Books by David Campany

Stephen Shore

by Quentin Bajac, David Campany, Kristen Gaylord, Martino Stierli

Organized into 60 thematic sections, this magisterial volume provides a complete overview of Shore's career―from the early portraits of Warhol's Factory to his latest Instagram images
One of the most influential photographers of our time, Stephen Shore has often been categorized as one of a group of artists of the 1970s who captured American popular culture in straightforward, unglamorous color images. While this is true, it is only part of the story: Shore has worked with many forms of photography, switching from cheap automatic cameras to large format in the 1970s, pioneering the use of color film before returning to black and white in the 1990s, and, in the 2000s, taking up the opportunities offered by digital photography, digital printing and social media.
Published to accompany the first comprehensive survey of Stephen Shore’s work in the US, this catalog reflects the full range of his contribution, including the gelatin silver prints he made as a teenager (and sold to The Museum of Modern Art); his photographs of the scene at Andy Warhol’s Factory, in New York; the color images he made during cross-country road trips in the 1970s; his recent explorations of Israel, the West Bank and Ukraine; and his current work on digital platforms, including Instagram.
This book offers a fresh, kaleidoscopic vision of the artist’s extensive career, presenting more than 400 reproductions arranged in a thematic framework, each grouping accompanied by a short but wide-ranging essay. This unique encyclopedia-style format makes visible the artist’s versatility of technique and the diversity of his output, reflecting his singular vision and uncompromising pursuit of photography’s possibilities.
Stephen Shore (born 1947) was the first living photographer to have a solo show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York since Alfred Stieglitz (40 years earlier). He has also had solo shows at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; George Eastman House, Rochester; Kunsthalle, Dusseldorf; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Jeu de Paume, Paris; and the Art Institute of Chicago. Since 1982 he has been the director of the Photography Program at Bard College, New York, where he is the Susan Weber Professor in the Arts.

Walker Evans: The Magazine Work

by David Campany

Walker Evans was one of the most important and influential artists of the twentieth century, who produced a body of photographs that continue to shape our understanding of the modern era. He worked in every genre and format, in black and white and in color, but two passions were constant: literature and the printed page. While his photographic books are among the most influential in the medium's history, Evans' more ephemeral pages remain largely unknown. From small avant-garde publications to mainstream titles such as Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, Architectural Forum, Life and Fortune he produced innovative and independent journalism, often setting his own assignments, editing, writing and designing his pages. Presenting many of his photo-essays in their entirety, Walker Evans: The Magazine Work assembles the unwritten history of this work, allowing us to see how he protected his autonomy, earned a living and found audiences far beyond the museum and gallery.

Nadav Kander: The Meeting

by David Campany

"It's no mystery why he is regularly hired by the New York Times Magazine … Kander strives to reveal something in his subjects that has not been seen before, and to humanize rather than flatter or ingratiate." –Los Angeles Review of Books
Regardless of his sitter―whether family member or influential celebrity―the portraiture of London-based photographer Nadav Kander (born 1961) shows what makes that particular individual human. His aim is to move beyond capturing an accurate likeness―to access the emotions within, the uncertainty, the shadow as much as the light, the complex sense of self that otherwise lays hidden. “Revealed and concealed, beauty and destruction, ease and disease, shame and shameless,” explains Kander, “These paradoxes are essential to all my work and represent what is common to all my varied subject matter.” This collection, the first book dedicated to his portraiture, shows the range and nuance of Kander’s work. His enigmatic depictions of actors, artists, musicians, authors, sports icons and political leaders―from Barack Obama, John le Carré and Alexander McQueen to Tracey Emin, Robert Plant and Prince Charles―are layered and penetrating, revealing unexpected moments of reverie and vulnerability.

Born in 1961, Nadav Kander lives and works in London. His work is held in collections including the National Portrait Gallery, London; the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; and the Statoil Collection, Norway. His exhibitions include those at the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego; the Museum of Applied Arts, Cologne; and Somerset House, London.

So Present, So Invisible: Conversations on Photography

by David Campany

There is a lot of casual chat about photography, just as there is a lot of casual photography. But there have always been articulate voices, able to see past the obvious, around the distracting, and through the trivial to say something about the more profound aspects of the medium. Many of those voices have belonged to image makers. The critic and exhibitions curator David Campany, often invited by photographers and museums to write about their practice during his career, talked with world-class artists – Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Daniel Blaufuks, Robert Cumming, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Lewis Baltz, John Stezaker, Paul Graham, Rut Blees Luxemburg, Jeff Wall, Lucas Blalock, Susan Meiselas, Victor Burgin, William Klein, Stephen Shore – to interrogate them about their past, the various creative phases they crossed over, and above all their rapport with photographic medium and reality. That is why these conversations transcend the dimension of the simple interview to reveal the close connection between art and author photography, between photography and the world, between thought and speech. Because, as noted by the author in his introduction, “whether long or short, nearly all these conversations were open-ended. Neither party knew where we might be going or where things would end up. For me, that is always the real value of a conversation, as opposed to an interview (or a questionnaire). There is risk and excitement, a sense of mutual exploration and speculation”.

Mona Kuhn Private

by David Campany

For her fifth book with Steidl, Mona Kuhn has entered the heart of the American desert and returned with a sequence of pictures that is seductive, enigmatic and a little unsettling. Private proposes a world in which concrete reality and the imaginary are one. Plants and animals on the edge of survival, sun-drenched landscapes and wind-sculpted earth are intercut with a series of nudes that push Kuhn's renowned sensitivity to human form into unexpected directions. The result is a book somewhere between the poetry of T.S. Eliot, the cinema of Robert Altman and a lucid dream.

One

by Teju Cole, John D'Agata, David Campany, Michael Fried, Christie Davis, Darius Himes, Leah Ollman, Laura Steward

Photography is omnipresent; everyone is photographing everything. How do artists and writers reconcile this voracious urge to photograph with a photographic aesthetic and methodology that has tended to value “less is more”?
One pairs artists and writers to think about this question. Eight photographers―Marco Breuer, Thomas Joshua Cooper, John Gossage, Trevor Paglen, Alison Rossiter, Victoria Sambunaris, Rebecca Norris Webb and James Welling―were asked to submit one image on the theme of minimalism. Eight writers―David Campany, Teju Cole, Christie Davis, John D’Agata, Michael Fried, Darius Himes, Leah Ollman and Laura Steward―were enlisted to respond to those submissions, each paired with a specific image. The results offer a probing assessment of Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s maxim: “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

Louis Stettner

by David Campany, Sally Martin Katz, James Iffland, Karl Orend

A major new monograph on the American photographer Louis Stettner (1922-2016), published to accompany the largest retrospective on his work to date.

Brooklyn-born Louis Stettner (1922-2016) created thousands of images over the course of a career that spanned almost eighty years. Acquiring his first camera as a young teenager, he quickly made a name for himself at New York's famous Photo League, where he formed friendships with Sid Grossman and Weegee. He served as a combat photographer in World War II, and the experience of fighting fascism left him with a lasting belief in the fundamental humanity of the common man. After the war, Stettner arrived in Paris in 1947, where he stayed for five years. During this time, he forged a lasting relationship with Brassaï, the city and its people.

Stettner's work defies categorization, containing elements of both the New York street photography aesthetic and the lyrical humanism of the French tradition. A lifelong Marxist, Stettner celebrated the working class and was inspired by his reading of Walt Whitman and the inner humanity that constantly drew him to the lives of ordinary men and women. For all its diversity, however, Stettner's work is thematically consistent: he sought out beauty in common people and their everyday life.

Accompanying the largest retrospective on Stettner's work to date, this substantial monograph at last gives his work the recognition it deserves. Essays by David Campany, James Iffland, Karl Orend and Sally Martin Katz chart Stettner's work chronologically from his early days in New York and Paris, through to his later use of colour photography, to his final meditations on the landscape of Les Alpilles. Showcasing more than 150 photographs spanning his entire career, the book also includes previously unpublished images and some of his hitherto almost unknown colour work, as well as a selection of Stettner's writings.

Accompanies the travelling exhibition of the same name, which showed at MAPFRE Madrid from June to August 2023, and is at MAPFRE Barcelona from June to September 2024.

Weegee Society of the Spectacle

by David Campany, Cynthia Young, Isabelle Bonnet

There's a mystery to Weegee. The American photographer's career seems to be split in two. On one side, his sensational photography printed in North American tabloids: corpses of gangsters lying in pools of their own blood; bodies trapped in battered vehicles; kingpins looking sinister behind the bars of prison wagons; dilapidated slums consumed by fire; and other harrowing evidence of the lives of the underprivileged in New York from 1935 to 1945. On the other, the festive photographs--glamorous parties, performances by entertainers, jubilant crowds, openings, and premieres--not to mention a vast array of portraits of public figures that Weegee delighted in distorting using a rich palette of tricks between 1948 and 1951, a practice he pursued until the end of his life.

How can these diametrically opposed bodies of work coexist? Critics have enjoyed highlighting the opposition between the two periods, praising the former and disparaging the latter. Weegee: Society of the Spectacle seeks to reconcile the two sides of Weegee by showing that, despite formal differences, the photographer's approach is critically coherent.

In the first part of his career, which coincided with the rise of the tabloid press, Weegee was an active participant in transforming news into spectacle. To show this, he often included spectators or other photographers in the foreground of his images. In the second half of his career, Weegee mocked another sort of entranced crowd: the Hollywood spectacular with its ephemeral glory, adoring crowds, and social scenes. Some years before the Situationist International, his photography presented an incisive critique of the Society of the Spectacle.