Published by Hatje Cantz. Text by Heloise Conesa, Ulrich Pohlmann.
This fourth monograph on the New York– and Costa Rica–based photographer, sculptor and video artist Ann Mandelbaum (born 1945) presents both analog black-and-white work from 1990 to 2000 and also digital color images from 2007 to the present. None of the 100 works published here have been exhibited or published previously. The 35-year span of the volume reveals Mandelbaum’s consistent obsession with the organic world, processed at first through the depths of the darkroom and subsequently on the digital screen. Her techniques draw on the history of photographic innovation, including the photogram and multiple printing. Throughout, Surrealist photographic vocabularies deploying sculpture, collage and the language of drawing can be detected.
Published by Hatje Cantz. Edited by Peter Weiermair. Essays by Victoria CombalĂa, Beate Ermacora and Annett Reckert.
One mouth, one elbow, one row of eyelashes--Ann Mandelbaum's intense examinations of a single human feature at a time are best known in photographic form, but here readers see her sculpture and video, too. The prints, casts and stills show one of the most convincing, authentic positions in contemporary surrealism, an artist exploring the experiences of her own body, its fantastic reality and her psychophysical fate. Thin Skin is Mandelbaum's third book, and it relates and compares casts of body parts made in recent years, fragments of reality reinterpreted in her photographs and the microorganisms she has invented and collected in display cases. "Lips stick, then part/Spit glows, then pops/Motion tells, dispels. Resells/What and where appear and smear÷" --Ann Mandelbaum
Ann Mandelbaum: Thin Skin