We're thrilled to introduce a beautiful new series for The Book/Shop Journal by Berkeley-based photographer Sean Jerd. Sean will be sharing photos he's taken of the home libraries of various contemporary artists. He's started with Oakland-based photographer Todd Hido, whose work has been featured in Artforum, The New York Times Magazine, Eyemazing, Wired, Elephant, FOAM, and Vanity Fair. Hido's photographs are in the permanent collections of the Getty, the Whitney Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the de Young, the Smithsonian, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Pier 24 Photography, as well as in many other public and private collections. He has over a dozen published books; his most recent monograph titled Excerpts from Silver Meadows was released in 2013, along with an innovative b-sides box set designed to function as a companion piece to his award-winning monograph in 2014. Aperture will publish his mid-career survey in 2016.

Sean shot these images in Hido’s 100 year old Victorian home in the Rockridge neighborhood of Oakland. Each room houses an individual genre of photography books – landscape, portrait, documentary, conceptual, found, it goes on. The books lay on salvaged hardwood tabletops and shelves – Adams, Baltz, Eggleston, Richter, Moriyama, a vintage print by an unknown artist that becomes all the more beautiful in its context...

Diligently catalogued and embossed on every end page, his collection houses over four thousand books and is constantly growing.