In the digital age, photography confronts its future under the competing signs of ubiquity and obsolescence. While technology allows amateurs and experts alike to create high-quality photographs, new electronic formats have severed the photochemical link between image and subject. At the same time, cinematic, staged, or digitally enhanced art styles stretch the concept of photography and raise questions about its truth value. Despite this ambiguity, photography remains a stubbornly substantive form of evidence. Referenced by artists, filmmakers, and writers as a powerful emblem of truth, photography has found its home in other media at the moment of its own material demise. By examining the medium as articulated in literature, film, and the graphic novel, Daguerreotypes demonstrates how photography secures identity for figures with an unstable sense of self. From Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida to Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz to Alison Bechdel's Fun Home - we find traces of these "fugitive subjects" throughout contemporary culture. Ultimately, Daguerreotypes reveals how the photograph has inspired a range of modern artistic and critical practices.

In an ancient account of painting's origins, a woman traces the shadow of her departing lover on the wall in an act that anticipates future grief and commemoration. Lisa Saltzman shows here that nearly two thousand years after this story was first told, contemporary artists are returning to similar strategies of remembrance, ranging from vaudevillian silhouettes and sepulchral casts to incinerated architectures and ghostly processions.
Exploring these artists' work, Saltzman demonstrates that their methods have now eclipsed painting and traditional sculpture as preeminent forms of visual representation. She pays particular attention to the groundbreaking art of Krzysztof Wodiczko, who is known for his projections of historical subjects; Kara Walker, who creates powerful silhouetted images of racial violence in American history; and Rachel Whiteread, whose work centers on making casts of empty interior spaces. Each of the artists Saltzman discusses is struggling with the roles that history and memory have come to play in an age when any historical statement is subject to question and doubt. In identifying this new and powerful movement, she provides a framework for understanding the art of our time.

In an ancient account of painting's origins, a woman traces the shadow of her departing lover on the wall in an act that anticipates future grief and commemoration. Lisa Saltzman shows here that nearly two thousand years after this story was first told, contemporary artists are returning to similar strategies of remembrance, ranging from vaudevillian silhouettes and sepulchral casts to incinerated architectures and ghostly processions.
Exploring these artists' work, Saltzman demonstrates that their methods have now eclipsed painting and traditional sculpture as preeminent forms of visual representation. She pays particular attention to the groundbreaking art of Krzysztof Wodiczko, who is known for his projections of historical subjects; Kara Walker, who creates powerful silhouetted images of racial violence in American history; and Rachel Whiteread, whose work centers on making casts of empty interior spaces. Each of the artists Saltzman discusses is struggling with the roles that history and memory have come to play in an age when any historical statement is subject to question and doubt. In identifying this new and powerful movement, she provides a framework for understanding the art of our time.

Best known for immersive video projections that use digitally animated natural and abstract forms to investigate themes such as the passage of time and organic movement, Jennifer Steinkamp (b. 1958) is one of today's most innovative artists. Featuring extensive installation photography, this catalogue includes works from across the artist's celebrated career and a new site-specific work created for the Clark's presentation. Moreover, it provides a unique opportunity to see how Steinkamp's meditative interpretations of nature interact with galleries designed by Tadao Ando specifically to engage the surrounding woodland setting. With an essay by Lisa Saltzman that isolates structuring concerns in Steinkamp's groundbreaking work, this book sheds new light on one of the most important pioneers in the field of video and new media. Distributed for the Clark Art Institute Distributed for the Clark Art Institute Exhibition Schedule: Clark Art Institute (6/30/18-10/08/18)