David Campany

A major reassessment of Walker Evans that shows him as a photographer both of his time and very much ahead of it. Walker Evans (1903–1975) is one of the great enduring figures of modern photography. His vivid images are inseparable from the history of the medium and the history of the USA. The subject matter was quintessentially American – small-town life, typical buildings, commercial signs and anonymous citizens – but Evans brought to them the curiosity and fascination of an outsider. His exacting eye defined an era while also questioning it. Pop artists and Conceptualists saw Evans as a pioneer and precursor, and his sensibility continues to inspire countless younger image makers. Walker Evans offers a broad overview of his work and its lasting influence on generations of artists. It brings together key photographs and projects spanning his entire career – from self-portraits of the 1920s to his Polaroid experiments in the 1970s – along with books and other publications that reflect his tireless capacity for observation. Together, the works reveal a creator who not only documented the world around him but also invited viewers to question the nature of photography and the perception of reality itself.

Offering a new perspective on Weegee’s oeuvre, Society of the Spectacle presents the photographer’s iconic images alongside lesser-known works. Weegee’s macabre tabloid photographs of murdered gangsters, bodies trapped in crashed cars, slums consumed by fire, and other poignant records of New York’s nocturnal low life in the 1930s and 40s are the stuff of legend. Lesser-known, however, is the work he created in his later years, when he satirized Hollywood, mocking its fleeting glory, jubilant crowds, and social scenes, and created celebrity portraits that he delighted in distorting using a palette of technical tricks. And herein lies the paradox of Weegee: how can two such wildly different bodies of work co-exist? Offering the first evaluation of the famed photographer’s career in its entirety, this book reconciles the two sides of Weegee by showing how the ‘spectacle’ was the unifying theme of his work. Over 130 images, some iconic, some more rarely seen, are accompanied by essays that explore the consistent themes throughout Weegee’s career, his documentary and photojournalism work, and his last great series taken on the set of Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr. Strangelove.

A major new monograph on the American photographer Louis Stettner (1922–2016), published to accompany the largest retrospective on his work to date. Brooklyn-born Louis Stettner (1922–2016) created thousands of images over the course of a career that spanned almost eighty years. Acquiring his first camera as a young teenager, he quickly made a name for himself at New York’s famous Photo League, where he formed friendships with Sid Grossman and Weegee. He served as a combat photographer in World War II, and the experience of fighting fascism left him with a lasting belief in the fundamental humanity of the common man. After the war, Stettner arrived in Paris in 1947, where he stayed for five years. During this time, he forged a lasting relationship with Brassaï, the city and its people. Stettner’s work defies categorization, containing elements of both the New York street photography aesthetic and the lyrical humanism of the French tradition. A lifelong Marxist, Stettner celebrated the working class and was inspired by his reading of Walt Whitman and the inner humanity that constantly drew him to the lives of ordinary men and women. For all its diversity, however, Stettner’s work is thematically consistent: he sought out beauty in common people and their everyday life. Accompanying the largest retrospective on Stettner’s work to date, this substantial monograph at last gives his work the recognition it deserves. Essays by David Campany, James Iffland, Karl Orend and Sally Martin Katz chart Stettner's work chronologically from his early days in New York and Paris, through to his later use of colour photography, to his final meditations on the landscape of Les Alpilles. Showcasing more than 150 photographs spanning his entire career, the book also includes previously unpublished images and some of his hitherto almost unknown colour work, as well as a selection of Stettner’s writings. Accompanies the travelling exhibition of the same name, which showed at MAPFRE Madrid from June to August 2023, and is at MAPFRE Barcelona from June to September 2024.

The pandemic serves as background to this story of human life and dynamics in a period of great individual and global uncertainty. From self portraits taken at the height of the lockdown to street photography in New York, Europe and Argentina, Trapped seeks to capture human feelings during these challenging times of social disruption and personal anxiety.

A diary for a world-wide pandemic, #ICPConcerned captures 263 days in 2020 recorded by 820 photographers curated from over 60,000 submissions. This is the book form of an exhibition at the International Center of Photography Museum (ICP) that became a digital phenomenon in lockdown.

Photography: The Whole Story is a celebration of the most beautiful, meaningful and inspiring photographs that have arisen from this very modern medium. It begins with a succinct overview of photography, placing it in the context of the social and cultural developments that have taken place globally since its arrival. Organized chronologically, the book then traces the rapid evolution of photographic style, period by period and movement by movement. Illustrated, in-depth essays cover every photographic genre, from the early portraits and tableaux to the digitally manipulated montages, split-second sports images, and conceptual photographs of today. The ideas and works of key photographers are assessed to reveal what motivated them, who influenced whom, and what each was striving to achieve. Detailed cultural and individual artist timelines clarify historical context.With over 1000 illustrations

An exploration of photography in 120 photographs.In On Photographs, curator and writer David Campany presents an exploration of photography in 120 photographs. Proceeding not by chronology or genre or photographer, Campany's eclectic selection unfolds according to its own logic. We see work by Henri Cartier-Bresson, William Eggleston, Helen Levitt, Garry Winogrand, Yves Louise Lawler, Andreas Gursky, and Rineke Dijkstra. There is fashion photography by William Klein, one of Vivian Maier's contact sheets, and a carefully staged scene by Gregory Crewdson, as well as images culled from magazines and advertisements. Each of the 120 photographs is accompanied by Campany's lucid and incisive commentary, considering the history of that image and its creator, interpreting its content and meaning, and connecting and contextualizing it with visual culture. Image by image, we absorb and appreciate Campany's complex yet playful take on photography and its history.The title, On Photographs, alludes to Susan Sontag's influential and groundbreaking On Photography. As an undergraduate, Campany met Sontag and questioned her assessment of photography without including specific photographs. Sontag suggested that someday Campany could write his own book on the subject, titled On Photographs. Now he has.

The Swiss company Baloise has a reputation among art experts, but not just as an insurance and financial services company. With its programs that support art, its collaborations with museums, and the renowned Baloise Art Prize for young artists, which is awarded at Art Basel, the company has had a lasting effect on the development of contemporary art. Less well-known up to now is the fact that, parallel to the company’s activities, it has also built a first-class art collection, which dates back to the mid-twentieth century. Since turning to contemporary art in the 1990s, the company has collected the works of notable artists. With a focus on photography and works on paper from the 1960s onward, some of the artists represented in the collection are Miriam Cahn, Simon Denny, Katharina Fritsch, Bruce Nauman, and Jeff Wall. Baloise Art is the first publication to provide a broader audience with an overview of the collection. Informative texts by prestigious authors accompany the artworks.

Gain a new perspective on photography in this personally guided introduction to photographic images and what they mean by one of the leading writers and curators of our time On Photographs is destined to become an instant classic of photography writing. Rejecting the conventions of chronology and the heightened status afforded to ‘classics’ in traditional accounts of the history of the medium, Campany’s selection of photographs is an expertly curated and personal one – mixing fine art prints, film stills, documentary photographs, fashion editorials and advertisements. In this playful new take on the history of photography, anonymous photographers stand alongside photography pioneers, 20th-century talents and contemporary practitioners. Each photograph is accompanied by Campany’s highly readable commentary. Putting the sacred status of authorship to one side, he strives to guide the reader in their own interpretation and understanding of the image itself. In a visual culture in which we have become accustomed to not looking, Campany helps us see, in what is both an accessible introduction for newcomers and a must-have for photography aficionados.

Photography is omnipresent; everyone is photographing everything. How do artists and writers reconcile this voracious urge to photograph with a photographic aesthetic and methodology that has tended to value “less is more”? One pairs artists and writers to think about this question. Eight photographers—Marco Breuer, Thomas Joshua Cooper, John Gossage, Trevor Paglen, Alison Rossiter, Victoria Sambunaris, Rebecca Norris Webb and James Welling—were asked to submit one image on the theme of minimalism. Eight writers—David Campany, Teju Cole, Christie Davis, John D’Agata, Michael Fried, Darius Himes, Leah Ollman and Laura Steward—were enlisted to respond to those submissions, each paired with a specific image. The results offer a probing assessment of Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s maxim: “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

Known for his unconventional technique and gritty, evocative images of people and places, Ed van der Elsken was a self- taught photographer whose work documented his own life and travels. This book offers a definitive overview of van der Elsken's entire oeuvre, including his groundbreaking photo novel, Love on the Left Bank and his paean to 1950s Amsterdam, Once Upon a Time. On display at Amsterdam's famed Stedelijk Museum, the exhibition at the center of this book focuses on the museum's extensive collection of van der Elsken's prints, and on the renowned installations he mounted there during his lifetime. Essays reveal the photographer's early influences, including Weegee, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Robert Capa, while also showing how his confident, unorthodox, and self-expressionist style paved the way for late 20th-century photographers, including Larry Clark, Nan Goldin, and Wolfgang Tillmans.

British Conceptual artist John Stezaker (b. 1949) is known for his distinctive, often deceptively simple, collages. He has been making art since the 1970s, but achieved prominence relatively recently. In 2011, he had a retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and, in 2012, he won the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, even though he does not take photographs. Stezaker says collage is about ‘stuff that has lost its immediate relationship with the world’ and involves ‘a yearning for a lost world’. A collector, he works from an archive of out-of-date images — mostly old film stills, vintage actor head shots, and antique postcards. These images come in standard sizes and are highly conventionalised — all variations on themes. Art critic David Campany says, Stezaker ‘is drawn to that very slim space between convention and idiosyncrasy.’ In addition to collages, Lost World includes poignant found-object-sculptures: a selection of antique mannequin hands, offering a repertoire of gestures. There’s also a film, Crowd, presenting hundreds of film stills of crowd scenes, each for one frame only, in a bewildering blur.

The River Lea runs from Hertfordshire down to the Thames in East London. Once a busy commercial waterway, it is now a nature reserve and leisure area. From the grand site of the 2012 Olympic Games it passes industrial estates, sports centres, new build homes and council estates. Escape from the city the reinvention of social spaces the attraction of water the meeting of different cultures the persistence of nature. Adventures in Lea Valley collects a decades worth of photographs from Davaid Campany and Polly Braden, telling the story of this changing land.

Un estudio clave sobre el lugar que ocupa la fotografia en la historia del arte reciente.Artistas internacionales de las ultimas cuatro decadas representados por una obra o una coleccion significativas, con pies de foto descriptivos.Textos de algunas de las figuras mas destacadas del siglo XX, incluidos los teoricos Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, y los artistas Victor Burgin y Jeff Wall.Una obra esencial para estudiantes, profesionales y lectores interesados en la fotografia y los medios.