Book by Josephson, Kenneth, Wolf, Sylvia, Lipscomb, Stephanie

Kenneth Josephson: A Retrospective

Arts & Photography

Josephson, Kenneth

Wolf, Sylvia

Lipscomb, Stephanie

Art Institute Of Chicago

Individual Artists

Art Inst of Chicago

Kenneth Josephson is one of the foremost conceptual photographers in America. Since the early 1960s, when institutions such as MoMA privileged photography in the documentary mode, Josephson has championed the photograph as an object "made," not taken, by an artist pursuing an idea. Using innovative techniques such as placing images within images and including his own body in photographs, Josephson has created an outstanding body of work that is startlingly contemporary and full of ideas that stimulate the digital generation—ideas about the nature of seeing, of "reality," and of human aspirations, and about what it means to be a human observing the world.
The Light of Coincidence is the definitive, career-spanning retrospective of Kenneth Josephson's work and one of the few volumes ever published on this major artist. Josephson has worked in series over long periods of time, and this book beautifully reproduces representative selections from every series, including Josephson's best-known Images within Images. Lynne Warren places Josephson's art in historical context, from his early studies with Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan at the Institute of Design and with Minor White at the Rochester Institute of Technology, to his mature work, which shares affinities with that of conceptual artists such as Cindy Sherman and Ed Ruscha, to his shaping influence on generations of students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he taught for over thirty-five years. Preeminent photo historian Gerry Badger's foreword confirms Josephson's stature as an artist who has explored "in a thoroughly creative and complex, yet accessible, way, the perhaps narrow but infinitely deep gap between actuality and image."

The Light of Coincidence: The Photographs of Kenneth Josephson

Photography & Video

University of Texas Press

“A monument of the conceptual photobook. . . . It’s the book itself that is the work of art, not the individual images. . . . Like most of the best conceptual photography, the idea is devastatingly simple on the surface, yet infinitely complex when you look beyond the surface.”—Gerry Badger, author of The Photobook: A HistoryIn 1973, renowned conceptual photographer Kenneth Josephson photographed a sliced loaf of bread from one end to the other to create The Bread Book. A deceptively simple object—photographs of the fronts and backs of ten slices of bread, sandwiched between the heels of the loaf with no accompanying text—this artist’s book raises fascinating questions about the nature of photography and its ability to transform an object into an idea or concept, while creating yet another object: the book itself. Reviewing The Bread Book in afterimage, Alex Sweetman proclaimed that “the result of this act of transformation is that the original loaf no longer functions as a loaf of bread, but as a self-contained book considering the ideas of sequence and illusion in relation to the photographic medium.”Originally published in an edition of 1,800 copies, The Bread Book has been out of print and greatly sought after for many years. This new edition is limited to 250 copies, each signed by Kenneth Josephson.

The Bread Book

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Books by Josephson, Kenneth