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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

Following on from the bestselling box set Gathered Leaves, published to accompany Alec Soth’s touring exhibition which opened in London in 2015, this unique publication brings together five of Soth’s major books in their entirety in a single, compact, and densely detailed volume. Across more than 700 pages of newsprint, Soth updates and reimagines the original version of Gathered Leaves by reproducing every spread from these five books with detailed annotations in the form of notes, text extracts, and additional photographs. This new roadmap through Soth’s oeuvre also includes a new introduction by the artist. Soth’s meteoric rise to international acclaim began with his first book, Sleeping by the Mississippi (2004), an elegiac road trip down the ‘third coast’ of the United States, which has since has sold through numerous print runs and is widely acknowledged as a classic. The success of his subsequent volumes Niagara (2006), Broken Manual (2010), and Songbook (2015) elaborated Soth’s lyrical but unflinching approach and reinforced his position as a master of the book form. His most recent work, A Pound of Pictures (2022), brings a new, poetic perspective to the idiosyncrasies of American life and the practice of image-making, broached once again through Soth’s now-distinctive road trip format.

Read more less

Archive is the first book by Sofia Coppola, covering the entirety of her singular and influential career in film. Constructed from Coppola's personal collection of photographs and ephemera, including early development work, reference collages, influences, annotated scripts, and unseen behind-the-scenes documentation, it offers a detailed account of all eight of her films to date. Mapping a course from The Virgin Suicides (1999), through Lost in Translation (2003) and Marie Antoinette (2006), to The Beguiled (2017) and her upcoming feature Priscilla (fall 2023), exploring Priscilla Presley's early years at Graceland, this luxurious volume reflects on one of the defining and most unmistakable cinematic oeuvres of the twenty-first century. An art book personally edited and annotated throughout by Coppola, Archive offers an intimate encounter with her methods, references, and collaborators and an unprecedented insight into her working processes. Accompanying the highly personal images and texts from Coppola's archive is an extended interview with renowned film journalist Lynn Hirschberg discussing the remarkable oeuvre they reflect.

Read more less

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

Read more less

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

Read more less

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.

Read more less

Since 2014, Alessandra Sanguinetti has been returning to the small town of Black River Falls in Wisconsin, creating the photographs that would come to form the stark and elliptical series 'Some Say Ice'. The same town is the subject of 'Wisconsin Death Trip', a book of photographs taken by Charles Van Schaick in the late 1800s documenting the bleak hardships of the lives and deaths of its inhabitants. Sanguinetti first came across this book as a child, and the experience is engraved into her memory as her first reckoning with mortality. This encounter eventually led her to explore the strange relationship of photography and death, and ultimately to make her own visits to Black River Falls. The austere, sculptural scenes and ambiguous, uneasy portraits that make up 'Some Say Ice' depict a place almost outside of time. Presented unadorned by text or explication, the photographs are touched with the spirit of the gothic as well as the unmistakable tenderness familiar from Sanguinetti's series The Adventures of Guille and Belinda. By bringing undercurrents of doubt and darkness to the surface of her images, Sanguinetti alludes to things absent or invisible, playing on atmospheres both real and imagined, as well as the ghostly possibility of undoing death through the act of photography. With its title inspired by Robert Frost's famous poem equivocating on how best one's inevitable death might be met, 'Some Say Ice' is a humane look at the melancholic realities underpinning our lives, seen with glacial clarity by one of the world's foremost photographers.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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?

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

a Handful of Dust is David Campany’s speculative history of the last century, and a visual journey through some of its unlikeliest imagery. Let’s suppose the modern era begins in October of 1922. A little French avant-garde journal publishes a photograph of a sheet of glass covered in dust. The photographer is Man Ray, the glass is by Marcel Duchamp. At first they called it a view from an aeroplane. Then they called it Dust Breeding. It’s abstract, it’s realist. It’s an artwork, it’s a document. It’s revolting and compelling. Cameras must be kept away from dust but they find it highly photogenic. At the same time, a little English journal publishes TS Eliot’s poem The Waste Land. “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” And what if dust is really the key to the intervening years? Why do we dislike it? Is it cosmic? We are stardust, after all. Is it domestic? Inevitable and unruly, dust is the enemy of the modern order, its repressed other, its nemesis. But it has a story to tell from the other side. Campany’s connections range far and wide, from aerial reconnaissance and the American dustbowl to Mussolini’s final car journey and the wars in Iraq. a Handful of Dust will accompany Campany’s exhibition of the same name, curated for Le Bal, Paris (16 October 2015 – 17 January 2016), with works by Man Ray, John Divola, Sophie Ristelhueber, Mona Kuhn, Gerhard Richter, Xavier Ribas, Nick Waplington, Jeff Wall and many others, alongside anonymous press photos, postcards, magazine spreads and movies. This unusually bound book includes a separate, loose volume held in a well in the middle of the larger volume.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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'.

Read more less

A luxurious, printed clamshell box containing 28 postcards presenting striking images by American photographer Alec Soth. Hailed as a master of visual story-telling, Soth is also the author of multiple bestselling photobooks. Derived from his four most celebrated bodies of work, these photographs of American landscapes, people and culture are elucidated in an accompanying booklet with illustrated text.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

'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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

In 'The Pliable Plane', curator and historian Penelope Curtis traces the ways sculpture infiltrated architectural thought over the post-war period. Her study identifies the wall as a particular locus of creative thinking - a surface which produces both continuity and separation, and which similarly unites and distinguishes the two disciplines. Surveying a series of walls - carved, cast, applied, imagined, and even conceptual - in such places as bomb shelters, caves, war memorials, and public buildings, Curtis introduces a cast of renowned and lesser-known practitioners who defined the three-dimensional conception of the years 1945 to 1970. With close readings of the work and lives of Henry Moore, Anni Albers, Frederick Kiesler, Jorge Oteiza, and Mary Martin, among others, Curtis's fluid and perspicacious history encompasses the developments of wartime production, the discovery of the Lascaux Caves, and the rise of relief art. Turning away from familiar pairings and dichotomies, it considers spaces and surfaces of coalescence and influence. Curtis compels us to understand the wall as support as much as partition, arguing for the centrality of this very pliability to the entwined development of both sculpture and architecture.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.’

Read more less

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.

Read more less

What makes a good listener? There are a number of commonsensical ideas about what constitutes doing it well - patience, tolerance, availability, responsiveness, lack of moral judgement - but is it really so simple? Is it a skill one can easily learn or more of a quirk or talent? And why do some people seem to be so much better at it than others? Written by a psychoanalyst and a violin maker, 'Uneasy Listening' is a dialogue between two very different kinds of professional listener: the former working with speech, the latter with musical instruments. Beginning as total strangers, Anouchka Grose and Robert Brewer Young embark on an engaging, entertaining, and winding meditation on communication that weaves together wide-ranging references from across psychoanalytic theory, philosophy, contemporary politics and culture. As they discuss the differences, similarities, and resonances between their practices, they run up against some of the illuminating difficulties of dialogue itself. The result is a kind of awkward duet in which two thinkers and practitioners accommodate, interrupt, and perplex each other in an attempt to say something about what listening means.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

Co-produced with the Fundacion Botin on the occasion of a major solo exhibition at the Centro Botin in Santander, Mundo De Papel demonstrates the elaborate life-sized paper sculptures of internationally renowned artist Thomas Demand in the most ambitious book project of his work yet. Demand's practice is all about paper engineering and the relationship between representation and 'real' events. This extraordinary book takes that dialogue to a new level with the sophisticated use of paper mechanics in the form of pop-ups representing the 8 large pavilions Demand designed to be suspended in the Centro Botin, each of which replicates an urban landscape. The volume includes a separate book of installation views of the exhibition and a newly commissioned text by Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

"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.

Read more less