Published by Walther König, Köln. Edited with text by Louise Wolthers, Dragana Vujancovic Östlind. Text by Jennifer Blessing, Rudi Fuchs, Hans den Hartog Jager.
This large-format volume, designed by Irma Boom in close collaboration with Rineke Dijkstra (born 1959), focuses on the female figure in the photographer's work—women and girls who have stopped somewhere (in a park, a beach, at a party), whom she captures in such a way that they appear present to an astonishing degree. Spanning three decades of work, the book unites images from her classic series, including both photo- and video portraits, and extracts them from chronological order to suggest fresh ways of looking at her work. The book is published for Dijkstra's 2017 Hasselblad Award, for which occasion the Hasselblad Foundation described her images as "recalling the visual acuity of 17th-century Dutch portraiture." Essays discuss Dijkstra's gift for communicating an empathy with her subjects, and the logic of her image layouts in book form. Limited quantity available
Published by Guggenheim Museum Publications. Foreword by Richard Armstrong. Introduction, text and afterword by Jennifer Blessing.
This catalogue presents an important new trend in contemporary photography, offering an opportunity to define the concerns of a younger generation of artists and contextualize them within the history of art and culture. Drawing on the legacies of conceptual and commercial photography, these artists pursue a largely studio-based approach to still-life photography that centers on the representation of objects, often printed matter such as books, magazines and record covers. The result is images imbued with poetic and evocative personal significance--a sort of displaced self-portraiture--that resonate with larger cultural and historical meanings. Driven by a deep interest in the medium of photography, these artists investigate the nature, laws and magic of film photography at the moment of its disappearance in our digital age. They attempt to rematerialize the photograph through meticulous printing, using film and other disappearing photo technologies, and by creating photo-sculptures and installations. Artists include Claudia Angelmaier, Erica Baum, Anne Collier, Moyra Davey, Leslie Hewitt, Elad Lassry, Lisa Oppenheim, Erin Shirreff, Kathrin Sonntag and Sara VanDerBeek.
Published by D.A.P./San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Edited by Corey Keller. Text by Julia Bryan-Wilson, Jennifer Blessing.
Artists who arrive fully formed at a young age always dazzle, and Francesca Woodman was one of the most gifted and dazzling artist prodigies in recent history. In 1972, the 13-year-old Woodman made a black-and-white photograph of herself sitting at the far end of a sofa in her home in Boulder, Colorado. Her face is obscured by her hair, light radiates from an unseen source behind her out at the viewer through her right hand. This photograph typifies much of what would characterize Woodman's work to come: a semi-obscured female form merging with or flailing against a somewhat bare and often dilapidated interior. In an oeuvre of around 800 photographs made in just nine years, Woodman performed her own body against the textures of wallpaper, door frame, baths and couches, radically extending the Surrealist photography of Man Ray, Hans Bellmer and Claude Cahun and creating a mood and language all her own. In the 30 years since her untimely death, Woodman has gained a following among successive generations of artists and photographers, a testament to her work's undeniable immediacy and enduring appeal Amid a renewed intensification of interest in Francesca Woodman, this volume is published for a major touring exhibition of her photographs and films at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim. Containing many previously unpublished photographs, it is the definitive Francesca Woodman monograph. Francesca Woodman (1958-1981) was born in Denver, Colorado, to the well-known artists George and Betty Woodman. In 1975 she attended the Rhode Island School of Design, and in 1979 she moved to New York, to attempt to build a career in photography. In 1981, at the age of 22, she committed suicide.
Published by Guggenheim Museum Publications. Text by Jennifer Blessing, Sandra S. Phillips. Interview by Jan van Adrichem.
This volume is the first comprehensive monograph on Rineke Dijkstra to be published in the United States. The catalogue accompanies the first U.S. mid-career survey of this important Dutch artist’s work in photography and video; it features the Beach Portraits and other early works such as the photographs of new mothers and bullfighters, together with selections from Dijkstra’s later work including her most recent video installations. Also included are series that she has been working on continuously for years, such as Almerisa (1994–present), which documents a young immigrant girl as she grows up and adapts to her new environment. The catalogue features essays by exhibition curators Jennifer Blessing (Senior Curator of Photography at the Guggenheim) and Sandra S. Phillips (Senior Curator of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art); an interview with the artist by Jan van Adrichem; interviews with the artist’s subjects by Sophie Derkzer; short texts on the artist’s series by Chelsea Spengemann; and the most comprehensive exhibition history and bibliography to date. Rineke Dijkstra came to prominence in the 1990s with her celebrated Beach Portraits, large-scale color photographs of children on the verge of adolescence posed on beaches around the world, from South Carolina to the Ukraine. From that point on, her sensitive and visually riveting portraits have documented individuals caught in transitional states, sometimes due to physical exertion, for example after giving birth or dancing, or charted over time through series. Along with other Western European photographers such as Thomas Struth and Thomas Ruff, Dijkstra has been a leading innovator in the production of large-scale color images, which came to define contemporary photography in the 1990s and have transformed it ever since.
Published by Guggenheim Museum Publications. Edited by Jennifer Blessing, Nat Trotman. Text by Jennifer Blessing, Peggy Phelan, Lisa Saltzman, Nancy Spector, Nat Trotman.
Much of contemporary photography and video seems haunted by the past, by ghostly apparitions that are reanimated in reproductive media, as well as in live performance and the virtual world. By using dated, passé or quasi-extinct stylistic devices, subject matter and technologies, these arts can embody a melancholic longing for an otherwise unrecuperable past. Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance examines the myriad ways by which photographic imagery is incorporated into recent art practices, and in the process underscores the unique power of reproductive media—while documenting a widespread contemporary obsession with accessing and retrieving the past. The works included in Haunted range from individual photographs and photographic series, to sculptures and paintings that incorporate photographic elements, to videos, film, performance and site-specific installations. Drawn primarily from the Guggenheim collection and its recent acquisitions, Haunted features major artists such as Marina Abramovi?, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Christian Boltanski, Sophie Calle, Gregory Crewdson, Tacita Dean, Stan Douglas, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Anthony Hernandez, Roni Horn, Pierre Huyghe, Joan Jonas, Zoe Leonard, Sally Mann, Ana Mendieta, Annette Messager, Richard Prince, Robert Rauschenberg, Cindy Sherman, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Sara VanDerBeek, Jeff Wall and Andy Warhol. A significant part of the survey is dedicated to work created since 2001 by younger artists such as Walead Beshty, Spencer Finch, Ori Gersht and Idris Khan.
Published by Guggenheim Museum Publications. Text by Jennifer Blessing, Katrin Blum.
Jeff Wall: Exposure introduces four new large-scale black-and-white photographs by the Canadian artist Jeff Wall. Presented publicly for the first time in an accompanying special exhibition at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, this new work is shown alongside earlier pieces--both black-and-white photographs as well as transparencies mounted in light boxes--to create an ensemble that resonates formally and thematically. Wall has long been interested in the language of Realism, in the values and aesthetics of representing daily life. All of the pictures realistically portray desolate places and people in straitened circumstances typical of contemporary society. This focused catalogue, with essays by Guggenheim Museum Curator of Photography Jennifer Blessing and Katrin Blum, aptly demonstrates Wall’s continuing interrogation of the history of photographic representation--here specifically the legacies of documentary photography and Neorealist film.
Published by Guggenheim Museum Publications. Text by Rebecca Solnit, Jennifer Blessing.
True North features the work of contemporary artists whose photographic or video-based work evokes the formal conventions of Northern Romantic landscape painting as well as its legacy in later nineteenth-century photography. Yet unlike their Romantic antecedents, the works in this exhibition are historically and politically self-reflexive and problematize the notion of a pure, unchangeable North. Rather than report a uniquely Northern essence or truth, this presentation is premised on the idea that our visions of the North are structured through our own varying positions. A fantastical place of fear, desire, refuge, conquest and decay, the North has played an increasingly important role in the work of contemporary artists interested in the socio-political issues of colonization and pollution, as well as aesthetic notions of the sublime. Accompanying a spring 2008 exhibition at Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, this catalogue includes entries on the featured artists: Stan Douglas, Olafur Eliasson, Elger Esser, Thomas Flechtner, Roni Horn, Armin Linke and Orit Raff. In the introduction, Jennifer Blessing, Curator of Photography at the Guggenheim Museum, sketches a theoretical framework for the exhibition, linking the recent focus on Northern locales to the qualities of the photographic medium itself. Rebecca Solnit's poetic essay gathers together personal recollections, reflections on literature and environmental and political concerns to explore various cultural fantasies and symbols associated with the North.
Published by Guggenheim Museum Publications. Text by Dorothy Allison, Jennifer Blessing, Russell Ferguson, Nat Trotman.
This comprehensive new exhibition catalogue, published to accompany the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum's major mid-career survey of Catherine Opie's work, is the first to gather all of the artist's key projects to date in a single volume. Opie is best known for her subtle but potent portraits of people from the queer communities of Los Angeles and San Francisco. In this definitive volume, each of Opie's series--among them Portraits, Freeways, Domestic, Icehouses and In and Around Home--is reproduced in full color plates alongside works that were not displayed in the exhibition, allowing for the most complete overview of this important Los Angeles artist's work to date. In addition, this volume features a lead essay by exhibition curator Jennifer Blessing, which surveys Opie's artistic career and its historical contexts; a series of interviews with the artist by Russell Ferguson, Chair of the Department of Art at UCLA; and a brief personal reflection by internationally renowned novelist Dorothy Allison, whose work explores many concerns similar to Opie's. It also includes introductory essays on each of the artist's series by Nat Trotman, Assistant Curator at the Guggenheim, as well as a newly researched, exhaustive exhibition history and bibliography, making it the primary source for future research on Opie's work. Catherine Opie was born in Ohio in 1961 and is currently Professor of Photography at UCLA. Opie's work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States, Europe and Japan. She has had solo exhibitions of her work at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; St. Louis Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, among many others.
Photo-Poetics
Francesca Woodman
Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective
Haunted: Contemporary Photography, Video, Performance
Jeff Wall: Exposure
True North
Catherine Opie: American Photographer