Honorable Mention in the Best Edited Historical Book category of the 2004 Golden Light Awards Photographic Book of the Year competition sponsored by the Maine Photographic Workshops Jaroslav Rossler (1902-1990) was one of the Czech avant-garde photographers of the first half of the twentieth century whose work has only recently become known outside Eastern Europe. Czech photography in the twenties and thirties produced radical modernist works that incorporated principles of abstract art and constructivism; Jaroslav Rossler was one of the most important and distinctive artists of the period. He became known for his fusing of different styles, bringing together elements of symbolism, pictorialism, expressionism, cubism, futurism, constructivism, new objectivity, and abstract art. His photographs often reduced images to elementary lines and shapes that seemed to form a new reality; he would photograph simple objects against a stark background of black and white, or use long exposures to picture hazy cones and spheres of light. From 1927 to 1935 he lived and worked in Paris, producing work influenced by constructivism and new objectivity. He used the photographic techniques and compositional approaches of the avant-garde, including photograms, large details, diagonal composition, photomontage, and double exposures, and experimented with color advertising photographs and still lifes produced with the carbro print process. After his return to Prague, he was relatively inactive until the late 1950s, when he reconnected with Czech artistic and photographic trends of that period, including informalism. This book documents each stage of Rossler's career with a generous selection of duotone images, some of which have never been published before. The photographs are accompanied by texts by Vladimir Birgus, Jan Mlcoch, Robert Silverio, Karel Srp, and Matthew Witkovsky.

Jaroslav Rossler: Czech Avant-Garde Photographer

Arts & Photography

Witkovsky, Matthew S.

Srp, Karel

Silverio, Robert

Individual Artists

Mit Pr

A handsome volume charting the thirty-year career of a widely celebrated, American-born conceptual artist Representing Christopher Williams’s first publication with a major American museum, this illuminating and unusual volume is equal parts artist’s book and exhibition catalogue. Over the course of his thirty-year career, Williams (b. 1956) has crafted photographs that engage—often through uncanny mimicry—the conventions of photojournalism, picture archives, and commercial imagery, as well as their sociopolitical contexts and implications. The book includes a trio of essays by curators Mark Godfrey, Roxana Marcoci, and Matthew S. Witkovsky, which explore Williams’s engagement with his artistic peers and predecessors, with cinema (particularly the film-essay), and with the methods and modes of display and publicity in the art world, in addition to a transcript of a talk Williams delivered on the work of John Chamberlain. These more conventional contributions are “interrupted” by additional historical and contemporary textual and visual materials that were selected by the artist himself and are occasionally presented in facsimile form. An exhibition history, bibliography, and illustrated list of works round out the publication.

Christopher Williams: The Production Line of Happiness

WILLIAMS, CHRISTOPHER

Marcoci, Roxana

Godfrey, Mark

History & Criticism

Art Institute of Chicago

This concise yet breathtaking book is the first publication of Sarah Charlesworth’s (1947–2013) photographic series collectively entitled Stills. Charlesworth made a name for herself as a member of the New York–based Pictures Generation artists when, in 1980, she produced this series of 14 large-scale photographs. Like her previous work, the images were appropriated from newspapers, which Charlesworth re-photographed. The images that comprise Stills hauntingly depict people falling or jumping from buildings, the suspended moment further dramatized by the photographs’ scale: Charlesworth’s prints measure over six feet tall. Seven of the 14 photographs were exhibited in 1980 at the apartment of the artist’s dealer, but the other half was not printed until 2012, when she created a unique artist’s proof edition from her original negatives for the Art Institute of Chicago. Until now, the full series has never before been published or exhibited together. Following an essay by Matthew S. Witkovsky, this landmark publication presents Stills in its entirety for the first time.

Sarah Charlesworth: Stills (Art Institute of Chicago)

A brilliantly illustrated survey of modernist photography in Central Europe, published in association with the National Gallery of Art. In the 1920s and 1930s, photography became an immense phenomenon across Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Austria, and Poland. Through magazines and books, in advertisements and at exhibitions, from amateur clubs to avant-garde schools, photographs emerged as a key vehicle of modern consciousness. This book presents the work of approximately one hundred individuals whose creations exemplify the potential of photography in Central Europe between the two World Wars. Foto brings together for the first time works by recognized masters such as the Russian El Lissitzky, the Hungarian László Moholy-Nagy, and the German Hannah Hóch―all of whom developed their photographic ideas in Germany―with contemporaries like Karel Teige and Jaromír Funke (Czechoslovakia), Kazimierz Podsadecki (Poland), Károly Escher (Hungary), and Trude Fleischmann (Austria), who are less well known today. Organized thematically, the book explores topics from photomontage and war to gender identity, modern living, and the spread of Surrealism. It shows the shared experience of modernity in the region, whereby recently founded nations and dismantled empires alike sought their place within the new world order established in the aftermath of World War I. The illustrations, drawn from more than seventy collections in America and abroad, include several previously unpublished works as well as many others never before available in high-quality reproductions. 230 illustrations in color, tritone, &amp; duotone

Foto: Modernity in Central Europe: 1918-1945

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Thames&Hudson

The impact of the humble American snapshot has been anything but humble. Any American who takes a snapshot contributes to a compelling and influential genre. Since 1888, when George Eastman introduced the Kodak camera and roll film, the snapshot has not only changed everyday American life and memory; it has also changed the history of fine art photography. The distinctive subject matter and visual vocabulary of the American snapshot--its poses, facial expressions, viewpoints, framing, and themes--influenced modernist photographers as they explored spontaneity, objectivity, and new topics and perspectives. A richly illustrated chronicle of the first century of snapshot photography in America, The Art of the American Snapshot is the first book to examine the evolution of this most common form of American photography. The book shows that among the countless snapshots taken by American amateurs, some works, through intention or accident, continue to resonate long after their intimate context and original meaning have been lost.
 The catalogue of a fall 2007 exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, The Art of the American Snapshot reproduces some 250 snapshots drawn from Robert Jackson's outstanding collection and from a recent gift Jackson made to the museum. Organized decade by decade, the book traces the evolution of American snapshot imagery and describes how technical, social, and cultural factors affected the look of snapshots at different periods.

The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888-1978

Greenough, Sarah

Kennel, Sarah

Waggoner, Diane

History

Princeton University Press

In the early 20th century, visual artists began to think of the newspaper as the basis for verbal and visual puns, as a source of found language and images, as a means to mark time and place or express political criticism. Shock of the News - its title playing on that of Robert Hughes’ popular BBC television series and book The Shock of the New (1980) - traces the newspaper’s impact on modern art from 1909 to 2009.

Shock of the News

Brodie, Judith

Boxer, Sarah

Poggi, Christine

Mileaf, Janine

Lund Humphries

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Books by Witkovsky, Matthew S.