The penultimate installment in Skira’s five-volume Barkley Hendricks survey reveals the artist’s little-known work in photography
Barkley L. Hendricks (1945–2017) revolutionized postmodern Black portraiture. This volume, the fourth in a five-part series dedicated to Hendricks’ career, focuses on the artist’s photographic oeuvre. Hendricks credited photography as a key facet of his practice, both as a tool for documenting his own work and as a source of inspiration for his paintings. Influenced by his experiences under Walker Evans’ tutelage at Yale, Hendricks frequently took to the streets to capture the world as he saw it, with his subjects in their element as they lingered in front of stores or performed in jazz clubs. As in his paintings, Hendricks’ attention to graphic composition and ability to capture his subjects’ dynamism are stunning. For the first time, Hendricks’ considerable body of photographic work is collected in a single volume, revealing an essential though underdiscussed dimension of his art.
Featured image is reproduced from 'Barkley L. Hendricks: Photography'.
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Harper's Bazaar
Kerry Pieri
Barkley L. Hendricks revolutionized postmodern Black portraiture. This volume, the fourth in a five-part series dedicated to Hendricks’ career, focuses on the artist’s photographic oeuvre.
New York Times
Arthur Lubow
Hendricks’s photographs share his trademark wit and pride. Whatever the medium, his sensibility comes through.
Art Newspaper
Gareth Harris
Unseen photographs gathered in [this] new publication...looking at how aspects of his painting and photography overlapped...photographs mirror[ing] his full-length paintings of friends and colleagues...casual domestic scenes, American landscapes, and city scenes...with an element of quiet humor.
Artnet
Caroline Goldstein
Hendricks is revealed as a prolific and impressive photographer [...] Hendricks took in the world through his lens, often using photographs he took of particularly stylish or confident-looking people on the street as the basis for his portraits.
ARTnews
Andy Battalgia
One of these lesser-known aspects of Hendricks’s art is his photography, selections of which feature in Barkley L. Hendricks: Photography (Skira), the latest in a new line of books devoted to different facets of the artist’s life and work.
Bookforum
Jane Ursula Harris
His full-length realist paintings of mostly Black figures set against monochromatic backgrounds are celebrated for their sartorial swagger. But between 1984 and 2002, the artist stopped making these works. Instead, as these books bring to the fore, his output was dominated by other equally compelling interests, which the photography installment beautifully conveys.
STATUS: Out of stock
Temporarily out of stock pending additional inventory.
“Untitled” (1974) is reproduced from Barkley L. Hendricks: Photography, the highly-anticipated new release from Skira. Whether used as source material for Barkley’s iconic figurative paintings or produced as discreet artworks in and of themselves—Hendricks studied with Walker Evans at Yale—the 50 color photographs gathered here comprise a key, but until now, little-known aspect of the artist’s oeuvre. In both his paintings and his photographs, Hendricks involved his subjects in a riveting performance. Yet, "taking a photograph was just as much a performance on his part," Anna Arabindan-Kesson writes, "a stage on which he could reveal his own artistry. Diminutive actions, slight gestures, fine angles and unconscious expressions, these were the notations with which Barkley L. Hendricks worked.”
FORMAT: Hbk, 6.5 x 9.25 in. / 96 pgs / 50 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $25.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $34.5 ISBN: 9788857241500 PUBLISHER: Skira AVAILABLE: 6/22/2021 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: Out of stock TERRITORY: NA LA
Published by Skira. Text by Anna Arabindan-Kesson.
The penultimate installment in Skira’s five-volume Barkley Hendricks survey reveals the artist’s little-known work in photography
Barkley L. Hendricks (1945–2017) revolutionized postmodern Black portraiture. This volume, the fourth in a five-part series dedicated to Hendricks’ career, focuses on the artist’s photographic oeuvre. Hendricks credited photography as a key facet of his practice, both as a tool for documenting his own work and as a source of inspiration for his paintings. Influenced by his experiences under Walker Evans’ tutelage at Yale, Hendricks frequently took to the streets to capture the world as he saw it, with his subjects in their element as they lingered in front of stores or performed in jazz clubs. As in his paintings, Hendricks’ attention to graphic composition and ability to capture his subjects’ dynamism are stunning. For the first time, Hendricks’ considerable body of photographic work is collected in a single volume, revealing an essential though underdiscussed dimension of his art.
