Pioneer of colour photography: a comprehensive overview with unreleased photo material

Fred Herzog is known for his unusual use of color in the 1950s and 1960s, a time when art photography was almost exclusively associated with black-and-white imagery. The Canadian photographer worked almost exclusively with Kodachrome slide film for over 50 years, and only in the past decade has technology allowed him to make archival pigment prints that match the exceptional colour and intensity of the Kodachrome slide. In this respect, his photographs can be seen as a prefiguration of the New Color photographers of the seventies.

This book will bring together over 230 images, many never before reproduced, and will feature essays by acclaimed authors David Campany and Hans-Michael Koetzle. Fred Herzog will be the most comprehensive publication on this important photographer to date.

About the Author:

David Campany is a curator, writer and educator, based in London. His previous books include On Photographs, Walker Evans: The Magazine Work, The Open Road: Photography and the American Road Trip and A Handful of Dust, each of which was accompanied by an exhibition. Awards received by Campany include the ICP Infinity Award and The Kraszna-Kraus Book Award.

The first monograph of trailblazing photographer Anastasia Samoylova is a vital – and gently humorous – meditation on environmentalism, consumer culture and our disorientating times

Adaptation is the first career survey on Anastasia Samoylova, one of the most dynamic image makers to have emerged in recent years. Bringing together her six major bodies of work, it reveals the enormous range of artistic influences and ideas that inform her art, as well as the threads of connection that unite them. While each series explores different themes, they share a formal beauty, a masterly use of colour and an original approach to visual culture for which she is rightly celebrated.

Russian born and now a native of Florida, Samoylova moves between observational photography and studio practice, often incorporating collage and painting. Her virtuoso compositions are layered meditations on an everyday life made precarious by rising sea levels, image overload, gentrification and corporate culture. This is a provocative vision of the 21st century, at once sublimely beautiful and incisive in its assessment of the challenges we face.

About the Author:

Anastasia Samoylova is an American, born in the USSR in 1984. Her previous books include Floridas (2022), Flood Zone (2019) and Image Cities (2022). David Campany is a renowned writer and curator with particular expertise in American photography. His many books include William Klein: YES (2023), The Open Road: Photography and The American Road Trip (2014) and Walker Evans: the Magazine Work (2014). He is Curator at Large for the International Center of Photography, New York. Lucy Sante is a Belgian-born American writer, critic, artist and frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. Mia Fineman is Curator of Photography at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

A photo-dialogue on Florida past and present

Sunshine state. Swampland paradise. Tourist aspiration. Real estate racket. Refuge of excess. Political swing-state. Subtropical fever dream. With forms of nature and culture found nowhere else, Florida is unique. It is also among the most elusive and misunderstood of places. Anastasia Samoylova photographs Florida on intensive road trips. Walker Evans (1903–75) photographed it over four decades. Twisting the visual clichés, these two remarkably discerning observers convey Florida’s dizzying combination of fantasy and reality.

Evans witnessed modern Florida emerging in the 1930s, with its blend of cultures, waves of tourism, stark beauty and blatant vulgarity. He photographed there until the 1970s, making Polaroids that still feel contemporary. Samoylova inherits what Evans saw coming. With intelligence and humor, she picks her way through the seductions and disappointments of a place that symbolizes the contradictions of the United States today. In Floridas, photographs by Samoylova and Evans are presented in parallel, weaving past and present, switching between black-and-white and color imagery, all complemented by an essay by editor David Campany and a visionary short story by celebrated novelist and Florida resident Lauren Groff.

Florida is as fascinating as it is deceptive, a place of wild cliché and deep complexity. Walker Evans and Anastasia Samoylova have been two of the state’s most acute and thoughtful observers. In this book their photographs are seen in rich dialogue across the decades. Florida cannot be explained but these smart and playful photographers are the perfect guides to the puzzle. - David Campany

About the Authors:

Born in Moscow in 1984, Anastasia Samoylova moves between observational photography and studio practice. Recent exhibitions include those at Kunst Haus Wien, Kunsthalle Mannheim, USF Contemporary Art Museum, the Orlando Museum of Art, The Print Center and the Chrysler Museum of Art. Her work is held in the Wilhelm Hack Museum, Perez Art Museum Miami and the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, among other collections. Steidl published Samoylova’s FloodZone in 2019.

Walker Evans (1903–75) is an acknowledged master of photography whose diverse body of work continues to shape our understanding of the modern era. Evans began photographing in the 1920s, moving quickly to define his aesthetic and subject matter: straight and sober images of American everyday life and its environs. Within a decade he had produced some of the most significant photographs of the twentieth century, exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and published two landmark books: American Photographs (1938) and Let us now Praise Famous Men with James Agee (1941). Evans wrote art and film reviews for Time (1943–45), was employed by Fortune between 1945 and ’65 and taught at Yale thereafter. Steidl has published Lyric Documentary (2006), Walker Evans: the magazine work (2014) and Double Elephant (2015).

Gain a new perspective on photography in this personally guided introduction to photographic images and what they mean by one of the leading writers and curators of our time

What shapes our response to a photograph? Where does the meaning we ascribe to it come from? And how important to our reading of it are the photographer’s intentions? In a dazzling example of photography writing – an exploration of the photographic medium through 120 images, some familiar, some surprising – David Campany shows us that how we think about photographs is just as important as what we think about them.

Rejecting the conventions of chronology and the heightened status afforded to ‘classics’ in traditional accounts of the history of the medium, Campany’s selection of photographs is an expertly curated and personal one – mixing fine art prints, film stills, documentary photographs, fashion editorials and advertisements. In this playful new take on the history of photography, anonymous photographers stand alongside photography pioneers, 20th-century talents and contemporary practitioners. Each photograph is accompanied by Campany’s highly readable commentary, which strives to guide the reader in their own interpretation and understanding of the image itself.

In a visual culture in which we have become accustomed to not looking, Campany helps us to see.

Contents List:

Introduction • The Photographs • List of Works • Further Reading

About the Author:

David Campany is a curator, writer and educator, based in London. His previous books include Walker Evans: The Magazine Work, The Open Road: Photography and the American Road Trip and A Handful of Dust, each of which was accompanied by an exhibition. Awards received by Campany include the ICP Infinity Award and The Kraszna-Kraus Book Award.