Best known for his oversized, dead-pan portraits, his unmediated shots of commonplace interiors, and his seemingly straightforward photographs of architecture, Thomas Ruff has quietly approached many familiar genres, and proceeded to discreetly reinvent them.
For his Zeitungsfotos (Newspaper Photographs) series, Ruff found images in newspapers, and then re-photographed and enlarged them to isolate the photographs from the text, allowing Ruff’s viewer, now no longer a reader, to make assumptions about the photograph without any information to support the viewer’s inferences.
The book consists of 400 reproductions from German newspapers that Ruff collected over the span of 10 years (1981–1991).
French photographer Patrick Cariou accused Richard Prince of copying 41 images of rastafarians and landscapes from his book Yes Rasta, which Richard Prince was using for a series of paintings and collages called the Canal Zone.
A deposition is the out-of-court oral testimony of a witness that is reduced to writing for later use in court. In such a scenario Richard Prince had to explain and defend his art, his career, and his decades-long practice of appropriating images made by others.
Collected and arranged by artist and blogger Greg Allen, this Q & A must be the most detailed insight about his career and work he ever gave to this day. For a maximum of almost seven hours he had to answer the extensive, confrontational questioning by the attorney of Patrick Cariou—under outh.
Ernst Moiré was a mysterious Swiss photographer whose career has been obscured by silence, documentary voids, and misinformation. So much of his life is shrouded in speculation and half-truths that he sometimes seems more like a phantasm than the flesh-and-blood figure who will forever be remembered as the inadvertent inventor of the blur that bears his name.
In 2002, Cabinet magazine dispatched literary scholar Lytle Shaw to Zurich to investigate the reclusive figure‘s life and work. Shaw published his initial findings in Cabinet issue 7, but the puzzle of Moiré continued to vex him, and it is only now, a decade later, that the full story of his continuing investigation can finally be told.
The Moiré Effect tracks the artist from his humble Alpine beginnings as the son of a postal clerk to his fateful founding of a Zurich photography studio in the 1890s and his subsequent role in the lives of a number of curious figures including the legendary Dutch architect Mer Awsümbildungs, the theosophist philosopher Rudolph Steiner, and several members of the old and fearsomely secretive Chadwick family.
Hailed by Harry Mathews as a «complex» and «excitingly» written book bound to «delight» and «entertain», Shaw‘s thriller takes readers on a journey through the elegant salons of Swiss palazzi and the dusty bowels of ancient archives, finally ascending to a mountainous conclusion as hair-raising as it is bedevilingly oblique.
Lytle Shaw is a New York based writer whose books include Cable Factory 20, The Lobe, Principles of the Emeryville Shellmound, and Frank O‘Hara: The Poetics of Coterie. His art writing has appeared in Cabinet, Artforum, and Parkett and in catalogues for Dia Art Foundation, the Drawing Center and the Reina Sofía. With Jimbo Blachly, Shaw oversees the Chadwick family archive, which has been exhibited widely and is represented by Winkleman Gallery in New York.