haas's trees are portraits of Los Angeles in all its complexity and quirkiness, and his views of individual trees reveal much about their surroundings and the humans with whom they share their habitat.
Hardcover. Los Angeles, Bunker Hill Publishing Inc, 1st, 2006-11-13, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 96 pages. Illustrated throughout in color and b&w. Clean, unmarked copy in excellent condition. In the 80 images throughout this book, Haas has forced Nature to do his bidding. Still, Haas's trees are portraits of Los Angeles in all its complexity and quirkiness, and his views of individual trees reveal much about their surroundings and the humans with whom they share their habitat.
Hardcover. Philadelphia, Running Press, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 416 pages, illustrated throughout in color and b&w. Light shelf-wear to dust jacket. Clean, tight copy. George Hurrell is credited as the master of the Hollywood glamour portrait. He photographed every star from Greta Garbo to Humphrey Bogart to Sharon Stone. Written by historian and former Hurrell assistant Mark A. Vieira, George Hurrell's Hollywood is the definitive retrospective. Covers Hurrell's entire career, from his beginnings as a Los Angeles society photographer to his finale as the celebrity photographer who became a celebrity himself. Hundreds of pristine images showcase the photographer's work with Hollywood icons from 1929 to 1992. The text recounts the artist's life, from his childhood to the heyday of his career as a starmaker, through the previously untold stories of his fall from grace and eventual comeback.
Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, brick red cloth with a color photo illustrations on the front board with gilded and black letters to the front boards and spine, 168 pages. A fresh, comprehensive, and critical look at the California gold rush through the lens of the daguerreotype camera.The California gold rush was the first major event in American history to be documented in depth by photography. This fascinating volume offers a fresh, comprehensive, and critical look at the people, places, and culture of that historical episode as seen through daguerreotypes and ambrotypes of the era. After gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill in 1848, thousands made the journey to California, including daguerreotypists who established studios in cities and towns and ventured into the gold fields in specially outfitted photographic wagons. Their images, including portraits, views of cities and gold towns, and miners at work in the field, provide an extraordinary glimpse into the evolution of mining culture and technology, the variety of nationalities and races involved in the mining industry, and the growth of cities such as San Francisco and Sacramento. Still in publisher's shrinkwrap.
Hardcover. Washington DC, Island Press, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 489 pages. Hardcover. gilt title on spine. B/w illustrations throughout. Dust jacket unclipped. Dust jacket has a touch of age-wear (chipping at corners/creases), but very good. Very clean and bright inside. Boards bound in yellow cloth, excellent. Binding tight. In beautiful shape.
Hardcover. New York, Dey Street Books, 1st, 2018, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 220 pages. Hardcover with laminated cover boards. Clean, tight copy with light edge wear and rubbing to covers.
Hardcover. New York, Simon & Schuster Ltd, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 141 pages, illustrated throughout in b&w. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. Black boards, bright silver gilt lettering. 23 prose-poems by Nobel Prize Laureate Dylan are thought-provoking, witty, and unexpected observations of a bygone era.
Hardcover. New York, Simon & Schuster Ltd, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 141 pages, illustrated throughout in b&w. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. Black boards, bright silver gilt lettering. 23 prose-poems by Nobel Prize Laureate Dylan are thought-provoking, witty, and unexpected observations of a bygone era.
Hardcover. Berkeley, Calif., Ten Speed Press, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 192 pages, illustrated throughout in b&w. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. B&W photos of Hollywood celebrities of the 1970s and 1980s. Rose was a staff photographer for the Los Angeles Times.
Softcover. NY, Assouline Publishing, reprint, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 366 pages. Softcover with light wear to wrappers. Very little wear to cover. Many b&w and color photographs throughout. A bright, clean copy.
Hardcover. New York, powerHouse Books, 1st, 2009-07-20, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 223 pages, illustrated throughout in b&w. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. Folio. The writer's first collection of photographs provides a photographic essay of the Imperial Valley, California.
Hardcover. Layton UT, Gibbs Smith, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 230 pages, illustrated in color and b&w. Like new condition in a bright dust jacket.
Hardcover. US, Foggy Notion Books/Pasadena Museum of California Art, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 208 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to boards. Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. Until recently, the figurative artists who dominated the Los Angeles art scene of the 1940s and 50s had largely been written out of art history. L.A. Raw is an attempt to right that wrong. Bringing together works by 41 artists in a variety of media, it traces a lineage that connects postwar figurative expressionism to the 1960s and 70s investigations of politics, gender and ethnicity in art. The featured artists include John Altoon, Wallace Berman, William Brice, Hans Burckhardt, Chris Burden, Cameron, Judy Chicago, Connor Everts, Llyn Foulkes, Charles Garabedian, David Hammonds, Robert Heinecken, John Paul Jones, Kim Jones, Ed and Nancy Kienholz, Rico Lebrun, Paul McCarthy, Arnold Mesches, Betye Saar, Ben Sakoguchi, Barbara Smith, James Strombotne, Jan Stussy, Edward Teske, Joyce Treiman, Howard Warshaw, June Wayne, Charles White and Jack Zajac.
Hardcover. 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 208 pages illustrated in color and b&w. Until recently, the figurative artists who dominated the Los Angeles art scene of the 1940s and 50s had largely been written out of art history. L.A. Raw is an attempt to right that wrong. Bringing together works by 41 artists in a variety of media, it traces a lineage that connects postwar figurative expressionism to the 1960s and 70s investigations of politics, gender and ethnicity in art. The featured artists include John Altoon, Wallace Berman, William Brice, Hans Burckhardt, Chris Burden, Cameron, Judy Chicago, Connor Everts, Llyn Foulkes, Charles Garabedian, David Hammonds, Robert Heinecken, John Paul Jones, Kim Jones, Ed and Nancy Kienholz, Rico Lebrun, Paul McCarthy, Arnold Mesches, Betye Saar, Ben Sakoguchi, Barbara Smith, James Strombotne, Jan Stussy, Edward Teske, Joyce Treiman, Howard Warshaw, June Wayne, Charles White and Jack Zajac. No dj issued, clean copy.
Hardcover. Spokane, WA, Arthur H. Clark Company, 1st, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 343 pages. Hardcover. B/w illustrations throughout. Covers bound in red, gilt title on spine. Binding tight. Dust jacket unclipped. Dust jacket has a touch of fading, otherwise no rips, in very good condition. Very clean inside and out.
Hardcover. NY, Prestel, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 160 pages. This photographic homage to Los Angeles presents a timeless depiction of the great city. In his book New York Sleeps, Christopher Thomas traveled the empty streets of New York City shooting dreamy cityscapes with a large-format Polaroid camera. For this new book he focuses his lens on Los Angeles, capturing in duotone images of the iconic buildings and spaces in the city: the Chinese Theatre without tourists, the Griffith Observatory peacefully alone, the Hollywood Boulevard without celebrities or onlookers. Around the city's artdeco buildings and mid-century drive-ins, sidewalks, and parking lots are vacant. Shot in the early morning, with the sun's rays just hinting between buildings, or at dusk, when the light is inchoate and mournful, these pictures are a tender valentine to Los Angeles. Fans of New York Sleeps will be thrilled to encounter another sublime project by Thomas. And residents and lovers of Los Angeles will be awestruck at this new interpretation of the City of Angels.
Softcover. New York, Monacelli Press, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 183 pages, illustrated in color and b&w.Since 1988, New York-based architect Michael Bell has created a series of projects and essays that explore architectural and urban design for California, New York, and Texas -- the three most populous regions of the United States and, coincidentally, the three states in which he has lived and practiced. The first monograph on the architect, Michael Bell: Space Replaces Us; Essays and Projects on the City, includes both design work and writings.Bell has organized and designed two important installations, both of which include his work: "Endspace: Michael Bell and Hans Hofmann," at the University Art Museum, Berkeley, and "16 Houses: Owning a House in the City," at DiverseWorks in Houston, which featured his seminal Glass House @ 2 Degrees. Other projects included are an urban renewal scheme for a huge site in Far Rockaway, New York, and a series of residential projects, including the Ghent House, a modernist glass house currently under construction in upstate New York. Complementing the design projects are three major essays: "Having Heard Mathematics: The Topologies of Boxing," "Eyes in the Heat: RSE," and "New York City."
Hardcover. Berkeley CA , Ten Speed Press, reprint, 2002, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 231 pages. Hardcover. SIGNED BY AUTHOR on front end paper. Extensive color photography throughout. Gilt titles on dust jacket cover. Some soil from previous owners book plate on front end paper. Dust jacket priced clipped, otherwise clean, tight copy.
Hardcover. New York, Abbeville Press, 1st, 1985, Dust Jacket: Near Fine, 228 pages. Pink cloth covered hardcover with gray lettering on spine. Square quarto. B/W and color plates. a romantic and nostalgic look back at the fabulous nightclubs and palaces of entertainment that lined the Hollywood hills and spread across California's Southland in the heyday of the film capital, from 1915 to 1945. Clean, bright copy.
Hardcover. New York, Oxford University Press, 1st, 1999, Book: Near Fine, Dust Jacket: Near Fine, Hardcover, 242 pages. B&w and color prints. Lavishly illustrated catalog presenting a fascinating cultural history of an idyllic vision of California that still figures prominently in the American imagination. Red cloth, gilt lettering to spine. Pictorial dust jacket. Copy in mint condition, looks brand new.
Hardcover. US, Getty Publications, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 352 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. Documents the burgeoning Southern Californian post-war art scene, with several essays following a more or less chronological order, and hundreds of illustrations of artworks, but also of art people (a wonderful 1963 photograph of Marcel Duchamp playing chess with a naked Eve Babitz in front of a replica of his Large Glass in Pasadena, photographs of artists working in their studios, etc). Some names are well known, others less so, but it is the versatility, the creativity and, above all, the richness and depth of this LA art scene that strike the reader-viewer through these richly illustrated pages. The birth of a genuine pop art in California (thanks to some of the most gifted artdealers in the US), of conceptual art, the creation of a new way of making sculpture, all those aspects are tackled in an informative and erudite (sometimes too erudite, though...)text that makes this book a more than valuable addition to the literature on post-war American art.
Softcover. New York, E.P. Dutton, 1st, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 80 pages. Softcover. Color illustrations throughout. In excellent condition. Covers still very shiny, like new. Very clean inside and out. Photographs of the colorful and eccentric Victorian architecture of San Francisco.
Softcover. New York, E.P. Dutton, 1st, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 80 pages. Softcover. Color illustrations throughout. In excellent condition. Covers still very shiny, like new. Front cover has a bit of price tag residue on it. Very clean inside and out. Photographs of the colorful and eccentric Victorian architecture of San Francisco.
Hardcover. New York, Aperture , 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good , Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 144 pages, B&W photos. In original shrink wrap. For almost sixty years Pirkle Jones has chronicled the people, politics, and landscape of Northern California-a "promised land" which has long held sway in the American cultural imagination. Within the confines of that locale, he has unearthed a universe of beauty and meaning, photographing everything from flea-market finds to some of the most important American social movements of the second half of the twentieth century. Operating primarily within a social-documentary framework, Jones has made images characterized by sensitivity and acute observation. With uncanny prescience, a sense of urgency, and a sympathetic eye, Jones often plays the dual roles of artist and witness, combining portraiture, landscapes, and architectural photographs to create thorough documents of social structure and upheaval. Among the photo-essays included in Pirkle Jones: California Photographs are a compassionate and controversial piece on the Black Panther Party in the San Francisco Bay Area, Jones's portraits of the Sausalito houseboat community known as Gate 5, and a notable 1956 photo-essay done in collaboration with Dorothea Lange photographing the destruction and dislocation of the Berryessa Valley before it was flooded on completion of the Monticello Dam. Produced as a single issue of Aperture magazine in 1960 under the name "Death of a Valley", this essay remains a powerful testament to the price of progress. The book also includes Jones's work from the last few decades, in which he shifted his focus to an extended series of elegant, contemplative landscapes. A biographical essay by curator Tim B. Wride frames Jones and his work within the context of photographic history, the people he collaborated with-including Ansel Adams as well as Lange-and the great scope of Californian life.
Softcover. Los Angeles, Spurl Editions, 1st, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, Color plates throughout, unpaginated. Limited to 500 copies. Clean. Documents the eerie fragments of existence left behind in one city. John Brian King photographed RIVIERA from 2016 to 2018 in Palm Springs, California, and its surroundings; a full-time resident at the time, he used a cheap instant film camera to give his photographs a unique, washed-out, hazy aesthetic. King depicts a city that is frozen in a visually arresting state of decline.
Hardcover. NY, W. W. Norton, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 464 pages, b&w illustrations. Johnson's exquisitely researched and beautifully written book starts with the premise that the Southern mines during the early years of the California Gold Rush (1948-1852) were "a grand field for human interaction and connectedness." They were a kind of experiment in human relations, and Johnson points the spot light on the dynamic and flexible quality of race, gender, and sexuality. She argues that the social world of the gold rush - the organization of domestic labor, the leisure pursuits, and gaming activities (both mining and gambling) - reflected a topsy-turvy world not at all comfortable with itself. Johnson tells a story whereby the gold rush, particularly the relationships that developed in the more diverse and less wealthy Southern mines, created a crisis of racial and gender representation that only sorted itself out with the collusion of Anglo miners and the authority of the state. Johnson notes that Anglo miners, "Conflated their daily lives with a project of national expansion and economic growth infused with notions of progress and 'manifest destiny.'" In this way, Johnson explains the messy and not uncontested work of colonization and racial dominance, and she does so with an eye to the function of gender and sexuality. Clean copy.