Abigail Solomon-Godeau

A revisionist approach to photography's history, a critique of photographic modernism and the institutions that promote it, and a feminist exploration of the camera's role in producing (and reproducing) dominant social and sexual ideologies. Thoroughly illustrated in bandw. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices

Photography at the Dock

Why did the male nude become an object of spectacle and erotic display in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? Why was the male nude later eclipsed by the female nude? Why have historians ignored this "crisis" in the representation of masculinity, characterized by a taste for feminized male bodies? In this pioneering and compelling book, Abigail Solomon-Godeau shows that the masculine ideal, whether in the guise of martial, virile heroes or languishing, disempowered youths, raises important questions about the fashioning of masculinity itself. Examining the different forms of ideal manhood in relation to the cataclysms of the French Revolution and to international Neoclassicism, she explores how and why the beautiful male body dominated the visual culture of the time and appealed so powerfully to male spectators. Drawing on feminist, psychoanalytic, and critical theory, as well as on art and cultural history, Solomon-Godeau proposes a radical revision of Neoclassical visual culture as it relates to the emerging bourgeois order, demonstrating how both reflect the status of women.

A Crisis in Representation

Male Trouble

Presenting two decades of work by Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Photography after Photography is an inquiry into the circuits of power that shape photographic practice, criticism, and historiography. As the boundaries that separate photography from other forms of artistic production are increasingly fluid, Solomon-Godeau, a pioneering feminist and politically engaged critic, argues that the relationships between photography, culture, gender, and power demand renewed attention. In her analyses of the photographic production of Cindy Sherman, Robert Mapplethorpe, Susan Meiselas, Francesca Woodman, and others, Solomon-Godeau refigures the disciplinary object of photography by considering these practices through an examination of the determinations of genre and gender as these shape the relations between photographers, their images, and their viewers. Among her subjects are the 2006 Abu Ghraib prison photographs and the Cold War-era exhibition The Family of Man, insofar as these illustrate photography's embeddedness in social relations, viewing relations, and ideological formations.

Gender, Genre, History

Photography after Photography

Cornelia H. Butler

Valerie Smith

Helen Anne Molesworth

Vancouver Art Gallery

Catherine Lord

Peggy Phelan

National Museum of Women in the Arts (U.S.)

Nelly Richard

Jenni Sorkin

Judith Russi Kirshner

Institute for Contemporary Art (New York, N.Y.)

Marsha Meskimmon

Richard Meyer (umetnostni zgodovinar.)

Accompanied by critical essays and analysis, a groundbreaking collection of art produced by women artists during the 1970s reveals the influence of the feminist revolution on art in works by Judy Chicago, Louise Bourgeois, Susan Hiller, Yoko Ono, Hannah Wilke, Faith Ringgold, Cindy Sherman, Joan Semmel, Miriam Shapiro, Lucy Lippard, and many others.

Art and the Feminist Revolution

WACK!

Dominic Molon

Derek Bickerton

Nick McDonnell

Jake Chapman

This aesthetic evolution has occurred in tandem with the artist's peripatetic movements around the globe in pursuit of the perfect wave. Over 300 colour images of works from the 1980s until today capture the acerbic wit and tremendous talent of the enigmatic artist. Textual contributions from Bickerton's family and friends, As well as scholarly essays by art historian Abigail Solomon-Godeau and MCA Chicago Curator Dominic Molon, are interspersed with the artist's commentary. An interview between the artist and Serpentine Gallery Co-Director Hans Ulrich Obrist is brought to vivid life by the renderings of Ignacio Noe.

Ashley Bickerton

Joan Juliet Buck

This book accompanies the Fall 2013 exhibition of Richard Avedon's photography to be held at Gagosian Gallery Beverly Hills. Over his sixty-year career, photographer Richard Avedon was renowned for his distinctive, transformative eye. Women were often his subject, through his fashion work for Harper's Bazaar and Vogue and in his portraiture of both the famous and the unknown. What might have been pictured as prosaic or unattractive through another photographer's lens was presented by Avedon as unconventional, surprising, and sometimes revelatory. Through approximately 120 images, Avedon: Women explores Avedon's unique artistic perspective. The book includes essays by Joan Juliet Buck and Abigail Solomon-Godeau. -Dynamic unbound format available in three colorful translucent plastic covers, each with a unique image. -32 b&w contact prints from the Avedon archives, many previously unpublished -26 color images- two reproductions of vintage tear sheets and 24 rarely seen color transparencies from the Avedon archives -1 double gatefold, removable from layouts -4 Vellum Overlay spreads

Avedon Women

Abigail Solomon-Godeau

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