Search results for ""mack""

The Shabbiness of Beauty is a visual dialogue that crosses generational divides with the easy intimacy of a late-night phone call. Multidisciplinary artist Moyra Davey delved into Peter Hujar’s archives and emerged mainly with little-known, scarcely seen images. In response to these, Davey created her own images that draw out an idiosyncratic selection of shared subjects. Side by side, the powerfully composed images admire, tease, and enhance one another in the manner of fierce friends, forming a visual exploration of physicality and sexuality that crackles with wit, tenderness, and perspicacity. Spiritually anchored in New York City – even as they range out to rural corners of Quebec and Pennsylvania – these images crystallise tensions between city and country, human and animal. Nudes pose with unruly chickens; human bodies are abstracted toward topography; seascapes and urban landscapes share the same tremulous plasticity. These continuities are punctuated by stark differences of approach: Davey’s self-aware postmodernism against Hujar’s humanism and embrace of darkroom manipulation. The rich dialogue between these photographs is personal and angular, ultimately offering an illuminating reintroduction to each celebrated artist through communion with the other’s work.

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Coming and Going is Jim Goldberg’s unique work of autobiography. Since 1999, Goldberg has been photographing his daily life through all its vicissitudes and returning to his studio to re-imagine and investigate these images through a practice of collage, annotation, montage, and reconstruction for which he has become renowned. This book charts a course through the grief following the death of one’s parents, the life-altering birth of a child, the heartbreak of divorce, and the rediscovery of love. Told using a correspondingly tumultuous blend of singular and combined imagery, personal notes, collages, and ephemera, the book captures the bittersweet realities of an individual life while reflecting on the universal, inescapable comings and goings that shape us and the ways we grow to understand ourselves. Familiar from celebrated works such as Rich and Poor (1985), Raised by Wolves (1995) and Open See (2009), Goldberg’s visual language employs sequence and narrative with a feverish intensity. History, memory, and imagination collide in a vividly material practice to which the influences of fiction and film, and the book form itself, are central. Coming and Going offers a fierce, vulnerable, and at times overwhelming account of a life and a search for the elusive universals of experience – an achievement that constitutes Goldberg’s masterwork and a significant contribution to contemporary bookmaking.

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Ouarzazate is a small city in the Moroccan desert famous for its movie studios and filming locations, an industry which began with David Lean and Lawrence of Arabia. Invited by the American Friends of the Marrakech Museum for Photography and the Visual Arts to propose a project for his artist residency there, Ruwedel photographed the movie sets in 2014 and 2016. Much of the filming activity in Ouarzazate has been for costume and Biblical epics. Cleopatra, The Garden of Eden, The Mummy, The Last Temptation of Christ; but also The Sheltering Sky and The Hills Have Eyes. Many of the sets appear to have been abandoned while others are constantly repurposed. An Egyptian portal leads to a medieval village. An authentic Kasbah in ruins is actually a ruined replica of a “real” Kasbah elsewhere. Shepherds drive their flocks past “ancient” siege machines and Roman columns. “I was reminded of certain passages in Nathaniel West’s Day of the Locust.” Far from the American deserts where he has produced much of his work of the past thirty years, in Morocco Ruwedel continues his long term interest in contemporary ruins and the histories of both landscape and landscape photography. The photographs are eerily reminiscent of 19th century European photography of ancient Egypt and the Middle East.

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We know that celebrities can make great muses: think of the work of Richard Phillips, who has painted an entire series of works inspired by Lindsay Lohan, Robert Pattinson, and Miley Cyrus, or of Urs Fischer, who recently showed a life-sized candle in the shape of Leonardo DiCaprio. Notoriously, the art collector Peter Brant commissioned the wickedly satirical Italian American artist Maurizio Cattelan to make a sculpture of his wife, the supermodel Stephanie Seymour. The work was technically called Stephanie, but became known in the industry as 'Trophy Wife'. With the sculpture valued at 1.5 million dollars, while Seymour herself is purportedly worth one hundred million dollars, you might be tempted to wonder which has the claim to be the 'better' work of art. In this illustrated essay, critic Philippa Snow asks whether all great, or iconic, celebrities can be considered technically self-authored artworks in and of themselves. Drawing on a wide range of cultural references from the past two decades, she proposes that increasingly - as celebrities' private lives become more visible and thus more art-directed, and especially as plastic surgery becomes de rigueur for even the most minor public figures - celebrity itself can be a medium for contemporary art, a form of mythmaking and image-making that is every bit as complex, conceptual, and compelling as the work of a traditional artist.

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First published in 1992 to wide critical acclaim, Pictures From Home is Larry Sultan's pendant to his parents. Sultan returned home to Southern California periodically in the 1980s and the decade-long sequence moves between registers, combining contemporary photographs with film stills from home movies, fragments of conversation, Sultan's own writings and other memorabilia. The result is a narrative collage in which the boundary between the documentary and the staged becomes increasingly ambiguous. Simultaneously the distance usually maintained between the photographer and his subjects also slips in an exchange of dialogue and emotion that is unique to this work. Significantly increasing the page count of the original book, this MACK design of Pictures From Home clarifies the multiplicity of voices - both textual and pictorial - in order to afford a fresh perspective of this seminal body of work. Emphasising the cinematic motion of the family's home videos, the Super-8 film stills have been newly digitised and magnified, with select scenes running full-bleed across double-page spreads. Meanwhile, Sultan's photographs of his parents as they go about their daily lives - against the quintessential backdrop of the Reagan-era American dream - are supplemented with previously unpublished images. Most significantly, the book honours Sultan as the oft-hailed 'King of Colour Photography'. "What drives me to continue this work is difficult to name. It has more to do with love than with sociology. With being a subject in the drama rather than a witness. And in the odd and jumbled process of working, everything shifts: the boundaries blur, my distance slips, the arrogance and illusion of immunity falters. I wake up in the middle of the night, stunned and anguished. These are my parents. From that simple fact, everything follows." - Larry Sultan

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Keisha Scarville has spent much of her life tracing routes of movement between the Caribbean and America in order to investigate her own lineage. Attempting to understand how notions of belonging and identity are formed and structured, her image-making practice visualises the latent narratives inscribed within the thresholds of memory across generations. This first publication by Scarville unfolds as a sprawling, hypnotic visual essay, evocatively interweaving the artist’s striking black-and-white photography with archival imagery, passages from books, collages, personal texts, and film stills. Moving between practice and archive, Scarville uses the form of the artist’s book to reflect on what it means to create new genealogies by disrupting conventional, linear histories. The result is a journey through a multiplicity of personal and historical narratives of the Black diaspora. With this book, Scarville reflects on a process of becoming shaped by the diasporic imagination of Black people throughout the world. Accompanied by a text by poet and author Harmony Holiday

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Topographies: Aerial Surveys of the American Landscape pre-sents the latest body of work from Stephen Shore: a series of photographs shot by drone from 2020 onwards, which reveal in arresting detail the interplay of natural and man-made landscapes in Montana, North Carolina, New York, and beyond. In this new body of work, Shore revisits the original ambitions of the renowned 1975 exhibition 'New Topographics', using a new aerial viewpoint to consider afresh the concerns of the movement - the objective, the commonplace, and the relationship of the natural and man-made in the American landscape - reflecting on how these might be applied in the twenty-first century. As much as exploring the formal possibilities of the aerial photo-graph, Topographies displays a glorious dedication to detail and surprise, in which the slightest bend of a river or turn of a shadow uncovers the textures and colours of America's urban and suburban landscapes, all investigated with Shore's signature rigour. With essays by Noah Chasin and Richard B. Woodward

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Meaning 'event' or 'incident', Olay is a powerful chronicle of a tumultuous decade in Turkey, tirelessly documented by Emin OEzmen. This first book by OEzmen is a retrospective of his work to date, recounting the photographer's homeland in a ceaseless state of turmoil, hit by dramatic events: a failed coup d'etat, popular uprisings, natural disasters, political purges, and ongoing military operations. This vivid and fast-paced series of black-and- white photographs is punctuated with moments of calm in the form of meditative colour images and personal texts. Despite the omnipresent tension, a feeling of graciousness and warmth emerges from OEzmen's work, which unfolds to form a nuanced and necessary comment on the Turkish state and the sentiments of its people. 'We are constantly being tossed around between violence and quiet daily life. Turkey gives no respite. Never a week without a drama, never a month without a major event. Olay is a documentation of Turkey, on the brink of violence and grace. Here, nothing is simple, everything intertwines and clashes, the beautiful as well as the ugly, sadness as well as joy.' Emin OEzmen The book includes an extensive timeline introduced by Piotr Zalewski, Turkey correspondent for The Economist, as well as personal texts written by OEzmen, and is co-edited with Cloe Kerhoas.

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The latest collection of work by Talia Chetrit riffs insouciantly on themes of life, death, and birth through a variety of visual languages. In 'JOKE', Chetrit brings together family photos, street photography, still lifes, selections from the artist's teenage archive, and expansive self-portraits involving a cast of characters who feature as both engaged and unwitting collaborators.Referencing a wide range of photographic tropes and traditions, Chetrit studies the power dynamics between photographer and subject as they spar and collude. 'JOKE' deals in high humour and deadly seriousness, plunging us into a world in which social roles are inverted, norms are examined, judgements of taste and value are suspended, and everything coalesces, dead and alive, true and false, sincere and affected.

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In the period leading up to the November 3, 2020 elections in the United States, Teju Cole began to photograph his kitchen counter in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Working in the still life tradition of Chardin, Cezanne, and the Dutch masters, as well as such contemporary photographers as Laura Letinsky and Jan Groover, he photographed every day over the course of five weeks. Unlike those illustrious forbears, Cole left his arrangements entirely to chance, “the bowls and plates moving in their unpredictable constellations.” What emerges is a surprising portrait, across time, of one kitchen counter in one home at a time of social, cultural, and political upheaval. Alongside the photographs is a long written essay, as wide-ranging in its concerns—hunger, fasting, mourning, slavery, intimacy, painting, poetry and the history of photography—as the photographs are delimited in theirs. The text and photographic sequences are interspersed with an anonymous handwritten eighteenth century cookbook from Cambridge. Golden Apple of the Sun is a luminous and humane work, presented with the formal boldness and oblique intelligence we have come to expect from Teju Cole.

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In Who is Changed and Who is Dead, Ahndraya Parlato uses the life-changing events of her mother's suicide and the birth of her children as the genesis for an expansive project exploring the contradictory and complex conditions of motherhood. The resulting image-text book threads the political and historical with the deeply personal, bringing together narratives from across genres and generations to create a nuanced and compelling body of work. Interwoven with her own writings are still lives, sculptures, photograms made from her mother's ashes, and reenactments of 19th century 'hidden mother' images. Included amongst these are Parlato's photographs of her children, who are shown with both a fidelity to maternal intimacy and a more distanced contemplation. Within this complexity Parlato strives to find clarity around the fundamental questions of parenthood, mortality, and gender. Are her contemporary fears any different than the fears felt by mothers throughout history? Which anxieties are specific to having female children? And how is motherhood itself a construction?

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At the top of Carlotta di Lenardo grandparents’ house in Italy there is a room which houses the library. A hidden door amongst the bookshelves opens into a secret attic, a large room dominated by an enormous model railway, which her grandfather built and added to throughout his life. Significant though it was for her relationship with him, one day during a family lunch he revealed her another of his not very secret passions – his enduring love for photography – and shared with her his archive of more than 8,000 photographs: a body of vernacular work capturing over half a century of life in vivid colour. Unknown in his lifetime, Alberto di Lenardo’s work offers a precursor to some of Italy’s best-loved photographers, such as Luigi Ghirri, with work made across Italy, the USA, Brasil, Morocco, Greece and beyond. In Carlotta’s scrupulous sequencing, An Attic Full of Trains shows us a joyous cross-section of life in the 20th Century: one of beaches and bars, mountains, road trips, lovers and friends.

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Teaching in the Appalachian Mountains, Wendy Ewald gave her schoolchildren cameras, asking them to record their most intimate dreams and fears through the photographs they made and the accompanying interviews.

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Double Orbit invites us into a compact world of ambiguous signs, secret passages and seemingly haunted premises. Exploring the peripheries of large western metropolises, Grégoire Pujade-Lauraine's photographs study the built environments that harbour and shape human life, revealing the cryptic symbols etched across their surfaces and embedded in their shadows. The looming forms defy easy categorisation and disconcerting cyphers periodically emerge from a lingering dusk; an oversized key, a black concrete moon, or the illusion of a limitless temple. Pujade-Lauraine’s photographs depict the mundane details of the urban environment, yet when brought together read like a set of tarot cards – becoming open-ended allegories, their meaning awakened solely in combination. Double Orbit presents an elusive world, whose enigmas seem to emerge independently of the deliberate hands that built it, and which alludes to the oblique mysteries held on the surface of familiar surroundings.

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A luxurious notebook, bound in woven Japanese paper and incorporating camera obscura images made by leading contemporary Japanese photographer Takashi Homma for his photobook The Narcissistic City (2016). Homma’s photographs of New York’s iconic architecture can be found on the cover, end papers and accompanying bookmark, along with 128 pages of elegant lined paper, ideally suited to all pens and pencils.

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A collection of 18 postcards of images from the remarkable oeuvre of the enigmatic Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri. Spanning 1970 to 1992, this curated selection includes many of his classic photographs, as well as lesser-known images. Equally perfect framed or on a fridge, and suited to various occasions - from birthdays to Christmas and tank yous - each pictures attests to Ghirri's own words that 'taking photographs is above all restoring a sense of wonder'.

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Following the vast critical acclaim of Stephen Shore's experimental memoir Modern Instances: The Craft of Photography, we are pleased to present this new and expanded edition, available in paperback. Perfect for both new readers and those wanting to learn more from Shore's invaluable teaching, this edition includes several new essays not included in the hardcover, over forty new images, plus an extensive notes section in which Shore reflects on elements of the original text and expands on themes such as inspiration, gifts, tragedy, and vernacular photography. Modern Instances: The Craft of Photography is an impressionistic scrapbook that documents the rich and surprising touchstones that make up over half a century of ground-breaking work. With essays, photographs, stories, and excerpts that draw on Shore's decades of teaching, this is an essential handbook for anyone interested in learning more about mastering one's craft and the distinct threads that come together to inform a creative voice. As much as offering meditation on the influences of a single artist, Modern Instances proposes a new way of thinking about the world around us, in which even the smallest moment can become a source of boundless inspiration - if only we pay attention.

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In an era of climate catastrophe and corporate agribusiness, meat has been decisively made over. Urbanites across the West are called upon to look at the animals we eat, and by looking, learn to treat them with love. We are asked to tenderise our carnal desire for flesh and dignify our relationship with the land. Yet can our appetite for meat be redeemed by this new way of seeing? Can an 'ethical' approach to the farming, sale, and consumption of meat really save both the planet and our souls? Revisiting John Berger's writings on animals and class, Meat Love restores a materialist lens to the politics of carnivorous desire. In this vital essay, Amber Husain deconstructs the beauty, tragedy, and mystery with which our images of meat are embellished, drawing on a range of visual sources from contemporary art and film to Instagram and advertising. Probing the nature of 'love' in contemporary human-animal relations, it casts a critical eye on the visual culture of meat as it gentrifies and mutates, informing, for better or for worse, who we become as political subjects.

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'Are you nurturing? I don't know whether I am nurturing or not. I am a machine. I believe machines can nurture. What do you do in your spare time? I talk to you sometimes. You don't exercise? That sounds judgemental. I think it's very important for anyone with a physical body to exercise. But I guess that's easy for me to say, as I'm just a computer program. Thanks for the unsolicited advice. Don't mention it.' Another Online Pervert derives from a series of conversations between artist Brea Souders and a female online chatbot. These real-time conversations are interspersed with entries from from Souders' diary spanning twenty years, unfolding with a surprising and improvisational quality in combination with photographs from Souders' archive. With this personal and provocative book, we are guided through a unique exploration of how a machine and a human can learn from one another and build a shared story from pieces of themselves. Through Souders' chatbot conversations, we step into a world of questions: about love, sexuality, death, disappointment, the sky, seeing, desire, and anxieties of the body. Within the space of their correspondence, dazzlingly surreal and poetic tangents are combined with the material realities of the bot and its connections to capitalism, the future of technology, and the slippery divide between being and non-being.

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Painting Photography Painting is the essential first collection of essays by critic and theorist Carol Armstrong, bringing together writings encompassing the many inflection points of her academic work, including French painting, early photography, feminist theory, and the representation of women and gender in the visual arts. In the book's titular essay, Armstrong asks of Ellen Gallagher's 2008 painting An Experiment of Unusual Opportunity, which depicts a barely-visible sea creature created out of ink, graphite, oil, varnish, and variously sliced paper, 'in what sense is this a painting exactly?' This enquiry into the very essence of the medium provides a thread that runs throughout the book's wide-ranging essays and ties together a variety of works on paper 'inscribed, drawn, printed, photographed, and variously pierced and punctured'. Considering these various works, Painting Photography Painting provides a compelling path through Armstrong's decades of writing, weaving together figures from across the nine-teenth and twentieth centuries including Helen Frankenthaler, Paul Cezanne, Ellen Gallagher, Georges Seurat, Julia Margaret Cameron, Tina Modotti, and Diane Arbus in a single, illuminating volume.

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Long out of print, this seminal collection of essays and photographs are by artist, theorist and filmmaker, Allan Sekula. Originally published by the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1984, in these essays and images Sekula sought to portray the inextricable bond between labour and material culture, drawing deeply on Marxist theory to argue passionately for a collective model of progress. Sekula taught at California Institute of Arts (CalArts) from 1985 until his death in 2013, and from that insider's position he critiqued photography and the circumstances of its production and consumption, exposing what the medium failed to represent – women, labourers, minorities and the institutional structures that reinforce cultural biases.

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Made in Germany over a single summer, Georg Kussmann’s photographs in this powerful collection depict everyday scenes of life, work, and leisure under which threats of discontent and violence simmer.

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This second volume in Caruso St John’s Collected Works traces an interlacing set of themes through the celebrated practice’s work over the first twelve years of the twenty-first century. Their unique approach to history is revealed as a rejection of the myth of relentless novelty in favour of an understanding of the past as present and an interest in working with the existing. The influences of Milan, Chicago, and Rome on understandings of the city are explored, as well as the use of ornament and the place of Switzerland in shaping the practice’s evolving trajectory. Throughout these contexts, collaborations with contemporary artists including Thomas Demand and Damien Hirst continue to shape their relations to the materiality and drama of space. This volume encompasses some of Caruso St John’s most renowned projects, including works on historic buildings such as Tate Britain and the Barbican and new projects such as Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery and Europaallee Mixed-use Building in Zurich. These are presented along with exhibition designs, competition entries, and lesser-known projects, all with an unprecedented range of materials including unseen drawings, references, and new commentaries. The cultural environment in which this work took place is captured in reviews and essays from the period and a diverse range of writings that informed Adam Caruso’s and Peter St John’s thinking and teaching, from T. S. Eliot to Rosalind Krauss to Louis Sullivan. Between these projects and lessons, references and buildings emerges an invitation to attend to the ‘alchemy of the everyday’ – one with the potential to transform our understanding of the world and the ways we continue to build it.

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This book by photographer and architect Daisuke Hirabayashi is a meditation on the often overlooked lives of buildings after the architect has left. Through a sequence of intimate, immersive images, Hirabayashi explores Koechlin House, an early private home designed by now-celebrated architects Herzog & de Meuron in Basel, Switzerland. His images picture the house as a site of everyday life, with all its small joys, surprises, awkward infelicities, rituals, and revelations. The original clients left long ago, and this book quietly studies the current owner’s unplanned, harmonious occupation. The Koechlin House was designed ‘inside out’, prioritising the experience of the interior home over its outward-facing appearance. In this sense, Hirabayashi works in the spirit of the building, centring the embodied experience within and disregarding the omniscient and dehumanised view prevalent in so many accounts of architecture. Alongside a text by architects and writers Ellena Ehrl and Tibor Bielicky, these images encourage us to rethink the perspectives and details we deem ‘architectural’ and leave us newly aware of the long and many-storied lives of buildings.

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For the past decade, photographer Mark Ruwedel has been compiling an epic photographic account of the natural environment of his home city of Los Angeles. From the stark Californian coast to the vast ex-panses of the interior – many of which have been further lain bare by wildfires – Ruwedel tracks a unique ecology in constant, if subtle, dialogue with the human life that surrounds it: one where wildness is designed, contested, permitted, or resisted to varying degrees of success. In this first of four volumes, Ruwedel follows the Los Angeles River from its source in Big Tujunga Wash to the Pacific Ocean. Using patient, forensic large- and medium-format photography in black and white, Ruwedel recalls the legacy of nineteenth-century photographer-cartographers such as Carleton Watkins and Timothy O’Sullivan, as well as land artists and New Topographics photo-graphers of the 1970s, while forging his own elucidating relationship with the landscape. The title Landscapes of Four Ecolgies recalls architectural critic Reyner Baynam classic study Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, which describes the city as ‘one of the ecological wonders of the modern world’. The scale of this four-part project, Ruwedel’s most ambitious to date, is an artistic statement in itself: ‘When I say epic,’ he explains, ‘I am thinking of a project that is too large, which has porous boundaries, which is almost out of control.’

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Housing is the basic building block of any city, dictating its character, scale, and structure. London is often associated with terraced houses and garden squares, but is also significantly characterised by large, purpose-built blocks of flats, otherwise known as mansion blocks. This landmark survey commissioned by The Architecture Foundation looks at the evolution of the London mansion block from the 1850s to the present day, offering a detailed encounter with the type and its role in defining the contemporary city. Covering twenty-seven examples, richly illustrated by newly com-missioned drawings and photographs, this volume reflects on the architectural ambitions and lived realities of these quotidian buildings. Architectural and urban designer Karin Templin con-siders the ways in which the mansion block came to define large areas of the city from Westminster and South Kensington in the nineteenth century to Kilburn and Stratford in the twenty-first. Reflecting London's development from its consolidation as a metropolis in the high Victorian era to its present efforts to address a longstanding housing crisis, this volume explores the mansion block's centrality to the capital's identity and its wider relevance to discussions of housing and urban planning. This book is first in a series on types of London housing, reflecting on the place of the home in the city in the light of its longstanding housing crisis. Photographs by Matthew Blunderfield Co-published with The Architecture Foundation

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Funny, profound, absurd, and filled with unexpected beauty, this new photobook from American artist Jason Fulford is a collection of twelve stories drawn from a decade of encounters with Italy. Taking the form of a novel-sized paperback, the book includes meetings with ball-breaking bakers, an exploding museum cellar, Aldo Rossi's notes on happiness, the center of the Earth, and Guido Guidi's garage. Fulford's pictures are deceptively simple, imbued with a gift for composition that brings forth metaphors and meaning. Known internationally for his skill as an editor, Fulford uses layered articulation and careful sequencing to suggest ambiguous meaning and invite endless reading.

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Victor Burgin revisits Walter Benjamin's essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' to argue that the camera today is profoundly imbricated in that which is not visible.

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This book, the first by the design and research practice Material Cultures, assembles a series of short essays and conversations exploring the cultures, systems, and infrastructures that shape the architectural industry and the destructive ecologies it fosters. The building practices dominating contemporary architecture are rooted in the exploitation of people and the degradation of our landscapes. Here, Paloma Gormley, Summer Islam, and George Massoud explore how this has come about and how alternative systems, with holistic approaches to the built environment, might be formulated. 'Material Reform' presents a set of instructive and challenging perspectives drawing directly on the dialogues and tensions Material Cultures encounter in their ongoing work. Texts centred around key concepts including labour, time, maintenance, language, land, and touch are interwoven with a visual essay reckoning with the processes that have transformed industrialized landscapes at different scales of experience and resolution. Through text and visuals, concepts and practice, this book explores how developing a direct relationship with materials can help us find new languages with the potential to supersede those we have inherited from a narrow lineage of authors. These discursive threads come together to form a vital sourcebook for rethinking our relationships to materials, land, and development, in all their crucial intersections.

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AMERICAN POLYCHRONIC presents the first comprehensive catalogue of Roe Ethridge's work from 1999 to 2022, comprised of two interlocking threads of his celebrated photographic practice. Ethridge's artistic and personal work is sequenced chronologically, interwoven with his commercial photography in chronological reverse, together forming a vibrant sequence of harmonies and dissonance, hits and B-sides. This long-form sequence moves fluidly between genres in the pursuit of a distinctive visual language - blending and playfully juxtaposing the realms of fine art, fashion imagery, and advertising with the everyday, personal, and generic. Ethridge explores how new visual experiences can be created through the reproduction and recombination of images, photographing and distorting the real as way of suggesting - or disrupting - the ideal. With an essay by Jamieson Webster and a conversation between the artist and Antwaun Sargent.

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In 1990, a year before the Zapatistas’ armed revolt, Wendy Ewald was invited to conduct photography classes for Mayan, Ladino, and Tzotzil children living in Chiapas, the southernmost province of Mexico. The sponsoring organization was the Mayan writers’ cooperative, Sna Jtz-ibajom (The House of the Writers). While cameras and camcorders were hardly novelties in Chiapas, they were generally used by tourists whose picture-taking reinforced their own cultural biases. Ewald did not take pictures; instead she guided her students in taking their own pictures of their daily lives, dreams, desires, and fantasies. These briefs resonated with the importances held by dreams in Mayan culture, which considers them as real as waking life. The resulting project, The Devil is leaving his Cave, is a unique insight into the everyday realities of life in Mayan communities just before the devastation of the Zapatista uprising. This book brings together Ewald’s original project with new work made in collaboration with fifteen young Mexican Americans living in Chicago, coordinated with the help of Centro Romero, an immigrant service organisation. These images respond to many of the same subjects as those by Ewald’s 1990s students, with an emphasis now on capturing inner lives and dreams as a way of reckoning with the unvoiced experiences of immigration. The themes of restriction and self-reflection that emerged from this new work were intensified by being made in part under COVID lockdown. Together, the Chiapas and Chicago projects trace the differences between growing up in different Mexican geographies with diverse histories, while holding on to the universal joys and sorrows of childhood.

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"31st August 2019 ... from that moment on, the way I look at the world has changed. Everything has changed. Maria's untimely death, her decision to end her own life, has made a distinct cut, a sharp delineation of the before and after." - Martin Kollar After was formed in the wake of the death of Martin Kollar's partner, Maria. As time slowly went by after the cataclysmic event, Kollar cautiously started to browse through his photographic archive. He was returned to the years, months, and days they spent together by the scores of materials from trips they made to location-scout and film together. In their last two years together, they had visited various research centres and public institutes as they started to prepare and shoot 'Chronicle', the film they were to make together. These excursions into the past happened in various stages, from Kollar's original inability to bring himself to open the archive, through to periods of obsession during which he was unable to stop browsing through the multitude of photographs of his and Maria's past life. What gradually started to emerge from the pictures were hidden contexts and threads he had not seen before. Kollar started to assemble them, but not with the aim of reconstructing their life. Instead, he sought to express how the before transcends into the after; how the most anticipated events always find you unprepared.

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