Books published by The Ice Plant

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.

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.