David Campany

Key writings by artists and theorists chart the shifting relationship between film and photography and how the rise of cinema forced photography to make a virtue of its stillness. The cinematic has been a springboard for the work of many influential artists, including Victor Burgin, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Stan Douglas, Nan Goldin, Douglas Gordon, Cindy Sherman, and Jeff Wall, among others. Much recent cinema, meanwhile, is rich with references to contemporary photography. Video art has taken a photographic turn into pensive slowness; photography now has at its disposal the budgets and scale of cinema. This addition to Whitechapel's Documents of Contemporary Art series surveys the rich history of creative interaction between the moving and the still photograph, tracing their ever-changing relationship since early modernism. Still photography—cinema's ghostly parent—was eclipsed by the medium of film, but also set free. The rise of cinema obliged photography to make a virtue of its own stillness. Film, on the other hand, envied the simplicity, the lightness, and the precision of photography. Russian Constructivist filmmakers considered avant-garde cinema as a sequence of graphic "shots"; their Bauhaus, Constructivist and Futurist photographer contemporaries assembled photographs into a form of cinema on the page. In response to the rise of popular cinema, Henri Cartier-Bresson exalted the "decisive moment" of the still photograph. In the 1950s, reportage photography began to explore the possibility of snatching filmic fragments. Since the 1960s, conceptual and postconceptual artists have explored the narrative enigmas of the found film still. The Cinematic assembles key writings by artists and theorists from the 1920s on—including László Moholy-Nagy, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Victor Burgin, Jeff Wall, and Catherine David—documenting the photography-film dialogue that has enriched both media.

The Cinematic

Jeff Wall

Hans-Michael Koetzle

Fred Herzog is known for his unusual use of colour in the fifties and sixties, a time when art photography was almost exclusively associated with black and white imagery. The Canadian photographer worked almost exclusively with Kodachrome slide film for over 50 years, and only in the past decade has technology allowed him to make archival pigment prints that match the exceptional color and intensity of the Kodachrome slide. In this respect, his photographs can be seen as a pre-figuration of the New Color photographers of the seventies.This book will bring together over 230 images, many never before reproduced, and will feature essays by acclaimed authors David Campany and Hans-Michael Koetzle. Fred Herzog will be the most comprehensive publication on this important photographer to date.

Modern Color

Fred Herzog

After the end of World War II, the American road trip began appearing prominently in literature, music, movies, and photography. Many photographers embarked on trips across the U.S. in order to create work, including Robert Frank, whose seminal 1955 road trip resulted in The Americans. However, he was preceded by Edward Weston, who traveled across the country taking pictures to illustrate Walt Whitmans Leaves of Grass; Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose 1947 trip through the American South and into the West was published in the early 1950s in Harpers Bazaar; and Ed Ruscha, whose road trips between Los Angeles and Oklahoma later became Twentysix Gasoline Stations. Hundreds of photographers have continued the tradition of the photographic road trip on down to the present, from Stephen Shore to Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs. The Open Road considers the photographic road trip as a genre in and of itself, and presents the story of photographers for whom the American road is muse. The book features David Campanys introduction to the genre and eighteen chapters presented chronologically, each exploring one American road trip in depth through a portfolio of images and informative texts, highlighting some of the most important bodies of work made on the road from The Americans to present day.

Photography and the American Road Trip

The Open Road

Art and Photography (Themes & Movements S.)

Horacio Fernández

Sandra S. Phillips

Marta Dahó

Stephen Shore has had a significant influence on multiple generations of artists and photographers. Even for the youngest photographers working today, his work remains an ongoing and indisputable reference point. This book copublished with Fundación MAPFRE in conjuncƠtion with the first-ever retrospective exhibition, includes over 250 images that span Shore’s impressive and productive career. The images range from 1969 to 2013, with series such as Early Works, Amarillo, New York City, American Surfaces, and Uncommon Places, among others. Stephen Shore: Survey elucidates Shore’s contributions, as well as the historiographical interpretations of his work that have influenced photographic culture over the past four decades. Both the exhibition and the narrative of the catalogue are conceptualized around three particularly revealing aspects of Shore’s work, including his analysis of photographic and visual language, his topographical approach to the contemporary landscape, and his significant use of color within a photographic context.00Exhibition: Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid, Spain (17.9.-23.11.2014).

Stephen Shore

"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 call it a view from an aeroplane. Then they call it Dust Breeding. It's abstract, it's realist. It's an artwork, it's a document. It's revolting and compelling. The very same month, 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 ensuing decades? 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. The connections range far and wide, from aerial reconnaisance and the American dustbowl to Mussolini's final car journey and the wars in Iraq. A Handful of Dust features works by Man Ray, John Divola, Sophie Ristelhueber, Mona Kuhn, Xavier Ribas, Nick Waplington, Edward Ruscha, Jeff Wall and many others, alongside anonymous press photos, postcards, magazine spreads and movies."Gallery website.

From the Cosmic to the Domestic

A Handful of Dust

Photography is the easiest thing to talk about, and for that reason it can be the most difficult.

Conversations on Photography

So Present, So Invisible

William Klein

This astonishing book, for which all the photographs have been selected and laid out by William Klein himself, is an inspiring visual history of a long and distinguished career. His chronologically arranged collection of work includes iconic photographs, painted contact sheets and magazine covers, as well as examples of his seminal photo-books of the 1950s and 1960s, represented here by their powerfull jackets and spreads. Black-and-white and colour fashion photographs range from portraits to filmic and surreal tableaux, revealing klein's revolutionary impact on the genre, whilst film posters and stills show the ways in which he captured and commented on the spirit of the times, creating biopics of muhammad ali and Little Richard and Feature films with stars including Donald Pleasance and Serge Gainsbourg. William Klein : ABC Showccases his masterful achievements at their very best. Supplementing the stunning images is an insightful text by David Campany that in Klein's own opinion would be impossible to better as a succint distillation and fine understanding of his life's work accross a wide range of artistic fields.

William Klein ABC

France) Staff Bal (Art organization : Paris

Handful of Dust

Jerry L. Thompson

Heinz Liesbrock

"Walker Evans (1903-1975) is one of the most important photographers of the twentieth century and has influenced contemporary art beyond his medium until today. In 1938 the Museum of Modern Art in New York dedicated its first ever solo photography exhibition to Evans's work, and he has shaped America's image of itself particularly through his photographs of the Great Depression. The publication Walker Evans: Labor Anonymous is the first in-depth investigation into a series of the same name, which Evans published in Fortune magazine in 1946. On a Saturday afternoon in Detroit, Evans positioned himself with his Rolleiflex camera on the sidewalk and photographed pedestrians, mostly laborers, in his characteristically clear and unadorned way - an aesthetic he described as the "documentary style". As in his earlier series, e.g. in the famous Subway Portraits from the New York underground, his subjects were often unaware they were being photographed, but some of the pedestrians also looked straight into the camera. Representing much more than a simple typology, this photographic series does not offer a preconceived image of humankind or class, but - as foreshadowed in its ambiguous title - encourages critical reflection on such concepts. This publication anchors the series in Evans's oeuvre and presents a selection of more than fifty photographs from the series along with contact sheets, drafts for an unpublished text, notes, and letters from the Walker Evans Archive at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York"--

Labor Anonymous

Geoffrey Batchen

M. Darsie Alexander

Spanning 170 years, from William Henry Fox Talbot's first negative to the latest constructed tableau by Jeff Wall, Singular Images is a collection of thought-provoking essays on individual photographs. Each essay focuses on the uniqueness of one particular image, exploring the artist's intention, the work's technical complexities, its historical context, and the individual writer's response to it. The essays all capture a sense of how challenging it is to create a perfect single image.

Essays on Remarkable Photographs

Singular Images

Martin Parr

Nigel Warburton

Val Williams

Roger Hargreaves

Sheena Wagstaff

Mary Warner Marien

Dominic Willsdon

Darsie Alexander

Liz Jobey

Pierre MacOrlan

Eugène Atget

Text by David Campany, Pierre Mac Orlan, Jeffrey Ladd.

Eugene Atget Photographe de Paris

Books on Books 1

Erin O'Toole

Doug Rickard

Consists of images captured by Google Street View.

A New American Picture

David Batchelder

After five years of looking closely through his camera at a small beach, David Batchelder no longer sees the shores as we know them. His vision now is of a private reality within the tideland. In Tideland, Batchelder invites you to join him in his visual journey into a tideland like none that has yet been photographed. Batchelder uses the camera, not to picture more clearly that which we already know, but to discover and capture the unsung beauty of our land. He shares with us an inexplicable, ambiguous, imaginative and odd world of magical visions - landscapes, spaces, creatures and curious objects, disfigured and eroded by the ocean. Although Batchelder uses digital processes, his approach to creative camera work has its origin very much in the era of film, using a digital camera and Photoshop as one would have used a film camera and a darkroom.David Campany's essay introduces Batchelder's tideland world where the viewer's imagination and memory take over and, you too, leave the beach as you now know it.

Tideland

William Klein is a cult figure in photography and film and, although long noted as a painter, his early work has remained largely unseen for over sixty years. This book presents a selection of extremely rare Klein paintings from the late 1940s and early 1950s. It also includes projects for murals, some of which executed on a monumental scale for the first time, Lettrist works, fashion photographs and Printed Contacts. The show also maps a decisive moment in the artist's development: in 1952. While photographing his painted Turning Panels commissioned by architect Angelo Mangiarotti, Klein captured the blur of objects in movement. The incident set the artist off on a series of experiments in the dark room, in which he developed the blueprint of his photographic abstraction. Giving a new perspective on his entire career, this book clearly portrays the foundations of Klein's unique visual language as his trajectory is traced through painting, architecture, photography, books, and film.

Paintings, Etc

August Strindberg

Göran Söderström

Oll? Granath

Helen Sainsbury

Goran Soderstrom

"While August Strindberg (1849-1912) is well known to an international audience as a prolific writer of plays, novels, poetry, scientific essays and letters, his work in the visual arts has remained largely unseen. This illustrated book examines the paintings, drawings and photographs that display Strindberg's independent and radical approach to art, and his experimental innovations in photography." "Critics have compared Strindberg's paintings with Turner's but also with those of much later movements such as Informalism and Expressionism. In his youth, working as an art critic for a Swedish magazine in the 1870s, he was one of the first in Sweden to show understanding for the Impressionist movement in Paris. In writings in the 1890s he anticipated ideas favoured by Dada and Surrealism."--BOOK JACKET.

Painter, Photographer, Writer

Mark Neville

Fancy Pictures brings together seven of Mark Neville's socially engaged and intensely immersive projects from the last decade. Neville often pictures working communities in a collaborative process intended to be of direct, practical benefit to his subjects. The Port Glasgow Book Project (2004) is a book of his social documentary images of the Scottish town. Never commercially available, copies were given directly to all 8,000 residents. Deeds Not Words (2011) focuses on Corby, an English town that suffered serious industrial pollution. Neville produced a book to be given free to the environmental health services department of each of the 433 local councils in the UK. Battle Against Stigma and Helmand are both projects resulting from Neville's time in Afghanistan. Two projects for the USA are also included. Invited by the Andy Warhol Museum in 2012, Neville examined social divisions in Pittsburgh, and the photo-essay Here is London, commissioned by The New York Times Magazine, echoes the style of the celebrated photographers who documented the boom and bust of the 1970s and '80s.

Fancy Pictures

An intimate meditation on photography for the ages, curated around 120 epochal photographs. In On Photographs, curator and writer David Campany presents an exploration of photography in 120 photographs. Proceeding not by chronology or genre or photographer, Campany's eclectic selection unfolds according to its own logic. We see work by Henri Cartier-Bresson, William Eggleston, Helen Levitt, Garry Winogrand, Yves Louise Lawler, Andreas Gursky, and Rineke Dijkstra. There is fashion photography by William Klein, one of Vivian Maier's contact sheets, and a carefully staged scene by Gregory Crewdson, as well as images culled from magazines and advertisements. Each of the 120 photographs is accompanied by Campany's lucid and incisive commentary.

On Photographs

Diedrich Diederichsen

Catherine M. Soussloff

Séamus Kealy

Chantal Pontbriand

The most comprehensive book available on one of today's most important visual artists, this volume features images from Stan Douglas's acclaimed series as well as stills from a new video work and a stage production. This book features images and stills from Douglas's most recent works: Artists' Cabin, Olde Curio Shop, Kardynal Shoes, Tosi Foods, Crowds and Riots, Midcentury Studio, and Disco Angola. It also includes images from two much-anticipated works: a new video piece and Helen Lawrence, a cinematic stage production. A series of essays discussing Douglas's influences and themes as well as texts by the artist himself round out this impressive book.

David Campany

About

Books

Join the club