Harris, Gregory J.

Photography by the book : Wall, Matta-Clark and the photobook after Ruscha / by Gregory J. Harris.

2010.

1 PDF file (iii, 83 leaves) : illustrations (chiefly color), facsimiles

Ed Ruscha's photobooks have been widely scrutinized and acknowledged as seminal works in the histories of conceptual art and artist's books, though their legacy within the study of photobooks has been only vaguely articulated. More than just a monographic collection of photographs, the photobook utilizes the form and structure of the book as an essential part of its meaning. This thesis contends that Ruscha's photobooks suggest a spectrum of photobook making possibilities from the photographic - photobooks that achieve meaning through the interplay of photographic images with a minimum of text - to the typographic - photobooks that use typography and language in tandem with photographs to realize their consequence. Gordon Matta-Clark's Walls Paper (1973) and Jeff Wall's Landscape Manual (1970) offer telling examples of the photographic and typographic approach to the photobook and will be taken as case studies to examine these trends. Wall's Landscape Manual stands as one the most typographic photobooks. Comprised of fifty-five typewritten pages interspersed with numerous snapshots taken through a car window around the outskirts of an unnamed city, Landscape Manual took the Conceptualist's agenda of deskilling photography and making it subservient to a linguistic program to its extreme. Wall inundated the photographs with dense fields of text, anchoring the in such a way that that became purely denotative. The text became texture - the words seem to be there more to be looked at but not necessarily read. By contrast, the photographs become comparatively legible, but were rendered as little more than bland, ambiguous descriptions, nothing more than the affectless result of the ca-era's automatic mechanism. Walls Paper, a volume of intensely colored photographs, fulfilled Matta-Clark's ambition to deliver an otherwise inaccessible experience directly into the viewers' hands by playing with photography's unique ability to engage not only the sense of vision but also the sense of touch. Matta-Clark exploited book design and toyed the photograph's indexicality to reinvest the experience of photography with a sense of touch. Matta-Clark's treatment of the images undermines the purity of the photograph as perspectivally illusionistic. Rather, the flat composition allows the photographs to emphasize the tactility over the depth of their subject. More than simply depicting the walls, Matta-Clark's book, to use Nelson Goodman's term, exemplifies them. The book's small size and split pages extend this tactility into its physical form. Foregrounding the sense of touch, Walls Paper overrides conventional representational strategies and offers an unusually sensual experience of the world through photography.

Ruscha, Edward
Wall, Jeff, 1946-
Matta-Clark, Gordon, 1943-1978.
Photobooks.
Artists' books.
Photography, Artistic.
Art, Modern 20th century History.
Livres photos.
Livres d'artistes.
Photographie artistique.
Art 20e siècle Histoire.
photobooks.
artists' books (books)
art photography.
bookworks.
Art, Modern

PDF.
dissertations.
Academic theses
History
Thèses et écrits académiques.
Theses.

Location: Library electronic resource 287851
Call No.: 287851
Status: Available