Over the course of several recorded conversations, Andrea Bowers and Catherine Opie reveal the many similarities in their backgrounds and discuss ideas concerning documentary methodologies and community based work. The conversation spans many of the topics they regard central to their practices and responsibilities as artists, from memories and community, to activism, documentary, feminism, war, and environmentalism.

The older paradigm for photojournalists was to simply record events, with the hope—and frequently the expectation—that people and their governments would be moved to respond to the injustices pictured, as witnessed by the impact of certain images during the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War. Given evolving media and political climates, however, including the billions of images now available online from all kinds of sources, the purpose and effectiveness of media, in particular of visual journalism, has been called into question. Bending the Frame, by author and critic Fred Ritchin, addresses the new and emerging potentials for visual media ...

Photography has been used as a tool to record our bodies from the creation of the first mugshots in the late 19th century to recent developments in facial recognition technology. In the first episode of Mirror with a Memory, artist Zach Blas and filmmaker and scholar Manthia Diawara will discuss what it means to leave it to machines to verify our identities.

This sourcebook is a gathering of documentation on the labeling of all the materials that have gone into the exhibition Blind Sensorium. Il paradosso dell’Antropocene in Matera at the “Domenico Ridola” National Museum of Archaeology and in the spaces of the former “Alessandro Volta” school, from 6 September 2019 to 8 March 2020. The photographic images – which for the installation in Basilicata have been reproduced and printed in A4 and A3 format on specially prepared panels – are joined on these pages by the reproduction of materials contained in the “Domenico Ridola” Museum, which we have chosen as an integral ...

Camouflage of Large Installations by Charles Stankievech is a rare World War II handbook created by the British Government as a guide for factory owners to implement the then new theories of camouflage in order to protect industrial assets. The handbook is composed of three sections: instructional, advertising by corporations supplying camouflage services and full-page colour swatches. The full-page color swatches are particularly beautiful and when viewed aesthetically are interesting forerunners to the history of monochromes, specifically Yves Klein’s first artwork Peintures (1954): a small portfolio booklet that presents a series of monochromes. Interestingly, Klein had never made these paintings and the ...

The Chill of Lonesome is the title of a bluegrass album by Ernie Thacker. Ernie, his family and friends are amazing bluegrass musicians. They live in Clinchco, Virginia. Back in 2006, I suggested to Mélanie Scarciglia, my partner, Chris Hoover, our Good Samaritan (and producer) and Garret Linn, movie director (two of my good friends from New York), to go visit Ernie Thacker and his band, Route 23, and make a film about bluegrass music. Our destination was the small town of Clinchco, Virginia. We drove the 14 hours from NYC to Clinchco without knowing what we would find there. I ...

Contested Landscapes is dedicated to different rural regions—their landscapes, their producers, and their work. The paths of the family of the artist Sandra Schäfer and those of the famous German photographer August Sander cross in the Westerwald, a rural area in Germany shaped by farming and mining. A hundred years ago, the photographer August Sander captured his series of peasants there including the artist’s relatives. Schäfer’s “homecoming” is represented in the book by three works dealing with the changes of the landscape, its farming, and Sander’s photographs, as well as amateur ones from Schäfer’s family. Contributions from Schäfer’s interlocutors reflect ...

Art critic Ida Hiršenfelder interviews Trevor Paglen, a radical geographer with an academic background, muckraking author and outlaw artist who has been exploring the secret activities of the U.S. military and intelligence agencies for several years. Hiršenfelder and Paglen discuss here four projects: Simbology (2006) – a collection of insignia and patches used in secret operations, Missing Persons – a list of fake names used to cover up CIA agents in the war on terror, Code Names – a catalogue of words, phrases and terms employed for active military programs, and Limit Telephotography Project, which unveils the geographies of classified ...

Cookie Jar, a pamphlet series of the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, gathers five new pieces of writing by grantees that take on home as the unruly site of inheritance, memory, and imagination. In “Ejecta,” Ari Larissa Heinrich reflects on artist Jes Fan’s melanin sculptures and the geology of metaphoric language. Tan Lin’s “The Fern Rose Bibliography” is a meditation on the loss of his parents through an olfactory exploration of his family’s books. M. Neelika Jayawardane’s “‘This is not the correct history’” questions the evidentiary nature of documentary photography foregrounding the slippery ethics of reading images of the ...

Light symbolises the highest good, it enables all visual art, and today it lies at the heart of billion-dollar industries. The control of light forms the foundation of contemporary vision. Digital Light brings together artists, curators, technologists and media archaeologists to study the historical evolution of digital light-based technologies. Digital Light provides a critical account of the capacities and limitations of contemporary digital light-based technologies and techniques by tracing their genealogies and comparing them with their predecessor media. As digital light remediates multiple historical forms (photography, print, film, video, projection, paint), the collection draws from all of these histories, connecting them to ...

Repeated attempts to dismantle the aura of value and rarity surrounding art objects have been, for the most part, unsuccessful. Why is that? The majority of these attempts throughout the twentieth century have consisted of infiltrating the economy of care, custodianship, conservation, and considered attention granted to art objects upon entry into the art establishment. While the introduction of impostors into this ecosystem in the form of real-world doubles (such as Duchampian readymades) served to short-circuit the aura of authenticity within spaces of art, over time these impostors nevertheless began to perform the function of ritualizing a general sense of disbelief with ...