Photography Against the Grain

Photography Against the Grain
Author: Allan Sekula
Publisher:
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2016-08
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 9781910164495

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. Allan Sekula (1951-2013) was an American artist, whose work spans multiple media: long form photographic series (Aerospace Folktales, 1973; School as a Factory,1980; War Without Bodies, 1991/96), critical texts (The Body and the Archive, 1986 and Debating Occupy, 2012) and film (The Forgotten Space, 2012).

New Orleans Suite

New Orleans Suite
Author: Lewis Watts
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2013-02-07
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0520955323

With New Orleans Suite, Eric Porter and Lewis Watts join the post-Katrina conversation about New Orleans and its changing cultural scene. Using both visual evidence and the written word, Watts and Porter pay homage to the city, its region, and its residents, by mapping recent and often contradictory social and cultural transformations, and seeking to counter inadequate and often pejorative accounts of the people and place that give New Orleans its soul. Focusing for the most part on the city’s African American community, New Orleans Suite is a story about people: how bad things have happened to them in the long and short run, how they have persevered by drawing upon and transforming their cultural practices, and what they can teach us about citizenship, politics, and society.

Dear Erin Hart

Dear Erin Hart
Author: Jessamyn Lovell
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2015-03
Genre: Hidden camera photography
ISBN: 9780984303878

No Medium

No Medium
Author: Craig Dworkin
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2013-02-15
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0262312719

Close readings of ostensibly “blank” works—from unprinted pages to silent music—that point to a new understanding of media. In No Medium, Craig Dworkin looks at works that are blank, erased, clear, or silent, writing critically and substantively about works for which there would seem to be not only nothing to see but nothing to say. Examined closely, these ostensibly contentless works of art, literature, and music point to a new understanding of media and the limits of the artistic object. Dworkin considers works predicated on blank sheets of paper, from a fictional collection of poems in Jean Cocteau's Orphée to the actual publication of a ream of typing paper as a book of poetry; he compares Robert Rauschenberg's Erased De Kooning Drawing to the artist Nick Thurston's erased copy of Maurice Blanchot's The Space of Literature (in which only Thurston's marginalia were visible); and he scrutinizes the sexual politics of photographic representation and the implications of obscured or obliterated subjects of photographs. Reexamining the famous case of John Cage's 4'33”, Dworkin links Cage's composition to Rauschenberg's White Paintings, Ken Friedman's Zen for Record (and Nam June Paik's Zen for Film), and other works, offering also a “guide to further listening” that surveys more than 100 scores and recordings of “silent” music. Dworkin argues that we should understand media not as blank, base things but as social events, and that there is no medium, understood in isolation, but only and always a plurality of media: interpretive activities taking place in socially inscribed space.

Camerawork

Camerawork
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 126
Release: 2007
Genre: Photography
ISBN:

O Glorious City

O Glorious City
Author: Jeremy Fish
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2017-06-06
Genre:
ISBN: 1452156131

O Glorious City is an exuberant love letter to San Francisco from Jeremy Fish, a beloved artist who enjoys a massive fan base for his edgy artwork. When Fish was invited to create 100 new works of art in honor of City Hall's 100th birthday, he moved his studio into a City Hall office to become the city's first-ever artist in residence. This celebratory book gathers all 100 pieces of artwork—each rendered in his signature whimsical style—featuring everything from the city's famous architecture and treasured local landmarks to portraits of colorful local residents in a gallery of "unofficial mayors." Together these images form an energetic, visual tour de force showcasing San Francisco's vivacious spirit and vibrant history.

Thought Pieces

Thought Pieces
Author: Erin O'Toole
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020
Genre: Literature and photography
ISBN: 9781912339631

In the early 1970s, Lew Thomas set out to disrupt photography in San Francisco. Tired of the mystical thinking and emotionalism that had underscored Bay Area photography since the 1940s, Thomas pursued a photographic practice grounded in ideas gleaned from conceptual art and Structuralist philosophy. A cohort of other photographers, including Donna-Lee Phillips and Hal Fischer, embraced Thomas' mission, joining him in what became known as the 'Photography and Language' movement, named after a book and group exhibition of the same title produced by Thomas in 1976. Thomas, Phillips and Fischer were all extremely active in the mid to late 1970s. In addition to making their own artwork, they published essays, reviewed shows and organized exhibitions. Under the name NFS Press, Thomas published a number of books designed by Phillips, including 'Structural(ism) and Photography' (1978), which featured Thomas' work; 'Eros and Photography' (1977), which was edited by Phillips, and two books of Fischer's work: 'Gay Semiotics' (1978) and '18th Near Castro Street x 24' (1979). This volume assesses their work, their relationship to one another and their place in the history of photography in the 1970s.

Souls Against the Concrete

Souls Against the Concrete
Author: Khalik Allah
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2017-10-18
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 9781477313145

Khalik Allah is a New York–based photographer and filmmaker whose work has been described as "street opera," simultaneously penetrative, hauntingly beautiful, and visceral. His photography has been acclaimed by the New York Times, TIME Light Box, the New Yorker, the Guardian, the Village Voice, the BBC, and the Boston Globe. Since 2012, Allah has been photographing people who frequent the corner of 125th Street and Lexington Avenue in Harlem. Shooting film at night with only the light pouring from storefront windows, street lights, cars, and flashing ambulances, he captures raw and intimate portraits of "souls against the concrete." This volume presents a gallery of 105 portraits created with a Nikon F2 35mm camera and a photography predicated on reality. Inviting viewers to look deeply into the faces of people living amid poverty, drug addiction, and police brutality, but also leading everyday lives, Allah seeks to dispel fears, capture human dignity, and bring clarity to a world that outsiders rarely visit. This nuanced portrayal of nocturnal urban life offers a powerful and rare glimpse into the enduring spirit of a slowly gentrifying Harlem street corner and the great legacies of black history that live there.