Alison Rossiter Compendium 1898 1919

Alison Rossiter's large-format homage to the sculptural properties of photographic paper This volume documents 12 paper works made from the earliest expired photographic papers in the collection of Nova Scotia-based artist Alison Rossiter (born 1953), created in honor of Anna Atkins, the first person to illustrate a book with photographs. The exact expiration dates of these papers pinpoint their location on a timeline and coexist with events in world history. No matter what the light-sensitive materials have endured through dormant years, they still respond to chemical development, and the resulting photographic tones are evidence of experience. Physical damage, moisture and mold produce tonal changes when developed. This book, a copublication with the New York Public Library and Yossi Milo, includes all 12 works from the series at actual scale, along with close-up details. The reference dates, which cover world events such as World War II, and art historical references such as Picasso's Blue Period, are included at the back.

Divided into sections that represent the breadth of Alison Rossiter's (born 1953) process and vision, 'Expired Paper' offers a comprehensive look at the artist's body of cameraless photo-art?Latent, Landscapes, Pools, Pours, Dips, Blurs, Fours and Collages. Art critic Leah Ollman has been contemplating Rossiter's work for years, and her accompanying text serves as an ideal complement to the images: 'All of the works pay homage to the rich idiosyncrasies of photographic papers across history, and restore a sanctity to the photograph as object. Made without cameras, lenses or film, the works are nothing but process and materiality.' The book also includes a selection of early 20th-century photographic paper packages (which the artist has collected for over 10 years) in a separate booklet.

From the author of Welcome to Camp America, an eerie exploration of America's performance of power and identity in the post-9/11 era What are the stories we tell ourselves, the games we play, to manage unsettling realities? Made on ten military bases across the United States since 2016, Necessary Fictionsdocuments mock-village landscapes in the fictional country of "Atropia" and its denizens, roleplayers who enact versions of their past or future selves in realistic training scenarios. Costumed Afghan and Iraqi civilians, many of whom have fled war, now recreate it in the service of the US military. Real soldiers pose in front of camouflage backdrops, dressed by Hollywood makeup artists in "moulage"--fake wounds--as they prepare to deploy. Brooklyn-based conceptual documentary artist and former civil rights lawyer Debi Cornwall (born 1973) photographs this meta-reality--the artifice of war--presented in the book with a variety of texts to provoke critical inquiry about America's fantasy industrial complex. The book includes an essay by PEN Award-winning critical theorist Sarah Sentilles.

Before Palm Pilots and iPods, PCs and laptops, the term "computer" referred to the people who did scientific calculations by hand. These workers were neither calculating geniuses nor idiot savants but knowledgeable people who, in other circumstances, might have become scientists in their own right. When Computers Were Human represents the first in-depth account of this little-known, 200-year epoch in the history of science and technology. Beginning with the story of his own grandmother, who was trained as a human computer, David Alan Grier provides a poignant introduction to the wider world of women and men who did the hard computational labor of science. His grandmother's casual remark, "I wish I'd used my calculus," hinted at a career deferred and an education forgotten, a secret life unappreciated; like many highly educated women of her generation, she studied to become a human computer because nothing else would offer her a place in the scientific world. The book begins with the return of Halley's comet in 1758 and the effort of three French astronomers to compute its orbit. It ends four cycles later, with a UNIVAC electronic computer projecting the 1986 orbit. In between, Grier tells us about the surveyors of the French Revolution, describes the calculating machines of Charles Babbage, and guides the reader through the Great Depression to marvel at the giant computing room of the Works Progress Administration. When Computers Were Human is the sad but lyrical story of workers who gladly did the hard labor of research calculation in the hope that they might be part of the scientific community. In the end, they were rewarded by a new electronic machine that took the place and the name of those who were, once, the computers.

This publication traces the arc of Hudson Valley-based artist Tanya Marcuse's (born 1964) work over a 15-year period. Fueled by the Biblical narrative of the fall from Eden, these projects use fantastical imagery to explore cycles of growth and decay and the dynamic tension between the passage of time and the photographic medium. The first volume, Fruitless (2005-10), features serial photographs of fruit trees near Marcuse's home in the Hudson Valley. Repeatedly photographing particular trees from the same vantage point, Marcuse catalogs seasonal transformations; the fallen apples become more prominent as the work progresses. In the second volume, Fallen (2010-15), Marcuse imagines the landscape of ruin in Eden after the exile of Adam and Eve. Using fruit collected from beneath the trees of Fruitless, Marcuse depicts an ordered paradise becoming wild and untended. Volume three, Woven (2015-19), takes Fallen's dense arrangements of flora and fauna to a newly immersive scale, with 5-by-10-foot tableaux that converse with medieval millefleur tapestries. These exquisitely detailed photographs evoke a Boschian world of allegory and fable

"This work stems from the artist's fascination with the nature of our relationships to the landscape, the sublime, time, and impermanence. Both series consist of cyanotypes made directly in the landscape, where elements like precipitation, waves, wind, and sediment physically etch into the photo chemistry; the prints simultaneously expose in sunlight and wash in the water around them. Littoral Drift, a geologic term describing the action of wind-driven waves transporting sand and gravel, consists of camera-less cyanotypes made in collaboration with the landscape and the ocean, at the edge of both. The elements employed in the process -- waves, rain, wind, and sediment -- leave physical inscriptions through direct contact with photographic materials. Ecotone also engages dynamic photographic materials in the landscape, but collaborates with precipitation rather than ocean waves or running water in the landscape. Rain, snow, ice, fog, etc. chemically activate the photographic materials, while they expose via the residual sunlight that exists even in the heaviest storm. Riepenhoff drapes the photochemically treated paper on objects in the landscape, from windfall branches and boulders to garbage cans and fences."--Publisher's website, viewed 7 January 2019.

Among LeWitt's great contributions to art was the invention of his own economic model Not to Be Sold For More Than $100 presents a comprehensive overview of conceptualist pioneer Sol LeWitt's numbered R Series drawings, which he created from approximately 1971 to 1979. As early as 1967, LeWitt had started making cut, folded and torn works, which he intended would always sell for $100. "His wall drawings were already selling for thousands of dollars, so he wanted to have some artwork that everybody could buy," notes Jason Rulnick. This body of work consists of over 800 folded, torn and cut paper works, including cut maps, reproductions, and manipulated silver gelatin photographs. Thanks to extensive research throughout various private and public collections around the world, this volume includes over 100 color plates, along with an index/description of all 870 known works, information that has been made available through the artist's day books and journals uncovered (in the studio) by Veronica Roberts. In the high-flying commerciality of the contemporary art world, LeWitt's intention and foresight for this body of work resonates more than ever today.