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NZ Library: Set #2 (Six Volumes), Limited Edition [SIGNED]: Robbert Flick: LA Diary; Kazuo Kitai: Tsugaru / Shimokita; Philip Melnick: Nineteen Seventies California; John Schott: Mobile Homes 1975-1976; Toshio Shibata: Yodaka; Mark Steinmetz: Angel City West: Volume One (1)

Publisher: Paso Robles, California: Nazraeli Press, 2016
Edition: 1st Edition
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: New / New
Item #: 112274

$900.00

Specifics

PRICING & EDITION NUMBER: The price of this set of six titles reflects a 40% discount compared to purchasing titles individually ($150 per title compared to $250 per title).

DISCOUNT ON SET 2 SPECIAL EDITIONS: Customers who purchase this set of six titles also qualify for a $150 discount off the price of a special limited edition from Set 2 (with print) of one of the six titles from the set (you will receive a second copy of the slipcased book with the special limited edition).

SHIPPING NOTE: due to size and weight (e.g., multi-volume sets), additional shipping fees apply (calculated at checkout).

First edition, first printing. Limited edition of 350 copies. Each of the six volumes is numbered on the colophon page and signed by the artist on a label tipped in to the back cover. Each volume in the set shares the following characteristics: Hardcover. Silk cloth-covered boards; with photographically illustrated dust jacket and silk cloth-covered slipcase. 15 x 12 inches.

Condition

New in publisher's packaging.

Description

From the publisher: "We are excited to announce the NZ Library, a new series of limited edition, highly collectible artists' books. Printed on Japanese art paper using our exclusive 'Daido black' inks, all books in the NZ Library have certain aspects in common: each title is produced using the highest material and production values; each is limited to 350 numbered and signed copies; each is bound in silk cloth and individually slipcased. Each book in the series is uniform in height, with a slipcased format of 15 x 12 inches. The NZ Library will be built six titles at a time, with groupings curated to balance and play off of past, present and future titles in the series. While copies will be available to purchase individually, a generous discount is extended for orders of all six titles in any given set."

VOLUME ONE: Robbert Flick: LA Diary. ISBN 978-1-59005-436-9. 64 pp., with 29 duotone plates. From the publisher: " Robbert Flick, born in Holland in 1939, is a Southern California artist who uses photography as his primary medium. This gorgeous new monograph presents an important, early body of work that would inform Flick's approach to all of his subsequent artistic activities: 

'The late 1960s was an open-ended time with very few boundaries. I was interested in rendering my photographic experience of Los Angeles, and wanted to emphasize the process of that experience. Rather than framing a moment, it became important to acknowledge it. This meant that the act of photographing became a gesture. I was also quite poor and had a limited amount of film. I kept some several dozen self-rolled films in a shoebox; whenever I went out I would reach in for four or five of them, and return them back into the box when exposed, leaving a snippet of leader so the film could be reused. I would have absolutely no idea what was on which film I put in my camera.

At the time I would think of film as an endless continuum, and there was a wish to acknowledge that aspect visually...the idea of multiple exposures was linked to ideas about simultaneity, the use of the "I Ching" and "there is no such thing as accident." I photographed in this manner for a period of three years.'

One of the images on the cover of the book captures a moment from an Ortiz destruction event: where a piano filled with blood was hammered apart with an axe and subsequently a large number of mice were set free in mousetrap-filled areas on the floor. This Destruction Performance very much summarized the political conditions of the time and the senseless destruction of human life and landscapes engendered by the Vietnam war.

A Getty Scholar and Djerassi Foundation Artist-in-Residence (1989), Flick is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship; he is a two-time recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and was awarded a COLA Grant by the Cultural Affairs Department of the City of Los Angeles in 1999. Robbert Flick's work is in the permanent collections of many important institutions, including The Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; National Museum of American Art; The Chicago Art Institute; The High Museum of Art, Atlanta; and Bibliothèque National, Paris."

NOTE: A SPECIAL EDITION (WITH ONE PRINT) IS ALSO AVAILABLE.


VOLUME TWO: Kazuo Kitai: Tsugaru / Shimokita. ISBN 978-1-59005-437-6. 48 pp., with 40 duotone plates. From the publisher: "Kazuo Kitai dropped out six months into his first year of art school, revealing a rebellious streak that led him to become involved in the protest movements of 1960s Japan. His first photography book, 'Resistance,' was self-published in 1965. For the rest of the 1960s he continued to follow radical student protests, producing Barricade,Agitators and finally Sanrizuka in 1971.
 
As the 1960s came to a close, Kitai became disillusioned with political themes and turned to the everyday life of ordinary people. Kitai's first journey was to one of the most remote parts of Japan, the Shimokita Peninsula, and photographs from this journey to Shimokita in 1970 make up the first half of this book. In 1972 and 1973 Kitai traveled again to this most northerly part of Honshu, to the neighboring area of Tsugaru, and this makes up the other half of this book.
 
These regions of Shimokita and Tsugaru had been very isolated and barren, with bitterly cold winters. Local language, legends and ancient beliefs had survived into the modern era. The region was known for shamanism and communion with the dead spirits gathering around the holy mountain of Osorezan.
 
During the rest of the 1970s, Kitai was to continue his exploration of rural areas of Japan, for which, in 1976, he received the award of the inaugural Ihei Kimura Prize, Japan's most prestigious award for photography.
 
Kazuo Kitai was born in Manchuria in 1944. He began photographing in the mid-1960s and remains active 50 years later. He is best known for his protest photography of the 1960s and his work on rural Japan in the1970s. In the 1980s, he concerned himself with the citizens of Osaka and Tokyo (Shinsekai Monogatari, Funabashi Story). Recent years have seen him publish a regular column in Nippon Camera magazine ('Walking with Leica') as well as a rise of public interest in his work both in Japan and overseas."


VOLUME THREE: Philip Melnick. ISBN 978-1-59005-438-3. 48 pp., with 31 duotone plates. From the publisher: "Born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1935, Philip Melnick grew up in Los Angeles, where he attended the University of California. In the 1970s, shooting with a medium format camera, Melnick made black-and-white photographs of his surroundings, exploring the unique sense of style found in the Southern California urban landscape. Nineteen Seventies California offers a beautifully presented selection of Melnick's most striking work from this period, in which he displays a keen eye for the character of its vernacular architecture and the distinctive look of its streets: the quirky confluence of a single parked car with a street-facing wall and a fragmented apartment building; the intersection of street, fence and another non-descript apartment house. He isolates the intricate pattern of a wall, creating arresting fusions of everyday sights and geometric abstraction. 'Melnick's images emphasize a push-pull, hard-soft tension that give his pictures distinguished style and great beauty,' wrote the late Fred McDarrah, who was himself a photographer for The Village Voice, as well as a writer, during the years that this series was produced.

Philip Melnick's work has been widely exhibited and written about; his photographs are included in the permanent collections of numerous important institutions, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and Bibliothèque National, Paris."


VOLUME FOUR: John Schott: Mobile Homes 1975-1976. ISBN 978-1-59005-439-0. 64 pp., with 54 duotone plates. From the publisher: "'Encountering the American west for the first time in the early 1970s, I became fascinated with the landscapes and iconography of mobile homes. In a previous century Americans migrated west in Prairie Schooners to become farmers or shopkeepers. After the Second World War they continued this "Westward Ho!," but now in commercially-fabricated mobile homes, often to retirement. These new pioneers clustered in communities that transformed the western landscape and its built environment through a new architecture of mobility. 

Mobile home manufacturers produce a range of styles with architectural references that animate cultural aspirations or memories of home and community left behind. After choosing a basic style, new owners make individual touches to the exterior and lawn that transform the generic into the personal. Viewed from a surrounding hillside, mobile home parks look like arabesques of uniform aluminum boxes. On close observation, however, they reveal a rich flora and fauna of personal expression and longing for both individuality and community.' --John Schott, from the Preface

The images in Mobile Homes 1975-1976 were made with an 8x10-inch Deardorff view camera in California during 1975 and 1976. This project followed photographs of Route 66 motels in 1973 and 1974, work which was included in 'New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape,' at George Eastman House in 1975 and John Schott | Route 66: 1973–1974, Nazraeli Press, 2014 (NZ Library: Set One). 

John Schott's photographs are held within many public collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The George Eastman House, Rochester; and the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge."

NOTE: THREE SPECIAL EDITIONS (EACH WITH ONE OF THREE PRINT VARIANTS) ARE ALSO AVAILABLE.


VOLUME FIVE: Toshio Shibata: Yodaka. ISBN 978-1-59005-440-6. 48 pp., with 41 duotone plates. From the publisher: "'The end of the 1970s saw the completion of Japan's postwar construction, as well as a withering of the student movement and the various terrorist acts that had shaken the global community. The early 1980s was a brief interlude of calm, anticipating the end of the long Showa era, before Japan was deluged by the bubble economy. 

I had just returned to Japan in 1980, after studying for four years in Flanders where time moves slowly, and the atmosphere is very relaxed. In addition to the rapidly advancing westernization, the reality of this new Tokyo, where old pre-war Showa is blended with modern Showa (post-war), looked disorderly and chaotic to me, and it was not easy to capture it visually. I struggled to realize my own mode of expression in this home country of mine, and began by chasing lights of the night-time to deflect this chaos.' --Toshio Shibata, from the Afterword

Born in Japan in 1949, Toshio Shibata entered the painting department of the University of Arts of Tokyo in 1968. He later decided to continue his studies in Europe at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Gant (Belgium) where he turned to photography. It was upon his return to Japan in 1980 that he made the haunting, nighttime photographs of Tokyo presented here for the first time.

Toshio Shibata's work is included in the permanent collections of museums around the world, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Victoria and Albert Museum; London; Bibliothèque National, Paris; Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art; and The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

Yodaka is Toshio Shibata's seventh [Nazraeli Press] monograph."

NOTE: A SPECIAL EDITION (WITH ONE PRINT) IS ALSO AVAILABLE.


VOLUME SIX: Mark Steinmetz: Angel City West. ISBN 978-1-59005-441-3. 64 pp., with 58 duotone plates. From the publisher: "'I entered the Yale School of Art straight from college and left after my first semester. I was 21. I was restless, curious about the America that lay beyond New England, and had a strong interest in the movie industry; I also had heard that Garry Winogrand was somewhere in Los Angeles so in the summer of 1983 I headed west.' --Mark Steinmetz, from the Preface

Angel City West offers a touching, highly personal look at Los Angeles through the eyes of Mark Steinmetz as a young artist straight out of school. In his preface to the work, Steinmetz describes living in a studio apartment in the Miracle Mile district, complete with a futon surrounded by a dozen roach motels and a makeshift darkroom set up in a tiny nook off of the bathroom. It didn't take long before he ran into Garry Winogrand, for whom he became a kind of unofficial chauffeur, enabling Winogrand to photograph through the car window while Steinmetz navigated the streets of his new hometown.

Viewed together in book form, the 58 photographs presented in Angel City West document Steinmetz finding his own voice as an artist. In light of the later projects for which he has become so well known, this early series of street photographs, informal portraits and landscapes foreshadows the sometimes humorous, oftentimes sad, and always poignant mood that runs through Mark Steinmetz's work.

Mark Steinmetz's photographs have been exhibited extensively throughout the United States and Europe, and are included in the permanent collections of many important institutions including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 

This is Mark Steinmetz's ninth monograph to be published by Nazraeli Press."

NOTE: A SPECIAL EDITION (WITH ONE PRINT) IS ALSO AVAILABLE.