Search results for ""mack""

The first catalogue raisonne of Doug Aitken's work spans all of the artist's major ground-breaking projects in film, photography, sculpture, and beyond, with authoritative texts on his practice and oeuvre.

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In 2009, the artist Anna Ostoya created a booklet with textual collages using an essay by the political theorist Chantal Mouffe, 'Politics and Passions: The Stakes of Democracy' (2002). In the essay, Mouffe critiqued the then-dominant 'beyond left and right' politics of neoliberalism and warned of its dangers - the rise of right-wing populist parties. Fascinated by Mouffe's strikingly prophetic ideas, as well as her bold call to fight the status quo in order to radicalise democracy and to prevent violence, Ostoya returned to the booklet in 2019. She composed for it a series of portraits based on sketches of people on the New York City subway and on reproductions of her paintings and collages from the preceding decade. She also conducted a conversation with Mouffe about the politics of the last forty years, about the contemporary moment and about art, which is included in this publication.

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Since 2015, John Divola has been making photographic projects in an abandoned air force housing complex in Victorville, California. By intervening in the buildings’ disused interiors with spray paint then photographing the modified scenes, Divola creates work that sits at an intriguing juncture of photography, sculpture, and installation. The images in Terminus gaze down derelict hallways towards dark shapes which Divola has painted at their ends. Through layers of paint, dust, and plaster, they exert an unmistakable pull on the viewer, at once suggesting the deterministic forces of fate and the rupturing possibility of escape. Arranging and juxtaposing theses images within the book as a considered object, the artist leads the viewer on a stochastic and entrancing traverse through the abandoned compounds. Continuing the conceptual experimentation that has defined Divola’s oeuvre, Terminus captures a tension between the observation of the specific and the insistence of the abstract. These are real places, shot in the available light of early morning, but altered by Divola’s obscure hieroglyphs they are alive with suggestions of symbolism and fiction. Sharp details testify to the abandonment and demise of half-familiar scenes even as they transfigure them into stage-like arenas for ideation. Within the transitional spaces of these passageways, we are always travelling and never arriving, caught between the tidal currents of history and speculation.

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In 1977, Stephen Shore travelled across New York state, Pennsylvania, and eastern Ohio - an area in the midst of industrial decline that would eventually be known as the Rust Belt. Shore met steelworkers who had been thrown out of work by plant closures and photographed their suddenly fragile world: deserted factories, lonely bars, dwindling high streets, and lovingly decorated homes. Across these images, a prosperous middle America is seen teetering on the precipice of disastrous decline. Hope and despair alike lurk restlessly behind the surfaces of shop fronts, domestic interiors, and the fraught expressions of those who confront Shore's 4x5" view camera. Originally commissioned as an extended photographic report for Fortune Magazine in the vein of Walker Evans, Shore's multifaceted investigation has only gained political salience in the intervening years. Shore's subjects - including workers, union leaders, and family members - had voted for Jimmy Carter the year preceding his visit; now he found them disillusioned with the new president, fated to leave behind the Democratic party and become the 'Reagan Democrats'. Through unfailingly engrossing images by one of the world's acknowledged masters, Steel Town provides an immersive portrait of a time and place whose significance to our own is ever more urgent.

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In this book Sam Contis presents a new window onto the work of the iconic American photographer Dorothea Lange. Drawing from Lange's extensive archive, Contis constructs a fragmented, unfamiliar world centred around the figure of the day sleeper - at once a symbol of respite and oblivion. The book shows us one artist through the eyes of another, with Contis responding to resonances between her and Lange's ways of seeing. It reveals a largely unknown side of Lange, and includes previously unseen photographs of her family, portraiture from her studio, and pictures made in the streets of San Francisco and the East Bay. Day Sleeper will be featured alongside other works of Contis' in the exhibition Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures at the Museum of Modern Art, February-May 2020.

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First published in 1986 and long out of print, Between charts Burgin’s passage from early conceptual art, via appropriationist works and critiques of mass media imagery to a series of photo-texts informed by psychoanalysis, semiotics, cinema studies and feminism. Photographer, critic and curator David Campany writes: “Between was first published into a time when the art markets came to dominate and dictate as never before. Art was no longer that stubborn space of resistance and reflection; it was to be part of the spectacle of neoliberal capitalism in which image is all. Self-congratulatory art fairs, artists as media celebrities, bloated auction prices, and the reduction of criticality to recognizable and increasingly empty gestures. … Burgin makes photographic work like no other artist, but his themes and motifs are drawn from experiences common to us all – the modern city, the structures of family, language as something that forms and reforms us, the power of images, principles of government, memory and history. And yet, encouraged by the media to look to art for quick messages, some audiences and critics have found his work ‘inaccessible’. Actually Burgin’s work is among the most accessible I know, if by that we mean ‘easy to get into’. It’s the getting out that’s tricky.” Interweaving Burgin’s visual work with fragments from interviews, talks and letters, Between offers insights into the relation of ‘theory’ to ‘practice’ in a form of art which has undermined the basis of this distinction. This MACK facsimile makes Burgin’s historic and groundbreaking book available for the first time in over three decades.

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"At first the focus of my project was my gender transition, but along the way I found out that it's about an ongoing search for myself: being a human with feelings, who is continuously developing." - Marvel Harris MARVEL describes the journey of Marvel Harris' personal battles with mental illness, self-love, acceptance, and gender identity, all told through a searing collection of self-portraits spanning the course of five years. These photographs present a new-found visual language; a tool with which Marvel was able to express those emotions that, on account of his autism, he previously struggled to make sense of. The process of making these portraits allowed him to connect to the world around him at the time he needed it most. Winner of the MACK First Book Award 2021, MARVEL is an important new voice which contributes to an increased awareness of the issues surrounding gender identity and mental health. In doing so, this deeply personal book demands a more tolerant attitude from society towards transgender people and those who don't identify as entirely male or female.

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In 1978 Luigi Ghirri self-published his first book, an avant-garde manifesto for the medium of photography and a landmark in his own remarkable oeuvre. Kodachrome has long been out of print and on the 20th anniversary of Ghirri's death, MACK is proud to publish the second edition. 'Ghirri fights to maintain our ability to see. His works are powerful devices for the re-education of the gaze. They alter the perception we have of the world without proposing a single path to follow, rather they provide us with the tools we need to find the one we're looking for.'Francesco Zanot Part amateur photo-album, Ghirri presents his surroundings in tightly cropped images, making photographs of photographs and recording the Italian landscape through it's adverts, postcards, potted plants, walls, windows, and people. His work is deadpan, reflecting a dry wit, and is a continuous engagement with the subject of reality and of landscape as a snapshot of our interaction with the world. This new edition of Kodachrome is published as a facsimile of the original, adopting the original design, text layout and image sequence, but using new image files scanned from Ghirri's original film to take advantage of modern technology and printing methods. A small booklet is included with an essay by Francesco Zanot, which offers a contemporary perspective on the historical impact of Kodachrome, alongside French and German translations of the original texts from the book (which were published in English and Italian). 'The daily encounter with reality, the fictions, the surrogates, the ambiguous, poetic or alienating aspects, all seem to preclude any way out of the labyrinth, the walls of which are ever more illusory... to the point at which we might merge with them... The meaning that I am trying to render through my work is a verification of how it is still possible to desire and face a path of knowledge, to be able finally to distinguish the precise identity of man, things, life, from the image of man, things, and life.' Luigi Ghirri Born in Scandiano in 1943, Luigi Ghirri spent his working life in the Emilia Romagna region, where he produced one of the most open and layered bodies of work in the history of photography. He was published and exhibited extensively both in Italy and internationally and was at the height of his career at the time of his death in 1992. Photography critic and curator Francesco Zanot has been working with some of the most renowned European and international photographers, including Alec Soth and Olivo Barbieri, for over 10 years. He has participated in multiple conferences and seminars on photography in different institutions such as Columbia University in New York and the American Academy in Rome. He is associate editor of Fantom, photographic quarterly magazine based in Milan and New York.

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This essay-led book project by Izabella Scott and Skye Arundhati Thomas examines ongoing land disputes, military occupation, and communication blackouts. Through an extended text and a selection of photo essays made in collaboration with photographers, the project gathers together records produced under daily surveillance and confrontation. It seeks a new register of writing and image to make visible the conditions of military occupation and the protracted violence of the blackout.

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This intimate, conversational reader transports us to the enchanted world of Alessandra Sanguinetti’s photographic series The Adventures of Guille and Belinda, exploring the evolution of this celebrated work and the themes and questions it raises. Made in the countryside of Buenos Aires Province, Sanguinetti’s series follows the lives of two cousins as they come of age alongside the realities of rural life. From a young age, Guille and Belinda have been Sanguinetti’s collaborators, co-conspirators, and playmates, evoking the unique worlds suspended between dreams and reality that define childhood, adolescence, and eventually adulthood. Here, they reflect with Sanguinetti on the work’s making and their changing relationship to it over time in an extended conversation illustrated with previously unseen images from across the years. This discussion is complemented by a conversation between Sanguinetti and curators Clément Chéroux and Pierre Leyrat, unpacking the ways this work engages with and disrupts conversations around documentary photography, artistic collaboration, and the depiction of the lives of girls and women the world over. This reader coincides with a solo exhibition of Alessandra Sanguinetti’s work at Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris, opening 30 January 2024.

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The title of this new book from renowned photographer and book-maker Torbjorn Rodland suggests that the artist is looking for the divine in his sitters. If the child in Madonna and child paintings sym-bolises truth, then the pregnant virgin might represent a temporarily concealed truth - one masked or hidden behind compromised shells and failing bodies, young and old. The photographs in this arresting new collection negotiate surface and interiority and welcome tensions between contingent reality and archetypes, often uncannily recalling day-to-day life in intensely physical and opaquely allusive scenes. Constructed with characteristic precision and an instinct for surrealism and surprise, this sequence feeds on symbolism and visual texture in a sense reminiscent of classic 'art' photography or religious painting, but its self-conscious edge gives it a distinct and hard-to-fathom charge. With The Pregnant Virgin, Rodland explores analogue photography in dialogue both with online digital culture and visual art from before photography existed as a stable medium.

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The Triple Folly presents the rich collaboration between artist Thomas Demand, architects Caruso St John, and textile makers Kvadrat which produced an astonishing new pavilion for Kvadrat’s Ebeltoft campus. The basis of the building is three found paper objects – a legal pad, a paper plate, and a soda jerk hat – which Demand brought to Caruso St John with the simple question: ‘Can you make this into architecture?’ In response, the architects created a sculptural tripartite folly, a kind of inhabitable still life poised on the area’s rolling seaside hillocks, encompassing a meeting room, a kitchen, and a flexible living space which holds a textile work by the artist Rosemarie Trockel. Inspired by Kvadrat’s role as a celebrated textile producer, Demand initially pursued the idea of the tent as an archetypal architectural structure with many iterations across contexts of leisure and shelter, simplicity and grandeur. Translating these concepts into his own artistic idiom of paper, he tasked Caruso St John with materialising this lightness of form, with a touch of his distinctive, duplicitous whimsy. The final building, completed in September 2022, achieves this through a harmonious sequence of steel and fibreglass structures which create their environments through the fall of light and shadow, textured opacity and welcoming transparency. This publication presents extensive images of the completed buildings alongside in-depth illustrated conversations with Frank Gehry, Denise Scott Brown, Adam Caruso, Valerie Verhack, Anders Byriel, Emilie Appercé, and Thomas Demand.

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Face to Face presents a selection of portraits of artists by three of the most prominent portrait artists of our time. Bringing together the diverse and distinctive work of Tacita Dean, Brigitte Lacombe, and Catherine Opie, this book forms an investigation into the charged genre of portraiture and its various approaches, navigating tensions between intimacy and publicity. While the three artists collected here share a wide set of historical touchstones, each deploys the camera differently: Dean exploits cinema's capacity for duration; Lacombe takes her cameras out on assignment; Opie works in the tradition of the studio photograph. Often overlapping in the subjects depicted, Face to Face offers an opportunity to look closely at bracing, intimate, and resonant portraits of the seminal thinkers and makers that these artists have encountered across the fields of music, painting, photography, film, and literature, among them Hilton Als, Maya Angelou, Richard Avedon, Joan Didion, David Hockney, Joan Jonas, Fran Lebowitz Patti Smith, Kara Walker, and many others. Published in conjunction with an exhibition at the International Center of Photography (ICP), New York, the book includes essays by the exhibition's curator, Helen Molesworth, and the artist and writer Jarrett Earnest

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Beautiful, Still. is the first monograph from photographer Colby Deal, documenting the people, objects, and environments of everyday life in the Third Ward neighbourhood in Houston, Texas, where the artist grew up. In this ongoing project, currently consisting of over a thousand negatives, Deal sets out to provide a visual record of overlooked communities and the cultural characteristics gradually being erased by gentrification, as well as a depiction of communities of colour whose members are often portrayed with negative connotations. Through these instinctive black-and-white photographs, Deal’s down-to-earth approach to his subjects is made apparent; at times candid and blurred, other times poised and sharply focussed, the series builds to convey the dynamism and vibrancy of family, community, and individual life in the Third Ward. The scratches and dust left on the negatives reflect the marks of lived life and simultaneously suggest the fragility of these documents and the corresponding precarity of the fabrics of social life they often depict. Deal’s almost conversational tone — the anthesis of media portrayals of the neighbourhood — invites his viewers in with a sense of joy and intuitive playfulness. From these alternately staged and documentary images, a new narrative emerges about a reductively and oppressively narrativized place, celebrating the agency and freedom that the photographic medium can offer.

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An iconic project made at the height of the 'Troubles', Troubled Land deals with the small but insistent signs of political division embedded in the landscape of Northern Ireland. At the heart of the Irish conflict lays the land - who owns it, who controls it, whose history it expresses. Paul Graham's quietly radical book keeps this material truth in mind as it uniquely combines landscape and conflict photography, seducing us with bucolic views in which telling details only gradually appear: painted kerbs, distant soldiers or helicopters, flags and graffiti, paint-splattered roads, each tacitly aligning that location to its Republican or Loyalist allegiance. Pastoral photographs of green fields and hedgerows reveal themselves to be images of conflict and dispute - despite the steadiness of the photographic frame and the clarity of Graham's vision, this is unsettled land. Originally published in 1986, Troubled Land is reprinted here for the first time in thirty-five years. Controversial then for its use of colour and refusal to follow the cliched tropes of photojournalism, the book was pivotal in providing a fresh perspective on Northern Ireland's 'Troubles' and left a lasting impact on landscape photography, suggesting how it might engage with politics and society rather than escape from them. Together with A1 - The Great North Road and Beyond Caring, it completes a new edition of the remarkable trilogy of books Graham made in 1980s UK.

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This collection evokes a mysterious and fragmented cityscape of two places - London and Athens - both of which artist Effie Paleologou has come to regard as almost home. Working nocturnally, when identities become blurred and indeterminate, Paleologou conjures a third fictional staging that she has become all the more attached to. Her images are infused with a sense of the familiar but are equally beholden to the states of uncertainty and vulnerability that arise in alternative realities. Stripped of inhabitants this hybrid city appears silent yet strangely resonant. Paleologou offers a modern mapping of transitory and liminal spaces. She is drawn to train stations, hotels, carparks, seaports and airports, sites in which encounters, departures, disappearances, and endings unfold perpetually. Shadows and artificial light cast across urban geometries reveal phantasmagoric scenes and uncanny moods. If this is home, there is a restless theatre at play too. Alienation and belonging belong together here. With essays by Brian Dillon and Iain Sinclair.

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In 1983, Ursula Schulz-Dornburg accompanied two ethnologists and an architect on a research trip to Tana Toraja on the central Indonesian island of Sulawesi. Initiated by the Royal Tropical Institute of Amsterdam, the trip was intended to “explore the changing patterns in architecture and symbolism among the Sa‘dan Toraja”. On the way back from Rantepao to Ujung Pandang airport, Schulz-Dornburg passed the distinctive houses of the Bugis or To-Ugiq people, perched on the yellow paddy fields. Fascinated by their complex, expressive architectures, she began to photograph the houses in the short time she had before leaving, realising that the structures would likely not exist in their traditional form for much longer. The result is a body of work that not only surveys the houses’ physical forms but also considers wide-ranging ideas of physical and emotional homebuilding and the precarious place of tradition in the present day. Poised between heaven and earth and standing above the water when the rice fields are flooded, the Bugis houses reflect the creation myth of their people, in which the gods of the upper and lower worlds came together to create man to populate the uninhabited middle world. The farmers depicted by Schulz-Dornburg are likewise suspended between historic tradition and the impending pressures of the contemporary world. As they go about their work or greet her camera, they and their homes are held in the balance between past and future, mythology and everyday reality. With these shrewd and sensitive images, Schulz-Dornburg captures life as it is built and lived within a particular culture and landscape, offering a searching reflection on the places we call home. With a text by Sirtjo Koolhof.

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A Civil Rights Journey presents the astonishing archive of Dr Doris Derby: photographer, activist, and professor of anthropology. Active throughout the Civil Rights Movements of the mid twentieth century in the southern United States, particularly Mississippi, Derby acted as a photographer, organiser and teacher, making photographs of the intimate and human side of the everyday struggle for survival and human rights. She photographed both the organisation of political events, meetings, and funerals, alongside the literacy, co-operative and community theatre programmes, many of which she founded, and encountered much danger and tragedy along the way. Here we see the speeches and protests that gave the movement its defining moments, as well as vital figures including Muhammad Ali, Alice Walker, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Jesse Jackson. We also see classrooms and church halls, doctors and secretaries: everyday scenes of joy, frustration, curiosity, and connection, in which the determination and collective actions and resolve and actions of the movement are equally expressed. This extensive volume presents Derby's images in sequences that between them document rural and urban poverty, offer lucid ethnographies of particular streets and families, track the day-to-day lives of African American children growing up in the Mississippi Delta, and bear witness to such pivotal events as the Jackson State University shooting, the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr., and the 1968 Democratic Convention. Derby's photographs offer us an invaluably rich portrait of a historical moment whose effects have defined today's world and issues a vital reassertion of the work that remains to be done. Artist photographer Hannah Collins has worked with Doris Derby to recount the events photographed in extensive texts which accompany the images.

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What the Living Carry unveils a small town named Hoy’s Fork, situated in the American South. Drawing on memories of the rural setting in which he grew up, Virginian photographer Morgan Ashcom brings together photographs, type-written letters and a hand-drawn map to build a fictional narrative of a foreboding place. Leading us on a trail through the town and its surrounding forest, Ashcom presents scenes that point to a mysterious history, and people whose familial connections remain unknown: a forlorn old man, with champagne to hand, reclines on the corroding steps of a once grand home; a bloodied mattress is carried through an overgrown field; a solitary child burrows into a meadow, while on the streets, a man dutifully cleans a white picket fence – a vision that belies a local mural of a distant, ancient land. Interspersing this fragmented narrative is a set of texts – four letters responding to ‘Morgan’s’ request for DNA analysis – written by ‘Eugene’ of the ‘Center for Epigenetics and Wellness of the Spirit’. If What the Living Carry provides a set of clues to unravel the enigma behind this strange world, it is through a visual record that is simultaneously autobiographical and imagined, and inclined to elude.

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Taking its name from a line in the Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Gray Room,” Alec Soth’s latest book is a lyrical exploration of the limitations of photographic representation. While these large-format color photographs are made all over the world, they aren’t about any particular place or population. By a process of intimate and often extended engagement, Soth’s portraits and images of his subject’s surroundings involve an enquiry into the extent to which a photographic likeness can depict more than the outer surface of an individual, and perhaps even plumb the depths of something unknowable about both the sitter and the photographer. “After the publication of my last book about social life in America, Songbook, and a retrospective of my four, large scale American projects, Gathered Leaves, I went through a long period of rethinking my creative process. For over a year I stopped traveling and photographing people. I barely took any pictures at all. When I returned to photography, I wanted to strip the medium down to its primary elements. Rather than trying to make some sort of epic narrative about America, I wanted to simply spend time looking at other people and, hopefully, briefly glimpse their interior life. In order to try and access these lives, I made all of the photographs in interior spaces. While these rooms often exist in far-flung places, it’s only to emphasize that these pictures aren’t about any place in particular. Whether a picture is made in Odessa or Minneapolis, my goal was the same: to simply spend time in the presence of another beating heart.” – Alec Soth Coincides with four solo exhibitions in New York, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and Berlin. Includes interview with Alec Soth by Hanya Yanagihara.

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Victor Burgin is one of the most influential artists and writers working today. He came to prominence as a key figure in the Conceptual Art of the late 1960s. After turning to photography in his artistic practice he produced a series of groundbreaking theoretical essays that drew on semiotics, psychoanalysis and feminism in order to think through the ideological role of photographs in the production of beliefs and values, and in the understanding of memory, history, subjectivity and space. In the last decade or so, Burgin has worked with computer-generated imagery and the virtual camera. But rather than accepting a radical divide between so-called ‘analogue’ and ‘digital’ realms, Burgin has emphasised the continuity of the virtual camera, the various physical cameras in use today, and the painted images of Quattrocento painting – all of which have their essence in the perspectival system of representation. Further to this, Burgin argues that no image is merely an optical experience – all images are essentially psychological events and thus virtual also. Inseparable from language, they form the psychical spaces of fantasy and projection, recognition and misrecognition. Whether on pages, walls or screens, in galleries or online, single views, or swarms of picture fragments, images are the making and unmaking of our sense of self, and the world around us. This collection brings together for the first time Victor Burgin’s writings related specifically to the camera, following the shifts and nuances in his thinking over nearly five decades. Moreover, it allows us to chart the evolution of what the camera was and is, and how its affects are to be understood.

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Bringing together a sequence of disquieting photographs with a dozen original short stories, Pharmakon is a surprising new work from the singular mind of Teju Cole (Open City, Fernweh, Tremor).

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'I wanted to do something so absolutely different, and physical, and in a certain way, kind of ill-conceived... I took my camera and went underwater in a bunch of pools. And made pictures.' Between 1978 and 1982, in a departure from the collaborative con- ceptual work that he had become known for, Larry Sultan photo-graphed people learning to swim in public pools in San Francisco. Initially inspired by black-and-white documentary photograhs he found in a Red Cross swimming manual, Sultan soon began exploring an urge to create pictures that were physical, sensual, immersive, and painterly. The resulting work is saturated with colour and inflected by the unpredictable forms and chance abstractions which emerge through the distorted refractions of the water as a second lens. Often beautiful and regularly unsettling in their ambiguity, the series builds to create a feeling of sensory immersion alive with the fluid and uncertain atmospheres to which Sultan was drawn. This collection presents all the pictures from the series Sultan himself chose and exhibited, and expands to include additional images he marked on contact sheets as well as further selections from his archive which he likely never even reviewed. With a newly commissioned essay by Philip Gefter

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The roots of this book lie in the Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, NY, where Sally Stein and Gail Rebhan met in the 1980s, discovering their shared interests in feminism and critical modes of thinking and seeing - especially those that involved shades of the comic. They stayed in touch over the course of the intervening decades, Stein pursuing teaching and writing about the history of photography while Rebhan pursued teaching and image-making in various formats, with increasing recourse to text as an integral part of her graphic statements. When Rebhan was invited to show a retrospective at the American University Museum, she invited Stein to serve as guest curator. Led by Stein's insightful and often humorous commentary, this book charts Rebhan's unique artistic and political progressions, from early works using serial snapshot photographs to track the repetitive actions of domestic life through to wider-reaching studies of gentrification and inequality her home city of Washington, DC. The publication culminates with her most recent series, which examines the ways her own body bears the marks of time that women esp-ecially have learned to fear. Among the incisive, inquisitive, and politically engaged work in this collection, Rebhan's consistent rejection of photography's affiliation with stillness and silence in favour of sequence and transformation reveals time itself as the artist's perennial muse.

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‘I may pay rent to a friend for my place in Greensboro, but the South’s my landlord; and I’m trapped in its stomach trying to get to its brain. Here, I see butterflies with Confederate flag-grown wings and minstrel vestiges of Daddy Rice collecting dough. I can’t move because I’m stuck in Aunt Jemima’s syrup.’ Spell, Time, Practice, American, Body is the highly anticipated first book by artist, filmmaker, and writer RaMell Ross. Bringing together Ross’s large-format photographs, sculptures, conceptual works, and selected films, together with illuminating texts by Ross and a host of writers, this ambitious publication presents a chronicle of the American South that is both mysterious and quotidian, a historical document and a radical imagining of the future. The book opens with a series of illuminating colour photographs from Hale County, Alabama, Ross’s adoptive home and the setting of his Academy Award-nominated documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018). It then moves through a series of photographic and mixed-media works and writings that examine, deconstruct, and rewrite visual representations of the South. Amidst these works, at the book’s heart, is Ross’s film Return to Origin, a remarkable conceptual work in which Ross freight ships himself in a 4x8-foot box – a nod to Henry Brown who shipped himself to freedom in 1849. With Spell, Time, Practice, American, Body, Ross creates a new visual narrative of the South, freed from its iconic meanings to reveal the earth, dirt, soil, and land beneath. With texts by RaMell Ross, Tracy K. Smith, Richard McCabe, and Scott Matthews

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In this collection of idiosyncratic lessons, architect and teacher Pier Paolo Tamburelli engages with the very foundations of arch-itecture, proposing a series of new and open-ended perspectives on how we build the world. Developed for the 'Grundkurs', or 'basic course', at Vienna Technical University, Tamburelli's lessons are presented through the annotated sketches that form the basis of his lectures - variously rough and precise, sarcastic and sincere, and always uniquely expressive. This volume is a rich visual sourcebook of architectural ideas that form an accessible and discursive introduction to the discipline - one which pauses on the road to grand theories to learn from the intuitive processes of notetaking, drawing, and association. Tamburelli's lessons are based around a series of dialectic couples, including Roof/Wall, Shelter/Memory, and Language/Action. The pairs are experimental and often provocative, offering a framework to be used to climb in the direction of architecture. Tamburelli trusts in the capacity of images to suspend the restraints of more rigorous theoretical approaches, embraces the flexible wisdom of the note, and relishes the intrigue of the cryptic messages we leave for ourselves. Reproduced here in their entirety, these eight lessons offer countless routes towards, through, and around architecture, providing newcomers and experts alike with an intimate and refreshing encounter with a millennia-old discipline. With an introduction by the author and a text by Mark Lee, Chair of the Department of Architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design

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While Francesca Woodman's photographic work has been widely celebrated, little has been published until now about her remarkable series of artist's books. The basis of these works is in books that Woodman bought in local shops and flea markets throughout her travels in Italy in the 1970s, which she later repurposed to provide intriguing backgrounds onto which she pasted her print , trans-parencies, and written annotations. Collected together for the first time, these books demonstrate a sophisticated relationship to narrative and sequence and offer a new understanding of the scope of Woodman's engagement with the book form. Francesca Woodman: The Artist's Books collects for the very first time every page of all eight of Francesca Woodman's unique art-ist's books in one comprehensive volume. It includes two newly discovered books which have never been seen before, alongside better-known titles such as Some Disordered Interior Geometries.

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This limited edition artist’s book brings together digital collages and manipulated photographs by painter James White based on the celebrated and hugely influential series 'Evidence' by Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan. In 'Evidence', Sultan and Mandel drew on the archives of more than a hundred US government agencies, finding surreal narrative suggestions in deadpan images that were intended as functional documents, upending and interrogating the documentary natures they espoused. The book has been a continual reference for the grayscale photographic paintings for which James White has become known. In this volume, White pays tribute to Sultan and Mandel’s project by further undermining the evidentiary nature of the photographic medium through a process of intervention and painterly gesture which disrupts and reconstitutes the images’ mercurial surfaces. Published as a limited edition of 1000 signed copies.

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The Citadel is a story told in three movements: mapping a route through discovery, loss, and renewal across the uncanny landscapes of contemporary Africa. In 2007, Mame-Diarra Niang returned to Senegal to bury her father after spending years away living in France. Her unequivocally intimate relationship with the African continent translates into a refracted representation in which the places before Niang's lens are at once forensically studied and transformed into fabular non-places. In Sahel Gris, the outskirts of Dakar, where infrastructural projects lay abandoned to the dust, evoke a state of permanent suspension between movement and inertia. At the Wall presents a prismatic interrogation of the surfaces and perimeters of Dakar, depicting a city eerily drained of human life yet dense with its traces. And in Metropolis, Niang steps finally into the belly of the beast, looking outwards from within the crowded urban superficies of Johannesburg, dazzling in the southern light. At the centre of Niang's vision is the notion of 'the plasticity of territory', in which a personal investigation of place becomes indistinguishable from the photographer's own metamorphosis, and landscape becomes a 'material for producing many selves.' In these works, collected here to form a sustained project, a deeply personal but rigorously analytic relationship with place emerges, offering a complex, layered image to offset historic, imperially motivated Western visions of Africa as a vacant land.

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Part memoir, part tablueau, Corbeau is a multi-layered narrative collage tracing life and death in the rural farm on which Swiss artist Anne Golaz grew up. Made over a twelve-year period and bridging three generations, the three-part book weaves together photographs, video stills and drawings, with texts by the author, screenwriter and playwright, Antoine Jaccoud, as well as the artist’s own writings. Jaccoud reconstructs transcripts of conversations between family members and memories recounted by the artist in order to help to build this intricate story of stories into a dramatalogical work. The protagonist of Corbeau is a young man seen in each chapter dutifully working on the farm. Gradually, however, his sense of duty appears to be instilled with doubt – one that infuses the entire book.

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