This book explores the uncompromising processes of autobiographical excavation at the heart of Jim Dine's art today. Here his focus lies on three self-reflective series from the past three years, each in a different medium. In the self-portraits of "Drawing the Minutes" Dine less draws with pencil on paper than carves into it, feverishly erasing and redrawing to create a shifting typography of self and a study on the effects of time. The densely painted self-portraits of "Me" comprising oils mixed with sawdust and sand deepen Dine's acts of looking out and in, each layer of pigment a layer of self-knowledge. Finally we witness the monumental bronze sculptures of "Three Ships" whose title references the ships that carried the relics of the Three Wise Men on their final journey. Five years in the making, Dine's ships are dynamic masses studded with branches, ropes and dozens of tools-one of his most beloved motifs, born from childhood hours of intense observation spent in his grandfather's hardware store. Accompanied by short personal texts by the artist and photos documenting him at work at the Kunstgiesserei St. Gallen foundry, Three Ships is a testament to Dine's vitality and transformative versatility-which sweep across six decades and show no sign of abating.
Consisting solely of previously unpublished photographs, The Way Back is a deep dive through Bruce Davidson's 60-year career. The book chronologically presents photos made between 1957 and 1992, showcasing Davidson's exceptional versatility-from his earliest assignments to later seminal bodies of work including his year-long study of teenage members of a "Brooklyn Gang" (1959), his extensive coverage of the American Civil Rights Movement in "Time of Change" (1961-65), and his breakthrough portraits of the residents of a single block in Harlem in "East 100th Street" (1966-68). Series such as "Subway" (1980) and "Central Park" (1992) furthermore confirm Davidson as a quintessential chronicler of New York City.Regardless of his motif, what emerges through this retrospective is Davidson's overt sensibility and empathy for his subjects, his commitment to documenting them in depth over time, and to capturing their beliefs, communities and subcultures. Unlike his peers who photographed events that constituted history, Davidson focused on the people within these histories. Now, drawing near the end of his long career, Davidson offers this book as a parting look at his artistic passage, an elegiac goodbye as well as a requiem: evidence how his vision, experienced over decades, has shaped our understanding of the world.
Few contemporary artists can demonstrate an oeuvre as varied, consistent and influential as that of Jim Dine-incorporating painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture and photography, and sweeping across more than six decades. Fewer still can say they are respected poets. Dine has been writing and performing intensely autobiographical poems since the late 1960s, and With Fragile Spirit is his latest collection, consisting of five volumes. These differ greatly and include "A Beautiful Day," exploring Dine's polarities of experience from delight to melancholy, from disillusion to celebration; and "Like the Big Boy Tomato," a hand-written version of his 2021 hate poem "Electrolyte in Blue," probing themes of anti-Semitism, racism, climate change and failed world leaders. Together, these books affirm poetry as the unceasing critical flow that augments and energizes his visual work.
Too Much But Not Enough is an avant-garde fashion publication by Yang Li and Antoine d'Agata, consisting of 23 LP album covers and booklets, visceral portraits of 23 women they encountered throughout China. Since launching his eponymous label in 2012, Li has drawn on underground and sub-cultural references to create a darkly romantic aesthetic. For his very first campaign he contacted photographer Antoine d'Agata, and together they shunned professional models, instead taking to the streets where they approached over 300 women from vastly different walks of life to capture their stories in image and word. "There were some really compelling moments," Li recalls, "and the tears and anguish you see in the images are totally real." The photographs vibrate with a confronting physicality; while the intimate texts, transcripts of the subjects' own voices, touch on themes of self-knowledge and beauty, love and disillusion, personal freedom and social constraint. The volumes are housed in a slipcase that has been distressed by hand with tape-a final expression of the individualist, counter-culture spirit of the project.Limited edition of 300Sprachen: Englisch, Chinesisch
Since 2007 Khalid Al Thani has dedicated his vision to the Qatari desert, taking tens of thousands of photographs (and counting). Photography is his medium and yet the effects he teases from his subjects are decidedly painterly-tone, texture and suggestion prevail over any documentary perfection of line or form. By faithfully returning to the same motifs (among them the Sidra tree, the oryx, the horse), his approach furthermore likens that of certain great painters (Cézanne with Mont Sainte-Victoire, Monet with his water lilies, Morandi with his bottles and jars spring to mind), who revisited the same beloved subjects to transcend their physicality and access a greater emotional truth. Malamh, meaning "details" or "features," comprises a volume of Al Thani's color work, and one black and white. The image sequence in each book begins with a sunrise, takes us through the changing moods of day, and ends with a starry night-a lyrical cycle which Al Thani reinvents each time he visits the desert.Sprachen: Englisch, Arabisch
Random Access is a collection of John T. Hill's photographs taken over 70 years, showing the remarkable scope and empathy of his vision. Hill's consistent focus over the decades has been what he calls "found compositions," recording "chance happenings that strike a personal chord." From a street scene in São Paulo in 1958 to the interior of a Queens taxi in 1970, from John F. Kennedy at the podium of a 1960 rally to punks in Trafalgar Square, from Walker Evans' home to recent landscapes and still lifes, his work is democratic, curious, all-embracing. Hill celebrates the contradictions and imperfections of his subjects, engages but never sentimentalizes, and is careful to never impose a singular interpretation onto the viewer. Here is none of the self-congratulation of "Look at what only I can see," but rather an open invitation for the viewer of "This is what you are also capable of seeing."
Dayanita Singh has long photographed the intriguing cloth bundles of India's archives, yet Time Measures marks the first time she has made portraits of them. Unlike its sister book Pothi Khana, which shows such bundles within their environments (on overflowing shelves, in the practiced hands of archivists), Time Measures presents these treasures photographed individually and close-up against a neutral stone background. Their details are thus revealed: the unique sun-bleached patterns in red, green or blue, the varying shapes and knots (tied and re-tied over the decades by unseen hands), the outlines of the secret contents within (which remain unknown even to Singh herself). Her images invite a process of slow, attentive looking through which the bundles assume the weathered charm of people's faces; the series becomes a shifting taxonomy of portraits. Bound in three different covers and designed to be hung directly on the wall, Time Measures furthermore extends Singh's project of transforming the book into the exhibition.
No other photographer knows the Qatari desert quite so well as Khalid Al Thani. The movements of its sands, the patterns of light, the behavior of its camels, falcons and oryxes, the changes in its sparse vegetation throughout the seasons-all this and more he has patiently observed, and captured with his camera. Al Thani photographs exclusively in analogue, and for many years a Leica with 35mm black-and-white film has been his favorite tool. Now, he has turned to Polaroids, and this book publishes the results for the first time. Al Thani's interest is not only the subtle, painterly compositions and luminous color variations of the medium, but also its fascinating irregularities: the unpredictable streaks, blotches and distortions that make every print unique.Sprachen: Englisch, Arabisch
Ralph Ellison (1913-94) is a foremost figure in American literature, hailed for his seminal novel Invisible Man (1952), a breakthrough representation of the American experience and Black everyday life. Lesser known, however, is his lifelong engagement with photography. Photographer is the first book dedicated to Ellison's extensive work in the medium, which spans from the 1930s to the '90s.Throughout his life, photography played multiple roles for Ellison: a hobby, a source of income, a note-taking tool and an artistic outlet. During his formative years in New York City in the 1940s, he keenly photographed his surroundings, with many images serving as field notes for his writing. In the last decades of his life, as he grappled with his much-anticipated second novel, Ellison turned inward, and he studied his private universe at home with a Polaroid camera. At all times his photography reveals an artist steeped in modernist thinking who embraced experimentation to interpret the world around him, particularly Black life in America. In a 1956 letter to fellow writer Albert Murray, Ellison underscored photography's importance to his creative process: "You know me, I have to have something between me and reality when I'm dealing with it most intensely." Accompanying the photographs in this book are several essays situating Ellison's work within his broader career as a writer, as well an excerpt from his 1977 essay "The Little Man at Chehaw Station: The American Artist and His Audience."Co-published with The Gordon Parks Foundation and the Ralph and Fanny Ellison Charitable Trust
This is the long-awaited new edition of Dayanita Singh's File Room, her first book dedicated to the archive, and published by Steidl in 2013. Singh's images of archives and their custodi- ans across India examine how memory is made and how history is narrated. Her photographs bring to light the paradoxes of archives: while impersonal in their classifications, each is the careful handwork of an individual archivist, an unsung keeper of history whose decisions generate the sources of much of our knowledge. Archives are vessels of orthodox facts but also the home of neglected details and forgotten documents that can unsettle the status quo. As the pace of contemporary India accelerates and its people continue to turn from the past and fix their gaze on the future, what will become of the archive? Singh prompts us to imagine archives not merely as documents of dusty scholarship but as monuments of knowledge, beautiful in their unkempt order.
Robert Frank carefully entwined his life and work, yet the man behind the camera always remained enigmatic. Goin' Down the Road with Robert Frank is a rare insider's look at Frank's world by his longtime friend and assistant (both in and out of the darkroom) Brian Graham. Graham's photos, made between 1979 and 2019, take us behind the scenes of Frank at work-on location for his 1987 film Candy Mountain, photographing Allen Ginsberg, inspecting contact sheets-and into his private life: laughing with his wife June Leaf, exploring a thrift shop, even fixing the roof of his Bleecker Street studio. Candid and spontaneous, Graham's images are often arranged in filmic sequences that create a sense of events unfolding in real time. Framed by nostalgic notes (by Graham as well as novelist and screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer) and an introduction by Ai Weiwei (another of Graham's friends from the Lower East Side in the 1980s and '90s), these images form an intimate and original portrait of Robert Frank, a central figure both in Graham's photography and the history of the medium.
This book is Dayanita Singh's meditative, sometimes melancholic exploration of a range of work environments across India. It comprises three visual chapters, each springing from individual, larger series in Singh's archive which she has now re-edited around the theme of work. The first, "Museum of Machines," presents black-and-white images of factory equipment, stately despite its grime, and only occasionally joined by human counterparts. "Blue Book" shows photographs of industrial landscapes Singh made on her wandering-exceptionally in color, the serendipitous outcome of running out of black-and-white film. All are tinged with the same eerie hue and form a poetic critique of the sites of labor. "Go Away Closer" returns us to black and white, and reveals the greatest range of subjects, from thousands of scooters in a warehouse to the charming clutter of a shop, and are taken from a series Singh originally edited according to what she calls the "note and feeling" of the images. Together, the chapters are furthermore a blueprint for the work involved in Singh's own bookmaking: the unceasing reassessment of her archive and its rebirth in book form.
Over the past ten years Mark Peterson has focused his lens on the divided political landscape America has become. The Fourth Wall takes up Peterson's ongoing documentation where his award-winning book Political Theatre, depicting the troubled lead-up to the 2016 presidential election, left off. He captures a time in which the left and right move further apart, misinformation and untruths abound in the media, and politicians have no qualms in breaking the fourth wall to recruit audiences to their causes. Peterson tackles these schisms head-on and portrays a country on edge, through subjects such as "Stop the Steal" protesters and the 6 January 2021 attack on the United States Capitol. With his trademark flash and high-contrast approach, Peterson's dramatic black-and-white images are like X-rays of America's complex political culture: "Democracy is a messy form of government," he declares, "and I try and capture it in all its chaos."
Covering over 30 years of artistic practice, this book celebrates the complex yet highly distilled photographs of Jin-me Yoon's dynamic vision. Showcasing a camera that is a witness to performative acts occurring both inside and outside the frame, the book reveals how Yoon has expanded conceptualist understandings of image-making and contributed to ongoing discussions of place and identity. In doing so, this volume illustrates how she uses the inherent mobility of images and the forces of diasporic thinking to bring disparate worlds together in poetic relation and create conditions for a different future.Featured works include Fugitive (Unbidden) (2004), which calls up stereotypes imposed on Asian Canadians and Asian Americans through popular culture in the context of intergenerational histories of war; and Long Time So Long (2022), in which, wearing traditional Korean masks that have been fused with ubiquitous emojis, Yoon performs against the background of an industrial waste plant that is also a natural bird habitat, to reimagine new ways of being in relation to nature and one another.Co-published with Scotiabank Photography Award, Toronto
Frames of Reference offers the first opportunity to view all of Lucinda Devlin's photographic series in a single volume. The nine thematic series reveal a remarkably consistent approach from the 1970s to the present; from her early work as an exponent of New Color photography to her focus on a wide variety of interiors, before expanding her scope in the 2000s to include exterior environments and landscapes. No people appear in these images, yet their influence is everywhere.Following the example of Walker Evans, Devlin is guided by specific phenomena of American culture and its developments, which she observes with a critical eye-from the early series "Pleasure Ground," offering glimpses into spaces of entertainment and diversion (discos, strip bars, fantasy hotels), to later images of treatment rooms, operating theaters, autopsy rooms, and execution chambers in American prisons in "The Omega Suites." In more recent works that are more subtle yet no less nuanced, Devlin examines the cultivation and management of landscapes in Indiana, the Midwest, the Carolinas and Arizona, as well as the changes in Utah's salt flats and Great Salt Lake. An enduring source of contemplation is the vast expanses of Lake Huron, to which she dedicated "Lake Pictures" between 2010 and 2019.Sprachen: Englisch, Deutsch
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