Seemingly drawing on the language of still lives and documentation, Irons’ paintings often find their well-source from photographic materials. Like the deadpan mimesis of a throwaway snapshot, the focus of her paintings often describe unremarkable elements of the every day, as we blindly learn to forget them. Chairs, doors, and plants reside in the plaintive silence of empty offices and building hallways, devoid of the human presence. Dispersed through various paintings are contours of colors that impel the appearance of abstract painting, though this too is transient, and affords a bare minimum of information. Gesturing both towards the ideas of abstraction and representation, the works move between the quotidian and the seductively opaque, at once inviting and challenging the interpretation of her tableaus.

Afghanistan has been ravaged by war for more than twenty years; the Soviet Union, the Mujaheddin, the Taliban and the United States have all played their part. Norfolk’s powerfully beautiful images reveal utter devastation on a vast and overwhelming scale. Afghanistan is unique, utterly unlike any other war-ravaged landscape. In Bosnia, Dresden or the Somme, for example, the devastation appears to have taken place within one period, inflicted by a small gamut of weaponry. However, the sheer length of the war in Afghanistan, now in its 24th year, means the ruins have a bizarre layering; different moments of destruction lying like sedimentary strata on top of each other.

Since the 1970s Barbara Kasten has developed her expansive practice of photography through the lens of many different disciplines, including sculpture, painting, theater, textile, and installation. Spanning her nearly five-decade engagement with abstraction, light, and architectonic form, this publication situates Kasten’s practice within current conversations around sculpture and photography. Barbara Kasten: Stages is the first major survey of her work. The publication includes a biography of the artist, a conversation between Kasten and artist Liz Deschenes, and new scholarly essays by curator Alex Klein, and art historians Alex Kitnick and Jenni Sorkin.

The war in Bosnia in the 1990s raised to common currency the terms ‘ethnic cleansing,’ and ‘humanitarian intervention’. It brought back to Europe a barbarism not seen since the Second World War; and was the first war fought very much under the eyes of the media. It was also the first conflict fought by killers who knew, even before the war had finished, that a war crimes tribunal awaited them.

Norfolk’s photographs initially appear almost abstract. Yet through these still and beautiful images of ice, water, snow and the land, we can sense the arrogance of killers who believed they could conceal the brutal evidence of their crimes by reburying their victims in ‘secondary’ graves. But over time secrets escape, and the truth bleeds out.

Simon Norfolk’s 2002 book Afghanistan: chronotopia is now recognised as a classic of photography. It established Norfolk’s reputation as one of the leading photographers in the world and has been exhibited at more than thirty venues worldwide.

In 2010 Simon Norfolk returned to Afghanistan. This time he followed in the footsteps of the nineteenth century Irish photographer John Burke, a superb, yet virtually unknown, war photographer. Burke’s eloquent and beautiful photographs of the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878-1880) provide an extraordinary record. Using unwieldy wet-plate collodion negatives and huge wooden cameras he shot landscapes, battle-fields, archaeological sites, street scenes, portraits of British officers and ethnological group portraits of Afghans in what amounts to a richly detailed record of an Imperial encounter. The range is tremendously broad, yet suffused with a delicate humanism. These are also the first ever pictures made in Afghanistan. With this book, one hundred and thirty years too late, John Burke’s time has come at last.

Norfolk’s new work looks at what happens when you add half a trillion US war dollars to an impoverished and broken country such as Afghanistan. Very loosely re-photographic in nature, the work is presented as an artistic collaboration between Burke and Norfolk. It features photographs by Burke never before published as well as Norfolk’s new pictures from Kabul and Helmand.

The New York curator Marvin Heiferman characterized Lewis Baltz’s landscape photography as a “topography of the emptiness of random, damaged, remote places”. The images in his 1989 series Candlestick Point show Californian fallow land, where piles of rubble and waste accumulate in the middle of the prairie. Traces of technical land development – drainage channels and water dams – are visible, becoming a typically American theme: the development of a territory in the almost infinite prairie. Baltz’s photographic record of the development at Candlestick Point combines sociological and analytical rigour and is strongly oriented towards the tradition of Land Art, and retrospectively pays tribute to its crucial influence on conceptual art since the 1970s.

Joachim Brohm, born in 1955, created the right photographic images at the right time – images that would prove to be a pioneering achievement in the context of a fierce debate over the status of photography in art. His work became a vehicle for an understanding of art since the 1970s that made a young generation of artists connect the visual possibilities of color photography with a newly defined ‘everyday cultural landscape.’ At the same time, Brohm s constantly elaborated sequences of photographs also show how important the medium and the artist s archive have become as reflectors of day-to-day existence, challenging him to keep developing and reviewing them in the light of changes in the reality of our lives.

Common Objects revisits Lewis Baltz’s most remarkable series from The Prototype Works (1967-1976) to Ronde de Nuit (1992-1995), and interrogates for the first time the influence of European cinema (Antonioni, Godard, Hitchcock) on his work. Baltz’s seminal series The Prototype Works, The Tract Houses (1969-1971), Candlestick Point (1987-1989), Sites of Technology (1989-1991) and Ronde de Nuit are presented in dialogue with stills from several films: Alfred Hitchcock’s Saboteur and Psycho, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, La Notte and Red Desert and Jean-Luc Godard’s Les Carabiniers.

The creation of seamless illusion without jarring disruptions of cinematic space or time remains the driving tenet of Hollywood cinema. The preservation of this order, called continuity, is John Divolas focus in this striking book. Divola creates haunting installations of fictive reality through his use of original still photographs of Warner Bros. film sets from the 1930s which he has collected. Divided into such subject categories as Hallways, Broken Furniture, and Evidence of Aggression, these images display a glorious formal beauty (made possible by the use of 8 x 10 negatives) as well as the solid intellectual grounding one finds in the best conceptual art.

Jude’s latest book project, Emmett, brings new life to a selection of his own early photographs, made in the early 1980s in central Idaho. Enhanced by special-effects filters and cheap telephoto lenses, the pictures include hazy scenes of a summertime drag race, a forest across changing seasons, midnight horror films on TV and a Nordic-looking teenager who appears as a specter from the artist’s past. Edited here nearly 30 years after its making, this experimental body of work acquires unexpected nuance and humor, and has the serendipitous qualities of a dream–memories reorganized into a fictionalized narrative, imagery suffused with both an unsettling melancholy and the glow of youthful reverie. Related conceptually to and residing thematically between his two previous books–Alpine Star and Other Nature–Emmett achieves an aesthetic inspired by equal parts Motorhead and Jean-Paul Sartre.

This photo book seamlessly weaves together the disparate strands of American photographer Ron Jude’s three-part look at his childhood home of Central Idaho. Pulling equal parts from Alpine Star (2006), emmett (2010), and Lick Creek Line (2012), Jude fleshes out the consistent tone and crossover between what appear on the surface to be three incongruent projects. An aging fur trapper, a young man on the threshold of adulthood in the early 1980s and an entire community (as represented by a weekly newspaper) converge through the repeating motif of a woodland landscape. Published in conjunction with the exhibition Backstory (2013) at the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College in Chicago, Fires functions not as a catalog, but as a self-contained piece that exploits photography’s tendency to continuously tip away from empiricism into the realm of the prose poem.

Flight Patterns highlights contemporary artists primarily working in the Pacific Basin–Southern California, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia–whose work addresses the specific topographical conditions and experience of living in this geographically and geopolitically dynamic region. As its conceptual foundation, Flight Patterns rethinks topographical practices of photography since the 1970s, looking at current manifestations of the topographical impulse in landscape-oriented work. The exhibition and its accompanying catalogue include new projects, recent work from the 1990s, and historically significant works of photography, film, video, and painting by 23 artists, including Doug Aitken, Christina Fernandez, Rodney Graham, Anthony Hernandez, Tracey Moffatt, Paul Outerbridge, Allan Sekula, Miles Coolidge, Simon Leung. Flight Patterns introduces the work of West Coast American artists as well as those artists working in regions where there is a parallel history of landscapes and their representation, and where similar postcolonial issues are at stake. A landmark artistic, social, and geographical document, Flight Patterns highlights a diversity of artistic approaches–both formalist and conceptual–to one of the most fascinating and complex areas of the planet.

‘It is a commonly held belief, although a myth nonetheless, that the birds refuse to sing amongst the remains of the death camp at Auschwitz; but it is certainly one of the quietest places on God’s earth. Perhaps this is because it is somewhere from which He turned and walked away.’

Simon Norfolk has photographed sites of genocide. The names ring like a death toll for the twentieth century – Rwanda, Cambodia, Vietnam, Auschwitz, Dresden, Ukraine, Armenia, Namibia … Charged with emotional intensity Norfolk’s photographs document the human traces left behind: a tooth Iying in a field, or the worn steps of a death camp.

December 9th, 1998 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the United Nations convention on genocide. With the twentieth century now at a close this book is a profound comment on its worst atrocities.

A dialectic cuts through the world of modern rocketry. The launch behicles are massive cans of metal and industrial fuels; yet the satellites and missiles themselves are infinitely delicate packages of microchips and sensors. The workaday limits of rocket science are conjointed to a world of weightlessness and omniscience. Satellites and missiles are born in worlds of utter secrecy – clandestine factories and closed military bases – and live out their lives in the soundless black of deep space, silently listening, watching and processing. (Who would have thought that a space so totally empty would make such a wonderful place to hide; to observe unseen?)

But there is one moment in their lives when they bellow their existence with a ground-trembling, exubernt din that lights the night skies like a second sunset: the 45 seconds or so it takes for them to lift from their launch pads and disappear thousands of miles downrange. They may have feet of clay, but their heads are truly in the stars.

Ten major series by John Divola are explored. Starting with Vandalism, his iconic look at Southern California in the 1970s, and including his most recent work, the Theodore Street project, this collection of beautifully reproduced images shows how expertly Divola moves between medium and technique. Using Polaroids of sculpted objects, appropriated stereographs, and landscapes featuring his own image, Divola’s diverse body of work explores painting and conceptual art through his photography. Essays by the accompanying exhibitions’ curators explore themes such as existentialism, California and photography in the 1970s, and natural and built environments. Divola’s most recent project is discussed in an interview between the artist and Simon Baker.

In Lago, Ron Jude returns to the California desert of his early childhood as if a detective in search of clues to his own identity. In a book of 54 photographs made between 2011 and 2014, he attempts to reconcile the vagaries of memory (and the uncertainty of looking) with our need to make narrative sense of things. Using a desolate desert lake as a theatrical backdrop, Jude meanders through the arid landscape of his youth, making note of everything from venomous spiders to discarded pornography.

If one considers these traces to be a coded language of some sort, Jude’s act of photographing and piecing them together becomes a form of cryptography – like a poetic archeology that, rather than attempting to arrive at something conclusive, looks for patterns and rhythms that create congruity out of the stuttering utterances of the visible world. According to Jude, “these harmonies, when we’re lucky enough to find them, are probably the closest we can get to discovering actual ‘meaning’ and grasping the potency of place.”

Lewis Baltz, with his iconic, minimalist photos of suburban landscape, is considered the founder of the New Topographics movement. Reproduced for the first time, his earliest portfolio, The Tract Houses (1971), and his preliminary forays into a minimal aesthetic, The Prototype Works (1967-1976), illuminate Baltz’s drive to capture the reality of a sprawling Western ecology gone wild. Together with The New Industrial Parks near Irvine, California, this trilogy reveals the indelible importance of Baltz in the development of contemporary photography. ‘Baltz turned his camera on the virtually featureless built environment of California . . . He pushed his compositions to an astringent minimum,’ writes curator Sheryl Conkelton in an informative essay.

Ron Jude’s new book, Lick Creek Line, extends and amplifies his ongoing fascination with the vagaries of photographic empiricism, and the gray area between documentation and fiction. In a sequential narrative punctuated by contrasting moments of violence and beauty, Jude follows the rambling journey of a fur trapper, methodically checking his trap line in a remote area of Idaho in the Western United States. Through converging pictures of landscapes, architecture, an encroaching resort community, and the solitary, secretive process of trapping pine marten for their pelts, Lick Creek Line underscores the murky and culturally arbitrary nature of moral critique. With an undercurrent of mystery and melancholy that echoes Jude’s previous two books about his childhood home of Central Idaho, Lick Creek Line serves as the lynchpin in a multi-faceted, three-part look at the incomprehensibility of self and place through photographic narrative. While Alpine Star functioned as a fictitious sociological archive, and Emmett explored the muddy waters of memory and autobiography, Lick Creek Line finds its tenor through the sleight-of-hand structure of a traditional photo essay.

Over the past three decades, Mark Ruwedel has examined the intersections of representation, cultural memory, and the shifting perceptions of space. His work is an epic account of North American civilization, extending from topologies of urban architecture to large-scale projects such as “The Ice Age” and “Westward the Course of Empire. Ruwedel represents landscape as a site where radically different scales of time intertwine. Picturing the earth as an enormous historical archive, he describes his work as “an inquiry into the histories, cultural and natural, of places that reveal the land as both a field of human endeavor and an agent of historical processes.” Ruwedel spotlights traces of human activity—whether an ancient footpath in Death Valley or a rotting wooden trestle abandoned after the failure of the Vancouver, Victoria and Eastern Railroad—in relation to geographic and geological upheavals that have shaped the earth’s surface. Ruwedel thus historicizes nature’s transformation of human structures into relics on their way to obliteration.

Ludwig Mies van der Roche’s 1930 design for a golf clubhouse in Krefeld never reached the construction phase. In 2013, however, a full-size model that could be entered and walked around was built at the originally planned site in cooperation with the Belgian architects Robbrecht en Daem architecten, based in Ghent.

This volume documents a unique exhibition project, MIES 1:1. With revealing series of photographs by well-known photographers Maarten Vanden Abeelen, Joachim Brohm, Michael Dannenmann, and Thomas Florschuetz, it discusses possible insights that architecture could gain from such models, both with regard to our understanding of space as well as further research on MIes. The publication of both the historical plans and the construction drawings of Robbrecth en Daem architecten makes this volume an indispensable reference for appreciation of Mies van der Rohe.

“Milton Rogovin celebrates the non-celebrated, the ones who make the world go round.” These words, spoken by prize-winning author Studs Terkel, are a fitting lens through which to view the work of Milton Rogovin, optometrist, political activist, and photographer. Milton Rogovin: The Making of a Social Documentary Photographer chronicles the story behind that life, and the man behind the acclaimed photographs that invite us to see for the first time, or to see anew, the tenacity, profound dignity, and resilience of people living in extremely difficult circumstances.

Rogovin devoted himself to chronicling the lives of people in New York, Appalachia, Scotland, Cuba, Zimbabwe, Mexico, France, Czechoslovakia, Spain, Germany, and China. Scholar Melanie Herzog locates Rogovin within a tradition of social documentary photography that began when nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century sociologists took up the camera, or, more often, enlisted the service of photographers to advocate for social reform through visual representations of the plight of the poor. But while Rogovin’s work is undoubtedly political, he does not romanticize his subjects or seek to portray them as victims or heroes; he seeks simply to convey the effects of material reality on people and their agency, to show how people live in relation to social conditions.

This richly illustrated retrospective features Rogovin’s own narrative of his development and life as a documentary photographer, amplified by an account of the historical events and circumstances that shaped his politics and social consciousness. Milton Rogovin has dedicated his life’s work-as an optometrist, an activist, and a photographer-to enabling people to see more clearly. His photographs demand witness, and to witness is to see.

Milton Rogovin has been photographing coal miners since 1962, working first in Appalachia and later, in the 1980s, in Europe, Asia, South Africa, China, Mexico, and Cuba. Particularly in these later portraits he concentrated on the lives of miners as revealed at work and at home. Men and women portrayed at a mine entrance or in a changing room, covered in coal dust, are barely recognizable in the accompanying photographs, where they proudly stand in their living rooms or backyards, holding a pet or posing with their families, surrounded by their cherished belongings.
Milton Rogovin: The Mining Photographs presents more than one hundred of these direct and powerful images, usually in pairings that reveal Rogovin’s unsentimental regard for men and women whose dangerous work is shown to be only one part of their complex lives. With an introductory essay by Judith Keller, associate curator of photographs at the Getty Museum; a chronology of Rogovin’s life and career and a selected bibliography are provided by Melanie Herzog.

Simone Nieweg’s latest book is a compilation of nearly every variety of agricultural cultivation, rang ing from small market gardens with vegetable beds and fruit trees to pastures, fallow land, forest fringes, arable land, and fields of grain. Without exception, Nieweg photographs her subjects in a soft, almost shadowless light that does not obscure the fine structure of her images. Her long exposure times require an absolutely breezeless day in order to capture images of plants and landscapes in hitherto unseen clarity and richness of detail. Nieweg’s photographs tell of the unconventional marriage, which nature and civilization have entered upon in
the course of their long evolution, and everything in them gives the impression of being known and familiar through many encounters. The present work is a selection of photographs taken by Simone Nieweg over the last ten years. The introduction was written by Heinz Liesbrock.

Joachim Brohm was among the first of a younger generation of Germans to discover in color photography new opportunities for self-expression. His Ohio photographs, made in 1983 and 1984 while he was living in the state as a student and Fulbright scholar, show cluttered yards and houses and focus on apparently trivial and banal scenes of everyday American life. As one commentator puts it, “Brohm’s images seem strangely empty. Their centers seem to have fled; a surface has appeared in front of the camera’s lens that surrounds the actual image.” At the time, such mundane scenarios were considered unworthy of photographic documentation, but today this approach constitutes almost an entire genre of its own. This precocity of subject and the use of color photography make the Ohio series gathered here a significant milestone in the history of photography.

“For many years now, my work has been concerned with offering an understanding of the American West as a palimpsest of cultural and natural histories. Dusk and Dog Houses may best be described as chapters of a much larger project entitled Message from the Exterior, while 1212 Palms is a complete work representing my long-term interest in place names and a conceptual approach to landscape photography. 1212 Palms is a set of nine black and white photographs of locations in the California deserts that were named for a certain number of palm trees. From Una Palma to Thousand Palms Oasis, the nine names add up to one thousand two hundred and twelve, although the number of trees depicted do not.”

– Mark Ruwedel

In his previous book, Alpine Star, photographer and publisher Ron Jude appropriated and recast a collection of his hometown newspaper photographs as a cryptically humorous meditation on the grey area between personal history and collective memory. Jude’s latest series of photographs, Other Nature, adds a more intimate, diaristic strain to this line of inquiry. In this handsome volume, two separate sets of his own 4 x 5 color pictures (made between 2001 and 2008) combine to create a subtle and uncanny instance of what Jude has called the “slippery threshold of narrative” in still images. Drawing on the concerns of the New Topographics photographers, Jude’s accounts of anonymous motel rooms and the stranger regions of the American landscape could, on first glance, be mistaken for an ecological critique. But as the exterior and interior details of these environments (floral patterns, wood grain, sunlight) begin to merge, interrupt and inform each other, the book shifts into a more abstract, subjective register, provoking reflections on photography, the visible world and the things hovering just outside our physical perception.

Devils Gate, Devils Canyon, Bumpass Hell, Hells Half Acre, Dirty Devil River:
photographer Mark Ruwedel visited all of these places and more while creating
the series Pictures of Hell. This book is the culmination of the journey he began
in 1995, and brings together virtually every image in the artist’s brilliant
interpretation of the American West. Ruwedel, 2014 winner of a Guggenheim
Fellowship and the prestigious Canadian Scotiabank Award, is inspired by the
19th-century photographers whose photo albums revealed the glories of the
West. In Pictures of Hell, he layers history with a contemporary investigation of
technology, anthropology and colonization. Ruwedel’s work has been exhibited
at TATE Modern, Yale University Art Gallery, SFMoMA, LACMA and other
important venues. 132 meticulously reproduced tritone plates are complemented
with essays by Simon Baker and Chiara Siravo. With intellect and wit, Ruwedel
investigates what the West means today, and how its mythology and culture
affect our current sensibilities.

As much influence as Bernd and Hilla Becher have had over the years, as founders of the Dusseldorf School and mentors to artists including Andreas Gursky, Candida Hofer, Thomas Ruff and Thomas Struth, among others, few of their progeny have worked in their most favorite form, the taxonomic study. Frank Breuer’s portfolios of logos, warehouses, shipping containers and now, utility poles, are not just a tribute to his teachers. Critics have called them “distinctive and deeply relevant.” The London Independent observed that “Breuer’s classically restrained photographs…give the corporate logos of our consumerist society a strange, sculptural dignity.” These utility poles, a series he began as an artist-in-residence at Harvard and continued in the midwest, represent his first American series.

Using the work of Lewis Baltz, a leading photographer of the 1975 New Topographics movement, as a jumping-off point, this book documents Mario Pfeifer’s multi-faceted work, Reconsidering The New Industrial Parks Near Irvine, California by Lewis Baltz, 1974. Pfeifer went on the road to track down the buildings photographed by Baltz and their history, and also sought out where the portfolios of photographs can today be found. Included is a film installation, consisting of two synchronized, looped, and parallel projected films, that takes as its point of departure the first monograph of Baltz’s work, published by Castelli Graphics, New York in 1975. Includes film stills, production stills, an excellent interview with Baltz by Pfeifer, and a critical essay by noted contemporary art historian, Vanessa Joan Muller, essay by Chris Balaschak with introductions by Martin Hochleitner and Julia Moritz.

Wilhelm Schürmann (*1946 in Dortmund) is not just a photographer, but a well-known collector and curator of contemporary art. This is the first presentation of the photographs he took between 1979 and 1981 in Steinhammerstrasse in Dortmund. Having grown up there, Schürmann not only examines the many facets of his own background but relates impressions of a German cosmos, a small world full of descriptive details. A “roadmap to happiness,” a brochure for a lottery outlet peeking out of a pants pocket, is only one example of his many fabulous images. During his forays the artist captured, with both sensitivity and humor, countless black-and-white photographs of façades, shops, displays in store windows, and living rooms, unfolding a fascinating panorama in which the postwar Ruhr district symbolizes the euphoria of Germany’s economic miracle and the ensuing phase of disenchantment.

This progressive book object combines two volumes and covers the sweep and depth of Lewis Baltz’ influential oeuvre. Rule Without Exception is a re-issue of Baltz’s award-winning mid-career retrospective book which accompanied a traveling exhibition of the same name in 1991. The book surveys Baltz’s work from “The Prototype Works” of 1967 through to “Sites of Technology” of 1991, showing the range of his images of industrialized landscapes and technological sites. Each section of the book is accompanied by installation views as well as texts by distinguished wirters, some newly commissioned for this edition.

Only Exceptions is a new book chronicling Baltz’s work – now usually site-generated comissioned works – from 1992 to the present and is published on the occasion of an exhibition organized by the Kunstmuseum, Bonn. Only Exceptions includes Baltz’s work in California, Leipzig’s “Black Triangle”, Reggio Emilia, Groningen, Rome, Venice, and two projects with Jean Nouvel in France and Italy.

The photographer Ursula Schulz-Dornburg (* 1938 in Berlin) unites the two apparently opposing genres of conceptual and documentary photography in her work. This is the first book to assemble several cycles and series, including some that have not been published previously. This complex artist’s book in the form of a box containing several different kinds of objects and materials is the product of a long phase of conception, during which the author and editor developed a new kind of monograph. Besides nine notebooks, each containing a cycle, a series of photographs printed on cardboard, a map, and a large individual print on tissue paper, the collection also features an essay about the photographer and three statements by Lawrence Weiner.

This is the long-awaited compendium of Lewis Baltz’s writings from 1975 until 2007, drawn from his critical writing for magazines such as Art in America, the Times Literary Supplement, L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, and Purple. The book includes Baltz’s texts on Edward Weston, Walker Evans, Robert Adams, Michael Schmidt, Allan Sekuka, Chris Burden, Thomas Ruff, Barry Le Va, Jeff Wall, Félix González-Torres, John McLaughlin, Slavica Perkovic and Krzysztof Wodiczko, among others. This important publication gives Baltz’s literary output the standing it deserves and offers a unique insight into some of history’s leading photographers.

Photography’s remarkable ability to represent the past in the present is frequently invoked as one of the medium’s essential characteristics. Yet, as many contemporary photographers acknowledge, its relationship to the past is by no means straightforward. Organized thematically, the exhibition The Memory of Time: Contemporary Photographs at the National Gallery of Art explores the work of contemporary artistswho investigate the richness and complexity of photography’s relationship to time, memory, and history.

From a shared fascination with photography’s past, including early photographic techniques, to creating works which give form to the literal passage of time and the fleeting evidence of cultural change, many contemporary artists are creating works that evocatively engage with how the past has been shaped by photography. The medium has been instrumental in both preserving and creating memory from its inception, and its ability to record the existence of ruins in contemporary society strikingly calls into question what is remembered or forgotten by history. This exhibition and catalog will examine how photographs not only evoke memories of place through the unfolding of different moments of time but also create powerful visual histories of our relationship with the land.

As a young photographer, Lewis Baltz became fascinated by the stark, sometimes repellent, manmade landscapes fast replacing the mostly agrarian Southern California. The photos he made became a portfolio, New Industrial Parks Near Irvine, California, and when they were first published in 1974, Baltz was hailed as the father of a new way of thinking which resonated with photographers around the world. The Topographic movement unflinchingly details the landscape of construction sites and suburban sprawl, turning utilitarian, anti-artistic sites into works of strange, minimalist beauty.

“Baltz’s work exemplifies the way in which photography, beginning some four decades ago, started to loose the bonds of its isolation within its own segregated history and aesthetics and began to take its place as an equal among other media“, Adam D. Weinberg, Alice Pratt Brown Director, Whitney Museum of American Art.

His entire work is focused on the counter-aesthetic of photography, searching beauty in desolation and destruction.  Baltz images describe the architecture of the human landscape, offices, factories, and parking lots.  His pictures are the reflection of control, power, and influences by and over human beings.  His minimalist photographs in the trilogy Ronde de Nuit, Docile Bodies, and Politics of Bacteria, picture the void of the “other”.  In 1974 he captured the anonymity and the relationships between inhabitation, settlement, and anonymity in The New Industrial Parks near Irvine, California (1974).

His books and exhibitions, his “topographical work”, such as The New Industrial Parks, Nevada, San Quentin Point, Candlestick Point (84 photographs documenting a public space near Candlestick Park, ruined by natural detritius and human intervention), exposing the crisis of technology and of man, had an enormous influence on a generation of photographers trying to define both objectivity and the role of the artist in photography.  The author of the primary text for Lewis Baltz: Prototype Works is Matthew S. Witkowsky, Chief Curator and Chair of the Department of Photography at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Taking the title from Anthony Trollope’s 1875 satiric novel about the all-too-familiar excesses of human behavior that arises during peaks of economic prosperity, the works in The Way We Live Now, in their distinctly bleaker visions, suggest the impending dusk awaiting the end of every golden age. Artists compiled include Jane Dickson, David Deutsch, Heidi Schlatter, Lucia Love, Barbara Ess, Clover Archer, Susan Willmarth, and Irons.

In 1973, California artist John Divola began the first of three highly ambitious and original bodies of work that form Three Acts, the first book dedicated to them. His Vandalism series comprises black-and-white photographs of interiors of abandoned houses. Entering illegally, Divola spray-painted markings that referenced action painting as readily as the graffiti that was then becoming a cultural phenomenon. For the following year’s Los Angeles International Airport Noise Abatement series, he photographed a condemned neighborhood bought out to serve as a noise buffer for new runways, focusing on evidence of previous unsanctioned entries by other vandals. His final work, Zuma, documents the destruction of an abandoned beachfront property by the artist and others, as it deteriorates frame by frame and eventually burns. Divola has much in common with artists such as Bruce Nauman and Robert Smithson who have used photography to investigate other topics. He describes his innovative practice succinctly: “My acts, my painting, my photographing, my considering, are part of, not separate from, this process of evolution and change. My participation was not so much one of intellectual consideration as one of visceral involvement.”

Joachim Brohm rose to prominence in the early 1980s, one of the first photographers in Europe to take pictures exclusively in colour, connecting the everyday cultural landscape with the new possibilities of colour photography. This collection titled Typology 1979 is one of his very earliest series, depicting 35 allotment sheds from the Ruhr valley region of Germany, painterly images that are an everyday inventory – of garden structures, of human activity. Influenced by the great American photographers such as William Eggleston and Robert Adams, he also looked to his German contemporaries, Bernd and Hilla Becher, whose ‘typologies’ are heralded in the collection’s title.

Written on the Land presents Mark Ruwedel’s ongoing photographic project that looks at the impact of technologies and culture on the land. His subtle yet rigorous, decade-long investigation has resulted in a fascinating accumulation of images portraying not only those devastations we have wrought during our own recent history, throught military manoeuvres, weapons testing, resource extraction and cultural modification’s but also the violent intrusion that was the ‘conquering’ of the west, in particular the building of the railways and the application of the new site names by European immigrants and explorers. The book covers Ruwedel’s work from 1990 to 2001, divided into three sections: The Ice Age; Pictures of Hell; and Westward The Course of Empire. These three series are interrelated, as archeological history, land use and the act of naming places combine to form a picture of human interaction with the land.
The publication includes a list of works and biographies.