A panorama of the career of South African photographer David Goldblatt, elucidating his artistic commitments, networks, and influence.

David Goldblatt: No Ulterior Motive coincides with a major traveling retrospective of the renowned South African photographer’s work. From vintage handprints of the artist’s black-and-white photography, taken between the 1950s and the 1990s, to his post-apartheid, large-format, color work, photographs in the volume are approached thematically—under headers such as “Assembly,” “Disbelief,” “Dialogues,” and “Extraction”—to draw out the artist’s core interests in working-class people, the landscape, and the built environment. Objects from Goldblatt’s (1930–2018) personal archive are also included.

In an effort to create a more inclusive dialogue around Goldblatt’s work, the catalogue features images and texts by contemporary photographers and scholars, many of whom were mentored by Goldblatt, including Zanele Muholi and Sabelo Mlangeni. Some write on Goldblatt’s photographs, while others discuss his influence on their own work. Goldblatt devoted his life to documenting his country and its people. Known for his nuanced portrayals of life under apartheid, he covered a wide range of subjects, all of them intimately connected to South African history and politics.

The wide-ranging voices in this catalogue foster a broad frame of reference for his work, thus countering a frequent misunderstanding of apartheid as a situation peculiar to South Africa.

For more than thirty-five years, James Welling has explored the material and conceptual possibilities of photography. "Diary/Landscape"--the first mature body of work by this important contemporary artist--set the framework for his subsequent investigations of abstraction and his fascination with nineteenth- and twentieth-century New England.
In July 1977, Welling began photographing a two-volume travel diary kept by his great-grandmother Elizabeth C. Dixon, as well as landscapes in southern Connecticut. In one closely cropped image, lines of tight cursive share the page with a single ivy leaf preserved in the diary. In another snowy image, a stand of leafless trees occludes the gleaming Long Island sound. In subject and form, Welling emulated the great American modernists Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, and Walker Evans--a bold move for an artist associated with radical postmodernism. At the same time, Welling's close-ups of handwriting push to the fore the postmodernist themes of copying and reproduction.
A beautiful and moving meditation on family, history, memory, and place, "Diary/Landscape" reintroduced history and private emotion as subjects in high art, while also helping to usher in the centrality of photography and theoretical questions about originality that mark the epochal Pictures Generation. The book is published to accompany the first-ever complete exhibition of this series of pivotal photographs, now owned by the Art Institute of Chicago.

A roster of prominent artists, curators, and scholars offers a new, entirely contemporary approach to our understanding of photography and media Focusing on the Art Institute of Chicago's deep and varied collection of photographs, books and other printed matter, installation art, photobooks, albums, and time-based media, this ambitious, wide-ranging volume features short essays by prominent artists, curators, university professors, and independent scholars that explore topics essential to understanding photography and media today. The essays, organized around themes ranging from the expected to the esoteric, are paired with key objects from the collection in order to address issues of aesthetics, history, philosophy, power relations, production, and reception. More than 400 high-quality reproductions amplify the authors' arguments and suggest additional dialogues across conventional divisions of chronology, genre, geography, and technology. An introductory essay by Matthew S. Witkovsky traces the museum's history of acquisitions and how the evolution of the museum's collection reflects broader changes in the critical reception of the field of photography and media. Distributed for the Art Institute of Chicago

A fascinating gathering of modern and contemporary art that considers artworks from different media as material objects This book features 31 objects from Constance R. Caplan's noted collection of 20th- and 21st-century art, including works in a variety of media by artists such as Hans Arp, Lynda Benglis, Liz Deschenes, Claes Oldenburg, and Cy Twombly. Rather than specialize in one medium, artist, or movement, Caplan has instead assembled paintings, photographs, drawings, sculptures, and examples of decorative art that together capture the full scope of a transformative period in art history. Individual pieces are examined by a diverse group of scholars that includes voices from both the school and the museum of the Art Institute of Chicago, while Yve-Alain Bois provides a historical overview of the collection's genesis, with a particular focus on the dialogue among works from different artistic disciplines. Distributed for the Art Institute of Chicago Exhibition Schedule: The Art Institute of Chicago (February 22-July 5, 2020)