CONCEPTUALISTS
The photo book is a natural home for creative innovation, conceptual inquiries,
and far-reaching artistic pursuits. Questions and proposals are made physical
in the components of the book: miniature portfolios, ribbons, bold patterns,
pencil marks, accordion folds, bellybands, hearts, trilogies, and repeated
imagery. Artisanal and artful, these books make room—indeed they broaden the
mold—for the strange, the odd, the compulsive, the pressing question, the
profane, the sly, the outrageous, and the beautiful. It’s here we find Claude
Cahun’s compelling and rare photomontages using herself as model, Karl
Blossfeldt’s compulsive studies of plants reproduced so large as to turn them
into elegant alien beings, Bernd and Hilla Becher’s inspired lifelong study of
architecture, and John Gossage’s mesmerizingly irreverent portfolios. Most
particularly we find Edward Ruscha, the towering contemporary artist, whose
photo books are everything at once: a document, a context-less study of form
and idea, and a series of small, perfect volumes made with a sense of lightness
and play.
Lot 216 (detail)
