This Land Is Your Land

Taj Forer: Threefold Sun

Published by Charta.
Text by Carol Mavor.

In Threefold Sun, photographer Taj Forer takes a warm and thoughtful look at some people and places influenced by the work of Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), the German artist-philosopher who gave the world not just his work and writing, but Waldorf schools and biodynamic farming. Forer's color photographs of laundry lines, garden hoses, straw forts, rubber boots and kitchen tables are at once beautiful and banal. Beauty is where it might be expected (a wall of sunny children's paintings, a tree house), but more often where it wouldn't be (a slightly deflated yellow ball in a cement play yard, a sledding hill without enough snow). Utopia is waiting in a patch of sun, a smudge of mud, a chalkboard message professing heavenly joy, a little bit of blood in the small nostrils of a boy baptized with everyday dirt. Forer received his BA in Photography from Sarah Lawrence College in 2003, and is a 2007 Artist in Residence at the North Carolina Contemporary Art Museum; he is a co-founder of Daylight Magazine, an award-winning biannual publication of contemporary documentary photography.

PUBLISHER
Charta

BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 9.5 x 9.5 in. / 136 pgs / 56 color.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 8/1/2007
No longer our product

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: FALL 2007 p. 69   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9788881586356 TRADE
List Price: $59.95 CAD $70.00

AVAILABILITY
Not available

David T. Hanson: Colstrip, Montana

Published by Taverner Press.
Text by Rick Bass, David T. Hanson.

David T. Hanson's photographs of the coal-mining town of Colstrip, Montana, and the ruined landscape around it were exhibited by John Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1986. The work signaled a shift in American landscape photography, away from the cool modernism of the New Topographics. One of Hanson's aerial views of a waste pond looked like "a second-generation Abstract Expressionist canvas painted in acid," wrote New York Times critic Vicki Goldberg. The interaction of humans and their technology with nature is a subject that has been of particular interest to American artists and is inseparable from our shared heritage in the taming of the wilderness. The historian Leo Marx referred to this theme as "the machine in the garden." In Colstrip, Montana, the process is seen at its endpoint. The machine has ravaged, even consumed, the garden. The photographs reveal an entire pattern of terrain transformed by men to serve their needs. Individual images from the Colstrip series have been widely exhibited and published, but the entire sequence of 66 photographs have only rarely been seen. For this publication, Hanson has added 21 images and re-sequenced the series. Although the photographs were made in the early 1980s, they are perhaps even more relevant today, given growing concerns about energy production, environmental degradation and climate change. The pictures remain tragic reflections of a despoiled environment.

PUBLISHER
Taverner Press

BOOK FORMAT
Clth, 11.75 x 9.75 in. / 200 pgs / 87 color.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 11/30/2010
Out of stock indefinitely

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: FALL 2010 p. 70   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9781935202202 TRADE
List Price: $55.00 CAD $65.00 GBP £50.00

AVAILABILITY
Not available

Mitch Epstein: State of the Union

Published by Hatje Cantz.
Text by Christoph Schreier, Giesela Parak, Stephan Berg.

Mitch Epstein (born 1952) is among America's finest contemporary photographers. Two of the most powerful series upon which his reputation rests are Recreation (1973-1988) and American Power (2003), sequences that attempt to make fundamental statements about the U.S. by scrutinizing how its citizens spend their leisure and how its energy industry operates. This publication examines the development of Epstein's work through the example of these two very different series. Recreation exemplifies traditional American street photography in its sometimes ironized depiction of everyday circumstances, where American Power critiques the energy industry and its interventions in nature in much bolder gestures--cooling towers and oil refineries dominate the picture frame, riding roughshod over all rules of proportion and dwarfing anything in their vicinity. Here, in 80 color images selected from these series, Epstein's development is traced, from major protagonist of the American color photography boom to leading commentator on the state of the nation.

PUBLISHER
Hatje Cantz

BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 9.75 x 14.5 in. / 120 pgs / 59 color.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 4/30/2011
Out of print

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: SPRING 2011 p. 93   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9783775727846 TRADE
List Price: $60.00 CAD $70.00

AVAILABILITY
Not available

Robert Adams: Turning Back

A Photographic Journal of Re-Exploration

Published by Fraenkel Gallery/Matthew Marks Gallery.
Photographs by Robert Adams.

Turning Back: A Photographic Journal of Re-Exploration is published to coincide with the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. The narrative begins at the Pacific Ocean and moves eastward through what was formerly one of the world's great rain forests. Photographs at the center of the book report on the forest's destruction. Elsewhere they trace a search for hope. Two hundred years ago, Lewis and Clark reported finding in the American Northwest a vast forest of ancient evergreens. In Turning Back Robert Adams looks again at the region's trees, discovering evidence both of America's failure and of a continuing promise. President Jefferson's primary charge to Lewis and Clark was to prepare the way for American commerce. Today, historians still speculate about why, upon his return, Lewis lapsed into depression and apparently committed suicide. “Going east,” Adams suggests, “was more difficult than going west.” So what is the future? Turning Back documents two kinds of predictive evidence. On the one hand we observe the results of greed so unrestrained that they are indistinguishable from those of nihilism. On the other we see what still lives, whether by our design or neglect, or Providence; in these 164 pictures the tone is celebratory, as in a prayer book. From coastal landscapes populated with tourists to timber clear-cutting and small family farms in eastern Oregon, here we reflect on what was lost, what is retained, and what we value both regionally and as a people with a common history.

PUBLISHER
Fraenkel Gallery/Matthew Marks Gallery

BOOK FORMAT
Clothbound, 9.75 x 11.75 in. / 234 pgs / 164 tritone.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 5/15/2005
Out of print

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: SPRING 2005 p. 10   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9781933045016 TRADE
List Price: $65.00 CAD $75.00

AVAILABILITY
Not available