stanley wolukau-wanambwa

• Mack 2021
• Softcover, 1st edition
• New

Dark Mirrors assembles sixteen essays by photographer and critic Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa focusing on contemporary fine art photographic and video practices that are principally, though not exclusively, rooted in the United States, written between 2015 and 2021. Wolukau-Wanambwa analyses the image’s relationship to the urgent and complex questions that define our era, through the lens of artistic practices and works which insightfully engage with the ongoing contemporaneity of disparate histories and the ever-changing status of the visual in social life.

The book sets out an argument that one of the most dynamic sites of artistic invention in photographic practice over the past decade has been the photographic book, and thus many of the essays in the volume assess artistic works as they are bodied forth in that form. Among the recurrent themes that emerge from these rigorous, probing essays are the complex interrelationship of anti-blackness and visuality, the fragility and complexity of embodied difference in portraiture, the potency of verbal and visual media as social forms, and the politics of attention.

With essays on Deana Lawson, Dana Lixenberg, Paul Pfeiffer, Arthur Jafa, Katy Grannan, and Robert Bergman among others. 

• Roma 2018
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• Used: near fine
  

This book gathers together work from two photographic series, Our Present Invention (2012-14) and All My Gone Life (2014-17), as well as two text collages all made in and focused specifically on the United States. Through a mixture of writing, portraiture, landscape and appropriated archival images, the book describes quotidian encounters with fraught desire, uneven freedom, irrational fear and deep structural division, asking whether the historical and contemporary realities of anti-Black and gendered violence - when treated as aberrations - do not in fact serve to veil violence's essential function in the maintenance of 'civil' society. One Wall a Web traces a chronological path through the production of two series, the first of which (Our Present Invention) sets out with a particular interest in the entanglement of masculinity with violence. The second series of photographs (All My Gone Life) comprises two chapters, the first of which consists of appropriated archival images which track continuities between past and present circumstances. These revenant images enter into dialogue with the final strand of contemporary photographs in the second chapter, which address themselves to the spectral form and the visceral costs of this history in the book's penultimate section. One Wall a Web concludes with an extensive essay that explores resonances between the field of black studies, questions of black life, and the strange ontology of the photographic image. 

Used copy in near fine to fine condition.