This publication introduces the untold story of German artist and poet Anneliese Hager. Active from the 1930s to the 1960s, Hager began her photographic experimentation in Germany during the Nazi censure of modern art. Her preferred medium was the cameraless photograph, or photogram—an image made by placing objects directly on (or in close proximity to) a light-sensitive surface and exposing the assembled material to light. In its final form, a photogram is a one-of-a-kind work that reverses light and dark: the longer the paper is covered, and hence unexposed, the brighter the covered parts will be, and vice versa. Hager . . . .go to book page >>

Our thoughts are known to us, and us alone. But for a brief period in the 1960s, Ted Serios (1918–2006) attempted to prove that his inner reality could be documented. Serios demonstrated an ostensibly psychic act termed thoughtography,” involving the transfer of mental images onto undeveloped Polaroid film. In studies supervised by respected Denver-based psychiatrist Dr. Jule Eisenbud, Serios produced over 1,000 anomalous photographs, a feat that has never been fully dismissed or wholly verified. Existing as an uncomfortable knot in time, the details of the Serios phenomenon can’t be disentangled without questioning the social conditions that produced it in . . . .go to book page >>

Over the centuries our manipulation of the natural world has resulted in an explosion of synthetic dye production and application globally. To gain insight into the history of how folk practices have been lost and technical processes found, anthropologist and textile artist Lauren MacDonald explores a practice that is both ancient and wholly modern: coloring cloth. The pursuit of color has long spurred economic and social contest, and through this deeply researched volume we explore the stories that the materials used to dye cloth tell us about our complex relationship to nature, our troubling ideas about progress and our understanding . . . .go to book page >>