One of the most significant Portuguese artists alive today, Pedro Cabrita Reis has produced a complex oeuvre encompassing a variety of media. His paintings, sculptures, and site-specific installations are primarily composed of found and manufactured objects. Often employing common, simple materials, his work touches on issues of space, architecture, and memory, with a suggestive power of association that goes beyond the visual to the level of metaphor. Bringing together the viewer’s subjective conscience with the greater conscience of everyday life, Cabrita Reis’s artworks induce a reconstruction of individual and collective memory, creating an expansion of meaning and proposing a literal and figurative reconstruction of the world. This lavishly illustrated publication provides a comprehensive overview of the artist’s work from the mid-80s to the present, and includes writings by the artist as well as bibliography and thumbnail catalogue raisonné. Edited by Michael Tarantino.~Essays by João Fernandes and José M. Miranda Justo. ~Conversation with Pedro Cabrita Reis and Adrian Searle.

Richard Billingham was born in Birmingham in 1970 and began taking photographs of his family as source material for paintings, which were subsequently exhibited as artworks in their own right. Constituting an intimate portrait of the artist’s life, at once tender, funny and melancholic, his work portrays a certain humour and intimacy, counterbalanced by an apprehension of time passing. His exhibition at Ikon Gallery in 2000 included a significant number of photographs that had never been shown before, images displayed in this publication, in several full colour sequences as well as a fold-out four piece insert. Of particular note amongst these are a collection of earlier black and white photographs (1990-91) and a selection from a more recent series focusing on diverse urban landscapes (1992-97). Billingham’s work is essentially concerned with the impossibility of closing gaps, both temporal and emotional. His photographs taken in the West Midlands town, Cradley Heath, for instance, depict places that have become stuck in his memory since childhood. In a comic yet insightful set of short explorations, a ‘glossary’ by curator Michael Tarantino completes this publication. In it, the author guides us through the recurrent symbols of Billingham’s photography, providing explanations for objects such as The Fish Tank and Alcohol & Cigarettes, as well as more conceptual issues including Public Space/Private Space and Poverty.

The questions of the “Narrative” in art and film are posed and compellingly expounded upon in this innovative publication from the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

Rachel Whiteread’s work is based on taking casts from the most commonplace objects. They evoke a combination of familiarity and strangeness, partly because they are not actually casts of the objects but of the spaces around or inside them. “House”, a casting of the interior spaces of an entire building, stimulated debate among the art world and general public alike. This catalogue introduces some of Whiteread’s less familiar works. Informative essays, together with numerous illustrations, introduce and explore the work of the sculptor.

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.

Slim catalogue documenting the exhibitions, Mirror Work 1962-1992 at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, and New Work at the Henry Moore Foundation Studio in Halifax. Foreword by Ian Cole, essays by Michael Tarantino and Robert Hopper.