Lateness and Longing
On the Afterlife of Photography
Format:Hardback
Publisher:The University of Chicago Press
Published:26th May '23
Should be back in stock very soon
How a generation of women artists is transforming photography with analogue techniques.
Beginning in the 1990s, a series of major artists imagined the expansion of photography, intensifying its ideas and effects while abandoning many of its former medium constraints. Simultaneous with this development in contemporary art, however, photography was moving toward total digitalization.
Lateness and Longing presents the first account of a generation of artists—focused on the work of Zoe Leonard, Tacita Dean, Sharon Lockhart, and Moyra Davey—who have collectively transformed the practice of photography, using analogue technologies in a dissident way and radicalizing signifiers of older models of feminist art. All these artists have resisted the transition to the digital in their work. Instead—in what amounts to a series of feminist polemics—they return to earlier, incomplete, or unrealized moments in photography’s history, gravitating toward the analogue basis of photographic mediums. Their work announces that photography has become—not obsolete—but “late,” opened up by the potentially critical forces of anachronism.
Through a strategy of return—of refusing to let go—the work of these artists proposes an afterlife and survival of the photographic in contemporary art, a formal lateness wherein photography finds its way forward through resistance to the contemporary itself.
"Lateness and Longing focuses on the work of Zoe Leonard, Tacita Dean, Sharon Lockhart and Moyra Davey. The choice of these four artists lies in their shared commitment to analogue technologies and their resistance to the pervasive influence of the digital. Baker examines the nature of their work through their ‘late’ modes by delving into the use of obsolescent mediums and outmoded forms, whether it’s Leonard’s use of an outdated Rolleiflex camera, Dean’s attraction to discontinued 16-mm Kodak film stock or Lockhart’s evocation of an older portrait conventions of rural locales of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The artists of Lateness and Longing share a common concern for reimagining and redeeming the abandoned objects of history. . . . Perhaps one of the lessons of Lateness and Longing is that images of survivalimplicate the survival of history, helping us answer the pressing question of howimages persist, endure and go on against the forces of indifference and forgetting." * History of Photography *
“Lateness and Longing is a work of great originality and a significant contribution to the history and theory of art, as well as to the criticism of contemporary photography. Through his close critical readings, Baker presents exhaustive critical accounts of four important artists, revealing how the figure of lateness achieves a kind of intimacy within their practices and developing an original conceptual vocabulary for the philosophy of photography.” -- D. N. Rodowick, author of An Education in Judgment: Hannah Arendt and the Humanities
“Multifaceted, innovative, and provocative, Lateness and Longing provides an original account of photographic anachronism, working through its cultural, social, aesthetic, and philosophical dimensions.” -- Sabine Kriebel, author of Revolutionary Beauty: The Radical Photomontages of John Heartfield
“Photography and art criticism are not obsolete but they are in eclipse, and that is where George Baker finds them. In the shadows, there is redemption and the promise of unpredictable reemergence. Baker sifts through the situation like a twenty-first-century Baudelairean, in the company of some of the most compelling contemporary artists. To find what? Revolutionary cause? Melancholy consolation? Something of both, along with a deeper understanding of what the past does for us, and with us, today.” -- David Campany, author of On Photographs
ISBN: 9780226035116
Dimensions: 254mm x 229mm x 36mm
Weight: 1987g
520 pages