Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa

Dark Mirrors' assembles sixteen essays by photographer and critic Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa focusing on contemporary fine art photographic and video practices that are principally, though not exclusively, rooted in the United States, written between 2015 and 2021. Wolukau-Wanambwa analyses the image's relationship to the urgent and complex questions that define our era, through the lens of artistic practices and works which insightfully engage with the ongoing contemporaneity of disparate histories and the ever-changing status of the visual in social life. The book sets out an argument that one of the most dynamic sites of artistic invention in photographic practice over the past decade has been the photographic book, and thus many of the essays in the volume assess artistic works as they are bodied forth in that form. Among the recurrent themes that emerge from these rigorous, probing essays are the complex interrelationship of anti-blackness and visuality, the fragility and complexity of embodied difference in portraiture, the potency of verbal and visual media as social forms, and the politics of attention. With essays on Deana Lawson, Dana Lixenberg, Paul Pfeiffer, Arthur Jafa, Katy Grannan, and Robert Bergman among others.

"From the advent of early colonial photography in the 19th century to contemporary 'white savior' social-media images, photography continues to play an integral role in the maintenance of white sovereignty. As various scholars have shown, the technology of the camera is not innocent, and nor are the images it produces. In this way, the invention and continuance of the 'white race' is not just a political, social and legal phenomenon, it is also a complexly visual one. In a time of revivified fascisms, from Donald Trump to Tommy Robinson, we must attempt to locate the image of whiteness anew, so that we can better understand its nonsensical construction. What does whiteness look like, and how might we begin to trace an anti-racist history of artistic resistance that works against it? 'The Image of Whiteness' seeks to introduce its reader to some important extracts from the troubling story of whiteness, to describe its falsehoods, its paradoxes and its oppressive nature, and to highlight some of the crucial work photographic artists have done to subvert and critique its image"--Publisher's description.

One Wall a Web gathers together work from two photographic series, 'Our Present Invention' and 'All My Gone Life', as well as two text collages all made in, and focused on the United States. Through a mixture of writing, portraiture, landscape, and appropriated archival images, the book describes quotidian encounters with fraught desire, uneven freedom, irrational fear, and deep structural division, asking whether the historical and contemporary realities of anti-Black and gendered violence -- when treated as aberrations -- do not in fact serve to veil violence's essential function in the maintenance of "civil" society. The book traces a chronological path through the two series, concluding with an extensive essay that explores resonances between questions of black life and the strange ontology of the photographic image.

Created while working in remote areas along the western slope of Colorado between 2012 and 2015, Kristine Potter builds on her previous investigations of masculinity and the American soldier, here fixing her gaze on a parallel archetype, the American cowboy. -- Provided by the publisher.