Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Edited by Eva Respini. Text by Jennifer Jae Gutierrez.
Robert Heinecken was a pioneer in the postwar Los Angeles art scene who described himself as a para-photographer because his work stood "beside" or "beyond" traditional ideas of the medium. Published in conjunction with the first museum exhibition of the artist’s work since his death in 2006, this publication covers four decades of his remarkable and unique practice, from the early 1960s through the late 1990s, with special emphasis on his early experiments with technique and materiality. Culling images from newspapers, magazine advertisements and television, Heinecken recontextualized them through collage and assemblage, double-sided photograms, photolithography and re-photography. Although he was rarely behind the lens of a camera, his photo-based works question the nature of photography and radically redefine the perception of it as an artistic medium. As the most comprehensive survey of Heinecken’s oeuvre, this book sets his work in the context of twentieth-century history of photographic experimentation and conceptual art. An illustrated essay by conservator Jennifer Jae Gutierrez about the artist’s experimental techniques, which ranged from photograms to photolithography to collage, contributes to the sparse scholarship on Heinecken’s working methods.
Robert Heinecken was born in 1931 in Denver, Colorado and in 1942 his family relocated to Riverside, California. After serving in the US Marine Corp, he earned a BA in 1959 from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he continued his studies, specializing in printmaking and graduating with an MFA in 1960. He founded the graduate program for photography at UCLA in 1964, where he taught until 1991. Heinecken died at age 74 in 2006 in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Eva Respini is the Barbara Lee Chief Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston. Prior to that she was Curator at The Museum of Modern Art.
Jennifer Jae Gutierrez is the Arthur J. Bell Senior Photograph Conservator at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. By Eva Respini. Text by Johanna Burton. Interview by John Waters.
Published to accompany the first major survey of Cindy Sherman’s work in the United States in nearly 15 years, this publication presents a stunning range of work from the groundbreaking artist’s 35-year career. Showcasing approximately 180 photographs from the mid-1970s to the present, including new works made for the exhibition and never before published, the volume is a vivid exploration of Sherman’s sustained investigation into the construction of contemporary identity and the nature of representation. The book highlights major bodies of work including her seminal Untitled Film Stills (1977–80); centerfolds (1981); history portraits (1989–90); head shots (2000–2002); and two recent series on the experience and representation of aging in the context of contemporary obsessions with youth and status. An essay by curator Eva Respini provides an overview of Sherman’s career, weaving together art historical analysis and discussions of the artist’s working methods, and a contribution by art historian Johanna Burton offers a critical re-examination of Sherman’s work in light of her recent series. A conversation between Cindy Sherman and filmmaker John Waters provides an enlightening view into the creative process.
Cindy Sherman is a ground-breaking American photographer, born in 1954. She began her "Film Stills" series at the age of 23, gaining early recognition, and has followed it with remarkable experiments in color photography. Her art has won her wide recognition and praise, and been collected and exhibited by major museums throughout the world since 1980. A major retrospective exhibition of her work was shown at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Dallas Museum of Art. Sherman is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. She is represented by Metro Pictures gallery in New York.
Eva Respini is a former Curator in the Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art, New York where she contributed to numerous publications including Robert Heinecken: Object Matter (2014); Cindy Sherman (2012); and Into the Sunset: Photography’s Image of the American West (2009); Fashioning Fiction in Photography since 1990 (2004).
John Waters is an American filmmaker, actor, writer, and visual artist best known for his cult films, including "Hairspray", "Pink Flamingos", and "Cecil B. DeMented". He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.
Johanna Burton has served as the director of the graduate program at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.
Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Text by Eva Respini.
Into the Sunset examines how photography has pictured, established and transformed the idea of the American West, from 1850 to the present. The development of photography coincided with the exploration and settlement of the West, and this simultaneous growth resulted in a complex relationship that has shaped the perception of that region's physical and social landscape to this day. Published to accompany a major exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Into the Sunset charts changing myths and cultural attitudes about the West through photographs dating from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. An expansive and dynamic survey, it brings together photographers as diverse as Carleton E. Watkins and Stephen Shore, Darius Kinsey and Dorothea Lange, Robert Frank and Cindy Sherman, an unknown daguerreotypist and Richard Prince. More than 120 works are organized thematically to highlight the artists' differing views of the West's land and people.
Published by J&L Books. Edited by Jacob Dyrenforth, Eva Respini.
J&L Video 2: Videos and Vodka is the second in a series of DVDs published by J&L Books featuring short films by artists. This volume is guest edited by curator Eva Respini and artist Jacob Dyrenforth, whose Videos and Vodka salon presented non-traditional screenings in a domestic setting. Stressing the importance of context in the viewing experience, their series aimed to bring together video makers and viewers without the usual meditation of the art market. This two-DVD set features videos by salon artists, including Guy Ben-Ner, Tanyth Berkeley, Duke and Battersby, Christopher Miner, Ohad Meromi, Lisa Oppenheim, John Pilson, Halsey Rodman, Kirsten Stoltmann and Sterling Ruby. An accompanying booklet considers Respini and Dyrenforth's salon within the history of video and within the context of other non-traditional viewing models.
Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Essay and Interview with Dennis Freedman by Susan Kismaric and Dennis Freedman.
Since the late 1980s, the field of fashion photography has exploded, moving away from presenting a desirable ideal to showing contemporary lifestyles. An intriguing exchange of ideas and techniques between commercial photography and art photography and, more specifically, between fashion and art photography has completely changed the idea of what a fashion photograph is and what it should look like. The focus is on defining a milieu rather than just clothing. Fashioning Fiction in Photography Since 1990 presents a selection of high-profile fashion photographs influenced by two aesthetic strategies: cinema and the amateur photograph. The cinematic image, through its attention to drama and its reverence for tension and voyeurism, seduces a young audience whose primary visual points of reference are film and television. The amateur photograph, including the family album picture, provides seemingly offhand documentation of the activities of friends and associates in the lives of photographers, blurring the line between pictures made for hire and those made as personal keepsakes. This groundbreaking book, and the exhibition it accompanies, includes lavish illustrations of the work by photographers such as Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Cedric Buchet, Glen Luchford, Tina Barney, Juergen Teller, Nan Goldin and Larry Sultan, among others. The principal essay, by Susan Kismaric, Curator, and Eva Respini, Assistant Curator, in the Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art, explores the nature of fashion photography in the last decade, and the work of the photographers presented in this volume. A second essay, by Dennis Freedman, Vice Chairman and Creative Director of w magazine, discusses the subject from within the fashion industry and provides an intimate view of the creation of the promotional campaigns and the imagery of fashion.
Cindy Sherman
Into the Sunset: Photography's Image of the American West
J&L Video No. 2
Fashioning Fiction In Photography Since 1990