The celebrated New York museum captured by two of today's most respected photographers, Tina Barney and Stephen Shore. The Noguchi Museum provides a unique perspective on the artwork of Isamu Noguchi and its setting in the Noguchi Museum through the eyes of renowned photographers Stephen Shore and Tina Barney. Noguchi, a modernist sculptor and designer, founded and designed the museum for the specific purpose of exhibiting his works. The 1920s-era industrial space in Long Island City, Queens, thus became the first and only museum in the US to be designed by a living artist for the artist's own work. Shore has photographed individual works on view at the museum, documenting them in new and surprising ways; and Barney has photographed visitors at the museum and its events, capturing something of the spatial experience of the museum. These new photographs comprise a beautiful object that pays tribute to the museum and artwork while highlighting the skill and eye of these two photographers. This is the only book that focuses on the unique dynamic between the museum's artworks, architecture, and visitors and the museum celebrates its 30th anniversary in 2015, coinciding with publication. The book includes a foreword by the museum director, Jenny Dixon, and a selection of archival images documenting the transformation of the museum-many published here for the first time.

Throughout the twentieth century, Isamu Noguchi was a vital figure in modern art. From interlocking wooden sculptures to massive steel monuments to the elegant Akari lamps, Noguchi became a master of what he called the "sculpturing of space." But his constant struggle—as both an artist and a man—was to embrace his conflicted identity as the son of a single American woman and a famous yet reclusive Japanese father. "It's only in art," he insisted, "that it was ever possible for me to find any identity at all." In this remarkable biography of the elusive artist, Hayden Herrera observes this driving force of Noguchi's creativity as intimately tied to his deep appreciation of nature. As a boy in Japan, Noguchi would collect wild azaleas and blue mountain flowers for a little garden in front of his home. As Herrera writes, he also included a rock, "to give a feeling of weight and permanence." It was a sensual appreciation he never abandoned. When looking for stones in remote Japanese quarries for his zen-like Paris garden forty years later, he would spend hours actually listening to the stones, scrambling from one to another until he found one that "spoke to him." Constantly striving to "take the essence of nature and distill it," Noguchi moved from sculpture to furniture, and from playgrounds to sets for his friend the choreographer Martha Graham, and back again working in wood, iron, clay, steel, aluminum, and, of course, stone. Throughout his career, Noguchi traveled constantly, from New York to Paris to India to Japan, forever uprooting himself to reinvigorate what he called the "keen edge of originality." Wherever he went, his needy disposition and boyish charm drew women to him, yet he tended to push them away when things began to feel too settled. Only through his art—now seen as a powerful aesthetic link between the East and the West—did Noguchi ever seem to feel that he belonged. Combining the personal correspondence of and interviews with Noguchi and those closest to him—from artists, patrons, assistants, and lovers—Herrera has created an authoritative biography of one of the twentieth century's most important sculptors. She locates Noguchi in his friendships with such artists as Buckminster Fuller and Arshile Gorky, and in his affairs with women including Frida Kahlo and Anna Matta Clark. With the attention to detail and scholarship that made her biography of Gorky a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Herrera has written a rich meditation on art in a globalized milieu. Listening to Stone is a moving portrait of an artist compulsively driven to reinvent himself as he searched for his own "essence of sculpture."

Stephen Shore's Uncommon Places is indisputably a canonic body of work--a touchstone for those interested in photography and the American landscape. Remarkably, despite having been the focus of numerous shows and books, including the eponymous 1982 Aperture classic (expanded and reissued several times), this series of photographs has yet to be explored in its entirety. Over the past five years, Shore has scanned hundreds of negatives shot between 1973 and 1981. In this volume, Aperture has invited an international group of fifteen photographers, curators, authors, and cultural figures to select ten images apiece from this rarely seen cache of images. Each portfolio offers an idiosyncratic and revealing commentary on why this body of work continues to astound; how it has impacted the work of new generations of photography and the medium at large; and proposes new insight on Shore's unique vision of America as transmuted in this totemic series. Texts and image selections by Wes Anderson, Quentin Bajac, David Campany, Paul Graham, Guido Guidi, Takashi Homma, An-My Leê, Michael Lesy, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Francine Prose, Ed Ruscha, Britt Salvesen, Taryn Simon, Thomas Struth, and Lynne Tillman

Explores how the ancient world shaped innovative American sculptor Isamu Noguchi's inspirational vision for the future.

The Nature of Photographs is an essential primer of how to look at and understand photographs, by one of the world's most influential photographers, Stephen Shore. In this book, Shore explores ways of understanding photographs from all periods and all types - from iconic images to found photographs, from negatives to digital files. This books serves as an indispensable tool for students, teachers and everyone who wants to take better pictures or learn to look at them in a more informed way.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Changing and Unchanging Things: Noguchi and Hasegawa in Postwar Japan, organized by The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum. Venues: Yokohama Museum of Art, January 12-March 24, 2019; The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, May 1-July 14, 2019; Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, September 27-December 8, 2019. This exhibition is made possible through lead support from the Terra Foundation for American Art.

In Players, Tina Barney expands her subject matter to include fashion, performers, and actors, as well as her own circle of friends. Emboldened by the cacophony when photographing on stage, Barney has embraced a more casual aesthetic that is visually exhilarating. Editor and designer Chip Kidd has translated this excitement to the pages of this new book. And Michael Stipe has contributed his poetic vertigo. In her two previous books, Barney chose to look at families in America and their milieu and then carried on this examination of families in Europe. Now she combines commercial assignments dating back as far as 1988, with editorial, fashion, and portraiture. Selections from her personal work complete the mix. The result is refreshing, revealing and curious. Barney has always been fascinated by the circumstances in which her subjects operate. Whether performing publicly or privately, they are all "players". Tina Barney was born in 1945 in New York. Since 1975, she has been producing large-scale photographs of family and friends. Her meticulous tableaux chronicle the complexity of interpersonal relationships. These lush colour prints have been exhibited and collected by major institutions around the world. Barney was the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. Her monographs include The Europeans, published by Steidl in 2005. She lives in New York and Rhode Island.