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Text by Philipp Kaiser, Polly Staple, Karl Holmqvist, Interview by Helena Selder. The video works of the Swedish artist and 2007 Documenta participant Johanna Billing, born in 1973, occupy an unusual terrain between documentary and staged scientific experiment. Billing depicts the rituals of society by filming, for example, a group of young people as they reconstruct a(...)
Contemporary Art Monographs
February 2008, Basel/Dundee
Johanna Billing. Look behind us, a blue sky
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Text by Philipp Kaiser, Polly Staple, Karl Holmqvist, Interview by Helena Selder. The video works of the Swedish artist and 2007 Documenta participant Johanna Billing, born in 1973, occupy an unusual terrain between documentary and staged scientific experiment. Billing depicts the rituals of society by filming, for example, a group of young people as they reconstruct a long-forgotten experiment, or a group of artists singing a melancholy ballad together in a gesture of solidarity. By focusing on the dialectical interplay between the individual and the community, Billing reveals processes of social erosion--but without asserting emphatic judgment of these processes. The artists video works--among them the well-known works You Don't Love Me Yet (2003) and Magical World (2005)--have been shown in many international group exhibitions, but this publication is the first to provide a comprehensive overview of her profoundly atmospheric productions.
Contemporary Art Monographs
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From the strictly regimented church bells to the freewheeling chatter of civic life, Renaissance Florence was a city built not just of stone but of sound as well. An evocative alternative to the dominant visual understanding of urban spaces, The Noisy Renaissance examines the premodern city as an acoustic phenomenon in which citizens used sound to navigate space and(...)
The noisy Renaissance: sound, architecture and Florentine urban life
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From the strictly regimented church bells to the freewheeling chatter of civic life, Renaissance Florence was a city built not just of stone but of sound as well. An evocative alternative to the dominant visual understanding of urban spaces, The Noisy Renaissance examines the premodern city as an acoustic phenomenon in which citizens used sound to navigate space and society. Analyzing a range of documentary and literary evidence, art and architectural historian Niall Atkinson creates an “acoustic topography” of Florence. The dissemination of official messages, the rhythm of prayer, and the murmur of rumor and gossip combined to form a soundscape that became a foundation in the creation and maintenance of the urban community just as much as the city’s physical buildings. Sound in this space triggered a wide variety of social behaviors and spatial relations: hierarchical, personal, communal, political, domestic, sexual, spiritual, and religious.
History until 1900, Renaissance
Larry Sultan: The swimmers
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Between 1978 and 1982, in a departure from the collaborative conceptual work that he had become known for, Larry Sultan photographed 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,(...)
Larry Sultan: The swimmers
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Between 1978 and 1982, in a departure from the collaborative conceptual work that he had become known for, Larry Sultan photographed 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.
Photography monographs
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One of the most prized categories of early photography was the reproduction of artworks, a role in which photographs largely replaced engravings in book imagery during the mid-19th century. Photographs of paintings, sculptures, and other works were compiled in albums, ranging from surveys of museum collections and catalogues of works by single artists to illustrated(...)
Art and the early photographic album
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One of the most prized categories of early photography was the reproduction of artworks, a role in which photographs largely replaced engravings in book imagery during the mid-19th century. Photographs of paintings, sculptures, and other works were compiled in albums, ranging from surveys of museum collections and catalogues of works by single artists to illustrated travel guides and archaeological reports. While such albums have often been valued for documentary purposes, their broader role in the institutional development of art has, until now, been overlooked. The first book on the subject, this collection of twelve essays explores topics such as how the acclaim of artists like Rubens grew because their paintings reproduced so well in photographs, how Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel frescoes were given a new public identity by the photographer's choice of striking details never explored in traditional prints, and other important ways in which photographically illustrated publications influenced the experience and the history of art.
Photography Collections
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The landscape and people of the American Midwest have captivated photographer Terry Evans (b. 1944) throughout her forty-year photographic career. Evans has a deep connection to her native region, which she has explored from a variety of visual and thematic perspectives. Heartland traces the evolution of Evans’s vision, beginning in the early 1970s with her social(...)
Photography monographs
October 2012
Heartland: the photographs of Terry Evans
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The landscape and people of the American Midwest have captivated photographer Terry Evans (b. 1944) throughout her forty-year photographic career. Evans has a deep connection to her native region, which she has explored from a variety of visual and thematic perspectives. Heartland traces the evolution of Evans’s vision, beginning in the early 1970s with her social documentary images of people in Kansas. She became a landscape photographer in 1978, focusing on the grasses, land, and skies of the prairie; this was followed by an aerial survey of the entire Great Plains, from Texas to Canada. She has also photographed Chicago from the air, an abandoned military site, small-town life in Kansas, and historical samples of prairie flora and fauna from Chicago’s Field Museum. More recently, she has documented the steel industry in the Midwest and oil and gas drilling in North Dakota. This illustrated book examines all of these works, which together reveal the enduring beauty of the prairie landscape.
Photography monographs
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Building Subjects, the fourth issue of Standpunkte Magazine, is a collaboration between the architect De Peter Yi, the art historian Nancy P. Lin, and the graphic design studios Normal and Some All None. The publication revolves around collective housing in China, an architectural challenge expressive of the country's ongoing negotiations between its rich history and(...)
September 2019
Building subjects: collective housing in China
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Building Subjects, the fourth issue of Standpunkte Magazine, is a collaboration between the architect De Peter Yi, the art historian Nancy P. Lin, and the graphic design studios Normal and Some All None. The publication revolves around collective housing in China, an architectural challenge expressive of the country's ongoing negotiations between its rich history and undetermined future. The study combines typological research with the modes of the architectural manifesto by establishing an exchange between cultural-historical observations, the consideration of contemporary socio-economic pressures, and evolving architectural aspirations. Through a close reading of spaces from monumental utopian communes in Beijing to round earthen dwellings in the Fujian province, Building Subjects stages collective housing as a key to residential architecture in China. The publication is simultaneously inward and outward looking, and this duality is also reflected in its meticulously composed layout: documentary photography and detailed axonometric drawings are juxtaposed to establish a correspondence between old and new, between reality and projection.
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Dorothea Lange (1895–1965) aimed to make pictures that were, in her words, ''important and useful.'' Her decades-long investigation of how photography could articulate people’s core values and sense of self helped to expand our current understanding of portraiture and the meaning of documentary practice. Lange’s sensitive portraits showing the common humanity of often(...)
Photography monographs
November 2023
Dorothea Lange: Seeing people
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Dorothea Lange (1895–1965) aimed to make pictures that were, in her words, ''important and useful.'' Her decades-long investigation of how photography could articulate people’s core values and sense of self helped to expand our current understanding of portraiture and the meaning of documentary practice. Lange’s sensitive portraits showing the common humanity of often marginalized people were pivotal to public understanding of vast social problems in the twentieth century. Compassion guided Lange’s early portraits of Indigenous people in Arizona and New Mexico from the 1920s and 1930s, as well as her depictions of striking workers, migrant farmers, rural African Americans, Japanese Americans in internment camps, and the people she met while traveling in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Drawing on new research, the authors look at Lange’s roots in studio portraiture and demonstrate how her influential and widely seen photographs addressed issues of identity as well as social, economic, and racial inequalities—topics that remain as relevant for our times as they were for hers.
Photography monographs
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Over the past three decades, Vancouver artist Jeff Wall's large color transparencies have won international acclaim. Wall has created a unique, seductive and complex pictorial universe by drawing upon philosophy, literature, nineteenth-century painting, Neo-Realist cinema and the traditions of both Conceptual art and documentary photography. Organized by The Museum of(...)
Contemporary Art Monographs
February 2007, New York
Jeff Wall
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Over the past three decades, Vancouver artist Jeff Wall's large color transparencies have won international acclaim. Wall has created a unique, seductive and complex pictorial universe by drawing upon philosophy, literature, nineteenth-century painting, Neo-Realist cinema and the traditions of both Conceptual art and documentary photography. Organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Wall's 2007 American traveling retrospective will include all of the artist's major works to date. In addition to color plates and illuminating details, the exhibition catalogue includes an essay by Peter Galassi that explores the full range of Wall's artistic and intellectual interests and offers fresh perspectives on one of the most adventurous creative achievements of our time. The essay is followed by an interview with the artist by James Rondeau, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago, where the exhibition will be on view during the Summer of 2007.
Contemporary Art Monographs
books
Thinking photography
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"Thinking photography" brings debates within the theory and practice of communications and culture, in this case in photography and photography criticism, to a wider audience. Victor Burgin's book is concerned with the production of meaning in photographs ( and so it is fully illustrated). A photograph has traditionally been understood as an expression of the(...)
Thinking photography
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"Thinking photography" brings debates within the theory and practice of communications and culture, in this case in photography and photography criticism, to a wider audience. Victor Burgin's book is concerned with the production of meaning in photographs ( and so it is fully illustrated). A photograph has traditionally been understood as an expression of the photographer's personality, a transparent presentation of a real scene, or more recently in 'modernist' criticism as a purely formal object. Victor Burgin and his collaborators - Umberto Eco, Allan Sekula, John Tagg and Simon Watney - taking their cue from Walter Benjamin's "The author as producer" (also reprinted here), and working from a wide range of photographs, challenge the concept of the autonomous, spontaneously creative artist, the idea of documentary truth in photography and the notion of purely visual languages. They develop an account of the production of the meaning as a photograph within social institutions - advertising, journalism, art - within a society with a history and within the unconscious.
books
April 2003, New York
Theory of Photography
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The original impetus behind this project was the desire to document the extraordinary richness, variety, and quality of Havana’s Art Deco’ architecture. Looking back at these photographs, photographer Duccio Malagamba is still glad he made the decision to undertake that adventure, despite the fact that the result of that effort, due to a series of circumstances, lay(...)
Duccio Malagamba: Habana Deco
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The original impetus behind this project was the desire to document the extraordinary richness, variety, and quality of Havana’s Art Deco’ architecture. Looking back at these photographs, photographer Duccio Malagamba is still glad he made the decision to undertake that adventure, despite the fact that the result of that effort, due to a series of circumstances, lay dormant for decades in a drawer in his studio. There is no doubt that, the documentary value of the photographs remains intact—or perhaps increased, since it is possible that over these 30 years some of the works portrayed have succumbed to successive cyclones and lack of maintenance. The valuable aesthetic and compositional charge of the images does not seem to have been compromised by the passage of time. Today, however, alongside with the worn beauty of the buildings portrayed, what captures the viewer is the life that has been encapsulated in these photographs. A life frozen in most cases accidentally.
Photography monographs