Craigie Horsfield

Craigie Horsfield's incredibly moving photographic and video meditations on the phenomenon of the crowd elicit a magical sensation of life passing by at great speed, with both warmth and sadness. Horsfield grasps that the very idea of the crowd transforms itself constantly, both in specific circumstances of congregation (such as dance) and as an historical phenomenon: today we rarely envisage a crowd as a positive agency of social change, for example. Commonly identified as a photographer, Horsfield has often worked in other media--video, sound, drawing, performance and installation--but this volume broaches new terrain, reproducing a series of tapestries titled Confluence and Consequence (a title which might stand for the artist's fascination with crowd activity). The rich metaphors of weaving in relation to crowds, and the warmth of fabric itself, responding to Horsfield's imagery, are amply conveyed in this beautifully produced volume.

This beautifully printed, 380-page monograph delivers a thorough examination of the oeuvre of the British artist and photographer, Craigie Horsfield, born in Cambridge in 1949 and nominated for the Turner Prize in 1996. Horsfield's deeply saturated, often enigmatic and usually black-and-white photographs reflect a rigorous and refined formal unity and a precise visual vocabulary. They are held together by the notion of relation, according to the artist, in that the individual is inextricably bound to relation and not to separation or alienation. Horsfield often prints his photographs years after they were originally made, so that memory brushes up against the present, and realities conflict. Additionally, he was ahead of artists like Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff and Andreas Gursky in manipulating and enlarging his images to the large scale we see so often today. A breathtaking presentation of one of Britain's most influential photographic artists, with new scholarship by Slavoj Zizek, among others.