Bøger udgivet af The Ice Plant

Return to the real world! A coupon-style booklet of 52 activities for offline fun, from Jason Fulford and Tamara Shopsin

What does the world look like? What feelings does it stimulate? Why do we photograph it so urgently? Since 2009, Danish photographer Albert Elm (born 1990) has pursued his curiosity about human existence with a restless energy and intrepid wanderlust, crossing far-flung time zones, boarding the Trans-Siberian Railway, traveling alone in Dubai, China, India, or just walking through his neighborhood in Copenhagen.What Sort of Life Is This remixes Elm's distant and local journeys into a bright, bewildering panoply of narrative fragments and surreal compositions that feels both global and personal, fractured yet strangely complete. Photographed using a 35mm film camera (color and black and white) and referencing numerous styles and genres, the work explodes with the spontaneous color and complexity of life--tender, violent, lonely, joyful, bizarre. Equalizing the exotic and the banal, the book treats every picture as if it were made in the same mystifying place: the world itself.

A luminous photographic consideration of atmospheric phenomena, visual perception and life on Earth, from the author of Des OiseauxIn Cloud Physics, American photographer Terri Weifenbach explores the vital interconnection of our planet's clouds and the intimate forms and textures of its biological life. The backbone of this work is a series of photographs (for which she received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2015) made at an American research facility used for the study and measurement of clouds, their origin, structure, particles and solar relationships. The exotic instruments she portrays are designed to express ephemeral atmospheric phenomena as sets of numeric data, yet Weifenbach's camera (and her way of seeing) renders our organic terrestrial world as an unquantifiable mystery. The vibrant scenes of her wide-ranging images -- tiny variations of light, humidity, fire, lightning; iridescent mists and vapors; glimpses of the animal kingdom and the vegetal world -- are like myths-within-myths unfolding throughout the book, against a backdrop of endless weather events. In an original essay, Luce Lebart examines Weifenbach's work in the historical contexts of visual art and environmental science.Terri Weifenbach (born 1957) is an American photographer based in Paris. She has taught at the Corcoran College of Art + Design and American University (both in Washington, DC). Her work has been exhibited internationally for over 15 years and is in numerous collections, including the Sir Elton John Photography Collection and the Museum Ludwig in Koln, Germany. She has published more than 10 books, with presses such as Nazraeli and Atelier EXB.

A poetic artist's book of found photographs from the early to mid-20th century, sequenced thematicallyPhotographer and bookseller Melissa Catanese has been editing the vast photography collection of Peter J. Cohen, a celebrated trove of more than 20,000 vernacular and found anonymous photographs from the early to mid-twentieth century. Gathered from flea markets, dealers and Ebay, these prints have been acquired, exhibited and included in a range of major museum publications. In organizing the archive into a series of thematic catalogues, she has pursued an alternate reading of the collection, drifting away from simple typology into something more personal, intuitive and openly poetic. Her magical new artist's book, Dive Dark Dream Slow, is rooted in the mystery and delight of the "found" image and the "snapshot" aesthetic, but pushes beyond the nostalgic surface of these pictures and reimagines them as luminous transmissions of anxious sensuality. Through a series of abandoned visual clues, from the sepia-infused shadow of a little girl running along a beach to silhouettes of a group of distant figures pausing upon a steep and snowy hill, a dreamlike journey is evoked. Like an album of pop songs about a girl (or a civilization) hovering on the verge of transformation, the book cycles through overlapping themes and counter-themes--moon and ocean; violence and tenderness; innocence and experience; masks and nakedness--that sparkle with deep psychic longing and apocalyptic comedy.

In Christmas Day, Bucks Pond Road, his second book with The Ice Plant, Brooklyn-based photographer Tim Carpenter (born 1968) revisits the Central Illinois topography of his first monograph, Local Objects, with a sequence of 56 black-and-white, medium-format photographs, all made on a single winter morning. Where Local Objects meandered this semi-rural Midwestern landscape through changing seasons, detached from time, here Carpenter follows a straightforward path, literally taking the viewer on a chronological two-hour walk from point A to point B. Nothing much happens along this brief narrative arc--there are fallow fields, standing water, dormant trees, the occasional tire track on worn pavement--yet Carpenter explores the stillness of this outdoor space with an intensity of attention, a lightness of touch and a palpable, almost erotic longing, discovering complex subtleties at every turn.

A charming collection of vintage photographs of readers lost in thoughtWhere do our minds go when we read books, magazines and letters? Do we seek an escape, a portal to another world? A secret, a truth, a pleasant distraction? Voyagers, edited by Melissa Catanese (author of Dive Dark Dream Slow), consists almost entirely of anonymous black-and-white snapshots of people in various postures of reading in living rooms, on beds, at the beach, eating breakfast.We can't see what these readers are thinking, but Catanese occasionally breaks the hypnotic typological rhythm to reveal a new photographic element--a pyramid, a starry night, sunlight blindingly glowing through a window--giving us brief glimpses of the readers' potential narrative journeys.A wordless book with the size and feel of a vintage paperback found at a flea market, Voyagers reminds us of the power and intimacy of our relationship to reading devices, and evokes an exotic nostalgia for our recent predigital culture.As with Catanese's prior books (Dive Dark Dream Slow [2012], Hells Hollow, Fallen Monarch [2016]), the images were judiciously selected from the collection of Peter J. Cohen, a celebrated trove of more than 20,000 vernacular photographs from the early to mid-20th century. Gathered from flea markets, dealers and eBay, these images have been acquired, exhibited and included in a range of major museum publications.

Clouds, electronics, fog, bugs, glass, cellophane, rust, weeds, waves, particles: Mike Slack (born 1970) delves into an overheated terrestrial ecosystem in his new book The Transverse Path (or Nature's Little Secret), surveying a luminous topography of monumental details and mundane vistas alike with cosmic curiosity. Transcendental in mood, Slack's vaguely sci-fi photographs envision a sun-blasted wilderness of synthetic and organic stuff tangled together, flourishing and disintegrating on its own terms, as if engaged in an ageless negotiation (or flirtation?) just beyond our grasp. Where does nature end and its opposite begin? And where do people figure into this balance? Made primarily around the American Southwest from 2011 to 2017, these vivid photographs--like a series of thought bubbles in search of a narrative--are concise and direct, yet driven by an emotional ambivalence that hovers between stark environmental dread and calm intimate reverie.

It is never too early to learn about abstraction--especially if celebrated illustrator Tamara Shopsin is doing the teaching. What Is This? is Shopsin's wordless children's book that will encourage imaginative thinking in readers both young and old. The miniature book, made for small hands, is filled with simple line drawings, executed with characteristic charm by Shopsin. Each drawing playfully adds to and alters the same basic squiggle, which is transformed across different contexts on each successive page: first the squiggle appears as the petals of a flower, next as a bird's nest, then a cowboy's lasso, then a plume of smoke from a factory chimney. Each time, only a few extra lines are required to suggest the conversion. By the end of the book, faced with an innocent squiggle, the question is not "what is this?" but rather, "what isn't this?" Tamara Shopsin (born 1979) is a graphic designer and illustrator whose work has been featured in The New York Times, Good, Time, Wired and Newsweek. She is the author of the memoir Mumbai New York Scranton, designer of the 5 Year Diary and coauthor, with Jason Fulford, of the children's book This Equals That. She is also a cook at her family's restaurant, Shopsin's, in New York.

"From chicken to sheep, frogs to dogs, each of the creatures seems to ask: "You looking at me? Who are you?" -American PhotoAnimals That Saw Me, Volume Two presents a new collection of photographs from the observational wanderings of Ed Panar, author of Animals That Saw Me, Volume One (2011, now out of print). This body of work, encompassing recent pictures and newly discovered gems from Panar's vast back catalogue, records a series of brief, often strangely amusing moments in which nonhuman species (mammal, reptile, bird or insect) seem to behold the human photographer. Edited for the viewer's maximum delight, the photos convey a whimsical concept with surprisingly complex ramifications under the surface. Why do we distinguish between "us" and "them," and what exists in the space between these distinctions? What does it mean to make "eye contact" with another species? What does the presence of a camera add to this phenomenon? Channeling the same thoughtful humor, wonder and peculiar engagement with the world that made the first volume of Animals That Saw Me an instant hit, this second installment also includes an original essay by acclaimed speculative realist philosopher Timothy Morton.

Found: The Rolling Stones presents a series of never-before-seen snapshots of The Rolling Stones on a 1965 tour through Savannah, Georgia and Clearwater, Florida. Found in an unmarked box at a flea market in Southern California by musician and art collector Lauren White, these rare candid images of Mick Jagger, Brian Jones, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts, Bill Wyman and founding member and road manager, Ian Stewart, capture the band--on the brink of global superstardom--relaxed and unguarded. On tour in North America in the spring of 1965, the young band was playing YMCA auditoriums and college gymnasiums in support of their third album, The Rolling Stones, Now!, and still trying to set themselves apart from the scores of other bands emerging out of Britain at the time. An additional handful of snapshots (found in the same box) appear to be from a year or two later, with the band in full rock-star mode. Dilettante gallery in Los Angeles showed the photographs for the first time after their discovery, but despite considerable press attention, the photographer responsible for these remarkable images still has not emerged. Some have speculated that it could be Keith Richards, since he appears in only one of the 23 photographs. White has her own suspicions: "My female intuition says that it was a girl. If you look at the photos, they look very vulnerable ... I don't think that a guy could evoke that kind of expression." This key moment in the band's history was recently chronicled in the documentary The Rolling Stones: Charlie Is My Darling--Ireland 1965 (2012), filmed during another tour that same year. The cache of photographs in Found: The Rolling Stones is a rare discovery and a thrilling piece of rock-and-roll history, but also an intimate, fresh look at five faces that were soon to become iconic.

Seth Lower's second photo book, The Sun Shone Glaringly, explores an observation he made upon moving to Los Angeles in 2011: "It isn't always easy to differentiate between what is spontaneous, or real and what's mediated. Nothing is ever one or the other." Throughout the book, while repeatedly announcing the thoughts and actions of our generic "hero," Lower combines various elements--photographs of oddly familiar filming locations; portraits of aspiring actors he contacted through Craigslist; dialogue and screenplay notations lifted from Hollywood blockbusters; and his own fabricated narratives--to suggest a story at once sordid and hilarious. Like a neo-noir film script referencing works as diverse as Mulholland Drive and Crocodile Dundee IV, Lower's book evokes all the tropes of the Los Angeles myth to address an essential question: how do popular representations of Los Angeles affect the everyday experience of the city, and how do people negotiate the slippage between their real lives and their potential selves?

Mike Slack's "Pyramids" builds on the striking Polaroid aesthetic of his previous books, "Ok Ok Ok" (2002) and "Scorpio" (2006), rounding out a trilogy of stand-alone volumes that together contain 123 pictures. This collection records everyday details of what could be a recent past or a very near future--a dust storm in the desert, simple geometry, stairways and windows, schoolchildren on a field trip--quietly dramatic scenes energized by a sense of anticipation rather than nostalgia. Presented as physical artifacts of fictitious events to be deciphered by the viewer, the pictures also document the travels, observations and graphic fixations of the photographer, centering on a set of three identical early 1970s office buildings (in Slack's hometown of Indianapolis), from which the book takes its title.

Jason Fulford has arranged his third collection of photographs into eight distinct chapters that can be read as a game, a series of essays, an abstract visual narrative or all of the above. The design of the book is rigid and deliberate, while its meaning is flexible. "The intention of this edit and layout," Fulford explains, "is to create as many relationships as possible between the pictures as well as the chapters. I like the idea of a meticulously planned-out event that remains unpredictable." The work in "Raising Frogs for $ $ $" was selected from his personal archive, taken between 1997 and 2005 in various countries. Fulford's photographs have been used on dust jackets by Don Delillo, John Updike, Bertrand Russell, Terry Eagleton, Ha Jin and many others. His work frequently appears in "Harper's" and "The New York Times Magazine." He lives in Brooklyn and Scranton, PA, and is a cofounder of J&L Books.

Los Angeles artist Bettina Hubby (born 1968) takes a detour from her curatorial, community-based projects with Uniforms, an artist's book of paper collages as precise and elegant as they are chaotic and devious. Here, clothed bodies collide, recombine and somersault across the page; machines mimic birds; jackets seem to genuflect in prayer. Constructed with the muted hues and contemplative negative space of a Noh play, Hubby's mash-ups reassemble the familiar photographic imagery of fashion, commerce and reportage into a open-ended riff on personal identity and the human organism. Complementing the work is an original fictional narrative by Dave Cull, delivered in brief installments throughout the book. Uniforms is published in an edition of 750 copies on the occasion of Pretty Limber, Hubby's fall 2013 exhibition at Klowden Mann Gallery.

First published in 2006 in a limited run of 75 copies, Los Angeles photographer Mike Slack's High Tide has now been issued in this expanded edition. It collects a series of Polaroid close-ups of actors photographed in apparent states of calm or contemplation. "More like meditating than acting," Jeffrey Ladd wrote (of the 2006 limited edition), "each seems to have momentarily dropped their profession and found a personal truth." Slack, a veteran of Polaroid photography (as evidenced by his previous volumes OK, OK, OK, Scorpio and Pyramids), achieves a peculiar tension in these images, between their apparent serenity and their multiple layers of artifice.

Clothbound in delicate pinstripes with a red ribbon bookmark, the diary is designed so that it can be started on any day of the year, even on a leap year!Now available in blue, Tamara Shopsin's classic 5 Year Diary is back in stock. Designed by Shopsin--whose illustration work is regularly featured in The New York Times--and produced by The Ice Plant and Shopsin's General Store, the pint-sized 5 Year Diary helps you keep track of the next 60 months of your life in just a few lines a day. Each page of the diary is devoted to one day of the year and subdivided into five sections (each with its own space for notes), so that, as time goes by, past entries can be read as the new ones are written. Handsomely clothbound with a red ribbon bookmark, the diary can be started on any day of any year--even a leap year. In the back of the diary are pages to record the books you've read and places you've traveled. As New York magazine's Kendall Herbst noted, the 5 Year Diary is an ideal gift for anyone, anytime, as well as the perfect way to "trace your life's highlights and trim out the minutiae... Think of it as a sort of CliffsNotes to your life."

Clothbound in delicate pinstripes with a red ribbon bookmark, the diary is designed so that it can be started on any day of the year, even on a leap year!"THIS book belongs to," reads the frontispiece of the little red diary, followed by the words "Florence Wolfson," scrawled in faded black ink. Inside the worn leather cover, in brief, breathless dispatches written on gold-edged pages, the journal recorded five years of the life and times of a smart and headstrong New York teenager, a girl who loved Balzac, Central Park and male and female lovers with equal abandon...The diary was a gift for her fourteenth birthday, on August 11, 1929, and she wrote a few lines faithfully, every day, until she turned 19. Then, like so many relics of time past, it was forgotten... for more than half a century inside an old steamer trunk, plastered with vintage travel stickers that evoke the glamorous golden age of ocean liner voyages. The trunk in turn languished in the basement of 98 Riverside Drive... until October 2003, when the management decided it was time to clear out the storage area." --The New York Times Brought to you by The Ice Plant in collaboration with Shopsin's General Store, this charming, pint-sized and extremely well-designed diary, inspired by a 2006 story in The New York Times, lets you keep track of your life with just a few lines every day for five years. Each page of the diary is devoted to one day of the year and subdivided into five sections-so that as time goes by, past entries can be read as new ones are written. Clothbound in delicate, nubby pinstripes with a red ribbon bookmark, it is designed so that it can be started on any day of the year, even on a leap year. In the back of the diary are pages to record books read and places traveled. An ideal gift for sophisticated nostalgics, new parents, dreamers, schemers and plain old lovers of good design.