By turns humorous, striking, mysterious and surprising, these photographic pairings by MOSS design shop founder Murray Moss reveal unanticipated elements of the objects' personalities. "Some are duets, or fugues," Moss writes. "Some dance a pas de deux. Many are six degrees incarnate. And others are conversations between strangers who share a bench in the park and discover common ground." Reproduced at the actual size of the original photos, with both the front and the often annotated back presented with equal importance, these artifacts, "retired now from their labors, are akin to those exceptional functional objects that have served their time and have later come to be appreciated, even coveted and exalted, for the extraordinary qualities that lie outside of their original function."

Murray Moss: Tertium Quid: Pictorial Narratives Created from Vintage Press Photographs

Arts & Photography

Moss, Murray

Photography & Video

August Editions

Grafted documents, through stunning photography, the groundbreaking collaboration between Adam Silverman, a renowned LA-based ceramicist, and Kohei Oda, an award-winning Japanese plant sculptor. Through two exhibitions, Silverman and Oda worked together to produce one hundred unique works combining Oda s grafted cacti with Silverman s textural ceramic pots to produce one-of-a-kind, out of this world artworks that cross boundaries. Beautifully photographed by Shuji Yoshida and Joshua White and edited and designed by Tamotsu Yagi, Grafted is a testament to the power of merging two powerful visions. As Glenn Adamson writes in his introduction: Their collaboration is not just about a hundred plants in a hundred pots; it is further evidence that art at its best can move effortlessly across cultures, across media, and against expectation.

Grafted: Plants by Kohei Oda | Pots by Adam Silverman

Kohei Oda

Adam Silverman

History & Criticism

A photograph is forever. Or is it? Culled from the vast vernacular photographic collection of Thierry Struvay, Love &amp; Hate &amp; Other Mysteries presents a funny, often poignant and truthful glimpse into the human condition. The unassuming and elegantly designed hardcover publication explodes once opened with 100 found black-and-white and color photographs that have been manually altered by scissors or pen, or physically attacked in a fit of rage. Some deletions, such as a missing face in the shape of a heart or oval, were clearly intended for a locket. Others, however, contain angrily scratched-out heads and bodies, or are simply torn in half. A third group features manipulations more mysterious in nature: strange cut-outs that hint at a mix of emotions and motives. Together with a poetic introductory text by Glenn O'Brien, the photographs suggest a wide range of human drama, from affection to anger and much in between.

Love & Hate & Other Mysteries: Found Altered Snapshots from the Collection of Thierry Struvay

Architect Marcel Breuer’s House in the Museum Garden, now considered one of the most influential architecture exhibitions of the 20th century, was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art and built in their garden in 1949. Exhibited to record attendance, the house featured the updated Bauhaus prescriptions for modern living―an airy, informal combination living room/dining room and a pass-through kitchen―and was intended to inspire the future of American housing. The project featured custom hardware produced by W.C. Vaughan in collaboration with Breuer, which included everything from mahogany door knobs to cabinet hinges. Vaughan also supplied hardware for Breuer’s iconic Frank House, the Geller House, Breuer’s own houses in Massachusetts and Connecticut plus houses by Walter Gropius, Philip Johnson and other modernist masters. An essay by historian Robert Wiesenberger, historical black-and-white and color photographs by Ezra Stoller plus shop drawings by Vaughan of the hardware complete this deeply engaging and important architectural publication.

Transitional Moments: Marcel Breuer, W.C. Vaughan & Co. and the Bauhaus In America

In 2015 the French illustrator and writer Jean-Philippe Delhomme was asked by Zeit Magazin, the Sunday magazine of the German newspaper Zeit, to contribute a weekly column for the year about living in Paris. 2015 was an extraordinary and tumultuous year for Paris, with the Charlie Hebdo and the Bataclan terrorist attacks in January and November, which Delhomme covered with sensitivity and poignance. In between, he wrote about and illustrated the daily joys and frustrations of living in one of the world's most beloved cities, from daily walks with his dog Astor to discover Picasso's former studios, to the invasions of Uber and joggers in the Luxembourg gardens. As Delhomme writes in his Introduction, "Paris, lost in its winter rains and dim light, is a trip through time. From its greyness, I came to realize, there were many stories to emerge if you had, maybe, the eyes of a dog to see them. The night recalls Brassaï, the hunching silhouette of Giacometti blurs in the winter fog, and Gertrude Stein's exhausted guests wait for a cab on rue de Fleurus, next to a contemporary princess commanding an Uber from her iPhone."

Jean-Philippe Delhomme: A Paris Journal

Individual Artists

Wilshire Boulevard is one of Los Angeles's transportation lifelines, and as close as one gets in the sprawling metropolis to a Main Street. Running east-to-west from downtown to the ocean, Wilshire is a link from late-nineteenth-century L.A. to the explosive growth of this city in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Fascinated by its history, New York–based photographer Adrian Gaut pays tribute to L.A.'s most famous strip in his unique framing of architectural details. Gaut's photographs evoke the 100-year-plus history of L.A.'s growth through rigorous documentation of the boulevard starting with One Wilshire in downtown L.A. and ending with traffic cones that divide the Pacific Coast Highway. In between―the Art Deco details of Miracle Mile, the 1980s reflective glass facades of Century City and the midcentury modern architecture omnipresent throughout the entire strip―is captured in more than 100 color and black-and-white semi-abstract compositions. A brilliant way to mark a time and place in Southern California in the early 21st century.

Adrian Gaut: Wilshire Blvd

Photographed over a ten-year period, Dog Houses is a collection of 30 forlorn and often humorous color images of canine shelters found throughout the Southern California desert landscape. American photographer Mark Ruwedel (b. 1954), known for his majestic "Westward" series of residual landforms created by expanding railroad lines across the nineteenth-century American West, turns his discerning eye to the last western frontier―the American desert. Dog Houses, part of Ruwedel's larger "Desert House" series, takes readers to a place where signs of human activity in the landscape are much more recent and revealing. Like their human counterparts, the doghouses in these photographs constitute an inventory of an iconic yet surprisingly flexible form. Often made from discarded material left over from the construction of human houses, the funny and sometimes haunting structures evoke the asymmetrical yet reciprocal relationship between owner and animal.

Mark Ruwedel: Dog Houses

Furniture generated by smart algorithms, the first fully functional 3-D printed steel bridge, and a 3-D printable chair that can be downloaded from the Internet these are but a few examples of the ingenious oeuvre of Dutch designer and inventor Joris Laarman (b. 1979), who works at the intersection of design, art and engineering. Part of the recent high-profile Dutch design movement, Laarman quickly set himself apart from his peers with the Heat Wave Radiator, which erases the lines between the functional and the decorative. Quickly embracing digital technologies and applying them to the traditional field of design, Laarman has produced instant icons such as the ''Bone Chair'' designs, which harnesses a computer algorithm to mimic bone growth for the form of the designs. He has also bridged the distance between digital technology and craftsmanship with his Makerchair, downloadable as an open-source design. Abolishing the distinctions between natural and manmade, Laarman s work opens a new avenue for the future of design. In parallel with the touring exhibition, this handsome hardcover catalog with over 300 color illustrations goes far beyond the exhibition, revealing Laarman s process, his studio and numerous designs in office, home and workshop settings. Flowing throughout the book are informative project descriptions, a statement from the LAB and assorted essays. The American museum tour includes the Cooper Hewitt, NY (2017), the High Museum, Atlanta, and MFA, Houston (2017 18).

Joris Laarman: Lab

Decorative Arts & Design

The nude body may still be the most dangerous image in western culture. Decades after the sexual revolution, society's discomfort with the human form is alive and well, as it develops new versions of the same puritanical or infantile responses that have always sought to censor or stigmatize it. The nude self may no longer be XXX, but it's certainly NSFW; we may have stopped draping classical statues, but we are desperate to contain our gender identities to two hyper-minimal pictograms for bathroom options. Arguably, this repudiation of human sexuality shares a root with society's other bodily horror: our collective fear and shame over sickness, deterioration and death. We have come to see our genitals as sites of weakness, just as we have our eventual decay: both must be covered, hidden, left unspoken, treated as a source of humiliation.

Mats Gustafson: Nude

The Women of Woodcock is the companion photo book to the just released award-nominated film Phantom Thread, from the auteur director Paul Thomas Anderson. Starring the Oscar-winning actor Daniel Day Lewis in his last role, as Reynolds Woodcock, the film portrays an uncompromising fashion couturier in 1950s London — and the women that surrounded him: clients that included royalty, society debutantes, and heiresses, as well as his sister who runs the fashions house, the seamstresses, and his mistresses. Gaining full access to backstage and on set, the English photographer Laura Hynd documented the fictional House of Woodcock: Hynd and her camera moved fluidly back and forth between costume fittings, the set, epic crowd scenes, extras, and classic portrait sessions. With insider access Hynd explored the fictional couturier with a specifically female gaze. Through her camera, all the women in the House of Woodcock, from royalty to atelier staff, are celebrated equally — a deliberate concept supported and highlighted by the inclusion of handful carefully selected frames from the movie. The Women of Woodcock is stunning, artful, and unexpected — much like Phantom Thread itself.

The Women of Woodcock

Laura Hynd

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