Art Museum Publications

The Itinerant Languages of Photography is the catalogue for the eponymous exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum September 2013-January 2014.

While photographs have been exchanged, appropriated, and mobilized in different contexts since the 19th century, their movement is now occurring at an unprecedented speed. The Itinerant Languages of Photography examines photography’s capacity to circulate across time and space as well as across other media, such as art, literature, and cinema. Taking its point of departure from Latin American and Spanish photographic archives, the volume offers an alternative history of photography by focusing on the transnational dimension of technological traffic and image production at a time when photography is at the center of current debates on the role of representation, authorship, and reception in a global contemporary culture.Featuring a wide-range of photographs—images that converse across temporal, political, and cultural boundaries by artists such as Lola and Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Marcelo Brodsky, Joan Colom, Marc Ferrez, and Joan Fontcuberta—the book argues that the photographic image comes into being only as a consequence of reproduction, displacement, and itinerancy.

• Hardcover

The Life and Death of Buildings: On Photography and Time

Buildings inhabit and symbolize time, giving form to history and making public space an index of the past. Photographs are made of time; they are literally projections of past states of their subjects. This visually striking meditation on architecture in photography explores the intersection between these two ways of embodying the past. Photographs of buildings, Joel Smith argues, are simultaneously the agents, vehicles, and cargo of social memory.

In The Life and Death of Buildings photographers as canonical as Bernd and Hilla Becher, Laura Gilpin, Lewis W. Hine, and William Henry Fox Talbot enter into visual dialogue with amateurs, architects, propagandists, and insurance adjusters. Rather than examine photographers’ aims in isolation, Smith considers how their images reflect and inflect the passage of time. Much as a building’s shifting function and circumstances substantially alter its significance, a photograph comes to be coauthored by history, growing layers of meaning to which its maker had no access.

• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 8.5 x 0.5 x 8.75 inches
• Softcover

The Olmec World: Ritual and Rulership, by Michael Coe, is the catalogue for the eponymous exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum December 1995 - June 1996.

Between 1400 and 400 BC, in what is  now Mexico and Central America, the Olmec people created a magnificent  culture, one too often overshadowed by those of the Maya and the Aztec.  The exhibition featured over 250 Olmec works of art - ceramic, jade and  stone - and their images are captured in this book. Essays by prominent  scholars offer interpretations of such topics as the power of objects  within the context of the Olmec ritual system. These identify and  illustrate the fundamental themes of Olmec small-scale sculpture, the  sacred role of the maize in Olmec ideology, and the relationship of  Olmec culture to later civilizations. An illustrated glossary of motifs  and symbols is provided to clarify the often highly abstract style and  encoded iconography of the Olmec. The book also includes precise  mineralogical descriptions of the lithic materials they used.  

• Hardcover