Preview our Spring 2024 catalog, featuring more than 500 new books on art, photography, design, architecture, film, music and visual culture.
APERTURE
Photography Is Magic
Edited with text by Charlotte Cotton.
Photography Is Magic draws together current ideas about the use of photography as an invaluable medium in the contemporary art world. Edited and with an essay by leading photography writer and curator Charlotte Cotton, this critical publication surveys the work of a diverse group of artists, many working at the borders of the "art world" and the "photography world," all of whom are engaged with experimental ideas concerning photographic practice and its place in a shifting photographic landscape being reshaped by digital techniques. Readers are shown the scope of photographic possibilities in the context of the contemporary creative process. From Michele Abeles and Walead Beshty to Daniel Gordon and Matthew Lipps, Cotton has selected artists who are consciously reframing photographic practices using mixed media, appropriation and a recalibration of analog processes. Cotton brings these artists together around the idea of magic, the properties of illusion and material transformation that uniquely characterize photography. Beautifully produced and critically rigorous, Photography Is Magic is aimed at younger photo aficionados, students and anyone interested in gaining a deeper understanding of contemporary photography. It includes images and text by more than 80 artists, including Sara Cwynar, Shannon Ebner, Annette Kelm, Josh Kline, Elad Lassry, Jon Rafman, Shirana Shahbazi and Sara VanDerBeek, among many others.
Featured image by Jessica Eaton is reproduced from Photography is Magic.
This week, we release Photography is Magic, Charlotte Cotton's superb, 384-page survey of contemporary art photography, published by Aperture. Featured artist Brandon Lattu, whose "Seven Projections" (2010) is featured here, writes, "For too long, photography has relied on a failed mimicry of human vision. The chosen direction and bounded rectangle can, like other aspects of representation, be used as political tools that fulfill the desires of some while controlling others and surveying all. The works shown here, from 2007 and 2010, try to get beyond the camera’s dependence on a single line from the photographer, through the device to the subject by recording omnidirectionally instead. Magic is a mystifying reordering of the expectations of a system of representation; photography was once seen as magical in this way. What is needed now is to go beyond magic—to overthrow, supplant, skew, shift the relationship of representational systems to power. Vision and representation are seductive and surprisingly malleable; if we are not fixed on a preformed model of vision, we can create a new model that is relevant to how life is lived now." continue to blog
In her introduction to Photography is Magic, Charlotte Cotton's new, must-have survey of contemporary art photography (published by Aperture), Cotton writes, "Close-up magic—the kind of intimate, right-in-front-of-you sleight of hand that brings pure wonder and delight—is the inspiration for this book, which gathers the work and words of more than 80 artists operating in the related field of photographic magic. The idea that close-up magic has bearing on the critical mass of contemporary photographic art centers on their shared capacity to recalibrate established creative forms in ways that relate to our collective present: to conjure imaginative and open-ended experiences and trains of thought in the viewer. Magic in both realms is a multisensory experience that calls—instantaneously without our consciously knowing it—upon our capacity to script our own sense of visual reality." Featured image is Sara Cwynar's "Girl From Contact Sheet 2 (Darkroom Manual)" (2014). continue to blog
"Photography is Magic privileges the potentials of ideas over the virtuosity of individual authors or the perfection of techniques and mechanisms," Charlotte Cotton writes in her essential new survey. "As with actual close-up prestidigitation, ideas are what ultimately allow the magic to happen. The works shown here take into account the many ways in which viewers relate to photographic media, materials, and image cultures in our current media environment. They are potent in decidedly new ways, and specifically because of the terms of engagement they propose: calling upon our ability to construct meaning from our collective 'muscle memory' of making and consuming photographic imagery." Featured image is Taisuke Koyama's Untitled (Seventh Depth 013) (2014). continue to blog
Sunday, November 22 from 1–3PM, Photography is Magic author Charlotte Cotton brings her survey of more than 80 contemporary photographic artists to Machine Project, Los Angeles, where she conceived the book during a 2012-2013 residency. Cotton will sign copies of the book inside Patrick Michael Ballard’s RETURN TO FOREVERHOUSE, installed in the Machine Project storefront. continue to blog
Saturday, November 21, Arcana: Books on the Arts presents a launch and multi-photographer signing for Photography is Magic, the new contemporary photography survey from Aperture. Join author Charlotte Cotton with photographers including Carter Mull, Soo Kim, Owen Kydd, Anthony Lepore, Asha Schechter, Farrah Karapetian, Phil Chang, Victoria Fu and Marten Elder, as well as the book's designer, Harsh Patel, from 4-6PM! continue to blog
FORMAT: Pbk, 8 x 10.25 in. / 384 pgs / 311 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $49.95 LIST PRICE: CANADA $60 ISBN: 9781597113311 PUBLISHER: Aperture AVAILABLE: 9/29/2015 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: No longer our product AVAILABILITY: Not Available
Published by Aperture. Edited with text by Charlotte Cotton.
Photography Is Magic draws together current ideas about the use of photography as an invaluable medium in the contemporary art world. Edited and with an essay by leading photography writer and curator Charlotte Cotton, this critical publication surveys the work of a diverse group of artists, many working at the borders of the "art world" and the "photography world," all of whom are engaged with experimental ideas concerning photographic practice and its place in a shifting photographic landscape being reshaped by digital techniques.
Readers are shown the scope of photographic possibilities in the context of the contemporary creative process. From Michele Abeles and Walead Beshty to Daniel Gordon and Matthew Lipps, Cotton has selected artists who are consciously reframing photographic practices using mixed media, appropriation and a recalibration of analog processes. Cotton brings these artists together around the idea of magic, the properties of illusion and material transformation that uniquely characterize photography. Beautifully produced and critically rigorous, Photography Is Magic is aimed at younger photo aficionados, students and anyone interested in gaining a deeper understanding of contemporary photography. It includes images and text by more than 80 artists, including Sara Cwynar, Shannon Ebner, Annette Kelm, Josh Kline, Elad Lassry, Jon Rafman, Shirana Shahbazi and Sara VanDerBeek, among many others.
