A superbly made hybrid photobook on the stories that objects invite us to tell
In July of 2017, photographer Matthew Connors (born 1976) and novelist and critic Lucy Ives (born 1980) embarked on a strange project: to remove and catalog all the contents of Connors's car, a 1992 Volvo 240 station wagon. Although the New York–based duo began the endeavor without knowing where it would lead, their investigation―of parts, tools, ephemera, litter, personal items, unidentifiable disjecta, among other objects―lasted more than two years and resulted in a series of photographs by Connors and an essay by Ives on narrative forms and temporalities inherent to contemporary media. This collaborative publication, designed by Elana Schlenker, poses questions about where narrative originates and how we establish our stories in relation to the objects and timescales that carry, ground and surround us.

Matthew Connors & Lucy Ives: The Poetics

Arts & Photography

Photography & Video

Image Text Ithaca Press

A sumptuous artist’s book of acclaimed writer Renee Gladman’s fantastical drawings that merge writing and architecture, with a response from Fred Moten
Since 2013, poet, novelist, essayist and artist Renee Gladman (born 1971)―author of the acclaimed Ravickians novels―has been doing a kind of asemic writing that is also at once drawing and architecture (some of this work was published as Prose Architectures in 2017). Printed in white ink on black, with a beautiful embroidered cover, One Long Black Sentence brings together these drawings with a text by New York–based theorist and poet Fred Moten (born 1962) to form a sumptuous artist’s book in which drawing becomes an architecture for thought, for what writing looks like from the inside out. Fred Moten’s “Anindex” pushes the index beyond its utilitarian conventions. At times riffing on the architectonics of Gladman’s illustrations, Moten’s associative poetic prose points toward the structuring imposition or emergence of sentences as the marks and forms of thought.

Renee Gladman & Fred Moten: One Long Black Sentence

Individual Artists

These beautiful, unsettling and playful photographs show how certain sci-fi tropes--from digital servants to sex robots--have been consistently gendered as female The latest photobook from Brooklyn-based photographer Hannah Whitaker (born 1980) imagines the embodied forms of personified technology which have long been central to sci-fi narratives: digital servants, sex robots, machine-learning projects. Ursula addresses the consistency with which these figures are gendered as female, subservient and sexualized, and slyly points to our society's insidious failures to fully see women without imposing such roles and distinctions. Immersed in techno-futuristic design tropes, Whitaker's photographs--at once playful, maximalist and estranging--are accompanied by texts by David Levine and Dawn Chan.

Hannah Whitaker: Ursula

A meditation on the meaning of text-image collaboration, from the author of Sprawl and Margaret the First Author Danielle Dutton's A Picture Held Us Captive asks what it means for a writer to work "with" someone or something else--to make art in dialogue with an energy not one's own. Dutton (born 1975) explores ekphrastic fiction, looking at a wide range of writers and artists including John Keene and Edgar Degas; Eley Williams and Bridget Riley; Ben Lerner and Anna Ostoya; Amina Cain and Bill Viola; Lydia Davis and Joseph Cornell; as well as her own textual responses to visual artists Richard Kraft and Laura Letinsky. A Picture Held Us Captive--which includes a series of images at once illustrative and refusing simple illustration--considers the ways in which ekphrasis operates as a diptych. A work of both commentary and self-reflection, Dutton considers a dialectic between art's ability to make strange what has grown familiar and the writer's desire to make recognizable the experience of one artwork in the space of another. Danielle Dutton is an American writer and the cofounder of the feminist press Dorothy. Born in California in 1975, Dutton now resides in Missouri where she teaches creative writing at Washington University in St Louis. She has authored four books, including Sprawl and Margaret the First. She contributed the text to Here Comes Kitty: A Comic Opera, a book of collages by Richard Kraft. Her fiction has appeared in major publications such as the Paris Review, Harper's and Guernica.

A Picture Held Us Captive

Dutton, Danielle

History & Criticism

Taking inspiration from vintage catalogues and classified ads, Everything Must Go acts as a playful memento mori that compiles writing, photography, and illustration in a variety of formats and genres. This offering of giveaways is a collaboration between Jason Fulford and nine artists of the experimental Image Text Ithaca MFA Program. The publication invites viewers to interact with works by: Karine Baptiste, Caiti Borruso, Eleanor Eichenbaum, Cable Hoover, Marissa Iamartino, Will Matsuda, Erika Morillo, Michael Popp, and Irit Reinheimer. Take what you wish, but Everything Must Go!

Everything Must Go!

George Saunders & Joshua Lutz: Orange Blossom Trail

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