Essential Reading

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Artists, designers, and writers examine the city and everyday life. Here is an incomplete, in-progress list of books worth reading:

👉 Basic definitions

📷 Urban exploring: playing/walking/observing

  • Crossroad Puzzlers, David Webster (1967)
  • Shadow Science, David Webster (1976)
  • Track watching, David Webster (1972)
  • The Wander Society, Keri Smith (2016)
  • How to Be an Explorer of the World, Keri Smith (2008)
  • Everything That Can Happen In A Day, Bargain Price (2010)
  • The Artist’s Eye, Peter Jenny (2012)
  • See for Yourself A Visual Guide to Everyday Beauty, Rob Forbe (2015)
  • How to See: Visual adventures in a world god never made, George Nelson (2017)
  • The Lost Art of Walking, Geoff Nicholson (2009)
  • How to Walk, Thich Nhat Hanh (2015)

🔎 Urban exploring: theories and history

  • Psychogeography, Merlin Coverley (2006)
  • Walkscapes, Francesco Careri (2002)
  • Wanderlust: Actions, Traces, Journeys 1967–201,  Rachel Adams (2017)
  • Situationist International Anthology, Ken Knabb (2007)

👀 How to look at the everyday

  • Seeing What Others Don’t, Gary Klein (2014)
  • The Wandering Maker, Machiel Spaan (2019)
  • The Art of Looking Sideways, Alan Fletcher (2001)
  • On Looking, Alexandra Horowitz (2013)
  • The Art of Noticing, Rob Walker (2019)
  • Visual Intelligence, Amy Herman (2016)
  • Wandering, Hermann Hesse (1972)

🥛 How to look at everyday objects

  • The Good Life: Perceptions of the Ordinary, Jasper Morrison (2014)
  • Home-Made: Contemporary Russian Folk Artifacts, Vladmir Arkhipov (2006)
  • The Language of Things, Deyan Sudjic (2009)
  • Super Normal, Naoto Fukasawa and Jasper Morrison (2018)

📺 How to look at everyday images/media

  • How to See the World, Nicholas Mirzoeff (2015)
  • Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design, Theo van Leeuwen (1996)
  • The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, Marshall McLuhan (1967)
  • Failed Images: Photography and Its Counter-practices, Ernst Van Alphen (2018)
  • Ways of Seeing, John Berger (1972)

🤓 New theories about the everyday

  • The Beauty of Everyday Things, Soetsu Yanagi (2019)
  • Everyday Aesthetics, Yuriko Saito (2007)
  • Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, Lucy R. Lippard (1997)

💡 TBC

Posted in Books, Inspiration.
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