A handsome volume of the renowned photographer’s work from 2005 to 2021 Best known for his large-scale photographs, carefully constructed “near documentaries” created in collaboration with the subjects, Jeff Wall (b. 1946) is one of the most influential photographers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Often displayed as backlit color transparencies, Wall’s works have helped define the use of color and painterly sensibilities in contemporary art photography. This volume collects over fifteen years’ worth of new work from Jeff Wall in a lavish presentation that includes multiple gatefolds to better convey the scale of Wall’s work. As a collection of Wall’s most recent work, this volume will include numerous pieces that are as-yet unfamiliar to many of his fans. Chevrier’s essay deftly summarizes the varied directions of Wall’s recent work and contextualizes them within the body of work that precedes this volume; de Duve’s and Campany’s wide-ranging conversations with the artist cover the role of performance and the effects of spontaneity and scale, respectively.
Walker Evans was one of the most important and influential artists of the twentieth century, who produced a body of photographs that continue to shape our understanding of the modern era. He worked in every genre and format, in black and white and in color, but two passions were constant: literature and the printed page. While his photographic books are among the most influential in the medium’s history, Evans’ more ephemeral pages remain largely unknown. From small avant-garde publications to mainstream titles such as Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, Architectural Forum, Life and Fortune he produced innovative and independent journalism, often setting his own assignments, editing, writing and designing his pages. Presenting many of his photo-essays in their entirety, Walker Evans: The Magazine Work assembles the unwritten history of this work, allowing us to see how he protected his autonomy, earned a living and found audiences far beyond the museum and gallery.
The second volume of Barcelona-based photographer Txema Salvans’ (born 1971) series The Waiting Game documents fishermen on Spain’s Mediterranean coast. Essays accompanying Salvans’ photographs explore the balance between ugliness and beauty in his work.
The cinematic has been a springboard for the work of many influential artists, including Victor Burgin, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Stan Douglas, Nan Goldin, Douglas Gordon, Cindy Sherman, and Jeff Wall, among others. Much recent cinema, meanwhile, is rich with references to contemporary photography. Video art has taken a photographic turn into pensive slowness; photography now has at its disposal the budgets and scale of cinema. This addition to Whitechapel’s Documents of Contemporary Art series surveys the rich history of creative interaction between the moving and the still photograph, tracing their ever-changing relationship since early modernism. Still photography—cinema’s ghostly parent—was eclipsed by the medium of film, but also set free. The rise of cinema obliged photography to make a virtue of its own stillness. Film, on the other hand, envied the simplicity, the lightness, and the precision of photography. Russian Constructivist filmmakers considered avant-garde cinema as a sequence of graphic “shots”; their Bauhaus, Constructivist and Futurist photographer contemporaries assembled photographs into a form of cinema on the page. In response to the rise of popular cinema, Henri Cartier-Bresson exalted the “decisive moment” of the still photograph. In the 1950s, reportage photography began to explore the possibility of snatching filmic fragments. Since the 1960s, conceptual and postconceptual artists have explored the narrative enigmas of the found film still. The Cinematic assembles key writings by artists and theorists from the 1920s on—including László Moholy-Nagy, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Victor Burgin, Jeff Wall, and Catherine David—documenting the photography-film dialogue that has enriched both media. Contributors: Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Raymond Bellour, Anton Giulio Bragaglia, Victor Burgin, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Catherine David, Thierry de Duve, Gilles Deleuze, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Philippe Dubois, Régis Durand, Sergei Eisenstein, Mike Figgis, Hollis Frampton, Susanne Gaensheimer, Nan Goldin, Chris Marker, Christian Metz, Laura Mulvey, László Moholy-Nagy, Beaumont Newhall, Uriel Orlow, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Constance Penley, Richard Prince, Steve Reich, Carlo Rim, Raul Ruiz, Susan Sontag, Blake Stimson, Michael Tarantino, Agnès Varda, Jeff Wall, Andy Warhol, and Peter Wollen.
Including esays and an interview with Karen Knorr, this extensively illustrated text is a comprehensive overview of the photographer’s work from the 1990s to 2002. Knorr’s photographs explore with wit and humour the patronage and heritage that informs our ideas of art and national identity, with images taken at historical art collections and stately homes, and new developments using sound, installation and video. Knorr has been making photographs since the early 1980s, using a documentary style that recalls earlier traditions of portraiture and painting,
The relationship between architecture and photography is the focus of this book that features the work of eighteen influential artists, from the 1930s to the present day. Architecture has long been a subject matter for photographers, who utilize the medium not just to document the built world, but also to reveal wider truths about society. This book features chapters devoted to various artists–among them, Berenice Abbott, Walker Evans, Ed Ruscha, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Andreas Gursky and Iwan Baan–and includes 220 color and duotone images. Each chapter opens with a text introducing the artists’ work, followed by reproductions of their photographs. Arranged chronologically, the book documents the birth of the skyscraper against the backdrop of the Great Depression; the rise of the modernist tradition in America, post-colonial Africa, and India; the effects of industry on 1960s Europe; the increasing suburbanization of America and Europe; and the consequences of today’s mass urbanization in Asia, the Middle East, and South America. Far-reaching and penetrating, this volume reflects on the ongoing dialogue between photography and architecture.
Luwa AG’s photography collection, initiated in 1990 in Zellweger, Switzerland, by Ruedi and Thomas Bechtler and never before shown in public, has since become one of the finest and most extensive collections in the area of conceptual and serial photography. Embracing the seventies to the present, it contains major works and groups of works by artists such as John Baldessari, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Sigmar Polke, Imi Knoebel, Martin Kippenberger, Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky, Fischli & Weiss, Roman Signer, Richard Prince, Jeff Wall, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Stan Douglas, Ken Lum, and Gabriel Orozco. This splendid publication unfurls a rich visual display, and texts by Stephan Berg, Konrad Bitterli, David Campany, Stefan Gronert, and Dora Imhof expound on this spectacular collection.
Art and Photography surveys a rich and important history, from the 1960s to the 21st century. Arranged thematically, it presents works by the most significant international artists who have explored and extended the boundaries of photography. This influential body of work by over 160 artists over four decades is contextualised in the “Documents” section by original artist’s statements and interviews, as well as lucid reflections on photography by major thinkers of our era such as Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard. Today photography is art’s pre-eminent medium. Photography pervades our visual culture. It has become what painting was in previous centuries: a universal language. Today’s photographers are internationally admired as “the painters of modern life”. Yet it took the whole of the 20th century for photography to reach this status. On its invention, the photograph was derided as a purely mechanical, “artless” medium which could never be considered among the fine arts. As the 20th century unfolded, Modernist movements experimented with the photograph and expanded its limits, yet still the art establishment held out. Only recently have the majority of art museums begun acquiring works of photography. In 1976, when the Museum of Modern Art, New York – one of the first institutions to collect photographs – staged a retrospective of the American colour photographer William Eggleston, this was a groundbreaking event: it was the first time colour photography had been exhibited, as art, in a major museum. This moment in the 1970s marked a dramatic sea change, but the tides had begun to turn in the early 1960s, when artists such as Andy Warhol, Ed Ruscha and Gerhard Richter used the everyday, mass-produced quality of the snapshot as a basis for their work. From this early adoption of photography for its “artless” qualities, artists have explored photography extensively ever since, ranging from Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman’s reflections on the visual messages of film and advertising, to the richly layered, ‘painterly’ genres of portraiture, landscape and still life in the work of Nan Goldin, Andreas Gursky, Roni Horn, Wolfgang Tillmans, Jeff Wall and others who have brought photography full circle, to the roles that painting fulfilled in past centuries.
What did the arrival of cinema do for photography? How did the moving image change our relation to the still image? Why have cinema and photography been so drawn to each other? Close-ups, freeze frames and the countless portrayals of photographers on screen are signs of cinema’s enduring attraction to the still image. Photo-stories, sequences and staged tableaux speak of the deep influence of cinema on photography. Photography and Cinema a considers the importance of the still image for filmmakers such as the Lumière brothers, Alfred Hitchcock, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, Mark Lewis, Agnès Varda, Peter Weir, Christopher Nolan and many others. In parallel it looks at the cinematic in the work of photographers and artists that include Germaine Krull, William Klein, John Baldessari, Jeff Wall, Victor Burgin and Cindy Sherman. From film stills and flipbooks to slide shows and digital imaging, hybrid visual forms have established an ambiguous realm between motion and stillness. David Campany assembles a missing history in which photography and cinema have been each other’s muse and inspiration for over a century.
After the success of CHROMA we are happy too announce a new book by John Divola. SCAPES contains some of his greatest series in Black and White like “Four Landscapes”, “As Far As I Could Get” and “Dogs chaising my car in the desert”. [from the text by David Campany] Cameras and their users are caught between the universal and the particular. Photography and photographs; humanity and whatever specific kind of human we happen to be. There is at least something existentially universal about Divola’s photographic adventures. The lone observer moving through the world and reflecting upon it through various camera possibilities. But nobody is truly universal, or only universal. We each come wrapped in our particulars, just as each and every photograph belongs to the universe of photography precisely insofar as it is particular. Forever the two. When I look at Divola’s photographs, I sense something universal because I sense all the particulars. Yes, a white, male, middle class Southern Californian, post-conceptual artist of the kind that makes these kinds of photographs. But nobody makes photographs quite like Divola.
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
UFO Presences explores the places where UFO sightings have taken place across America: in California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and of course the infamous Area 51, along South Central Nevada’s State Route 375―the so-called Extraterrestrial Highway, where so many travelers have reported UFO observations and other bizarre alien activities. Spanish photographer Javier Arcenillas (born 1973) has diligently photographed these locations, and sequenced them in this book as a visual road trip, mixing his photographs with news clippings and other relevant ephemera.
UFO Presences is the winner of RM’s 6th Photobook Award with a jury composed of David Campany, Lesley Martin, Julien Frydman, Susan Meiselas, Martin Parr and Alec Soth, among others.
English artist John Stezaker (born 1949) reexamines various relationships to the photographic image―as documentation of truth, purveyor of memory and symbol of modern culture. In his collages, Stezaker appropriates images found in books, magazines and postcards, and uses them as “readymades.” Through his elegant juxtapositions, Stezaker adopts the content and contexts of the original images to convey his own witty and poignant meanings. In this new volume, Stezaker started with found images from Hollywood’s golden era. Using publicity shots of classic film icons, the artist splices and overlaps famous faces, creating hybrid stars that dissociate the familiar and take on an uncanny quality, destabilizing our idealization of celebrity through work both surreal and grotesque. The volume includes an essay by writer, curator and artist David Campany.
An international movement that followed specific geographical-cultural patterns, Conceptual Art built on the legacy of Marcel Duchamp, redefining the institutional and social relationships among production, work and audience in ways which have comprehensively transformed the nature of the art object and forms of artistic practice, both historically and in the present. Investigating and documenting the histories, theories and forms of Conceptual Art, this timely book, including both established writers and a new generation of art historians, shows that Conceptual Art was a broad movement encompassing a range of artistic tendencies. This is the most stimulating account of the movement to date, arguing forcefully for its vitality and potential as well as examining its influence on art today. With essays by Alex Alberro, Stephen Bann, Jon Bird, David Campany, Helen Molesworth, Michael Newman, Peter Osborne, Birgit Pelzer, Desa Philipagesi, Anne Rorimer, Peter Wollen and William Wood.
Spanning 170 years, from William Henry Fox Talbot’s first negative to Jeff Wall’s latest constructed tableau, Singular Images collects thought-provoking essays on individual photographs, one image per writer. The essayists consider, sometimes in highly personal ways, the artist’s intention, their own response, the work’s technical complexities, its historical context or its formal properties. Each text captures a sense of how challenging it is to create a perfect single piece. Art photography has been increasingly well-surveyed in recent years, but individual works have rarely been written about at length, perhaps because of lingering doubt that a single photograph can command the kind of sustained attention often given to individual paintings or sculptures. Singular Images is a lively inquiry into the value of analyzing individual photographs, and it persuasively encourages the reader to engage at length and in depth with one remarkable piece at a time. With its broad scope and diverse range of issues, it can also be read as an informal–and thoroughly entertaining–introduction to art photography. Featuring essays by some of the most brilliant critical minds in the field, including David Campany on Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, Darsie Alexander on Nan Goldin and Liz Jobey on Diane Arbus
a+mbookstore is a publishing house and a bookstore specializing in visual contemporary arts, founded in 1993 in Milan.
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